Experience Pool - I wish I could understand it.

Trying to verbalize some of my frustrations with the pools of experience. I'll do it as bullet points and in no order:

1. Killing a 'red' creature with everything off or one thing on and we can lose experience from pool.
2. I can be losing experience with one thing on and turn more on and stop losing experience.
3. I am told long fights means I am 'using' experience in the pool during the contest.
4. Why is there even a 'maintain' feature? Why would any experience have to go into this?
5. You may hear people say you want a huge pool. The bigger the pool the 'less' you spend....but is it just me or are these people forgetting the fact they weren't learning/using anything while they were getting to this pool.. Example: Mac wants to have 5 million in his experience pool before he goes after another GM and to cover anything popping on him and killing him. He turns everything off and 5 hours later he has 5million. It takes him 1 hour to GM something so lets say 6 hours right? So if he had no pool it may take him...2? 3? hours to GM without having to make this pool?
6. The crafting pool....sigh....I'll never understand how I can make a 1000 ingots and my skill won't go up because I have it set to 'maintain' just so I can get my 'pool' up so I can 'use' it for masterworking /whatever.

I think at some point someone has to step back and say "well - we had an original idea and I still like the theory but it just isn't working" and re-work it. Just my opinion.

 

@Xkhan

To start with the easy part experience going into your pool. Everything you kill gives you experience that is put into your pool of experience so monster X give 1000 exp, when you get the kill shot you get 1000 exp added to you pool. (A smaller amount if partied)

Now for the other not so easy stuff experience leaving your pool. Each time you use a skill and that skill is set to raise, an amount of experience is removed from you pull and applied to your skill. The amount of exp moved from your pool to that skill is a direct relationship to the size of your pool. (For example for simplicity not the true calculation) So if you have 1000 exp in your pool and you swing your sword once, 100 exp is applied to sword skill. If you have 100000 exp in your pool and swing your sword once, 1000 exp is applied to sword skill.

So now to put it all together when you are fighting with skills opened...
Monster X gives 1000 Exp
You swing sword skill (set to raise) 10 time’s applying 100 exp each time.
Net result on your pool of experience is 0

Next Fight...
Monster X Gives 1000 exp
Your swing a differebt sword skill(set to maintain) 10 Times applying 0 exp to sword skill.
Net result on your pool of experience is 1000

The two schools of thought so far, I am aware of are:
1. people get a decent size pool of exp then turn on and off skills to maintain their pool size
2. People lock everything then build a massive experience pool of 10+ Million and apply it quickly down to 1-2 Million the rebuild Pool.

The only difference I see with the two schools above is when you are using resources for the skill to be trained. If you are using resources you would want your pool to be as large as possible in order to apply the most experience on each use and limit the amount of resources required for training. I prefer school 1 and generally keep my pool between 1-2 Million exp. I am too impatient to build up my pool higher without applying those points where I need them.

 

1. Not quite sure about this, unless you are dying or your exp for maintaining your skills is more than the mobs exp drop, I don't see why this should happen, and never noticed that happen to me

2. The lower your exp pool, the less is being used, so at some point, of course if you turn more things on, you will use less. Also if I am not mistaken, there is a cap to the amount of exp used up from your pool every time, so if that cap is 2%, well the lower the pool is, the lower that 2% is.

3. The longer you do push ups, the more energy you spend. If you do 10 times 1 pushup, you will feel less exhausted than doing 10 pushups in a row. This is reproduced in the game.

4. If you stop training a skill, and don't practice it from time to time, you will be less skillful at it, once again, reproduced in the game, maintaining simply means you are making sure you don't become rusty with that skill.

5. Having a good pool also means when you die you don't lose skills. Let's say when I die I lose 10k exp. If my pool is empty, that 10k will be taken out of my current skills, meaning I could lose a level. What you mention specifically I'm not sure on the wording, but this is a good reason to keep up a big pool.

6. I don't do much crafting, sorry...

 

You have to think of the xp pool as like a savings account and each skill is a separate checking account tied to that savings account. You draw from savings when you want to train a certain skill and transfer that money to that skills checking account. Killing stuff and doing a quest will add to the pool. Training a skill will lower the pool.

Also, when you die, all of your skills suffer "skill decay". This means that a small portion of every skill you've trained is taken away whenever you die (except in PVP death). The more skills you have learned and the higher level they are... the more overall XP gets taken away on each death.

Basically, you have 3 settings for a skill that you have purchased from a trainer:
1. Unlearn - This will remove skill points from a skill over time, thereby adding some back to your pool and lowering the skill level of that skill.
2. Maintain - This will keep the same amount of XP you already applied to that skill. It won't draw from the pool when you use them, but it will draw from the pool to cover your decay when you die. Think of this as maintaining a fixed XP total in that skill. (NOTE - if your pool isn't large enough to cover the decay, the maintained skills will lose the balance needed to cover the decay total... and skills can de-level because of this.)
3. Training - This removes XP from your pool whenever you use that skill. For passives, this can mean doing anything in that tree and for some can even happen on just about any combat action (Tactics, Focus, Subterfuge passives for example).

There is a 4th - Not Training - which is a cross between maintain and unlearn. This one won't draw XP from your pool at all. It won't take any to level it up and when you die, none will be taken from your pool to keep it there. It will simply lose the decay XP on each death and it can/will lower the skill level as the decay points are removed from it.

The key factor with "training" though is that you have to be doing something pertinent to a particular skill in order to raise that skill. For example, if you have the Blades skill "Bladed Combat" (the main skill of the tree) set to training and the Fire Magic skill "Flame Fist" set to training... your Bladed Combat will likely get more increases than Flame Fist because the blades skill will get increases from any auto attack hit and any Blades tree skill you use... whereas the Flame Fist will only increase when you use that spell. So more chunks of your pool will get spent in Bladed Combat and lesser chunks gets put into Flame Fist. ***

Now, as others have mentioned, when you train a skill the amount applied to the skill is a percentage of your total pool. If you have a small pool, then only a little bit gets applied on each use. If you have 5 million XP, each chunk that gets added per use is a bigger chunk than if you only have a few hundred thousand XP in your pool.

And don't forget, if you have multiple skills being trained at the same time, they share that pool and draw it down quicker overall. So, to help explain your question about when you net zero xp from killing a red mob... it could be you have a main tree skill (or one you use often) set to training and it gets raised a lot during each fight.

*** This is why some people will save up a big XP pool and then skill up one skill/spell at a time. You can do it at a training dummy and may only have to activate the skill a few hundred times instead of a few thousand times with a lower pool. The reason is because with a bigger pool, a bigger chunk gets added on each use. If a skill needs 15 million XP to get it to GM... you are going to want to do that at a few thousand XP per use instead of a few hundred. Otherwise, it will take you forever to get that skill to 100.

It's all about streamlining where your gained XP gets applied and how efficiently you can do it.

 

I loathe the experience pool and decay system. It's the reason I am not playing. If they want to "throttle" our progress then better put a cap on the amount of skills we can have active (gaining). Who cares if everyone is a Grandmaster in everything eventually? Game is supposed to be about fun right?

I figured the ancient adagio of "if we make progress hard and slow in our MMO, people will play our game longer" was buried but I guess not.

It is a pity because the game is quit beautiful and immersive in itself.

 

Check closer, you may have something turned on that you don't realize. If your XP pool goes down during the battle, that is what is happening.


New XP goes into your pool. The stronger the monster that you kill, the more XP it gives you. This is not (as far as I know) modified by your adventurer level, just by whether you are PvP, in multi-player mode, or in a party. Crafting XP is similar, but is usually only very specific numbers: 10, 50, 100, 200, 300, and 500, and is not modified by player mode.

When certain things happen, XP is taken from the pool and added to a skill. For hotbar glyph skills, this is when you use the skill. For "innate" skills, this could be when using any related skill, or it might be from using any adventuring skill at all!

If you have "misc" selected in your chat filters, you will see a message when a skill goes up a level, at the same time as the woosh shound.

The more XP in your pool, up to a point (at least 4M pool), the larger the chunk of XP that is put into a skill.

The chunks get larger and larger as a skill reaches higher levels. It usually only takes around 4000xp to go from level 1 level 40. Levels 98 and 99 take about 100K to get to the next level. But some skills may take ten times that. Innate skills get a lot of chunks and can quickly get out of control. You should not let ANY skill go over 80 unless you know that you can afford it.

When you die (except in certain contexts like towns and PvP), you get a death penalty. I will not go into the details of this, but it applies a negative skill chunk to all your adventuring skills. If you have them set to "maintain", a corresponding amount of XP will be taken from your pool instead. The more skills you have over 80 and 100, the more expensive this will be.

If you have a skill set to untrain, it will go down by a small amount each time you do almost anything with other skills. (separated by adventuring vs crafting of course)

 

Can anyone provide the formula, or failing that, a table for the minimum pool size required, per level, to get the maximum XP transfer per skill use?

Thanks

 

Short version of the answer

1. After about 40 skill level in 2nd teir skills figure out what you use the most, turn off what you barely use (maintain) or lose skill.

That skill will go back into your pool and used elsewhere on other skills you have turned on. Im high level so i totally turn off the stuff i dont use to lose exp in that, and just keep it red arrows down, the experience then goes into, another skill i have turned up.

had to edit typing on a cell phone! (i hate that)