Zone Experience Modifiers - Please consider adjusting

since this just came up before PoP: What are the ZEMs for PoP zones?

I guess EPs will be best exp even though the lowest tiers zones like PoI have ZEMs, is that true? If this is the case, then what's the problem?

The point is, if you don't box and play a group dependant character, you won't be able to do this, because no-one else will want to - people mostly want to go to the place with the best xp, and sit there until they have the AA they need.

Since Luclin opened up, when going /lfg for AA, I have only ever been offered groups in the same old places - mostly Grieg's End, a couple of times the Deep for AE, and just once for anywhere else - Cazic Thule. And in that group in CT, the tank complained that the kills took too long and the xp wasn't nearly as good as GE, and he left after not very long. Some of the rest of us said it made a change from GE, but it was a fair bit harder (mobs healed themselves and each other and couldn't be stunned), and the xp was much slower.

Still nothing?

Oh well, looks like we should all just jump on the bandwagon of pick AoE hoppers and just control entire zones where the main population frequents like certain other guilds do and seem to get away with it on a daily basis.

A very valid point. Perhaps if all the zones had the same exp. rate as say the Karanas there would be a bit more spreading out of players in each zone.

That was the whole reason for this thread.

this is the reason TLP's die so quickly, i can assure you in 1999 many zones were utilized for leveling and socializing, and it was nothing like the linear themepark we get now

yesterday I proposed to go exp in Plane of Torment. I got laughed at.

I am sure... That TLPs dieing quickly has nothing to do with..
There being nothing left to due besides raiding when you hit max level, besides raid (get gear).

In Classic, you have just XP then gear..
In Kunark, you have just XP then gear..
In Velious, you don't even have XP.. just gear.
In Luclin, you have AAs (maybe 400 on average for all?).. and gear.
In Planes of Power, you have level 65, AAs (maybe 100 useful? 100 not so much?).. and gear.

Sure Luclin changed the curve with AAs.
But with the ability to bank 120 AAs, several of my guildmates at least, the ability to buy all the relevant PoP AAs when you hit 65 (or were progressing to) was there. Hell, as a Bard I only counted 93 relevant AAs, and that included things like finishing blow.

Hell, there are at least four or five groups of people in my guild, that have no interest to do anything sides farm tradeskill materials, spells (mainly runes), and raid. And the expansion is not even two weeks old yet.

I purposefully did NOT bank AAs and did NOT recap XP at level 60.
We have six months of Plane of Time being endgame.
Unless you count the LDoN stuff that will come out, that is fairly useless for endgame raiders besides a few augments, we do not really have that much to do.

People complain about the XP rates all the time on this forum. There is at least one new post a week, with several pages of replies. But, when it all comes down to it.. The XP rate is over double what it used to be. And the gear is way beyond what anyone, even the top guild on the server, ever had.

Hell, most of the camps I recall being great XP back in the day, without ever running out of mobs in an elemental flagged guild. I find myself running out of things to pull with a pick up group. A friggin pick up group! Without being fully VT geared even!

If the experience difference per kill was like 8% vs 9%, then sure, venturing out to other places to grind XP would be completely reasonable. But, as it stands, the difference between places like velks/ge is like 1% (or less!) vs a steady 1.8 to 2% per kill, which almost 50% slower! You have to go to the top places or you feel/know you're wasting time. It forces people to go to the high ZEM places and fight for mobs (which generates trouble) because even haggling over kills is better than other zones.

To be fair though, expansion are coming out 4x the speed they originally did though.

I don't think XP should be double what it is now, but I do think it would be nice if with each expansion there was a very small rate increase, which I think suits a progression style server but also helps offset the ever growing barrier to entry these servers notoriously have.

Many zones were used in 1999 because no one knew what we were doing, and even when we did, xp moved so slowly that it was very hard to tell which zones were better. But the same situation was present back then--some zones had much higher zems than others even in 1999. We were mostly just less aware of it, and it was all still new so exploring somewhere we'd never seen before was as important or more important than that ~25% faster xp we might get somewhere else.

You do realize if you're fighting for mobs, killing less mobs per minute, that even with a 50% bonus it doesn't take much for those mobs giving 1% versus 1.5% or 2% per kill to translate into less XP / hour?

In example if you kill:
3 mobs / minute at 1% per mob, you'd net 180% XP in an hour.
1.5 mobs / minute at 2% per mob you'd net 180% XP in an hour.

Both are exactly the same results and realistically compares an empty VL versus a busy GE.

I'll have to pull my log on Saturday from VL, but I wouldn't be surprised if was clearing in excess of 3 mobs / minute considering the trains I was pulling on myself could be 15 or so spiders at a time.

There is no arguing an empty GE at 2% a mob blows away most any XP option that isn't AE. I cannot argue that.

I can argue, however, having a zone mostly to yourself with aggressive pulling and high DPS can meet or exceed the black hole that GE becomes when it's busy. And considering the trump tears I see on the forums, GE is busier than I imagine these days.

I continue to not understand DB's stance on this issue (whether deliberate or incidental). There is no good reason for a cakewalk zone like GE to have a higher ZEM than, say, Cazic Thule. It is dumb and detracts from the gameplay experience for the many reasons noted above. Personally I have no interest in rolling another alt or even playing on a new TLP because, unless ZEMs are fixed, the entire game from classic through Luclin involves like 8 zones. It's truly stupid how a single ZEM table reduces the viable world of Norrath to a short sequence of good XP zones.

Im a believer that they should post actual ZEMs. If in the process of posting the ZEMs they think WTF why is that zones zem so low, then they should increase it. I also think it would be pretty cool for the new progression server to have rolling hotzone ZEMs starting in classic changed monthly.

Also, there were no pick zones then. So, once a zone was full, it was full. And some zones were so full that you could run around without agroing any mobs. So, once the best zones filled up, the others also filled up because you took what you could get.

Remember when lists were a regular thing, particularly in the well regarded spots?

These days with pick zones, you have multiple picks of the same zone, so if it's that much better than anywhere else, why would anyone go anywhere else?