As the title suggests, this is a request for an optional experience toggle prior to 51st level. At 51st level, the alternate advancement system comes into play, along with expendable glyphs. Prior to this point, however, there doesn't seem to be any options for players that might want to do significant amounts of older content at appropriate levels. In just an hour, I completely outleveled Befallen. Prior to collecting all of the keys, let alone finishing the *two* mobs there for hunter achievement. The progressive server guide is outdated and there are no longer any servers that offer classic experience rates. Current progressive servers slow things down a bit, but overleveling is still a significant problem on any of these servers. Joining a fellowship and sharing all of my experience also slows things down a tad, but it doesn't completely share all of my experience properly. Outside of completely skipping over huge amounts of content, there just don't seem to be any real options for players that may want to progressively do content at appropriate levels. As mentioned, it is fully possible here to stop all experience. Please, give us the option to do this prior to 51st level.
I'm going to end up giving those a go, actually. Thank you for the suggestion! Is there any practical way to go about looting and using mercenaries?
XP 100% to AA, spend them on Glyphs and Fireworks, level 51 plus. Eating a death or six by punching a guard under level 51 is /easybutton. (and now 3 threads on this non issue)
whatever mercs you have will scale with you (and charge some coin on reupping your level. Shroud forms lag in level behind charaacter level by 5, are hard to get gear with stats for as race / class use doesn't include shrouds. so can be weak compared to actual characters, give or take getting a full set of buffs. One other way to ditch XP is to group with a chacracter / boxed alt that is more than 1.5x your level, even with some random player in guild or PoK. Cheap 10 slot containers that you won't mind just deleting for 1 silver each: https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=12292 Plane of Knowleddge on find (crtl f), Culkin Ironstove, Baking merchant at top of ramp from soulbinder outside trader building under awning.
"Eating a death or six" is highly understating things. To delevel from 23rd to 6th level, I'm having to leave 50 to 100 corpses for each level. That's some serious clean up work. Is there a /decay all function, at least? I lose 1-2% per death. I was earning more than that per kill, I think. No, overleveling isn't a problem at all. As I mentioned in the OP here, I completely outleveled Befallen in barely an hour. That's killing mostly trivial mobs at that point, too. And only one zone of how many left untouched? Not all of us enjoy bottomfeeding for almost all of the content of five(?) expansions!
I would also like a way to limit exp gained or even completely turn it off. This question comes up from time to time. It seems like it would be an easy enough change considering there are already many existing ways that exp is boosted (bonus events) and reduced (fellowship). Doing things like shrouding, death loops, creating a fellowship, grouping with a high level, and so on are kludgy solutions. I know EQ players are used to coming up with kludgy solutions, but in this case, it seems like it should be easy enough to just add a way to stop exp. This is also a bit problematic during these bonus exp periods. The exp gain at lower levels is pretty fast already. Adding 50%-100% bonus exp just means blowing through these levels that much faster. Or having to death loop that much more often. One way would be to have something like the "Exp to AA" percentage, but call it "Exp to Void". You can send anywhere from 0% to 100% of your exp into the Void where it's lost forever.
The only thing that has actually worked to stop gaining levels has been grouping with a much higher level character. They'd have to be close enough to me, too, that they'd basically have to sit right on top of me. Just being in the same zone wasn't enough. It's not something that I'd ask anyone to do, of course, so I ended up just leveling a couple of characters on extra accounts. Fellowship sharing barely shared any experience, if anything at all. It certainly wasn't enough to be noticeable at all. Shrouding seemed to work, but I jumped up quite a few levels once I removed the shroud. Maybe I did something wrong there? Anyhow, I didn't think that this request would be overly complicated. I've also noted that one of the newer premium account perks disables deleveling. I'll avoid that one like hell. Bad enough that I have to leave hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lying around.
Killing experience-giving mobs while shrouded will give you experience when you unshroud, but I don't know the conversion rates. So you didn't do anything wrong there. I like your idea of having an over-levelled groupmate. That's not something I would have thought of. You could hire a mercenary and set them on passive so they don't help and don't charge you. But this will only slow you down by no more than a factor of 2. A group of 3 with 3 mercenaries on passive where only one PC is killing the mobs should slow things down by more than a factor 2. When next year's progression server(s) open, they might have similar experience gains to classic. But once they start opening more expansions, the experience gains will increase. Otherwise, the only other option I can think of that's currently available is to only fight gray cons. It sounds like this is something you don't really want to do, though.
