Auto-mentoring - Contested Bosses

Just wanted to pop in and thank y'all for all the feedback! And also to let you know that I changed almost every encounter brought up in this thread =)
Let me know if there are any others! Or any zones in general that are frustrating placeholder heavy. Someone brought up Vestibule, I'll take a look at that when I get a chance.

I didnt read all 6 pages so fogive me if this has already been asked and answered. Will experience be given at the same rate as unmentored? For example I mentor to 60 and go to Silent City and work on Peacock or whatever. Will my level 75 character get the same experience they would recieve unmentored?

Currently when mentored there is a 95% XP penalty to prevent players from levelling too quickly by mentoring extremely low level friends.
Our plan right now is make this penalty dynamic and based on how far you have mentored (whether normally, or through auto-mentoring). For example:
If you're level 80 and mentor down to 70, the penalty will be very small because 70 is so close to 80. However, if you mentor all the way down to level 10, or even 5--the penalty will be very severe because of the extremely low target level.
Hopefully that's not too confusing =) The goal is to have XP gain be noticeable and useful, but not exploitative. The hard cap of 95% made it almost unnoticeable.

Timetravelling, the situation you describe, isn't that the way it is right now when you mentor someone?

timetravelling wrote:

Thats not confusing at all to me at least. But in an earlier post you mentioned the use of old zones as one of the purposes of this auto mentoring thing. Personally I beleive to make the best use of old content is to reduce very little of the experience lost. At least back to Desert of Flames 60+ zones. To be able to go solo DoF zones and gain experience would be almost as exciting as installing a whole new expansion in my eyes. I loved Desert of Flames and would love to have a reason to go back. But if that prevented me from obtaining the experience I would gain in Kunark (example) then I would be reluctant to mentor down just to experience old zones and get crappy loot and tiny coin. The exploit factor doesnt come to mind considering the whole new smart loot system and the stat caps since those old zones were released. What could be the exploit? Farming Poets Palace for a level 60 conjuror scout pet master? Maybe theres some I cant think of but I would just LOVE to be able to get green con mobs in some of the old zones while I level up my alts. Palace of Awakened and other KoS -DoF zones would be my target area if there was very little experience lost. I solo alot so the nostalgia feeling might not be worth the lost plat, loot and experience combined. And if that was the case then I think I'll stick to Kunark and TSO to level my alts and gain some plat.

I would recommend making it scale for level...lower level, lower spawn time...we blow by the lower levels and it is easy to miss things...u dont really make 2 runs of something at lvl 30 anymore.

timetravelling wrote:

I hope your also altering the rewards for quests that have little to them other than killing named mobs.
It just seems wrong to be able to do Screaming Mace in less than 30 minutes, and still get the same adventure and AA experiance it is currently offering, as well as the status and the item itself.

Is this auto-mentoring going hand-in-hand with item adjustments to make them worthwhile? Currently old world fabled are laughably bad.

timetravelling wrote:

What does the penalty apply to ? Actually, to make it clear, you could tell us about the maths behind the exp gains

Not sure if anyone mentioned these earlier, but pretty much every named in Obelisk of Lost Souls needed for the initial "Summoning the Creator" quest needs to have their rarity reduced. Avulsor, for example, is on a ~15 min respawn timer and on the last 5 characters I took into Obelisk only 1 of them actually got him to spawn (after 4 hours or so). The other 4 characters gave up and had a guildmate open the door for them so they could retrieve the runes needed for To Speak as a Dragon. To be perfectly honest, there is no reason why any of the named mobs for the Obelisk door access should have a placeholder. No one wants to spend 4 hours or more camping 1 floor of a very small zone just to be able to open the door to the next section. The named needed to open the door from the outside should also be looked at because their spawn is extremely variable. Sometimes I can get them to spawn within 1 or 2 phs and sometimes they took 5-10.

To Recap:
All the named Shadowmen in the outside area of Obelisk of Lost Souls needed for entry.
All the named on the first floor of Obelisk of Lost Souls needed for "Summoning the Creator" quest to access the second floor.

Thaelar wrote:

IMHO there should be different mobs for the exquisite drop and the quest update. What you are suggesting would most probably lead to high farming activities there. But beside that, yes, in times where you hardly need a day of solo questing to grey out those nameds, I would also like to see them changed.

timetravelling wrote:

Which makes me ask if quests are giving percentage chunks of XP, or actual numeric values? Since the XP pool that determines our level is supposedly a numeric one, wouldn't low level quests just giving numeric amounts of xp already deal with the issue of leveling too fast?
I.e. (using hypothetical numbers) if
level 2 took 100 xp points
level 50 took 100000 xp points
And a level 1 quest gave 25 points of xp.... wouldn't that already deal with the capacity to level fast by the very small amount of quest xp given as opposed to what a high level person needs to progress to the next level? in the given example one such quest would jump a level 1 25% of the way to level 2, but that level 50 would only get .025% of the way to the next level, and that without reducing the amount of XP we get while mentoring.
But, if quests give a percentage of xp needed to level, that explains why you are cutting xp..

The amount of experiance a quest gives (and probably mob kills as well) alters with your level.
As you get higher, a quest gives you less experiance in a numerical value, on top of the fact that you need to gain more experiance to get to your next level. The last time this was explained was pre DoF, so it is possible that it has been altered (though no mention of it has been made), but I would wager that the above is still accurate.

+1 to this thread because its cathartic to read other people's horror story posts regarding their mob camping.

ShinGoku wrote:

This is the first one I thought of. I spent hours over several days killing everything I could find and never got this mob on one character. Another time I got it in under an hour. I don't really get impatient until it passes the three hour mark but no low level quest mob should EVER even if you are just unlucky that day take over 2-3 hours to spawn.

Rocc@Unrest wrote:

It should still play that way. But remember how much quicker it is to level from 20 to 21 vs 70 to 71? That's what the xp penalty preserves. You should still level as though you're your original level instead of leveling like you're level 20 again =)
To a few other comments: The penalty is almost entirely aimed at mob-kill XP, not quest XP which handles itself pretty well.
And for the items: Unfortunately, we do not have the bandwidth to address every single item that is associated with these zones and bosses and quests. There are indeed balance issues as our itemization has evolved over the years, and hopefully we will be able to revisit them at some point.
However, while removing placeholders, I did take a look at any affected boss' loot table and improved loot chances quite a bit. Several epic rare spawns were also downtiered because they had no fabled items, and any spawned bosses that did drop fabled had the chance to drop those items increased by ~5%. Some bosses also had a chance to not even drop treasured, and where possible I tried to make sure that the affected bosses drop at Least a treasured item at all times.

timetravelling wrote:

Well thats backwards thinking.
Making the mobs more common, easier to kill, AND with better chances of dropping decient loot.

Xao June wrote:

Yes, because encouraging players to actually go out and kill contested, rather than just humping instances all day long, that's such a horrible, horrible thing to do.
Seriously, based on this and other posts you've made, are you sure you wouldn't be happier playing a game like Lineage? It's a grindfest extraordinaire that sounds like it'd be right up your alley.

timetravelling wrote:

The game is 5+ years old now, what would be the problem with people leveling up quickly? One of the major draws of a game like WOW is the fact that it is easy to achieve a high level. Wouldnt new players leveling up quickly and experiencing the higher content infact make them more eager to continue playing? Especially with a new expansion right around the corner in which the cap is gonna be raised yet again?

Sounds counter productive to me to place such a large hit for others to 'help'.. infact this "penalty" you speak of actually makes me, as a player with several high toons (not all 80), really not want to mentor anyone. Not too sound rude or anything but I dont pay for penalties so what is the incentive for me having a higher level player to even mentor at all? I dont see one. Don't trivialize the mentor system by putting all these penalties on it... the game is old enough right now that you should honestly open up the game a little more... stop with all the restrictions. There is a new MMO coming out soon incase you guys didnt know you might want to do something to make eq2 look just as appealing on that store shelf.

Kordran wrote:

If that were what the result of this change was going to be, it would be fine.
However, even if that is the intention, its not what the outcome will be. Wait until October for the complaint threads, then you'll realise.