You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

I want to start by saying while this issue does have an indirect impact from skill decay, THIS IS NOT A SKILL DECAY RANT THREAD... please read this thread carefully before responding and please don't derail this topic or complain about skill decay here.

Also, my knowledge of XP and leveling past 60 is limited, so if I am missing something here, please let me know.

@Chris

This post is specific to the idea that changing a skill tree late in your character's career will be extremely difficult and in some cases impossible with the way we currently accrue and spend pooled adventuring experience. My character currently has a total skill point count of 1,186 in adventuring skills and is adventuring level 69. I have 2 GMed skills, Bladed Combat and Acrobatics. My next highest skill is Swiftness which is right at about 90. All other skills are at approximately skill level 60 or below.

When my 4x multiplier ran out, I started losing on average 2000 experience out of my experience pool every time I killed a single mob out of a 5-6 skull zone.

I turned ALL skills I had points in to "maintain" and I was still losing XP out of my pool. To fix it, I had to get creative and upgrade my gear....

I recognized the fact that I was still wearing my Royal Founder gear, so I upgraded my chest piece to a crafted piece with about 16% crit chance and extra weapon damage and BOOM! I had an experience surplus after killing a mob.

This means that at some point, you literally have to increase the damage you do per attack or kill more than one mob at a time in order for your skills to be cost effective and maintain a surplus of experience in your pool.

This may at first glance seem logical, but it poses a few big problems. First, it sets an unintentional requirement that you must either be a crafter or know someone who crafts if you ever want to reach higher levels, because you must supplement the extra damage to keep your skills cost effectivee.

Secondly, in "end game", when your gear is maxed out and the experience consumed by skills to kill the biggest group of obsidian mobs you can find costs more than you recieve, your experience pool will eventually dry up. So, if I decided to switch, at that point in my character's career, from the light armor tree to heavy armor for example... I wouldn't be capable of doing so because I would be consuming more experience to maintain skills than I was receiving from the mobs I was killing.

The only option would be to wait until skill decay reduces your highest GM skills until you once again became cost effective and you could once again start increasing your XP pool so you could spend it on the new skills.


So how do we fix this so there is never a point where a character's skills become cost ineffective and consume more experience than they are reciving from the mobs they kill?


Thanks,
Grave

 

I think it has more to do with your hits damage and accuracy were not high enough to kill a mob that would yield you surplus XP points. I had the same problem on R25 while I was only able to grind up to level 51 without any XP bonus (since I started playing again in last December).

 

Hmm.. this is a bit puzzling. Does our adventure skill level decay? I have no real knowledge of how this stuff works, but it is sounding quite confusing. Having to turn on and off skills to maintain or what-not. I don't mess with all that gibberish. I just play the game.

I shouldn't have to play around with switches and knobs like i'm some sort of android.. i'm not the Oracle, i'm the Avatar!

 

Well, you also have the option to Not maintain a skill once you hit Gm. I don't Maintain Blades atm since it is an xp sink. I only maintain the ones I plan on leveling up, but not currently working on. And I also took the path of only working 2 skills at a time period this release. Blades/healthy gm'd blades locked healthy at 60 turned on train str and heightend awareness/locked str at 80 turned on train int and locked HA at 40 turned on..... and kept working my skills like that. .currently I have about 8 60+ with 500k in my pool at any given time..

The biggest problem I see people doing is trying to train entirely to much at one time.. if your pool isn't 100K plus turn off everything for an hour.. go do a dedicated gold farming session.. and then resume.

 

No your Adventure level does not move. Your individual skill levels do not move, although your progression xp in any skill not being used, or maintained ( bronze arrow up) loses progression. ( if your life attunement is 99 and you don't play, or level it any more it will always be 99. Just the xp in that skill to send it to 100 will decrease and even go negative) that s skill decay. Every game has some sort of mechanics and not everyone chooses to utilize them, just don't expect to be the best you can be without using the tools given to you. (That part isn't aimed at you Miracle Dragon ) But for everyone that doesn't want to use the skills tools ( stop gaining, maintain, gain) they cant expect to be great. The great ones will utilize every tool and advantage available.

 

If you want to change & start using a different skill set. You will in time forget your old ways. You cannot maintain knowledge of everything.
Sad but they wish to force us to buy characters or accounts to have more of an experience.

No. This thread is also not to point out that Decay Sux so I won't go there.

 

If im not mistaken, they are adding the ability to forget a skill .. so they aren't forcing you to do anything..

 

I'm interested in this. Isn't decay supposed to hit on death only? if you had all your skills at maintain... what made you spend XP? am i missing something here?

It doesn't, and its confusing because level does not accurately depicts the power of a character (imo) since it's related to the total amount of XP you've earned, instead of the actual amount of XP invested in your skills. I personally think it makes more sense if character level increases/decreases as your skills go up/down.

 

I think we fix it with a skill cap. We throw out all the complex math that just gets us into trouble, then we throw out decay (or at least modify it so that it's more in-line with a skill capped system).

The "problem" with this is some players want to endlessly mine for experience because they think it's fun or they're just good at it so it gives them a huge advantage over players that are not good at it or that won't do it. So once these players reach their skill cap they say the game becomes boring and either stop playing or become disgruntled.

When I think about changing this to a skill cap, I realize how few skills we actually have and how easy it is to obtain a skill that gives you pure functionality of the skill but maybe doesn't give you mastery of it (which often means that it doesn't give you as much damage output at level one as it does at level one hundred). So think the benefit to a skill cap is that it can give high level players more skills that they can GM without jumping through enormously unbalanced hoops to fight off decay. The downside, if you can call it that, is those players can no longer be masters of the universe by always progressing more and more skills.

::sigh::

But if we continue on this path of complicated math behind gears and levels, I suppose the other choice would be to make TRUE specialization of skills level up faster than having all the skills in the deck but only training one or two trees. Meaning that if you're going to be a fighter that uses two weapons, well then max out on that and stop dabbling in earth magic. The specialization will make you train faster and higher in the blades and tactics trees, but the moment you start to build up spells past level 20, you'll immediately see the hand of skill decay return to beat you into submission.

 

You are correct, it is definitely due to the amount of damage you are doing or your "skill cost effectiveness", because the fewer times you swing your weapon, the less XP it costs to maintain the skill, while killing that specific mob or group of mobs. Skills suck XP on each use, so if your skills are draining the xp pool faster than the xp earned from killing the mobs, you'll constantly be in a state of diminishing XP pool until it is finally gone.

Now at end game, there will come a time for most players (end game, min/max) where no matter how many high level mobs you round up and kill at the same time, you will be in that negative return and unless you're willing to allow decay to reduce your highest skills, there is no way to restore your skill cost effectiveness and begin increasing your xp pool again and thus, no way to train new skills if you decide to go from one tree to another. The option to zero out skills you don't want will not help unless you're zeroing out skills which are using the majority of your maintenance XP.

 

That is not an option.. you do not lose skills via decay..what ever your current level is it can only increase never decrease. Not until the implement the skill removal feature.

 

Manage you skills , easy simple and works like a charm, turn all to not gain and you can gain exp killing anything. I does not matter what level you are or what you are fighting if you can kill it you will gain exp.

I know a lot of player HATE the fact that they HAVE to manage their skills, and if you are not learning how to do it now when the game launches you will never achieve what you want they way you want.

And you can use this to change your template, it is actually EASY since gaining lower level skills goes FAST. If all you want is a way to lose or reuse your already trained exp p they have said there will be a way to do this kind of, but I think that is just bunko and if / when we can untrain players will find easy exploits to train easy skills then relearn other harder skills.

Again learn to manage your skills you can do anything you want.

 

Either way, it's a double edged sword. If the numbered skill level (52, 86, 100 etc) never decreases there is no fix for the issue I listed in my OP. If decay does reduce the numbered skill level, you could one day wake up and actually have decayed an adventuring level since its based on total accumulated XP.

 

Put it to - then it drains no Exp.. that is a fix. if you aren't putting exp into a skill it goes into your pool. This is getting over complicated.. With the current system and no way to forget a skill the worst case ( in my opinion ) is that you train 8 skills to 50.. decide you don't like that path. You then set those 8 to - status. You still have them available and effective at level 50 forever. But you want to learn new skills so with those skills turned off, you pick 8 new skills and begin leveling them as you normally would. WITH the bonus 8 skills at level 50 forever with no penalty...
Your newly selected skills will level at the same rate as your first 8.

 

You have to set it to maintain, otherwise youre subjecting it to decay. Not a viable option when youre trying to maintain 2-3 GMed skills while training lower level skills.

 

Setting it to maintain works just fine, as long as you use it every so often it does not use up exp or lose it.

 

This just isn't what I'm seeing. If you have a defensive innate, like acrobatics or sympathy of stone, set it to maintain and let a mob beat on you. Every time youre hit, youll see your experience pool drop.

 

You don't need to leave a skill on maintain to maintain it at its current level. You can if you want, but its going to drain your pool faster than if you set it to maintain every couple days, go hit something and then put it back to - . The maintain is a lazy option for people that don't want to constantly manage skills. I see no problem with this whatsoever. It gives people an option to just play if they want and also still leaves it open for the people who enjoy micro managing there skills. If you get to the point where you can't gain in your experience pool, just do like Weins said and set everything to - . You can then put those points into whatever skills you choose.

 

So we are saying that the experience being pulled while the skill is set to maintain is more than what is necessary to prevent skill decay? I will give it a try and I don't mean to doubt what you and Weins are saying, it just doesnt seem like excessive experience spend would be "working as intended".

 

Has anyone run any numbers to see exactly how much it's sucking up? You may be right, maybe it is taking up more exp than intended. I'll try and check it out in a few, got the day off for a snow storm