Please level out the XP bonus across content

I've played on 2 servers since returning to the game. Started out on Fallen Gate around the time it opened and the xp was so slow, I switched to AB... there, the xp rate is so high that I'm outleveling areas way before I'm anywhere near done with all the quests in that area. I switched xp to AA's and chronomentored so I can finish content in those areas (I love the lore in this game!), but now I have like 250 AAs at level 50, which seems really high. And since I'm mentored down, I'm steamrolling everything - it's not even a challenge most of the time. So, I switched back to FG for a while now... They need a progression server with the xp rate set somewhere in the middle.

It was mostly fine solo rate when EoF was the current expansion. Its the changes they did when RoK came out that borked it.

Shame you weren't here for the 12 weeks it was on target.

Yeap, you could level to 70 during the double xp in a few hours assuming you could have fun watching a 70 aoe tank obliterating content, but you could as well solo and do some grouping (with no mentor) and level up having some fun.

The rates post 65 are very fine too and you can reach 80 easily folloiwng the solo time lines.


Note that the server is declining sharply, i have zero interest to log unless for raids.

• Rushing the 4 instances for daily is trivial, half of the tank sucks since they never played in an environment requiring them to play even semi decently, even good ones get bored and since it does not really matter just run into mobs and mash buttons randomly. The spirit of people is completely changed, instead of having fun they just want to complete their daily as fast as possible.We see all sort of pathologies : people getting angry if not fast enough, groupmates unhappy if tank does not bypass content, people trying to get a super optimized group (troubi + 3 wizzies? what else ?). All this is 100% the dev team fault, when the design is horrible players get insane.
• Outside raid gear there is almost no progression in gear, i was happy to see the gift to the queen dropping from Drusella but examining it i found out that it is now a piece of crap. Chelsith is ridiculous, i saw the beastlord/priest 2 hander 50 times. Chardok is the only place in which i saw sometimes cool stuff.
• Solo time lines used to have a progression, with the final items being quite good, and with each faction selling usually at least one cool item. This is gone. May be the manawheel items could be still of some use (in raids ...) but with current manapools they probably do not really matter.
• At least 3 named that can be 2 boxed or even soloed (a ghost, a giant shark, a squely) drop items that are VP quality or even better. All are sort of perma camped by Sk/Channeler boxes. I saw some of those item on the broker sold for amount of plats large enough to buy a full mythical validation (indeed you can probably buy epic +mythical for this kind of amount ).
• Groups hunting Trom giants in TD are now becoming permanent, soon we will have waiting list like in Eq1 for lower guk. This is truly pathetic.
• The big, long and fun main solo quest (band of thuga) rewards you with crap similar to what you can get doing a 5mn right after landing in kylong plain (it used to be raid quality).
• Summoner dps is really low, necros doing better mostly due to lifeburn (and self haste? ) and to make the situation even worst their mythical is a piece of crap since the mythical pet is not better than an expert regular pet.
• Channelers (a class that came with ToV) are still almost necessarly and instead of tuning the channelers they tune the content for channelers making them even more important. Apparently the deep reason is that many veterans have to pay to access the class (anynone who left before ToV does).

Your list of complaints is mostly items, which they are updating every week. I don't log in my main except to raid, but still have a lot of fun playing alts. Until they nerfed xp and killed lower level grouping anyway.

I don't understand why they nerfed level 20-70 so terrible, when it could be a smooth progression from 1-80 instead. From a good game design stand-point, all the dungeons should give decent and similar xp, and it should be easier to level from 30-31 than from 79-80. So we have the choice to go to clefts, living tombs, new tunaria, courts of innovation, whatever... and it's going to be worth doing and possible to level. But the way it is now with xp varying from zone to zone, sucks. It also sucks when they increase the level cap and then totally gouge out the xp from where it was for the last 3+ months.

Like why is xp in SoS so bad, for example... what purpose does that serve. Do they think the game is too easy to level up or just trying to sell xp pots or something. They do not have the dev hours to adjust the xp curve and don't see it as a priority? I suppose it's not a priority over fixing end-game gear and releasing avatars/content, but it will whittle down the server population if people have a hard time getting leveling groups, and soloing is not a viable way to level.

I've always been an advocate for group xp should be better than solo xp, but there comes a time in a MMO life cycle where the population does not sustain xp grind groups, and then companies try to find ways to mitigate that... agnostic dungeons, mercs, adj xp curve, cross-server groups, make soloing easier, etc... you know how it goes. I think the best thing they can do for FG leveling/grouping is increase the xp for grouping and make solo questing a viable option at this point.

Obviously the daily dungeon runs and token merchant is to give us a reason to log in outside of raid times, but if people hate running the zones that much then that's just a personal problem I guess. I thought it was cool they threw that in because it's completely a bonus and was a surprise. He could have not bothered to make the daily quest and items and I guess then ironically no one would complain. They aren't going to make the heroic instances harder or re-do them and the loot isn't going to be better than raid gear, so not sure what you would suggest to make the game more fun for raiders... my reason to log in outside of raids used to be PvP and BGs, but like I said now I play alts.

They could give contested epics a chance to drop tokens, including all those little x2 in KJ and dominus, etc.

Read again it is not only about items ... I mentioned conjuror dps and you made a post about your class, yes wizzies and predators are (relatively) way too high, some member of the nolifeguild (they validated mythical 4 hours after rok release) recently was posting recruitment messages and they wanted wizzies ... only that. I also mentioned xp rates and i should have added heroic content difficulty which is way too low (around 75 i had cleared all this content so at 80 it is a joke). Yes SoS is terrible, went there with a 58 tank he was getting almost OS by trash and we were getting 0 xp ....

About the hunter: Doing 25 times 4 trivial zones is not a reason to log (at least for me), if the daily had been weekly asking to run the 4 zones and to kill chardok queen and kotis and giving 5 tokens it would have been ok. As it is probably less then 30% of the people are willing to do the quest.

Ok, so I did some testing.

Using a fairly standard baseline I have data comparing leveling a new character from start to max level. Grouping with same 5 players in both scenarios. In this PL setup, I ran only single target xp pots from 1 to max level. Same group setup, but in both cases the group was basically current tier fully geared players power leveling a single player. For EoF, that was full set bonuses and gear, for RoK, that includes mythicals.

For EoF era, the journey from level 1 to max level using a fully decked out power level group is 5.5 hours start to finish.

For RoK era, the journey from level 1 to max level using fully decked out power level group is 17.3 hours start to finish.

The huge differentiation that needs to be noted, is that group killed more than 8 times the number of kills to accomplish the same task.

Now, my scenario is grossly exaggerated and doesn't present the experience of an average player. I would expect an average player getting groups without mentored down mythical raiders to easily take 4-5 times as long to complete.

I don't think this is a reasonable barrier to entry, and the xp rates need to be fixed. Double xp is a bandaid at best, cause if its a flat double, its still going to take almost twice as long to get to max level as it did in previous expansion.

The root of the problem is the majority of the level range has to be done in zones with severely nerfed xp values, and only a 3rd of the levels can be done in a zone with reasonable xp levels.

Leave it like this if you want to kill the server, fix it if you want to extend your revenue stream. Your choice, feels like a simple choice, but I'm just a foolish customer, what do I know?

This definitely seems to mirror how it "feels" leveling since RoK. Honestly, I gave it less than a week, saw several posts without any sort of dev response and promptly canceled my subscription.

The one thing your numbers don't show which would be interesting if you can post it is what percentage of that time was spent from 1-20 + 60-70 vs the dreaded 20-59 range. Maybe compare levels 50-60 to 60-70 as well.

The bottom line is no reasonable person could possibly explain away how the xp rates are right now. There is also no possible way that Daybreak devs haven't read the dozen or so threads that have popped up since RoK launch. There just has to be some sort of agenda at this point, it doesn't make any sense otherwise. There has not been a SINGLE post responding to these concerns, even if just to say that they are monitoring the situation. If it weren't so pathetic it would be comical at this point.

I didn't log the per level time exactly, but I know roughly, particularly due to when and where I had to use the next xp pot. The KC, and Seb times I know are nearly spot on. The TD time is a well educated guess, and well, the part between TD and KC, that is where the problem is and the remainder of the time falls there.

I did 56-66 in KC and that took 3 hours
I did 66 to 80 in seb, and that took 4.5 hours
I did 1-30 in TD, and that took maybe 1.5 hours
I did 30 to 56 in Kaladim, CT, Klak, and New Tunaria. This was the bear, those 26 levels 8.3 hours

The journey from 30-56 took longer than the journey from 56-80. This is what feels bad in that lower levels taking longer than top levels not only feels unnatural, once you hit 66, you can really be focusing on current tier quest lines, epics, and in general are 'caught up' with the current population.

If I hadn't gone to KC as soon as possible and had a level 70 mentor target on the bench to make that work, this would have taken MUCH longer.

I'm quite confident the method and areas I used represented the most efficient path short of stacking group pots or dumping plat in collections, both I wanted to avoid in order to have a comparative baseline.

Also remember, the person I was leveling had the benefit of 5 people mentoring him (50% bonus?) and 100% bonus xp pots.

Take that in mind and my PL group looks like this:
1) 80 Myth'd zerker in raid gear
2) 80 Myth'd warlock in raid gear
3) 80 Myth'd inquisitor in raid gear
4) 80 Myth'd Dirge in good gear
5) 80 Myth'd Swash in good gear

My point being, this group could pull 50 mobs and churn them faster than nearly any other PL group to achieve the numbers I did. The comparative actual time for someone to level 'naturally' I would shudder to think of.

So, for those of us on Fallen Gate trying to level the old fashioned way, with no potions and no powerleveling... no wonder it's taking so long

Yeah, I gave up and deleted my alt. I just don't have the time for a main and leveling any alt with this type of time investment for getting to current content.

P.S. DBG - you missed out on a lot of money I would typically spend on a toon for appearance items, house items, mount, potions of progress, etc. And, I'm a far less satisfied customer in the process.

Just vote with your wallets, time and time again it's the only language they understand.

Look what ex-employees have to say, essentially the same conclusions you're getting.
Management is at fault, stubborn and stuck in the past.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Daybreak-Game-Company-Reviews-E973097.htm

The 3 people that smile in your face on Youtube? Blame them. It's a dirty company. Despicable.
They're the ones who turned the MMORPG world into a cash grab business.

Vote with your wallets. Quit playing for a while. See if you need to come back.
It's just you being used to press buttons and your mind is attuned, affected with their environment.
You don't need this game. You don't need to deal with their ********.
Be free. Leave. It's better for you if you do.
Fallen Gate is dead.
Or stay and be a sucker.
What are you paying them for? So you waste time on increasing virtual values playing by their rules and them completely ignoring your wishes? As they always did, as they will always do.
You don't matter. You're a tool, a loser. You're wallet to milk.
Let this evil company rot and die. You're better than that. Don't let yourself be dragged down with them.
Don't let them make you their *****. Are you their *****? Where is your pride?
Will you let yourself be handled like a *****?
"Oh please make exp gain faster, pretty please"
What are you? Quit and regain your freedom.
Unless you're really that pathetic.
**** this company

They will look at the Fallen Gate XP once the current XP event is over. Kander said on Discord.

Stop being overly dramatic.

I hope so... I have 3 duos about to hit 25... I've been dreading that slog

]https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/chelsith-experience-bonus-question.534779/

So I did some poking around on the internet, everything is pointing towards the old xp weekend's were multiplying the base, and now it's JUST an additive 100% on the base instead of it being a base multiplier.

Conversion rate is (Xp + Bonus) * (100% AA + AA bonus) So on a normal day it's (100% normal xp) * 100% = 100% AA With potion and Vitality it's (100% normal xp + 200% vit +100% potion) * (100% normal + 100% potion) = 800% aa

With potion, vit and server Bonus it's (100% normal + 200% vit + 100% potion + 100% server) * (100% normal + 100% potion + 100% server) = 1500% AA

I'm finding posts from 2008-2014 confirming our beliefs in the previous thread about xp bonus multiplying the base then other additive multipliers going in.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/double-xp-bonus-for-labor-day-weekend.495979/

Here is a post where the community manager is talking about a TRUE double xp, i'm curious to see exactly when this was changed, I know from a intimate way that xp definitely used to be multiplied at the base because of how bonkers "double/bonus xp's" used to be.

I find it odd that xp numbers are no longer given when killing mobs, instead you get a message saying that you just gain experience now to hide the numbers.

Edit #3: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/all-access-members-get-double-xp.563363/

Here is one more post about Roshen saying its a DOUBLE experience, that obviously implys it being either a multiplier on the base, or at the end.


Per Caith: XP potions are working the same as they have worked for the past 10 years, it just isn't a significant amount compared to the current content bonus in Kunark zones on TLE. Additive XP bonuses do not multiply the end result of the previous amount, they multiple the base, so if you are getting 30 xp from a kill on the base, an experience potion grants you 30 more xp. If you are also getting 30 xp from a server bonus, 60 from vitality and 120 from the current content bonus, that extra 30 isn't a noticeable amount.

In reality this should be 60 base, the xp potion now gives you 60 more from pot, then 120 from vitality, an 240 from the current content bonus.
Meaning old formula = 480 xp per kill.

Current = 240.

Interesting since i was assuming that XP bonus meant base xp ...

So in a sense in RoK zones the effective bonus is only 25% since we got from times x 4 xp to times x 5.

It is not very wise since it makes xp potions useless.

Assuming that your figre of x4 XP (+300%) in rok is correct a smart move would simply be to multiply base xp by 3 (+200%) in all the zones and to add an extra 100% to heroic zones. XP and vitality potions would then sell like candies.

Good luck getting changes, I dont thing they even care about player opinion just $$$

If player opinion was costing them $$$, then things would change. That's why voting with your wallet always works. If you're on the TLE server and continue to play, then you're telling them that things are good enough to keep the $$$ flowing.

I dont recall saying player opinion cost them money

Correct. You said that they don't care about player opinion, only money. I agreed, but the said that the company assumes that player opinion of FG is currently positive because players are still giving them money and playing on the server. If people stopped playing and paying, the company would know what player opinion was not positive and might make changes.