Echoing Stone Tear - 5% isn't 5%.

Actually, you're not supposed to level it at all. You're supposed to leave it in your inventory as a reminder of how much you hate the entirety of VOA (especially anything related to Pilars).

Doing the pillars tasks about 780 times, as you have calculated above, every day for about half a year, at 4-5 tasks a day. Because if you do 20 of them per day for 39 days as the other alternative, you will need urgent psychiatric help.

That's one of the reasons I'm interested in knowing how many people actually did that. My next question after that would be how many of them were using illegal software because I have hard time imagining any sane human being spending that amount of time advancing their defense skill from 475 to 485, or thinking that it would make ANY difference for their character. It is an incredibly pointless waste of time. IF you actually spend it.

To put it bluntly, leveling this item to lv 20 suggests that its owner is suffering from severe case of OCD or using . Or both.

There are several people who have it in the 17-19 range. And, we know of at least one case where someone has it maxed, because their progress was where Dzarn set the new max.

I'd figured that level 17 would take 105 clicks and that I would get the fraction of a click through kills. According to the numbers Dzarn has posted here, it takes 107 and a fraction, not 105 and a fraction. So, I need to hoard 87 instead of 85. Right now I've got 75 of those 87; I expect to get two cycles done tomorrow and get a third done sunday, putting me at the 87 mark, and able to click them all to see where I wind up.

From the numbers here, I expect to need at least 400 more after getting the 87. Actually, I expect that I'll hit level 18 on the 85th click, or the 86th, due to the kills I've gotten while doing all these tasks. And, I figure that I won't need that full 405 clicks, but 402 or 403, once I hit 18 to progress to 20.

Is going from 350 to 360 defense worth the time and effort? Dunno - but its something to do between raids and it is not something that I expect to ever get upgraded (especially given the reason by Dzarn why he chose Defense skill for what this chase item would affect). I've got a sneaking suspicion that Defense skill is used in a variety of defensive checks, making this item worth more than it may first appear.

I think the sheer amount of kills and or pillars tasks it takes to do this, is a bit obsurd, even at 1/4 of these current numbers, it's pushing the major grind envelope. Even if you add a bonus for casters, I still wouldn't go back and do that many pillars tasks, or kill that many mobs there, have you done the pillars tasks?

After adding all the numbers together from lvl 1-20 it totals 21,537,901.. and lets say you decided to go solo (best xp numbers).. with green con mobs you need to kill 1,076,895 mobs.. or red con you need to kill 164,411 mobs. That's a lot. And if you do pillars tasks to level from 14-20, you need do get the optional part successfully 2032 times.

If my math is wrong here, please correct me.

Maxing the LDoN aug back in the day was no small task either as it took hundreds of missions to do so. This is no small task, but it's definitely doable with consistent effort.

Your math may be right, but you are making the same mistake I initially did.

"01 - 0 exp
02 - 4500 exp
03 - 6783 exp"

That does not mean that to hit level 3 takes an additional 6783 exp. It means that the TOTAL exp to hit level 3 is 6783. The difference, 2283, is the amount of exp required to go from level 2 to level 3.

I made that same mistake you did myself, at first. But the numbers that way do not match up. At level 15, I was getting 1.9% per Fragment click. If it took 1.4 million points, and I was only getting 10,000 points per click, then it would take 140 clicks to hit 16, not an estimated 52.6 (actually, if you subtract the 15 exp from the 16 exp, you get 47.3 clickies, which does not *quite* match what I saw at 15).

How fast you get the thing done depends upon a bunch of factors - but mainly how many sets of the five tasks you can accomplish daily. A little over 5 months if you do them once a day, and as little as 39 days if you're a sleep-deprived hermit who does four cycles a day (since they have 6 hour lockouts, you can't get it any faster than that; though those estimates ignore kill exp).

I'm sure the people this pertains to appreciate your insult.

Ok, that makes sense as well, here's some more numbers I came up with after doing the numbers this way.


7,250,885=total xp to level the item (1-20)
green=362,544 (green con mobs needed going solo)
red=55,350 (red con mobs needed going solo)
6,840,498= xp needed to level it from 14-20
684 tasks (from lvl 14-20) at 10,000 per click

At 1 task every 6 hours it would take you 171 days.

Still ridiculous..

Well, do all five then, rather than just one. You can get five clickies every six hours, you are not limited to just one clicky every six hours.

But would they be willing to admit it?

LDoN missions had other rewards, far more practical. They were the main content of a current expansion. They were the main source of xp at the time, when AA was still really hard to get. They were the ONLY source of augs that had just been introduced to the game and had a very significant value.

This item, on the other hand, has an almost zero practical value and no other rewards attached for killing these mobs and doing these missions (definitely not for the xp).

I've said it before, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Defense skill is used in a lot of things that involve your ability to take and avoid hits.

You can do it faster than that, lockout timer is based on when the mission is started and you don't have to be in the mission when it starts.

Crisis of Faith : solo task, finish within 72 minutes to get the clicky.
Word of ____ : group tasks with 6 hour timers. If you don't finish within 6 hours, you are not going to finish. Word of Melretia requires that you finish the task within 30 minutes to get the clicky (the other three Word of ____ tasks are not time limited in that sense).

Additionally, all five of these tasks have a 6 hour lockout.

Level - Exp Needed - % of kill based XP completed - # of missions to reach this point - % of missions completed
01 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0
02 - 4500 - 0.06 - 10 - 1.3 (1 Defense)
03 - 6783 - 0.09 - 14 - 1.8
04 - 10224 - 0.1 - 17 - 2.2 (2 Defense)
05 - 15410 - 0.2 - 20 - 2.6
06 - 23226 - 0.3 - 23 - 3.0 (3 Defense)
07 - 35007 - 0.5 - 26 - 3.4
08 - 52763 - 0.7 - 29 - 3.8 (4 Defense)
09 - 79525 - 1.1 - 33 - 4.3
10 - 119861 - 1.7 - 38 - 4.9 (5 Defense)
11 - 180655 - 2.5 - 47 - 6.1
12 - 272284 - 3.8 - 60 - 7.8 (6 Defense)
13 - 410387 - 5.7 - 80 - 10.3
14 - 618536 - 8.5 - 110 - 14.2 (7 Defense)
15 - 932258 - 12.9 - 141 - 18.2
16 - 1405100 - 19.4 - 188 - 24.3 (8 Defense)
17 - 2117767 - 29.2 - 260 - 33.6
18 - 3191899 - 44.0 - 367 - 47.5 (9 Defense)
19 - 4810831 - 66.3 - 529 - 68.4
20 - 7250885 - 100 - 773 - 100 (10 Defense)

Other than Rangers and anyone else who wants to reclaim the Ammo slot, those last 4 points of Defense are a testament to commitment/sanity.

The evolution is horribly designed to suck you in thinking Level 16 means you have made considerable progress when you actually need to do over 4x as much killing or 3x as many missions as you have to date to complete the evolution even though the rewards for evolving are linear.

So the other Word of _____ tasks other than Melretia you can complete more than 4 times per 24 hours and get a clicky.

The underlying basis for the logistics is start the missions with alts before or during raids (depends on how long you raid obviously) /taskadd to those after raids and then do then do 8 missions after raids doing 3 of the missions twice.

The more characters involved, the more elaborate the logistics but if you were in a high end and disciplined guild it's fairly trivial to figure out and then tell Ranger_03 start this task at 4 and 10pm on Saturday and Sunday and you could complete a lot of missions in a single weekend.

The answer to your question is "both" I can confirm that with utter certainty, and I rarely confirm anything as 100 percent certainty unless I am positive. Pillar tasks were a factor for sure but there was also more to it prior to that. But that's really as much as I can say on these forums.

The problem isn't just the sheer number of tasks required, and to actually do all 5 every 6 hours? That means not failing the optional part that rewards the clicky, I don't really remember how long they take, but I'm gonna go out on alimb and say that total time to complete all 5 would take anywhere from 2-4 hours, and this would give you a ~2 hour break from the game, only to come back and start them again. So the argument about doing all 5 every 6 hours is null to just about anyone who doesn't live in Norrath.

I would like to suggest making the required xp needed be 1/4 what it is now, or just remove the xp restrictions and not limit it to Alarans or Alaran ghosts. I partly say this because as people level, the mob con color becomes lower, eventually becoming green/grey con and awarding little to no xp, thus limiting someone who wants this to doing only pillars tasks ( provided this item isn't replaced by something else in the future) This kind of item reminds me of the BiC aug and that it would possibly be used for quite some time.

That's actually a really good point, looking long-term- whether the amount of experience is changed or not, unless new versions of the item are made, at some point, it's going to require either the ability to get XP for it from greys, or the ability to get XP for it from non-Alarans, unless Alarans are going to be a component of any and all new content. Getting harder as you level up is just silly- just look at Rear Guard Captain Balreth; Necro or go home!

Oh, as someone who is about to hit level 18 on the stone tear, and who has to do about 2.25 times what I've already done, I'd love to see the exp requirement reduced on this thing. Given the rate at which I personally accrue the clickies, at a minimum of 26 per week and up to 36 per week, depending (given my playtime and the guild's raid schedule), I'm looking at spending between 12 and 16 more weeks working on the thing, after tomorrow where I'll have enough clickies to hit 18.

Are you forgetting that being in the task gets you the lockout when it is done .. and that these Word of ____ tasks are each group tasks that have six hour time limits? Its not like you can start Word of Anriella, accomplish the easy optional step, wait four hours, and then taskadd someone, finish the task, and then have that someone then request a fresh Word of Anriella. They'd have to wait out the rest of the six hour lockout. It might only be an hour or two, depending on how long the alt held the task, but you are not increasing the four times per day rate at which you can get credit for Word of Anriella.

The one case that I know of who had gotten to 16 last summer, and who was then used as the benchmark for the new finished exp requirement, does not to the best of my knowledge fit either. I personally am merely determined to get it done, since it is something to do in EQ other than just roll up another alt and take that toon to max level/AA, or to camp useless items in missions I don't need.

OCD? Hardly. ? WTF for? I have never used it, but I have looked into that software before, and I don't see how it would help you get the optional steps for any of the missions done, considering the randomized nature of the tasks. The trees are never the same in either RT or WS for Crisis of Faith, You don't know beforehand whether the npc is going to be converted in Word of Melretia before you click the scroll on him, you don't control the droprate on the stuff for Word of Falkaa, nor the pathing of the see invis inside the light pillar, the timing on the AE's for Word of Anriella is random (I've gone as much as seven minutes without one AE before). The only task where I could see it possibly helping is Word of Erion, as long as you don't have any named in the way and can get your pulls done smoothly.

Ya might want to do the tasks a couple times before ya go an' insult the people actually doin' 'em.