How are you people leveling so fast?!

Just as an update, we did 2 more play sessions as this little 3 man group and we're now level 76.

I guesstimate will hit 95 with around 25 hours of real play time, maybe more, maybe less. This is a group playing up without powerleveling, doing virtually no quests.

Could it have been faster following one of my raid geared tanks around? Sure, but we'd have not learned much about playing the characters. Actually playing them in group content all the way up in my opinion provides far more real experience than PLing or the Soloquest method. Either of those teaches you about as much about playing the class, virtually none.

No withstanding the fact that you wade through content faster while grouping, is there any additional experience gain for a low level toon being mentored by 2 high level toons? ....and does the experience slider position factor in here?


Thanks

I seriously don't understand why people would play a game like EQ II but want to short-circuit the leveling process. I mean, to me that's like buying chocolate chip ice cream and then picking out all the chocolate chips!

it will actually be worse for you if you have 2 high level people mentoring down. Due to recent changes you need to get on the hate list of the mob to get the "good" exp same for encounters. With two high level toons they will have that mob or mobs dead before you can get off a shot.

here is the recent experience gain link
http://eq2.zam.com/story.html?story=30915

99% of all power leveling has to be Alts's no?

We kept the slider at 50% until we reached a point we couldn't spend the AA we got, dropped it to 0 for a bit then back up to 50%.

No mentoring except when I passed up my wife from having a little more vet xp.I would mentor back to her to keep her up to the same level as my son and I.

I think I have 80% vet xp, my son has 60% and she has 30 or 40%. So that is the real bonus we have that total newbies don't have.

And wading thru the content is a good description. Even with no mentored toon blowing up content I was still 'room pulling' Sanctom of Scaleborn while we were there.

Being in a group is big. Occasional wise use of the wizard merc is also useful. But you have to be real careful if the speed of the kills from adding him is more than double it would have been without adding him. Just keep that in mind when using mercs. There is a pretty heavy penalty for using them and we've only used them when there were just tons of tightly packed mobs, like in Fallen Gate.

For full disclosure, we are vets to the game, and we have all the vet rewards and the welcome home potion pack. So we've used the orb of concentrated memories once (vitality reset) and so far we've used one of the 2 vitality reset potions you get from the free packs. We also have had xp potions running the entire time, as there are more than enough free ones given to you with veteran accounts.

I'm by no means saying a complete new trio of players would keep pace with what we are doing, but I feel they could easily keep 50% of our pace. And if your talking about returning players as mentioned earlier in the thread, they will benefit from atleast some of the resources we've used.

You could always use SC and pick up more vitality resets and xp potions if you need them. We however don't like using SC for this kind of stuff and already have ample veteran rewards.

Lastly, we benefit from the knowledge of exactly how to best min/max our characters in these level ranges. There really isn't enough I can say about that and how it affects how fast we can kill.

Correct. If we did mentor toons down, my wife playing the healer would get tons of xp as it would be trivial for her to stay on the hate list of most of the mobs.

My son playing the assassin would get left behind as he has few aoe's to get off as mobs are swarm killed.

The way we are doing it isn't unreasonably slow, and my wife and son are getting reasonable mastery at playing the classes doing it this way.

Because the level process is old and tired, and for those of us that enjoy grouping, the level process offers little to none of that unless you do what Atan did and bring your significant other/child/friend along. And even then, you don't get the full grouping experience. Even if players were new and didn't have access to things like veteran bonuses, exp pots and the like, 6 people rolling up into Fallen Gate would pose zero challenge for that group because of itemization.

The game in itself has been dumbed down over the years to cater to the soloer. And quite honestly, for a lot of people that enjoy grouping and raiding, soloing is boring.

Maybe if there was more emphasis on making the level process more appealing than grinding "kill 10 rats" and "fed ex" quests, people wouldn't PL.

What others have said, for many it's we've already been playing it for so many years and experienced the lower level content multiple times.

Others it might be more they're just trying to get to a point where they can run with the vocal majority of the players. And by this I mean, you can see groups forming for 90+ zones, however chat is generally empty of players trying to run lower level content generally.

I love the vocal minority card. Anytime a player base is more represented than my own, it must be a vocal minority, cause clearly most people are more like *me* than not like *me*.

The one big advantage your new alt group has over a newly minted player to the game ...as well as the vet bonuses and potions: You know your way around Norrath. You know how to get from place to place quickly - if not downright using advanced guild portals for traveling, etc. A brand new player might not even know these are available. If an NPC doesn't tell them, they might not find out.

You also know where every mob is for every quest update and are not spending/wasting any time trying to figure out what the quest means or what mob you might need to update it. Some of the older quests are Byzantine in their lack of clear instruction of what you need to do next, IMO. Whereas I don't really want or need WoW Quest Quality actually showing me the mob's picture to make sure I 'get' it - some of the instructions for advancing quests are tough for a new player.

On the one hand it makes it quicker, on the other - the Old Way of running across Antonica to get to Thundering Steppes is not even remotely missed. Because of these things, though, you can't help but level a bit faster. You can't unknow what you know about the game.

LVL 92 master race checkin in!

i swore i saw a good recommendation of zones to powerlevel in, by tier, at EQ2flames in general gameplay or zones & population before...

i like forsaken city though, i think it's better than sebilis for powerleveling once LVL 65-70+, but iunno... >|

Not trying to argue with you, Atan, but in this case, I think that, by using the phrase vocal majority, Seiffil is merely pointing out that most of the people that are using level chat are doing so for the purpose of finding groups to run T10 content (i.e. content from Skyshrine to Siren's Grotto*). In other words, they are primarily the ones being "vocal" about it (although perhaps "textual" would have been a closer term - since level chat isn't really related to voice, except in the metaphorical sense).

* And, yes, I'm well aware that you knew what I meant by T10 content. The clarification was for those that might not.

Seliri, why are you so mad all the time?

i could write twelve novels on the subject, let us abstain... n_n ... ;p ... but no, i just like that smiley. =]

Fair enough, I may have misread his comment then.

I just wanted to add though regarding low level content and grouping, I saw no one doing it, ran into no other groups, etc.

I didn't even see another soul in a dungeon till we got to Sanctum, and even there it was just some molo people who we apparently greatly offended by slaughtering the zone around them. One of them even went so far as to complain to channel about us, though none of them so much as asked to join us, as we would have graciously invited them.

How would a player identify your group of three from a PLer group of 3?. I know on Freeport you don't even bother asking when the "group" runs past you wiping out everything in SoS. Just another PLer. Do the quests when it is NOT a double xp weekend.

Only complaint I ever have in contested zones is that people don't pick up after themselves (i.e. they just leave stuff laying around without pausing for the few seconds it takes to loot the chests). And honestly, that wouldn't even be a complaint (on my part) if quests didn't also take players into those same zones (since I generally prefer questing to grinding while leveling - it may not be the most efficient way to level, but to me it is more entertaining).

I haven't been. I never do. I'm still struggling to get my first one. It's very slow. Tradeskill wise I have no problem. Got 5 of them there so far. But I don't play every day because I have this thing called a job and I have a husband and frankly we often just have better things to do. It's one of the reasons we don't raid either. Some people make it their purpose in life to be the first one to reach the top no matter what. To what end. Does anyone seriously remember who was first?

The ones vying for the top 5 spots, perhaps. (Note: I am not among those in any shape, form, or fashion. Nor the top 10, 20, 50, nor even the top 100 - unless you manipulate the data to winnow down the prospective pool to 100 or less*. )

* Such as Human Male Level 95 Necromancers on Unrest server created in 2006 that are also Level 95 Carpenters and who have blonde hair.