No Experience Bonus Leveling

There might be a bit of confusion here.
There is currently two different 2x EXP bonuses.


@Weins201 is right. We are all earning 2x XP in the sense that ALL monsters etc are worth twice what they will be.

Not everyone is getting the little 2x multiplier by their name.
That is only awarded to the last level an avatar achieved in the previous wipe. If its a new avatar they will not get that 2x EXP. Yet they will still spend at the 2x rate.

 

You already can level up a bunch of skills at once if you want to, your points will just be allocated to each of them making them go up slower than they would if you weren't doing as many. It doesn't really mean anything to say that xp is going down when training xyz skills, because your xp will always go down when you have enough xp pooled that you are above the equilibrium point at which xp spent is greater than xp earned, regardless of how many skills that you are you training.

If you are training fireproof at level 50, every time you take fire damage .04% of your pooled xp will be put into fireproof unless that amount exceeds 5% of the total points required for that skill level, in which case the amount of points required to gain 5% of that skill level is deducted. All skills work this way, although not necessarily with the exact same numbers (I don't know). I might be remembering that wrong, but the point is that xp spent scales depending on how much of it you have, so it doesn't just keep going down forever.

For every rate of gain/rate of consumption, there is a quantity of pooled xp that is the equilibrium point. If you have less xp than that, your xp will go up, and if you have more, it will go down. This is true whether you're training 20 skills or 1.

 

the intent is to have the skills pull a similar percentage out of your xp pool, but as the bar increases, its not a linear increase. It take smreo and mroe xp to fill your bar the higher it gets, but the percentage that skills pull from it stays the same.

SO as your xp bar drops, your skill gain rate decreases, and when tis almsot empty, even the easiest of creatures should give a major jump to your XP pool visually. When the xp pool is filled to a respectabel loevel, xp gains becoem mroe unnoticable

So its suppsoed ot be harder to keep it higher, but your skills do train faster when your bar is filled higher. Whent he bar is low, its almsot effortless to keep it stocked enough for skilsl to continue pulling

 

New avatars and avatars that have expired thier 2x bonus are now recieving 1x experience as it will be after final wipe.

 

This is the main reason I started this thread. Most experienced players have been running on bonus experience for many releases. I believe most have lost sight of what bonus-less character leveling is like and will be in for a major shock in final release. In a group report I even recommend Portalarium not give any experience bonus this character release. As it is character leveling will not really get the testing and feedback it needs until final release.
As for skill management I do not believe low level characters should need to deal with it. At low levels you are still developing your foundational offensive and defensive skills. You need to be able to develop these skills before focusing on a specialization. My concern at this point is the new players this game needs will find the leveling experience frustrating too early in their gaming experience. After level 60 or so without the experience bonus I found my adventuring experience pool averaged around 8000. Of course if I turned every skill off my pool would grow bigger, but points in your pool are not doing to any good until they are applied to a skill. My point is if you are running out of points during fights at your level something is out of balance; especially at lower level.
This is not just me. Over the past release I have listened to a number of players express their frustration while developing a character for the first time into the 20s to 30s range.
Another thought; how many of you start to lose interest in playing the game fairly soon after you run out of bonus experience?

 

It's not the XP bonus going away that make me want to grind less. It's the camera control and targeting combined with the upcoming final wipe.

 

The xp pool drains more at lower levels, when your taking longer to kill things and getting less xp per kill.

 

~Hmm~
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/sota-basic-training-programs.49024/
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/new-chrs-skill-building.47802/
Those are just a few early chr skills investigations threads I did, but not with the current release...

This release I just made a chr to generally make gold, with no concentrated effort at all to how fast, slow, locked, unlocked or anything, because I see fast chr building as a concentrated effort towards that goal, unlike my current chr.
There's only slight differences between any swift skill building technique, yet over time theirs increasing differences of what your chr "should have done" before hand earlier in their lives.
Toying with skills (in the systems I use) just means less gold for a long duration early, while gaining skills naturally gains gold at a more rapid pace and still gains skills competitively with the other, yet with less boost on the end results.

~Locking & Unlocking~
Choose your own poison here, as I believe there's only one best way and that's to get all you can out of each lower mob, "in all of your skills" before heading into any next levels. I say this because, though a player may see more swift gains by attacking larger targets, there's less and less larger targets as the chr progresses through them much later.

If you lock a skill early and much later unlock it, it does rise faster with the targets you are then fighting, yet "their rising place" is still back at the lower targets, which means that you will then have to kill much more of those smaller targets, or, remain fighting the larger ones... which then stagnate or slow the skill later on from gains because it must then contend for points once the other skills have been unlocked again. This is why "innate skills" become the best for any concentrated effort early by locking the active skills. Innate skills are those that can allow the chr just to stand and swing away at a target on their own. This is why they are best to first raise due to their less allocation of skill points at higher levels because your chr isn't just swinging away all that often. Instead they are placing their efforts into active swinging/striking skills. Thus a concentrated effort into innate skills makes for good sense, while concentrating on any active skills at first dose not. Until those innate skills are all in the 60s, a chr shouldn't unlock any active skills. >>>---> "Yet this gaming of the system is not much different in monster impact until much later in their lives" <---<<< Later in their lives, those early built up innate skills will then payoff, because they are higher than they would have been if gained naturally without any locking at all. But>>>---> "there's not that much difference when considering that the rise and gold gain of that natural chr got the player much deeper into the game faster" <---<<< Meaning that the average player, with an average time to spend playing the game may and most likely will get very bored when attempting to hold their patients with lower targets and lesser gold long enough to make those initial innate skills gain to 60s with locking all active skills.

Yet the payoff for such patients is very large, but well ahead in the waiting for later life advantages (and I mean "much later" advantages).

Now too all this above, some and even I would say that it's a trade off as anything is. #1 the chr hasn't gained more gold within this active skill locking which later may not come in such quantity because of the lesser quantity of larger targets that can be taken "alone". The heavier mob targets tend to come in waves of larger mobs the deeper one goes other than the bosses. Yet your skills are then in much better shape for skill gains or large target successes because those innate skills are close to GM'ing almost as close as the actives are. This means that, though some other chr may have a GM and mine does not, my chr will have a better chance within the fight, because though the compared opponent is more GM active skill qualified, my innate skills are much more qualified than their own, which doesn't just level the playing field, it overcomes the GM active skill player because each of my strikes are hitting more critical blows, though his are striking with more consistently. But deeper into this overcoming active GM skilled chrs, then comes all those innate defensive skills to be considered. Many GM active defensive skilled chrs have complained within the forums that their active defensive skills aren't effectively useful, yet this is due directly from their having neglected, or put off, or not having concentrated on all those innate defensive skills early, meaning that they are less than those players that took all the time to have earlier worked up innate skills.

But I still stress that there's not but a slight difference until "much later" within the life of the chr, whether or not they took the time to do all that or not. One went for gold earlier and the other went for skills earlier, yet going for innate skills earlier is a much more gold poor existence for a very long time. That chr will make gold, yet it's not what larger targets yield and it's not the quantity that the other player had earned, because their time (of lets say "grind") is later within the food chain and not within those earlier tiny newbie mobs.

I see nothing the matter of just ignoring any lock or unlock and just playing the game, as it affords a more natural feel for the gaming world environment, which in turn makes for a "much more" enjoyable play!... and like I said, makes little difference for a very long time, meaning that it's a much more enjoyable way to the top, yet if self mutualizing and torcher is your thing, then have at the innate early skill building proses by all means! Just don't expect as much fun out of it...

I went almost 18 hours a day 7 days a week during the past 2 releases through 9 different chrs to find all that out, meaning months of difficult torturous tedium and tests of my own patients.

So you can rag on me or not, or pick my bones clean... But that's what I found out and how I found out...
I hope you all, or at least some of you found all that at least an interesting read because that's why I enjoyed all of yours...

~Time Lord~

 

The exp system works great, works as intended, and is very interesting without being very complicated. Once players who make these threads take a breath, let the explanations sink in, and then actually try some of the strategies suggested, they will catch on easy.

I predict many, many more threads of this format to come. 1) Hey! I dont get this! It sucks! Its Broken! 2) Naw, heres how it actually works... 3) But no! its broken, it sucks! 4) No really, just listen, heres how it actually works 5) *player figures it out and stops responding to thread*

----

My tactic is get a handful of baseline skills up to 50*, then secondary set of skills up to 50, then either grab a tertiary set or start picking one skill at a time to GM. This works well for me, and so far in R29 I have never gone below 3 bubbles of exp in the bar. I usually have between 5 and 6 bubbles stocked up, and level skills at what I consider a good rate. Im also not obsessed with maxing out my character in a game in 2 weeks, so YMMV. In fact, I play the game to have fun actually.

*one exception here is prereqs - I dont count those because it takes like 2-5 minutes to get any skill up to level 10 to advance to the next tier.

Anyway, this release I chose a hybrid mashup of abilities that made no sense at first, cuz hey, its my last pre-wipe avatar, why not? I started with Sprint (Im wearing cloth), Polearm Combat, Fire Arrow, Death Touch, Healing Touch, Searing Ray, Healthy, Heightened Awareness, and Discharge. Leveling all those up to 50 was easy, so I flipped em to "Maintain" mode and then went for Dodge, Acrobatics, Defensive Positions, Ignite Weapon, Immolation, Death Ray, Healing Ray, Train Intelligence, Inner Calm, and some Fire and Death innates. Getting those to 50 was far easier than the first round, which was easy unto itself. Now I am working up innates in Fire and Death, Swiftness, Heavy Lifter, Safe Fall, Armor Preservation, Fireball, Enlightenment, and Purify. I found that adding more skills in the mix to this caused exp to drain too fast, and I feel most comfortable with a decent pool. I also find that skills level pretty fast this way, so right now Im going for GM Polearm and GM immolation, and a few other random skills here and there.

As an aside, I built this avatar to be a goofy experiment, and it turns out Ive made a pretty uber character. I love this classlessness, when at first I feared it somewhat. I no longer have an archetypal class, I am a level 49 Seeker of Adventure and Do-er of Things.

Oh and another thing - utilize the deck system as much as possible, and avoid locked glyphs wherever possible (though I do have some deeper strategies with that too...). You can blast through leveling a single skill if you stack the glyphs in your deck in its favor and scatter it across many keys. Smacking a mob with Flame Fist 21 times in a fight levels it a heck of a lot faster than however many you'd get it out with the recast timer of a locked glyph.

Are you implying that playing is a bad thing? That actually sounds like great advice, its usually what I tell people who moan about grinding and dont realize they can just stop that and play and have fun whenever they like.

 

~I Absolutely "Totally" Agree With You!~!'

~Time Lord~!'

 

@Time Lord I deeply appreciate your inventory of animated gifs, though I often have a hard time perceiving an implied message in them.

 

When playing causes you to not be able to level and advance to newer zones because you are constantly XP starved, then yes. It is really bad advice. If the game was set up so you wouldn't ever get xp starved and stop advancing without knowing why then it would be fine.

 

I dunno. It seems to me like if a player is just always training whatever skills are useful to their character, they will be able to keep progressing without getting stuck. Playing that way won't be as efficient as always carefully allocating xp to whatever skill is the best value at the time, but it won't turn out horribly either.

Imo the xp system is the best feature of this game. It allows for a little bit of an advantage to be had by players that allocate their points intelligently, but it's not such a significant advantage that people who "just play" can't still do fine.