A 115 Paladin (43k plus AA points) and a 115 Rogue (19k plus AA points) are grouped both have healer mercs. in this example. The Paladin is the leader in the group and gets many times more AA experience than the Rogue per kill. Question is...why? I think I used to know the answer but I have forgotten what it might be.
Who is the puller? How is your fellowship sharing set up for the two of them? Is one of them a recruit-a-friend account? Since you didn't mention it: are they both set to 100% aa and/or do either of them have experience bonuses running?
The paladin usually pulls. No fellowship exp. going. No recruit-a-friend. I will start using the rogue to pull to see what that does.
There used to be a bonus for AA that was applied to you character if you were below a certain threshhold of AA's. It was a catch-up mechanic before Autogrant was initiated. As far as I know, it's still there but I have no idea how it scales these days. The bonus would slowly taper off as you gained more AA, coming closer to the current expansion. Considering how many AA's there are now, 19k is LOW. It would not shock me if that bonus is at play.
Except he said exactly the opposite is happening. The paladin that near max is getting more than the rogue that is low AA count.
There is some feature of EQ that nets the puller more XP &/or AA XP than anyone else in the group. As I recall this was asked for by the players a long time ago (in the era of much more open world static camps) as pullers were losing out on XP fairly consistently due to the range they needed to be within to get XP from the kill, and they didn't always make it back with the next pull to where the group was camped in time to get XP from the kill of the prior mob.
I box a bard/druid and my friend plays an SK. My bard is always set to puller, and the SK set to MT/MA. The bard and SK are heroic, the druid is not. I am careful on my bard to stay in XP range when pulling. We leveled up from 85 to 110 and all stayed exactly together, except the small difference when one of us died (then Overseer came out and we all got out of sync). There was no regular XP bonus for being puller. Once we all switched to 100% AA's it is a completely different, and confusing story. The bard has 16.5k AA. The SK has 18.8k AA. The druid has 18.2k AA. The bard gets AA's about 60% faster than the druid. I expect this to be somewhat faster because she has less AA. I didn't expect the difference to be this big. The SK gets AA about 10-15% faster than the druid. I don't know why this happens. The SK has more AA, so should get them at the same rate or slower. Some kind of bonus for being heroic? We see this every time we burn lesson while grinding. This is on FV without potions, fellowships or anything else. We all hit lesson at the same time every day.
Glad someone posted this. Was about to post about it today myself. I'd had a nagging suspicion it wasn't even, but did some testing today. Quick overview of the group. SK (heroic) Level 113 - 21k AA Shaman (normal) Lvl 113 - 21k AA Bard (normal) Lvl 110 - 16.5k AA Mage (heroic) Lvl 110 - 17.2k AA Beast (normal) Lvl 113 - 21.7k AA No exp buffs, no lessons. During the same period (SK is puller, but in camp till dead) these guys earned the following AA: SK - 27 Shaman - 10 Beast - 10 Mage - 18 Bard - 18 Camp was Frontier Mountains Sarnaks. Those numbers seem WILDLY off to me. Especially the SK.
Did the beastlord and shaman do any sort of damage to all of the NPC's you were killing? Or was it off and on?
Nothing really off about that, to be honest. You're in FM, which is THE zone where this bug/feature shows up more often than anywhere else. If the SK is puller on every mob, then his AA exp is going to shoot past all the others. Try pulling with the bard (or any of the others) and see what the results are.
Switching the BST over to do a session of pulling and we'll see how it goes. I already see him with 2 AA's in the short amount of time he's been pulling.
BST and SHM are both doing dots and meleeing the mob so doing tons of damage. Heck, even my noobie mage (fresh leveled) is meleeing.
Yeah, its been a little know secret for a long time in the puller gets more experience over group members.
Quick test switching BST to puller. He got 9 AA. In the same time span, SK and Shaman both got 3. 200% difference between puller and non puller seems huge. I didn't bother to check the two level 110's as they're getting a different, but consistent, rate.