Mining skill-up rate now seems to be about right

While I can't exactly tell for sure because I'm still in 4x mode (I'm at PL53, was PL59 before wipe), the skill-up rate for mining is clearly MUCH better.

One change I made myself this time is to turn off survey and meticulous completely (I leveled survey to 10 so I could unlock meticulous and then turned it off). After some marathon sessions of crystal mining, I have reached about 88.9 in mining and mining speed (I turned off mining for a short time to sync them). This was because there was clearly an upper limit to how much skills would be raised per skill event regardless of how many skills you had enabled, or the size of your pool.

I don't think I ever hit 900K in my producer pool during this, and after I hit about 85 skill or so, I noticed that my pool was shrinking, it's 680K-ish now. From GM-ing smelting and salvage before the wipe, I know that skills can put a heavy load on your pool when you get to around 90.

From what I've seen, it looks like the people saying that having Prosperity tools will somehow slow you down because of higher success rate (making you have to run around more) are not quite right. If you're in a mine, you can always go wait for repops, but those successes, especially on T5 nodes, are the source of XP for your pool. I seem to recall 2000xp awarded per successful T5 harvest in R20, and about 1100 xp used per smelting skill-up at 99 in R25. You really need to get that 60% or so success rate just to keep your pool up.

After final wipe with no 4x, I would probably turn on only mining and mining speed, then at about 70 or so would turn off mining speed and focus on success rate to optimize filling my XP pool. After GM, I would then finish off mining speed to GM, and then work on meticulous. While survey isn't a bad thing to have, it's not hard to learn what ores look like. Only "hidden" ores (behind the wall) will be a problem, if the devs decide to make significant use of them, and you could probably get away with only 30-40 skill for that.

 

I believe we are getting double XP at a 4x rate. Creatures, nodes whatever are worth double, and your getting them at 4x too.

GM'd mining, and level 90 in Swift Gathering. Totally loving this releases XP gains.

 

I stopped at level 99 because it upsets my friend who has mild OCD.

(Other mining skills at level 90).

 

I dont like the node-based mining at all. Mining in UO was fun, now we have the same dumbed down system like every other MMORPG.

 

So I have an update. When I hit 90, I turned off mining speed. And I'm glad I did, because getting from 90 to 100 drained about 300K from my producer XP pool.

Then I turned on meticulous and on the first try it went from 1.0 to about 2.95, holy crap. I think I'll leave it on meticulous a while to build up some pool before going GM on mining speed, now that I have some idea what it costs to go from 90 to 100.

But yeah, while it will hurt without the 4x, and even more if Port really considers the current XP rate to be 2x what they will do after Final Wipe, it's going to be no cake walk to reach GM.

And I now realize that another reason to keep meticulous off while leveling mining speed is that when it activates, you have to go through a full mining cycle delay each time. That can take a while if it kicks in multiple times.

 

I would agree that mining speeds seem to feel "right" this release. They are a tad slow early on, but once you build up your swift gathering up a bit it gradually gets better.

From my experience, the key to being a good miner is to find some lower level nodes (preferably crystals because they are faster) and level up swift gathering to at least 40ish first, by itself. With low level nodes, you already have a good chance at success, especially with the crystals, so you can easily build up an xp pool on those without having to raise mining proficiency. Then, after 40ish in swift, turn on mining proficiency too. Once that gets to around 40ish, I turn on survey and lock it at 10 (to open up meticulous). Next time I'm at a trainer, I buy meticulous, but still leave it off until mining proficiency and swift gathering are at least 70 each.

During the 40 - 70 range with proficiency and swift, I go find a mine with higher level nodes. These are lower success rates, but usually much more abundant and close together so running around isn't an issue. By these skill levels, you still have a decent success rate and now animation times are bearable. Plus, even failures will raise your skills and your pool should be well stocked from all the successes on the lower level nodes. I usually leave swift on the entire time, but occasionally I lock swift temporarily when proficiency is close to leveling up and I feel the need to see an improvement for my hard work. After the ding, I unlock swift again though and always strive to level that ASAP because faster mining = more mining!

Once I hit 70 in proficiency, I start training up meticulous because that's when I start caring more about how much ores I bring back rather than how high my skills are.

 

Hate to break it to you but UO was node-based mining as well.. the difference is in UO you couldn't see them. But you had to hit the right spot to get anything and then after you had to wait for that spot to respawn just like nodes.

 

And then there is cotton.

I'm jealous of you miners!

 

I agree with the OP that the mining skill-up rate seems to be in a pretty good balance now.

@Daxxe Diggler, that sounds a pretty good idea - getting swift gathering up first to some decent level. However it's good to keep in mind that the upper limit of mining speed is determined by node respawn rate in most if not all places. So the "faster mining = more mining" rule of thumb is true only up to a point. This is easy to see if we imagine what would happen if the mining duration were 1 second instead of half a minute. One could quickly clear out most areas but then run out of nodes, so one would either need to move elsewhere (to a different mine) or wait for the nodes to respawn, and mining speed would from then on be roughly equal to the respawn rate. The only way to increase mining volume in such a situation would be by meticulous mining.

It's also worth noting that getting a skill (say meticulous) to some level where it actually starts to be useful is very cheap in terms of XP - for example just getting the mining base skill from level 80 to level 81 is probably several times more expensive than getting, say, meticulous gathering from zero to 40-50's.

So I guess there is no "optimal" strategy as it is largely a matter of personal playstyle and preferences. I personally like to spend extended periods of time mining (as much as my carrying capacity allows), but most importantly using as little real-life attention as possible (because let's face it, mining is the ultimate grind, as boring as it ever gets). I just start mining a node and do something different. So for me it does not matter if one round of mining takes 40 seconds or 20 seconds - longer time can actually be much better because there are fewer interruptions.

Come next wipe, I will start by locking survey to 10 and get swift gathering to around 40-50 first (while also advancing the base mining skill a little bit), but then I'll lock survey there and bring meticulous gathering up to speed with the base skill. From then on I'll just advance these two skills (base skill and meticulous) until around 70. After that I might make modest improvements swift gathering (not too much, see above). From then on...well not planned that far yet

 

@helm I see your point, but I guess that depends where you do your mining.

Not sure where you mine for ore, but where I go, the nodes respawn fast enough for me to work 2 accounts right next to each other without ever waiting around. That's with both having swift gathering over 70.

I do move them from room to room as I clear them out, but by the time I finish 2 or 3 rooms, the first one has fully respawned.

All it takes is a few minutes in the beginning to break the hidden walls and kill all the mobs and then you can mine non-stop as long as you like.

 

While I see where you are coming from, I don't think i fully agree. I mean sure, if you're only going to be checking every 40 seconds, time less than that is not a huge gain, but if you hit a 5x metic when your mining takes 20 seconds, you actually checked 2 times you weren't done in that 100 second window. Additionally, having high swiftness means that when you are actively adventuring, the time to hit a mining node is practically nonexsitant and doesn't slow you down a bit from actively playing the game.

I have quite a few ideas about how to revamp xp gaining/spending and a couple other things to better provide for more balance among different play-styles. - Probably going to make a big suggestion thread on it within the next week or so.

 

I usually go to Graff's or Etceter, swift gathering is 60 atm, and despite my rather relaxed pace, especially in Graff's only the lowest level crystal nodes tend to respawn fully, the upper floor copper/iron nodes and the lower level silver nodes have usually not fully respawned. This does not matter, they respawn enough so that I can keep busy by cycling these three levels. Etceter upper level nodes seem to respawn a little bit quicker now so it's even easier in there. However (also to @Noric), please note I'm not trying so much to min-max the mining results (either skill or ore), I'm trying to minimize the real-life attention required when mining So the goals are a bit different. I use a timer that plays a little sound before automatically switching the focus to the SotA window for a few seconds, and then back to whatever I was doing (if I was doing something on a computer) if there is no need for action. If there is need for action (mining the node has finished), I go to the next one and restart the timer. It's really quite easy and takes a lot of pain out of mining, but it is certainly not the most efficient way.

5x metic occurs with my current skills only maybe every 500th attempt, I gladly welcome those Besides in some places one needs to check out the situation anyway every now and then because attacks are rather common (for example in Spectral mines).

 

I would argue that the two are related. The faster you get ore while paying minimal attention... the sooner you can switch to paying no attention to the game.

 

OK this is perhaps drifting a bit off topic in regard to the OP, but while what you're saying is in principle quite true, I think there is a "neuroergonomical" limit to how fast one can switch between two tasks (say, mining in SotA and writing a forum post in here), it is probably highly individual but for me about 30 seconds is the absolute minimum time between switches, any faster than that and I can't multitask effectively.

I guess what I was mainly trying to say was related to the decision, at what point to enable meticulous. Having a metic skill at 15% slows down progress of other mining skills maybe 10% (considering the time spent moving between the nodes, the faster the mining itself is, the more it counts) while bringing in 15% more resources. That's basically the individual decision to make - I favor slightly more resources esp. in the beginning, needing it for custom armor and whatnot (and in my case the slowdown can actually be good), others might favor slightly faster progress in base mining skills. In any case the XP cost of bringing metic to say lvl40 is negligible.

 

I don't really think that it should be a decision., or at least not a drastic one. I might favor temporary decisions that choose between the two goals, but in the long term there are major implications for your mining skill orderings. Sure, at 50 meticulous the impact is not huge in any single direction, but at higher levels it really does matter. I currently have over 110 mining swift - if i had no 4x bonus and a high meticulous rate, training my swift enough to make significant gains against decay that this point would be near impossible. Last release (before the increased xp spending), I had mining proficiency at 100 and mining swift at 105 or so. The rate of gain was essentially gated by the amount of producer xp that you could take in at any time(so the situation honestly not that different from now). Training from 100 to 105 was a time consuming, consistent task for me - If i had higher meticulous it would have been even worse. Now, I was not exactly short on materials - I crafted a full set of Crit stat armor using my materials(and this was AFTER the crafting changes) and had a surplus beyond.

I'm not sure that meticulous should increase experience spending(transfer from pool to skill), mostly because experience spending is essentially a function of your experience pools now with how aggressively the scaling occurs. However, I do think that meticulous should not particularly punish your ability to take in producer experience. By slowing down your gathering speed, it is already hurting your ability to gain skills, why should it also decrease your production pool's potential and slow down skill gain even further?

 

I have always thought that getting a meticulous collection should add additional xp points to your pool and, at the same time, put more points into your currently training skills.

I see it as being a bonus effect for having good meticulous skills and therefore should be a bonus to your pool and other skills when you get one. Not a penalty for getting lucky. As Noric said, it already penalizes your skill gains by adding additional time to your mining... so we should be compensated for that extra time spent by a small bonus to the pool and xp spent.

I remember last release I used to just back away from a node if I got a meticulous because that extra 20 seconds or so was slowing up my skill gains. I haven't done that this release, but I had thought about doing so several times just because I cared more about the skillups than the materials collected. It shouldn't be that way!

 

@Noric, excellent points. I'm perceiving this as part of a larger issue -- gains to the skill pool are way too "static". Because this thread is about mining, I will comment just briefly, taking ranged skills as an example. Currently it does not matter if you shoot a 280hp critical or a half-hearted 2hp arrow toss behind your back while running - the skill gains are the same. Therefore only option to grandmaster base ranged skills (in any reasonable time) is to start shooting badly and wastefully -- first building a large XP pool (by killing stuff in a "proper" way) , then turn autoattack on and start running backwards among pack mobs, with the goal of wasting as many arrows as you can. It's completely absurd, but no more than being "punished" for having high meticulous skills. Having for example 4x meticulous should be rewarded with, maybe not 4 times the amount of xp but perhaps something like N^0.7 (where N is the number of consecutive metic collections), and it should reflect directly in the mining skill pools as well (Edit - looks like @Daxxe Diggler beat me to it in regard to the last point).

 

I totally agree with you and Daxxe in regards to meticulous, though my personal numbers would be more conservative (somewhere between .2N and .5N bonus xp from meticulous). I also do agree with you somewhat about the static pool problem. However, that is by design - the soft caps of skills are essentially enforced by the static pool. I would probably stretch the "static impact" with some skill related stuff(like the metic change) but I wouldn't entirely destroy the system.

 

I think we speak of more or less the same thing, I just presume that some kind of exponential formula would be preferred to a fixed multiplier (easier to adjust and perhaps a bit "more fair"). And yes probably you're right, the N^0.7 was a quick, a bit off-the-knee value and too high, N^0.5 (or even N^0.4) would be closer to what you're suggesting. To clarify this, I put up a little table listing some values of N^0.5 (with values of N larger than or equal to 2 meaning meticulous collection). So for example with 5x metic one would get 2.25 times the base xp (translating to .45N XP bonus from meticulous).

Spoiler: Table N^0.5 for some values of N

Code:

N    N^0.5   N/(N^0.5)
----------------------
1    1.00    1.00
2    1.41    0.71
3    1.73    0.58
4    2.00    0.50
5    2.24    0.45
6    2.45    0.41
7    2.65    0.38
8    2.83    0.35
9    3.00    0.33
10   3.16    0.32
11   3.32    0.30
12   3.46    0.29
13   3.61    0.28

 

I just don't believe exponential is appropriate for the situation. The time for mining is directly proportional to the number of meticulous procs - so a flat(proportional) additional xp for each of those makes sense for me.