Adventure Lev and Producer lev in Layman's terms?

Sorry I have been away for about 5 version updates and cannot get my head around the adv/prod skill/char gain system.

Can someone steer me to a post or site with an explanation to this new system? I have read of few dev posts but am still stumped about all the pooling guff?

 

Well as far as I understand....
In the old days you went and killed an elf (for instance). The game told you that you earned 400 XP. (whoopee!) And eventually your "level" will go up. But there wasn't a real correlation with skill and ability.
Now - you go kill an elf, you do get XP, but these points go into a "pool". You can observe the pool if you want to - it's the lower line at the bottom of your screen. So with more adventuring, killing mobs etc, the adventure pool increases. Yay.
So what do you do with all these points? Answer - you unlock skills. By setting certain skills to train, the game knows that you want to filter points into them. So as you swing your sword (for example) a counter is happening, and as long as points are available, they will drip into that "container". And you periodically get a message that "skill X has increased to level Y". This makes the relevant skill more powerful, more effective and you are more formidable.
There are also "innate skills". If you set these to train as well, the game will also filter points into them from your pool, according to some formula that only Chris understands. For instance, using your sword will indirectly increase blade mastery and vital points, if you have them set to train. And periodically they increase as well.
Crafting sort of happens similarly, although I think it needs a lot of work. I have over a million points in the crafting bar that I can't seem to get allocated into skills. So it seems a bit unbalanced at present. But it roughly works the same way, you do stuff and earn points, which are filtered into the skills you are actually using, and those skills get better.
Clear as mud?

 

Clear as black mud but am getting the picture.

What's odd is I open ONE single skill eg. Bladed combat against Elfs in Greymark.. I still lose more pooled adv than gain on Bladed combat... On the surface it seems like an extremely convoluted system that doubles the time to gain skills?

In addition if I drain the adv pool can I still gain on skills?

 

If your pool is drained you will see no skill gain. the only time my Adv. pool got really low was when I was fighting monsters well below my level. Point accumulation decreases as monsters get easier. Accumulation also slows if you do the same thing over and over.

Every time you perform an action a small percentage of your pool is removed then distributed among all the skills associated with that action. For instance, using Whirling Blades would assign points not only to that skill, but to whatever blade innates you have opened. Prolly a bit to strength and/or dexterity as well.

This all occurs simultaneously. Experience points go into your pool and become skill points as they are removed. I hit a wolf with Thrust. Some experience points get pushed into my pool. At the same time some points are pulled from the pool and added to my Thrust skill as well as to any associated innate skills.

Whether any points get assigned to skills depends on if they have been opened (purchased) and turned on with the small triangle next to it in the skill tree.

 

The way i look at it is as a way to have a "use to level" system while reducing the ability of people to afk macro. People can cast on gustballs all they want with an empty xp pool and still won't gain.

If you are losing xp as you train, you need to fight things that give more xp (stronger mobs or more mobs) or train less skills simultaneously. If you can't fight tougher stuff or train less skills, you can either turn off your skills while you build up your pool or just accept that your skill will only gain as much xp as the mobs are giving.

 

Also the more you have in your EXP pool the more it puts into each trained skill.

For an example I'll use 1 skill, and the actual numbers are different, these are just easy to use.

So, if I have 10,000xp in my pool and unlock 1 skill to train it'll put 10 points into the skill each time its used. If I have 100,000 points in my pool then it puts 100 points into the skill each time.

I believe the diminishing returns are to keep people from 'running out' of xp. Unless you were to use the skill and never kill (gustball'ing) it, theoretically, should never hit zero. But if you have too many high level skill unlocked it'll drop every fight. Its putting more into each skill than you're earning. Turn a couple off.

 

Just think of it as a use based system that penalizes you for using your skills. Almost every post I've seen on training mentions stopping everything you aren't trying to train (i.e. use but don't go up) in order to min/max what you are trying to raise. It just seems that an attempt to stop afk macro (which this doesn't) made the levelling of skills and abilities more complicated than necessary.

It also means, you are pretty much forced to melee to keep going up in experience points as magic and ranged don't hold their own very well on "appropriate" level mobs.

 

...or lock EVERYTHING, and fight low level BS mobs, gain a ton of xp and then gustball. As it is now using the gustball as a 'training dummy' is almost a necessary evil. I look at like a boxer. Doesn't train while he fights, he trains to fight. So I go out and fight, and come home, lock myself in my basement and attack a defenseless gustball w/a great deal of shame and guilt.

 

So THAT'S the naughty and disturbing sounds I've heard coming from your basement. 8^p

Yeah, the number of people who look down on those who gustball tend to forget that the reason people do it is many times there isn't any other way to adequately level skills. I'm of the view if we have a use based system, we should have a use based system and not a lock all skills being used so you hopefully level what you want up.

 

There is another way you could hit zero and that is lack of skill diversity(I also left this out in my own response). Each level of a skill adds some power to your character. Generally the power is largely linearly added while the xp required increases at an accelerating rate. If you train a single skill high enough it might put your experience demands above the generation capacity of a character of your power. The game is effectively telling you to go find a way to add power that is less experience intensive. This could be something like updating your gear, but often just means you might want to train one of your lower level skills that can contribute a significant amount of power. Training a single skill while losing xp is more or less flaunting this system, though it might make sense if you just want to be done with that skill or believe that the skill adds so much power linearly that the increased cost is still worth it.

 

I have to say I am not a fan of this convoluted system. I feel like I have to work double hard to raise skill? Anyway Ill play around with it and see why I am losing more xp on a single skill fighting monsters that kick my ass?

 

Hmm, not sure what you're measuring there. And my understanding is about at its limit. Only thing I do know is that you might be seeing your adventure XP bar dropping - that means that points are being distributed somewhere. It takes a LOTTA points to get Bladed combat to move - I'm at 98, and it's been lots of blood, sweat and tears. And very many thousands of XP.

 

When i want to fill my pool i fight things that are high level that have low defense like flesh flayers since they die with very few skill uses. When i want to distribute those points into skills i things with high defense like the golems (they die slow so more skill use per kill). Hope that helps.

 

Thanks for the tips guys! I also found this useful:

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f.../wtf-is-going-on-a-sota-leveling-guide.41503/

 

Agreed that it is a great resource.

 

When I was doing my GM for blades I caught it at just the right time and noticed it was almost exactly 100,000xp to take blades from 98 to 99. I wanted to check from 99 to 100 but got sidetracked and forgot to look, then the maths got confusing and I was hungry...kinda all over the place that day. Pretty sure it was another 100k tho.

 

The cost in XP increases exponentially, while the effectiveness increases linearly. It takes approximately as much XP to go from 90 to 100 as it takes to go from 0 to 90.
In my opinion it makes more sense to train two skills to 90 than one skill to 100 for the same cost in XP.

After the next wipe, I don't anticipate raising any of my adventurer skill levels above 80. (Currently GM in blades with many skills above 80.)

 

Yeah, I did keep track of some skills in the 40's and 60's just for comparison. I don't remember exact numbers but it was something like 25k per level in the forties, or was it per level in the sixties. I dunno anymore, but yes it was exponential.

I cant make a call on the second part. I'm way too spread out with this character. If there is a bonus for GM'ing a skill then it might be leveling it makes sense. As it stands now, I agree, other than some passives (strength, health, focus, dex et. al) I cant see a huge advantage to taking the basic combat skills too far past 80.
Seems if you wanted a more precise character you might have more of a call for GM'ing a skill, but if you use multiple trees maybe taking them to 80 is all ya need (jack-of-all-master-of-none type avatar).

 

I have finally cracked it and am now able to skill gain a handful of skills and slightly gain on my pool. Its a fine balancing act.

I hope we see a major celebratory animation for each major gain in adv and prod skill?

 

Congrats! What did you shift that made the biggest difference?