Could someone explain to me how gold membership grants free AAs? Does this mean if I subscribe I'll never have to farm AAs? Seems too good to be true. Thanks!
You are not getting all AAs via autogrant. Currently you do get all AAs up to EoK auto-granted (of course based on your level). And some AAs are exempt from autogrant (tradeskill AA for example).
To start with Gold or All Access have the ability to earn as many AA as they want. They can do this with plugging away and earning them one by one or they can "auto grant" If you turn on "auto grant" then every time you level you will get 90% of the AA for your class for that level. The AA not included are trade skill related and Spell Casting Subtlety. See here for more info: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...-list-of-aas-that-are-not-autogranted.264600/ If you do not turn on Auto grant then you will earn a 10% bonus on AA up to 4000 AA and then after that you just earn normal. If you are a F2P or Silver account with limited AA then you can go All Access for a month and turn on Auto Grant for that month and be awarded all AA up to your level and over the cap limit for those accounts. And keep them when you go back to F2P/Silver. Auto grant can be a curse or a blessing depending on your play style. When you Auto Grant you will get a LOT of AA all at once. AA start at level 51 but if you are going to pay for a month and do it that way then most players wait until level 85 and up so they get more AA. You will be awarded all AA up to your level. So it will pick up any you missed. Once you Auto Grant you can never receive that bonus pre 4000. Its not a big deal really.
I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. You do get a bonus on the first 4000 AAs, but it's a sliding scale. For AA #1, it's a HUGE bonus. For AA #4000, it's a MUCH smaller bonus. Whether the average bonus over the whole 4000 amounts to 10%, I have no idea, I've never seen it quoted anywhere.
Ok I didn't go into detail on the 10% bonus but if someone is asking a general question then one can figure too much info will confuse them. It is an aggregate. This is how the bonus AA work: 10 times the base rate (100% of the base rate, plus 900% bonus) at 0 AA's. As you accrue AA's closer to the 4000 mark, that bonus decreases to 0% (for that 100% base at 4000 AA's only, no bonus at all). As you can see its easier to umbrella it with the perhaps slightly off statement that the bonus is 10%. I will leave it to you to google for the quotes on this.
What's the smartest way to do this then. Wait until 85, subscribe and then auto grant for a month? Also, i shouldn't grind any AA while leveling between 51 and 85?
A Correction: Spell Casting Subtlety (SCS) is included in autogrant. Shortly after autogrant was announce, we were told that SCS wouldn't be included. Whatever the history, it can now be toggled On/Off, and it is autogranted. To be fair, the information that SCS is included in autogrant can be found in two of the posts from the thread CatsPaws linked. So it seems that if the category for an AA is an expansion name, it can be autogranted as long as it's from a sufficiently old expansion (currently EoK or older) and your character has a high enough level for the particular AA. If the category is not an expansion, it won't be autogranted. Example categories include Tradeskill, Racial Innate, Progression, Expendable, and everything under the Merc tab. A Clarification/Recommendation: TLDR for this section: I think that if you plan to use autogrant, you shouldn't worry about the pre-4k AA bonus. I agree that it's not a big deal to miss out on the pre-4k bonus AA. In fact it will likely take a person longer to gain AA while they have the bonus than it would to ignore it and take the autogrant. The reason is they'd lose out on a lot of survivability and dps. The AAs which are obtainable and not covered by autogrant just don't do much to these 2 categories. Further, there just aren't many AA that can be purchased at lower levels that aren't included in autogrant. I'll use a heroic SK that I levelled to 115 (but never had him tank). He only has autogranted AA. The only AA he can purchase that don't having AA from expansions not currently covered in autogrant are all of the tradeskill AAs, Foraging, the Unity AA from RoS, and Extended Decrepit Skin. The last 2 will be autogranted when the next expansion launches. So if I had not used autogrant, I would have had to wait until level 100 before I could have spent 4000 AA on lines not currently covered by autogrant. When the next expansion launches, it will be level 105 instead of 100. This is really only a possibility if you're being power-levelled. If instead I had taken autogrant, I likely would have hit 4k autogranted AAs by level 80 (just an estimate). It looks like an SK could get 1787 AA (1762 once next expansion launches) not covered by AA. Of course the bonus gains on AA would disappear before level 80 if you were to take this route. Finally, as you get into levels 95+, you can (but don't have to) do achievements that give AA as rewards, sometimes a lot. These AA gains would not be affected by the pre-4k AA bonus anyway.
Depends on how you play. So lets assume your only going to subscribe for one month. If you wait till level 85 or even higher then you will get a lot more AA than if you subscribed for 1 month at level 75 or whatever. On my F2P I plunk around and get them some basic AA like natural durability, mystical attuning, run speed and just whatever looks like something he need to help him/her level better during the lower levels 50 and up. I kinda wait for some sort of bonus to happen in game. Something usually happens every 3 months or so. That is why I was plunking around, not wasting time but doing a few basic AA and leveling up. Now when the bonus hits, I am usually near or over 85 and will auto grant during the bonus time. While the bonus is on I go full AA and continue earning more AA which then go to tradeskills or what ever auto grant did not cover. When the month is up, you keep all those AA you auto granted or earned. Make sure you spend them all before your month is up. That is the only time you will get to go over the banked limit (well not really the banked limit - that is different but basically how many you can have as F2P) until next time you pay, if you do. Then back to leveling.
Tradeskill AA's will not be autograted (as been written above) and before you turn augo-grant on you may plan strategically: you will definitely want to have Salvage, New Taan Crafting Mastery and tradeskills AA's at 3/13 level, so you could work on tradeskills at your leisure. That's over 200 AA's or so (class and race dependant, you may want Anchemy, Make Poison or Tinkering added) With early 4000 AA bonus on (as been written above) you will earn those 200 AA at accelrated pace if you have not used autogrant. So you may consider strategy: earn tradeskill AA's quicker per mob kill, then turn auto-grant on, or turn auto-grant on, get AA's, which make your toon much better, and then earn tradeskill AA's at regular pace. It depends on your level, your team. In my opinion - past about lvl 75 f2p becomes a torture, unless you get PL'd.
For characters I've tradeskilled on, I've bought the first 3 ranks of the particular tradeskill mastery. However, I want to point out that not everyone does this. Before autogrant, one of the strategies with learning a tradeskill was to pick a very high trivial combine and use the Draught of the Craftsman potion (100% salvage for most recipes). People who went that route wanted a higher fail rate so they could use fewer materials to get to 300 skill. After people brought that up in the thread discussing the introduction of autogrant, DBG announced that tradeskill AA wouldn't be autogranted. I've never bought the salvage potion from the marketplace, but some people may still wish to.
It is 10x the rate at 0aa to 0 at 4000 AA, correct, but it is linear. So it averages 450% of unmodded gains over the course of 4000 aa, quite a bit bigger than 110% you stated.
I can say from experience that if you sub and get autogrant, then go back to f2p, you WILL be capped at 250 usable AA. You do keep the ones past that as you've earned them, but you will NOT be able to use them.
