Suggestion: Use adventure level to limit the number of skills one can train

I am not a fan of a newbie starting with a wide variety of skills training. there should be a hand holding quest that leads the avatar through the process of getting stronger and how to manage skills.

hopefully they will look into this for the battle camp.

I am not a min maxer but some amount of training and maintaining skills is important to building your strength.


as for limiting the amount that can be trained at one time I have not problem with that as long as its not total skills that can be trained at all but rather at a single time having clicked to training vs maintaining.

 

Definitely good advice. My gripe with the system is that it demands extended play with no advancement to build up that pool to achieve efficient advancement.

 

Why would you lock all your skills, build your pool to 3+ million and then train say dexterity instead of just locking everything but dexterity and doing what you did to get the 3+ million experience? From my perspective, you not only save time but you also get the benefit of increased dexterity, every time it goes up, while you're fighting.

 

Because it costs more XP per kill than I earn per kill, even on high XP mobs. So if I leave dex unlocked, my pool only goes one direction -- down. Which means it takes even longer to level, because the percentage pulled from the pool also drops as the pool goes down.

 

Actually, it takes less time but I'm tired of trying to explain it.

 

Having done it both ways, I have to strongly disagree.

 

Just read the whole thread. What a counter-unintuitive system! I hope it is good for bean-counters, because it is not so much for adventurers. If I use a skill, I expect it to become better with each use. What we have is a whack-a-mole: use your bow a lot, and eventually it will make you better at magic! Huh?

PS: If you think I "didn't get it" -- it confirms my observation. Don't waste your breath arguing it, but I will accept a definitive reference, which explains it in all gory details.

 

So have I.

 

In fact, your method is definitely awful. I spend a lot of time leveling up skills I'm not using to a base of level 40 so I can use them later if I want to try another class at some later date. If I kept my XP pool low, it would take ages to do that. I can make 100k xp in a very short amount of time, so keeping my pool at at least 3 million is not particularly difficult. But given how long it already takes to get things to 40 with it pulling from a 3 million pool, it'd drive me insane to try and get them to 40 with a substantially lower pool. It would also, for glyphs that require reagents, significantly increase the cost of raising those skills. Having a low XP pool is just a lose-lose situation across the board.

 

Um, that's not how it works. For innate skills (ones you don't cast), other spells you cast may help improve it. But I cannot improve, say "Flame Fist" in the Fire spell tree by doing anything with my bow. I must utilize "Flame Fist" to get it to level.

 

Seriously, you can only gain experience at a specific rate. If you're channeling that experience into the skills that you're trying to raise at the same time you're gaining that experience then that's faster than doing it separately. Period.

 

The amount of XP that goes into a skill is a percentage of your XP pool. The larger your XP pool, the more quickly the skill will raise. And, as I noted, will also reduce amount of gold I have to spend on reagents, since they level up faster.

 

You still have to gain that experience. If you're using the spells you're going to raise to kill the mobs then locking those skills while you are gathering the experience is actually wasting regs (and time). The only time it makes sense is if you're trying to raise a skill that you do not use that often. For skills like Train Dexterity, you're wasting time.

 

When you consider getting a skill to 40 only costs 4000-6000 exp, you can have lots of skills turned on at the start. Its when you start going to 60 it costs more so you gotta turn some off and be more selective, then 80 same thing more selective, and to gm you probably only want 1-3 skills turned on. If you can maintain above 1.01 mil, you will get decent transfer rate, but don't worry about building a mil pool till your going from 80-100 on most easy skills, and 60-100 on some of the heavy exp skills.

 

I think there is a misunderstanding/misinterpretation of what I said. IIRC, first an avatar has to clog the drain (so to speak) and accumulate an XP pool in millions using any means possible, e.g., a bow as in my example. Then an avatar opens up Flame Fist or any other unrelated skill, uses it --- lo and behold! --- it grows much faster, comparing with a small (normal/natural) pool. That clogging the drain sounds like a way to parlay bow skills into magic skills (or any other unrelated pair).

Still "um, that's not how it works"? Then, what about the definitive reference? Or is it still part of a folklore available only for anointed?

 

the less xp in the pool the slower you level and the less xp it costs per tick to level up a skill.

I would advise to keep large enough pool to account for death penalty, but building pool of 3 mil XP means you will have to make those xp without taking advantage of better stats... Making large pool before levelling makes sense for active skills that use reagents. Not for passives, though for some you have to keep an eye on not running too low on xp.

 

Id prefer a limit of schools in a deck.

 

We already sort of have a penalty for using lots of schools due to armor gemming. You can kinda boost attunement for one or two schools, so if you are using a school you are not gemmed for you have a disadvantage. Maybe it's too small an issue to be important though.

Couldn't you circumvent a deck limitation by switching decks (and properly attuned equipment)?

 

What I take away from this is simply that it's sometimes more important to keep a large pool than others. I think you can easily get to a plateau where you are strong enough to easily take on your current tier, but not strong enough for the next. I think this is another good point at which to build a big pool as the little micro increases in power won't make much difference in clearing your grind area. Taking things to 40 doesn't make much difference to me, but when I want to take something to 80 or 100, having a large pool is much more satisfying and saves on reagents/resources if they are needed.

I started with a million xp with only train strength turned on starting at level 60. The threshold where I spend about as much exp as I make seems to be ~100k. Actually not too bad, and I could see just leaving those kinds of innates on (one at a time) to level them. But you guys still can't convince me on the resource cost issue for other things (building pool with non-resource costing skills).