must do dmg for exp - update 9/20 - how does this work in groups?

Hm, Ok i admit i didn't watch who got the final blow.
Not sure it was my pet.

Will test this later again, trying to have my pet get the last hit etc.

Hm... just an idea:
There have been changes made to how encounter locking works. And if i remember correctly if someone from outside helps, the XP is somehow divided...
Perhaps our pets count as "outside" and we share our XP with them. Perhaps just us, otherwise the whole group would notice it.
Which would of course suck.

Made a thread on this where it is more likely to be seen, I'm also going to copy and post the bit about when you get xp, solo and grouped with this change to help others understand the frustration of it...please reply

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=combat&message.id=70526

If you had looked for maybe 20-30 seconds, on page TWO (right near the top) of that forum you would have found this post with a full discussion on this ALREADY happening.

Necro's can already solo ^^^ mobs to make up for the loss!

/duck

Edit: In case a flame is incoming, that is a joke post but one I would expect to see in the spells and abilities thread before too long.
Message Edited by El Chupacabras on 09-26-2005 03:03 PM

Bastard! That was a well kept secret ;-) j/k.

Seriously tho the soloing ^^^ mobs does NOT give a good outcome for me. Its either impossible due to mobs having ranged attacks (most named do) The ones that i can solo (regardless the color) dont seem to give that good xp.
How are the others' thoughts on it.

My thought is that a lvl 49 can't do it =/ I complain, but I don't have the balls to skip work and ignore my wife long enough to grind out the last 20% exp.....heh

My experiences are -
While it is nice to be able to kill ^^^ mobs - it is not worth it for the xp, only if you need that update or need to clear a path to where you are going.
So far I seem to get the best xp gains off of multiple mob solo groups - just AE'ing them down. These are quick kills and you still get the xp bonus from killing a multiple mob encounter.
I also like to kill the heroic groups of 2+ mobs by rooting one while sending pet at another at the same time. I'll fear the 3rd if there is one and root it, then burn down the one or two left on my pet and then take out the rooted ones one at a time. This method takes awhile longer and doesnt seem to give as fast of xp as slaughtering solo mobs, but I enjoy it. I get about 0.4% xp without vitality doing a group of heroics around lvl 50.
So in summary
XP - Slaughter solos > Multiple mob heroic > ^^^ heroic
Fun - Multiple mob heroic > Slaughter solos > ^^^ heroic
So I usually try to find a place with solo mobs and multiple mob heroics and do a little bit of both. Some good spots are near the Twin Tears and Bay of Anuk in SS, or the guards in MajDul (but I hate the carpet police) and some areas in the living tombs.

While I can solo 50^^^'s doing the classic pet tank, I find the risk to be way too high since at the end of the fight there is a good chance of my health being rather low from healing the pet and then catching agro. Add to this the harsh downtime and the so-so xp for time and it just isn't worth doing except for bragging rights.

My experience has pretty much been the same as Nimmh's for xp... even and low yellows for solo mobs are probably the best mobs for xp'ing without a group. Two and three mob groups are pretty good xp but as always the risk of missing one root can make this a bit of a tricky tactic to grind on since one resist could be really bad news (and it's not always easy to find a steady enough stream of groups far enough from each other to do this at a consistant clip).

Also, with convulse being just crap now (I haven't had one actually land in a couple days now) it gets quite a bit tougher to buy yourself those last few seconds if you catch the agro.

If its to stop afk bots why not have a flag set to see if pet defense comes into play and then go from there.

Shrammy, I'll admit I didn't do any research after your request. Sorry
If you indeed didn't get any exp in the groups, I'm troubled. I'll test it out tonight and double-check. I could have sworn I got the xp message when just sending the pet. I'll just have to make sure I start every battle with Darkness now instead of /pet attack. I wonder if I do damage to mob #1 of a group encounter if I'll get xp for the deaths of mobs #2- #4 if I don't do damage to them?
As for soloing heroics, I've found 45^^^ and 48^^ I can solo (at level 51) using the classic pet tank method. I'm going to upgrade Lich to Ad3 and try out the stun/root method. I've also found 43^^^ I cannot solo (that [expletive ninja'd by Faarbot] Fire Toad at the entrance to the cave in Lavastorm!). I don't understand this game sometimes.
As for the best experience, my new favorite is the Truth Preceptors and their pit fighters in Maj Dul. They are all in a very small area, give decent loot (one Truth token per Preceptor, sells on the market fairly well and very quickly), and are level 54 - so they are yellow. I believe there are 6 sets of spawn, and by the time I'm finishing off #6, the first one is spawning again, so there is almost no downtime and very very little risk of death. Once you get the "Warning: You're about to be caught breaking the Law" message, log out and back in real quick to clear your danger status and back to killing.
Procedure: pet attack, dogs and darkness on Preceptor, Ghastly Stench and Death's Coil on pit fighter. By the time I finish casting coil, the preceptor is dead and I can nuke and/or heal pet and lifetap the fighter down. Each set of 2 mobs takes about 20 seconds to kill because I usually have to wait for the dogs and stench to refresh before taking on the next group.
I'm on Kithicor also with at least two of the outspoken necros here, so .. don't steal my spot!!
Message Edited by legaleagle97 on 09-27-2005 11:15 AM

I don’t know how it is at the upper end, but I stopped playing my necro at Lvl 22 back over the summer. I couldn’t get a group, I couldn’t solo very well, it was a pain to do any writs, so I started a Healer and had a good time with that. Now its flip flopped, the healer is terrible soloing and my wards are nothing more than a red flag and a quick trip to the morgue. The Necro on the other hand is turned out to be fun and functional once again. I’ve gone up to lvl 28 just since the LU. It would have been more if I had known about the XP problem, I wasted several days with mobs that I wasn’t getting credit for and I wasn’t paying attention to the chat window, I just thought the XP was lousy, even when I was the only one in the party not dinging.

I dont really think that they needed to do anything to change the XP. Do I really care that Stanley in Portland is leaving his Summoner on all night to get XP?
No.
No more than I care if he pays taxes, is kind to his landlady and donates to the red cross. I don’t pay to race somebody else to Level 60, or 50 or 10 for that matter. If Stanley wants to level that way, then bless him and his shallow character. Yet in order to put Stanley out of business, (i have found that no matter what they do, Stanley will invariably find another way to achieve his exploitive playing goals) you have limited the rewards that I get for my style of play.
If I play the entire week, a few hours a night, then over the course of that week I might miss 5% of the XP that I should have gotten. Who's being penalized here, me or Stanley?
Even if I miss the XP on one mob, that’s one to (too?) many! The cure should never be worse than the illness and unless they start giving Cash rewards for leveling, Stanley and his sort of players are not on my short list of things that are wrong with this game.

Eliminate this 'fix'. If its such a problem then use your vast resources and years of knowledge and expertise to implement a solution that doesn’t take the entire class down with it. This is a pretty positive thread, good suggestions and well thought out arguments. I would be disappointed if one of the 'People in the Know' didn’t put in a word here one way or the other.

Here here! i fail to see how some schmuck afk leveling effects anyone else in the game other than him- or herself. so what if they lvl while sleeping. they're afk from the keyboard so it's not like they're getting all this loot and screwing up the market or anything.
There have been some really good suggestions to solve the problem made in this thread and i have to wonder, do the devs even play this game? and if they do, do any of them play a summoner class?

anodoel

Actually I'd like to know why just summoners are singled out. Any other class can do the same thing, we just have a built in pet to help. To show you what I mean, take any two classes (works best if one is a fighter type) group them, have them target each other and hit auto-attack. When one is hit both will auto-attack back. So it is the exact same thing it's just others need help from someone else to do it or just another account to 2-box. So where is the nerf for them? If someone want's to afk-grind then they will. And actually the way I see it if they are not looting to flood the market with money or items who are they hurting? Does it matter to me if they were not at the keyboard to get their levels? If that mattered why would we have Exchange to buy characters, they weren't at the keyboard for those characters eaither. So afk or pay someone else to grind for you who really cares?

I didnt mean any offence by saying that further tests were needed eagle. Sorry if it came over that way.
As for that Spot; WHERE WHERE WHERE?

Sounds really good. I found a similar spot with coin guards close to their court. It is some kind of small courtyard and if you slaughter them all, some supervisor spawns. (guaranteed chest too). I did that only cuz i needed tokens, so i have not paid attention to XP. I'll be sure to check it tonight and post my "Adventures" here ;-).


Oh yea i had that msg last night and zoned to the moon tower with 1% hp left when the carpet police came after me ;-)

The spot Legaleagle is referring to is near the Truth Court, and there are 8 pairs of mobs there plus one more pair that spawn on top of the building that always drop a chest. (drops a crappy bracelet - but sells for about 5g I think). I like it there and the coin place you refered to Schrammy - you can rack up about 14-5 coin tokens there every 10 minutes plus the chest drops from either the supervisor or the named.
There are actually tons of mini ring events like this all throughout DoF that have a chance of spawning a named. Two camps of lizzies (paired seer and another) at the southern Twin Tear, there is one with ghouls a lil south of the Bay of Anuk, and plenty more.
I am definately enjoying the expasion and these dynamic camps, and now that Im finally at Ally faction with the Blades I think I will explore the PoF more.

I've not noticed any problems with xp gain. But I'm usually in a group that's taking on stuff that lives for more than 3 hits. Or I use my aoe spell off the bat when I solo. The only problem I've noticed is I usually hit some hidden grouped mob and I have to fight those as well.
Message Edited by Nainitsuj on 09-29-2005 02:59 AM

I still couldn't find this "Truth" spot Eirgorn. Is that the one to the right of the stairs? (on the left of those stairs there is some named champion as well)

If so, those mobs are awfully close to each other, aren't they social?

Thanks for pointing this out to me

Here is a modified map taken from Ogaming where I point out the Coin spot and the Truth spot, hope it helps : )

hmmm, we ARE talking about the same Coin spot but i am not sure of the truth spot.
I will be harvesting it tonight thanks alot for this great tip.


BTW: Are those losers social or not? as in will they add if i pull on grp out of there?
Message Edited by schrammy on 09-29-2005 03:26 PM

The truth guards are spread out enough that they wont add. The pit fighters never go KoS (in my experience) and the Truth guards are staggered far enough apart that you wont get adds. I think both areas are on a 9-10 min timer, so I was clearing one (whichever one wasnt camped) then doing a grifter quest and repeating. Now I am max ally with the Blades and am exploring PoF more.