Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Advancing in the graveyard

Graveyard courtesy
The "Graveyard" is still the best place to advance in levels. Between Zombies, Fallens, and the rapid dispatch of Skeletons it's hard to beat the graveyard for pure experience per minute.

There's something for everyone in the Graveyard: mages can electrify skulls and Jack'O, archers can pick off zombies and skeletons pretty quickly, and high level warriors tank pretty good in combination with other players against fallens, zombies, and skeletons.

All this makes the graveyard a popular place. One of the things I try to do is when I see a single player fighting a monster I hit that monster once and move on. Why? Simple, generally single players are trying to level and hoping for a drop. You might think helping completely destroy a monster will assist a player, and in some cases this might be true, but mostly it's not - here's why:

As soon as a second player hits a monster, the experience points the monster gives out on death is doubled. Each subsequent hit subtracts from that pool of experience. For example: say a zombie is normally worth 8k experience. You hit that zombie once, now his experience goes up to 16k (minus about 300xp for hitting it). If you don't hit the zombie again, the player who keeps hitting and kills the zombie gets 15,700xp (roughly, these are just example numbers). Now if you start hitting again that number shrinks. The faster and more powerful you are the more experience is taken away from that pool. Now you could be a speed archer and take away a kill, but this is in extremely poor taste.

Techniques like this hold especially true for mages wanting to kill skulls. If you can hit a skull, hit it once and let the mages kill the skulls (they do a much better job anyway).

Now if a group is banding together to speed kill skeletons, zombies and fallens it's a different story. Experience can be racked up pretty quickly with the right group of speed archers, mages and warrior tanks. Normally I find archers and mages get the most experience, but it can be worth a warrior's while to lump in with speed archers and mages (remember to protect them though) because of the sheer speed with which zombies and fallens can go down with the right group. The experience per second just is faster this way, and it's a good way to level. It unfortunately isn't usually a good way to get items (at least not for a slow warrior), the faster, more agile players normally get the drops. So if you're looking for drops, solo, or duo with a helpful player, and remember the one hit experience trick.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Experience versus focus, evening the odds

I've spoke before about the unevenness between classes, in particular the fact that some classes can kill players many levels higher.

It does make sense that a spell like lightning can cause full damage (or even extra damage) on a warrior equipped with full plate armour.

On the other hand it doesn't make much sense that a warrior almost 10 levels higher can be killed by a lower level mage. This is especially true at higher levels. Consider how much experience divides a level 81 mage and a level 89 warrior. The gulf of experience is enormous, extremely enormous. One must really consider the huge gulf of experience when looking at a show down between high level characters. Consider the number of wizards who attempted to stop Conan... and failed.

So the question is how do you bridge the gulf between a wizard's lightning and a high level warrior?

One answer is ... magic. It could be magical armour, or it could be something like a sword scabbard with magical protection properties.

What it shouldn't be is something that reduces the existing armour of a warrior. It shouldn't be an item in which a warrior needs to reduce his armour class to be immune to lightning. Perhaps it's something limited to warriors of a certain level, or something that requires enchantment by elves or a wizard.