Use Based Skills and the Adventure xp Pool

I've been trying to understand the relationship between the adventure xp pool and point gain for various skills.
At first, I didn't really pay any attention to it, then we got the xp pool "bars" and I noticed that I had 1.2M point, but still didn't pay attention as my skills went up.
When my pool had dropped by over 1M points, I started looking at how things were acting based on what skills I used and what the effect was on the pool.
I've posted some results here

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n0P2Xz1l2lC-TMwusaiCxiCEgV3EINVSWZ_iDbUCHpA/edit?usp=sharing

I have a hard time understanding the design imperative that would make it impossible to build the pool and gain experience at the same time - even killing the highest level creatures in the toughest scenes.
Maybe I'm missing something - so please chime and enlighten me.
Thanks
Sil

 

If you have too many skills training at once, the skills used and related innates can indeed eat up your experience pool more quickly than it grows. The trick is to train fewer at once. Chris (the Dev responsible for the combat mechanics) addressed many concerns, including this one, in a video chat two days ago. It is very worth viewing!

EDIT: Listen to the explanation at 24:19 minutes

 

Yeah, I figured that's how it was going to pan out. This means, currently, you can't gain XP and use skills for advancement, concurrently.

All this does is encourage the play style of "Gain, then Spend" and REQUIRES the sole use of auto-attack / free-attack just to gain enough XP to spend, in a contrived fashion, to advance skills. It entirely undermines the idea that playing "normally" is sufficient.

I hope this isn't the design goal. It's reeeeeeeeeally not a good idea.

And on a personal note, if this IS the design goal, ... bait & switch doesn't even come CLOSE to how this mechanic is going to be perceived by the public once this information becomes common knowledge.

 

According to the answers given in the video, you need to concentrate on training the skills you really want and not train all related skills at the same time. If you are training everything at once, you are spreading yourself too thin. There are lots of factors that are still being tweaked, like skills learn rate and total cost multipliers.

Apparently it is indeed a design goal to prevent people from becoming masters of ALL skills, and it will need constant work to keep mastered skills at the grandmaster level. Some people like it, some people don't.

 

I plan on reviewing the video, however based on the test I documented it wasn't possible to train even 1 isolated skill without creating a net loss of xp.
My concern is that based on that experiment you have to choose to EITHER gain xp OR skill - you can't do both no matter how limited a set of skills you keep active.

 

i just counted, i have 35 skills active. some scenes i can still gain xp in even with all those, some no. it depends on the mobs and their rewards in that area.

 

I took a look at your documentation. It looks like your ranged combat skill at level 98 was swallowing a large part of your pooled experience, because once you stopped training it, your pool started to grow again.

In the video, @Chris put up the following three slides. The third one refers to working on lower level skills, but doesn't specifically say how much experience is consumed when training grandmaster level skills. Maybe this is another mechanism to impose a soft cap on levelling skills infinitely high?

 

It's not a matter of how many skills are active ... it appears to be based on the skills that you use and any skills that have dependency relationships to them. So in my case, the only way I could gain xp while using ranged attack was to stop ranged attack and all dependent skills (including tactics and focus) from gaining points. The fact that I had some magic and taming skills active wasn't an issue as long as I didn't use them as part of the test.

 

Exactly. So at that level, I can't allow ranged attack to gain or I'm always going to be negative xp even if ALL dependent skills are paused. I'm going to do a bit more testing after I watch Chris's presentation. I may start another avatar with 0 xp and see what the process is like without a large pool to start. It will be interesting to see how crafting xp evolves. Right now it's far more forgiving than adventure.
In any event ... Vielen Dank für Ihren Eingang

 

Innates and actives all coming from one pool is a strange thing. I will read your spreadsheet at home (work blocks it), but the large pool is definitely a factor, because you are able to allocate more XP because of the pool. You want the pool to decrease, but you also want to gain skills (need to see that part).

I still do not like this reverse binary system of turning things off to be able to 'concentrate' on certain things. Too much time micro managing. If I want to concentrate on ranged then I should say so and the skills UI should do the math and "off clicking" for me. My opinion.

Lots of promise, but it needs some work still in my opinion. I will withhold judgement until I see the R23 progress. No XP pool will change a lot.

 

If you think about it, that's kind of the way skills worked in the old system. You went out and killed things until you leveled up, then you had some points to put where you wanted them. The problem here is than while you can see your points in the pool, you don't know what your level up target will be and points kind of drip into active skills at various rates until they go critical and jump to the next level. I think this will work out better but I'm still trying to get my head around how to manage things effectively

 

I want to adventure, not manage... well, at least not micro manage.

 

glad someone posted this, i just blew up my whole pool last night and had to figure out what happened

 

Could be good to be able to flag ONE skill as priorities all experience beside the one to maintain skills goes to this.
Also could be good to be able to flag a skill as decaying. Every time you gain 100 experience drain 100 experience from this skill and place part of it into adventurer pool.

 

Theirs really no wrong way to gain skill points, just a matter of how much effort you want to put into specializing. Only advantage of building up a experience pool is that it transfer into skills faster.. but if you transfer all the experience you get into skills as you go, you've already achieved this goal. Only time I build up my exp pool is when I want to power lvl one skill in particular, then I can lock all other skills and go home and train one skill specifically... its actually more work over all then just playing.. but more useful in somethings.

 

Secret to fast gains is deciding which skills to cap and when. Sometimes its best to lock everything so other skills can catch up until your strong enough to fight stronger creatures, then unlock everything for another 20 points before relocking for a time.
If your loosing experience from your pool too fast, its because too many skills are training or the skills your training are higher in experience cost to train then then the experience you gain from the monsters your fighting.