Thoughs about XP Pool - Skills - Available Mobs

Hello everybody,
just a few thoughs about the subjects and the common hope that balancing will be better before the final release:

There are a lot of areas currently in SotA, but almost everyone have the same mobs, just with different level
... that's fine for hunting for some level, but when you hit higher level it becomes very "very" hard to gain XP, not enough high level mobs, and the higher level (miniboss or like that) have a respawning time that let you sleep.
The reaction to this point is that people are using any exploit they find to reduce the time (and to be honest "reduce the boredom") for getting enough XP on the pool to raise sills level.
I think that people will be happier and game will be more fun if XPs needed to advance skills are in line with the mobs on game:
it is fun hunting elder/obsidian wolves at Deep Ravenswood to get close to GM because they are harder enough to get satisfaction and they gives enough XP for the pool to use for high level skills, it is not fun having the need to hunt "tons" of the same elder/obsidian wolves at Deep Ravenswood because the XP needed to raise the skills over certain limit are crazy for the available mobs.

If also before the first release there is need to get over GM to have access to certain capability, well, allow players to have the chance to have higher level creatures they can hunt with a normal respawn, without becoming living BOT on the same mob for age!

Thanks in advance

 

I totally agree with the point expressed here, even when i'm still far from fighting top level mobs i'm struggling to progress. The XP granted by enemies does not seem appropiate to the amount of xp we need to raise the skills at the level i am, neither to the effort required to kill them. In my opinion it's has something to do with the fact that XP was factored when we only had levels, and the way we progress and use experience in the use based system is different enough to look at it deeply. The way i see it, the game should be de-levelized asap, thinking of another way to grant experience more in line with the use based system. To sum it up, it still feels like we're transitioning from levels to use based, and that's diminishing the progression experience.

On the long run i'd also like to see other ways to fill our XP pool than killing mobs, like random NPC's giving us quests like finding a special place in a zone, or getting a special drop from a mob, then posing the player a dilemma about how to solve the quest, to keep the moral theme of the game. I know that without the moral bit those kind of quests a bit standard in MMOs but doing those is definitely better than just killing the same kind of mobs over and over again.

Leaving the ways of fixing this behind, it could be great to get some information about the long term goals regarding progression, like how many skills are expected to be raised at once and until what % assuming we are able to keep up killing mobs "appropiate" to our "level"; (terms quoted because i think that the fact that we're still using that terms in an use based system are reflections of the problem).

 

I think the most you can get (and I'd have to test this to be sure) is something like 5k XP from an 'obsidian' difficulty creature, with all your skills and innates turned off. (so all the XP you gain just goes into the pool)
If it takes 1M XP to GM a skill, then you need to kill 200 of them.

Sound about right? Or are my numbers off?

 

1st - off learn to manage your skills if you are using more points than making ,you are the problem, NOT the game. This is by design to make it more difficult to just blanket GM all the skills you want.

2nd - as for the tedium, this is ONLY because of the 4x bonus when you are only getting 250 exp per the 1000 you are getting now it will all change. ((and then you all will be complaining how you cannot gain ANY skills - - Back to #1)))

3rd - stop trying to "fill" your pool that concept is going to GO AWAY, in the future

 

1.- If i'm killing monsters above my level (yellow) while raising only a skill and i lose xp maybe i'm part of the problem, but the game has its share as well. You can't just ignore a request for balance and attention assuming people don't know how to manage their skills, because maybe they do.
2.- It's actually the opposite. How killing 4 times more enemies reduce the tedium? This is related with the fact that there's no great difference between killing one monster from another, and they all give the same experience reward because of enemies being tiered in levels. Removing the 4x won't reduce the tedium (i can tell you i'm out of the 4x bonus and it doesn't help); enhancing AI, further differentiating enemies tactics and improving the interactive elements between skills will. So once again, why?
3.- You do need to fill your pool and you will need to because not enough xp on it reduce the amount of xp applied to a skill, so what's optimal is to have an xp surplus and never go below it. Also, because levels are still around there's an inherent benefit in just "filling" your pool. If all i stated is going to go away, i'd love to know how and (of course) where it was said.

 

good luck in the future, have fun enjoy, but when I say ITYS

 

Maybe those numbers are accurate regarding actives? Just spent around 100k to raise Train Dexterity from 55 to 60, so pretty sure i'll need more than a million to GM it... I still think nonetheless that the point is not in the amount of experience, but in the means to get it. The amount of creatures just reflects for how long the activity will be extended, but what makes it tedious is that every fight is the same, and currently there's no other way to get there. I'd just like to see differences between fighting enemy A and enemy B, and also more ways to gather experience besides massive killing.

A bit off topic, but having other kind of rewarding/fun activities in the game could help people to get distracted from the goal of GMing stuff, reducing the tedium as well.

 

Please read carefull before writing.
I am talking of getting XP to feed the pool (all skills closed to learn, so -> only getting XP killing creatures, no use of XP opened):
1. when you are over GM, increasing the skill become huge (each skill point demand a lot of XP from the pool)
2. to get them you have not sufficiently high creatures that supply enough XP
---> the only way to get XP is killing TONS of the higher creatures of the game but that is really boring, what I am asking is creatures that gives more XP (higher/ difficult) but not like boss/miniboss, where the spawning time is too long

Understand? I'll try to be more explicit:

Is not matter of blocking skills, think of a situation where all skills are blocked but the game become "very" boring, close to make you sleep to get points enough to skill only 1 point (just to talk of real things, i have 112 sword and 116 taming, 1 only point of taming demands crazy amount of XP)
--> my wish is only have access to an area with higher creatures than the current one, that gives enough XP for the pool to feed it in line with the request of XP over certain limit of experience

Thanks!

 

I do agree there is a need for higher difficulty zones, but there are probably skills that would make you stronger without training above 110. Expecting for the xp to scale with nonoptimal character development sounds a bit weird for me.

 

LMAO and it is only going to get HARDER to train, good luck. And when you CAN NOT lock All your skills what are you going to do???

Peace another thread I am Done with.

 

Gracy,

I completely understand where you're coming from; However, I do think Weins has a point but you kinda need to look past his.. well.. whatever it is. Essentially I believe (others may disagree) this problem stems from the fact there is no true cap, so players constantly feel they need to progress higher and higher. The "cap" in this game is basically when you reach a point where you cannot gain enough exp to compensate for the decay across all your skills. I know there was somewhere in this forum where a dev talked about the skill levels in relation to what they meant - 80=master 100=grandmaster 120=god or whatever it was.

The point I'm trying to make is if the vision from the devs is to have 120 be the highest of the high but don't implement a real cap yet they add more higher monsters they will artificially inflate the max skill level to say 140.

Quite honestly the whole leveling/use base just needs to be reworked - Adventure level and use base together just feels weird.

@Weins201 , Are they really doing away with the ability to stop/pause learning skills? Is there a source topic on that, i'd be interested to read it.

~Wodin

 

My only problem with this is you are forcing people's hand in what skills they Have to take. If I want air resistance, that doesn't mean I want to take air attunement, I may be using earth currently. But I still want the bonus from well grounded.

 

I'm not sure if this is the case, that's why I was asking for a source from Weins. I think it would be kind of weird since they stated they were working on implementing the ability to "Forget" a learned skill.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/q1-2016-schedule-update.42479/

Under R28 information

~Wodin

 

That would work, however that doesn't fix the fact you need 10 minimum in a skill to move down a tier.

 

I'm not really suggesting anything, just pointing out what they have stated they are doing. I'm not sure what the vision is for the skill system yet.

~Wodin

 

That's an interesting point.
Currently, in R27, the only resistances you can raise permanently (after getting 10 attunement) are Air, Fire, and Water.
If they add resistances for all the trees, it might be possible to offset some of the attunement detriment with those resistance skills.

 

Hello Wodin,

I don't think is a matter of lacking of a real CAP, i like that.
I personally think there are two things in conflict:

1. the need to go over GM to get some skills/capability (i.e. taming ferocious red spider requires 119 "at least")
.... VS
2. the difficulty to get XP over certain level (the max areas that "without exploits" people use to get XPs are the same to get to GM, but after that XP earned there are too few, it becomes only matter of time, continuous killing for hours and hours the same mob, transorming a funny game in a boring job)

that's my simple thought: or let players access to all the game's features to GM or make players have access to other more important areas after GM

 

lol ... in how many language should I write that "I'm talking of situation where "all skills are locked"?

again ... read carefully

 

Just a sec to tell everyone, I had a buddy join SotA yesterday night...he logged in, I explained and when we came to the point about Xp and how it works in SotA he was more then positively surprised. Just saying that sometimes its important how new people see stuff...since you never get a second chance to make a first Impression...SotA made a awesome good impression.

I am not in your shoes, cant say how hard it is to get something in the later levels...but SotA is really on the right track in that matter imho.