The State of Leveling

[Józef Taktyka]

Granted, some penalty should be in place.

[The Whistler]

There have been similar threads in the past, with similar receptions a la: devs know what's best for the community, stay in your lane. I always took the staff's side because I felt that the demands had been more or less ridiculous (100xp a pop, free RCRs, instant 30, etc) but there's a limit to how much you can tighten the noose and expect people to stick around. I alone identified 5 adverse changes made in the last 2 years in my post, other players mentioned the atrocious looting cap that sucked all the excitement out of leveling a new character, and now it's the Forgotten City nuke. Come on, guys. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that something has got to give.

[metaquad4]

On a side note, removing the lvl restricion between the PCs so that low and high lvls can grind together and low-lvl gain XP is IMO good idea. People could at least have bigger chances to meet up and create reletionships.

Some manner of penalty should be involved, not granting full 50 XP to the lower leveled player standing in proximity to save or die DC 30 AoEs in CR10.

There is currently a penalty involved; and that is what creates the issue of people not being able to do adventure RP together. It isn't like it would be a huge problem; let's not pretend that grinding is anything remotely challenging.

[blazerules]

I'll admit this thread has become completely directionless not even keeping to the topic of "leveling". With the occasional (purposefully) awful suggestions tossed in that dont really help in moving the discussion anywhere.

Feels like the general take away can be summed up as "leveling bad" which is not even something people dont know.

Some people have tried to bring direction to the thread like ILLY, Lambe (although I feel the points miss the point), etc but were largely ignored.

[Aspect of Sorrow]

On a side note, removing the lvl restricion between the PCs so that low and high lvls can grind together and low-lvl gain XP is IMO good idea. People could at least have bigger chances to meet up and create reletionships.

Some manner of penalty should be involved, not granting full 50 XP to the lower leveled player standing in proximity to save or die DC 30 AoEs in CR10.

There is currently a penalty involved; and that is what creates the issue of people not being able to do adventure RP together. It isn't like it would be a huge problem; let's not pretend that grinding is anything remotely challenging.

In context the penalty would apply if the adventure-together restriction was raised. I'm not advocating that grinding is challenging once understanding the PW's formula (I've probably RCR'd more than anyone), but it is to the people who are starting from a completely new slate.

[Rain]

On a side note, removing the lvl restricion between the PCs so that low and high lvls can grind together and low-lvl gain XP is IMO good idea. People could at least have bigger chances to meet up and create reletionships.

Some manner of penalty should be involved, not granting full 50 XP to the lower leveled player standing in proximity to save or die DC 30 AoEs in CR10.

Really? A player who is 9 levels above another can already cut up mobs at a pace that out competes the spawns of the area themselves. Having a lvl 30 vs a lvl 18 is hardly a big difference in clear speed. There are people at xvarts and wyverns to this day that clear the whole place out by themselves having to wait for responds.

Edit:: Not to mention that people already do train mobs for low level characters. Ive seen a group who gathers mobs together then an epic druid cast mass drown leaving everthing at low HP then the lower levels finish the job. This already happeneds.

[Aspect of Sorrow]

On a side note, removing the lvl restricion between the PCs so that low and high lvls can grind together and low-lvl gain XP is IMO good idea. People could at least have bigger chances to meet up and create reletionships.

Some manner of penalty should be involved, not granting full 50 XP to the lower leveled player standing in proximity to save or die DC 30 AoEs in CR10.

Really? A player who is 9 levels above another can already cut up mobs at a pace that out competes the spawns of the area themselves. Having a lvl 30 vs a lvl 18 is hardly a big difference in clear speed. There are people at xvarts and wyverns to this day that clear the whole place out by themselves having to wait for responds.

I'm well aware, special exemptions made, or just adjusted based on the time to kill can be a floating consideration.

[MuninN]

I feel that the level and adventure content on BG2 has always been the server's weakest aspect, especially when put in comparison with building and city design.
Inspiration and a healthy approach can often be found on other servers, especially in nwn1.
Designs such as crafting magic gear over random drops, a level cap at 20 and larger groups of npc's that complement each other over being single power houses are aspects that make adventuring more enjoyable in terms of leveling and at max level.

[GholaMan]

Some manner of penalty should be involved, not granting full 50 XP to the lower leveled player standing in proximity to save or die DC 30 AoEs in CR10.

Clearly some people are in favor of having a penalty for leveling with disparate levels within a group. I've never thought this was a good idea, lets assume for a moment that every mob on the entire server was always worth 50xp no matter what. It takes 438,000xp to reach level 30 as a non ECL race.

So how many mobs would one need to slay in order to reach level 30 if each mob was always worth 50xp? 438,000/50=8760. Even if all you did is sit around and slay 8760 beetles killing them in one hit each, just imagine doing that, imagine how not fun that would be. New person or old person to the server it would be boring, it would be tedious. You see but this isn't how it is, level appropriate areas give about half the amount of XP, so really we are looking at more like 16-18 thousand mob kills.

It's absolutely mind boggling to me how some people out there think leveling is too fast on this server, it just isn't. You wanna level at a slow pace, fine, do it, stop and smell the roses, wander around. If that is how you enjoy your game, good for you, personally I don't want to have to kill an entire cities population to hit max level. If I make a new character, I am forced to deal with sad XP and sad loot, which isn't exactly a thing you want to experience if you are trying to entice people to stay. And entice new people to join the server.

[Jepop]

Some manner of penalty should be involved, not granting full 50 XP to the lower leveled player standing in proximity to save or die DC 30 AoEs in CR10.

Clearly some people are in favor of having a penalty for leveling with disparate levels within a group. I've never thought this was a good idea, lets assume for a moment that every mob on the entire server was always worth 50xp no matter what. It takes 438,000xp to reach level 30 as a non ECL race.

So how many mobs would one need to slay in order to reach level 30 if each mob was always worth 50xp? 438,000/50=8760. Even if all you did is sit around and slay 8760 beetles killing them in one hit each, just imagine doing that, imagine how not fun that would be. New person or old person to the server it would be boring, it would be tedious. You see but this isn't how it is, level appropriate areas give about half the amount of XP, so really we are looking at more like 16-18 thousand mob kills.

It's absolutely mind boggling to me how some people out there think leveling is too fast on this server, it just isn't. You wanna level at a slow pace, fine, do it, stop and smell the roses, wander around. If that is how you enjoy your game, good for you, personally I don't want to have to kill an entire cities population to hit max level. If I make a new character, I am forced to deal with sad XP and sad loot, which isn't exactly a thing you want to experience if you are trying to entice people to stay. And entice new people to join the server.

+1

[Rinzler]

Agreed with GholaMan.

[JustAnotherGuy]

Some manner of penalty should be involved, not granting full 50 XP to the lower leveled player standing in proximity to save or die DC 30 AoEs in CR10.

Clearly some people are in favor of having a penalty for leveling with disparate levels within a group. I've never thought this was a good idea, lets assume for a moment that every mob on the entire server was always worth 50xp no matter what. It takes 438,000xp to reach level 30 as a non ECL race.

So how many mobs would one need to slay in order to reach level 30 if each mob was always worth 50xp? 438,000/50=8760. Even if all you did is sit around and slay 8760 beetles killing them in one hit each, just imagine doing that, imagine how not fun that would be. New person or old person to the server it would be boring, it would be tedious. You see but this isn't how it is, level appropriate areas give about half the amount of XP, so really we are looking at more like 16-18 thousand mob kills.

It's absolutely mind boggling to me how some people out there think leveling is too fast on this server, it just isn't. You wanna level at a slow pace, fine, do it, stop and smell the roses, wander around. If that is how you enjoy your game, good for you, personally I don't want to have to kill an entire cities population to hit max level. If I make a new character, I am forced to deal with sad XP and sad loot, which isn't exactly a thing you want to experience if you are trying to entice people to stay. And entice new people to join the server.

This isn't the full story, though. There's quests to boost you through levels early on, negating much of the xp. These can be done weekly, as well, and as far as I know there's no scaling with these, so there's a chunk of xp to knock out a few thousand each week (although they do get easier with level, meaning that your xp/hour goes up as you level up). Besides that, there is RP XP. If things haven't changed, and I am right, an RP XP tick is 20+dCL. So at level 1, you're getting 21 xp per tick. You can get three ticks per minute, I believe. So at level one, you're adding 63xp per minute as long as you are RPing on this RP server. That's 3,780 xp per hour of RP in addition to quests, grinding, or fishing.

Simply standing and fishing while RPing can net you several levels in a night. The issue is, leveling up by only grinding sucks. But this game and its mechanics does not lend itself to grinding. Even in MMOs, you don't get very far by simply grinding mobs; most of your xp will come by doing quests.

So, if we wanted to switch gears and say that we need more quests to allow for a better leveling experience, I'm all for that. But leveling in general is not hard. I've had characters go from an RCR'd 20 to level 30 in less than a week without a single grinding session. It's an RP server, and so it's to be expected that RP will grant more xp than grinding.

Once we start calculating how many boars in the Elwynn Forest we need to kill in order to level up, we've lost focus.

[Aspect of Sorrow]

To iterate, I'm not advocating the community retain the current leveling system, but not all of should be discarded.

Certain classes, play styles, play heavily toward fast XP gain. By your (Ghola) example the grind to 30 is only 14 and a half hours uninterrupted, 28 if at half XP. I'm not saying that it isn't a slog, it is, but once familiar with BG's formula you can very effectively solo many builds from 1 to 30 within 9 days no muling. It is a mind numbing slog, but that's a very doable one. Paired with a bard I was able to run the same test going into 30 within 5 days. For fishing starts - If timed near a reset you can obtain fishing XP from both servers independently for 3k, and on the reset the second 3k set, bringing you from level 1 into level 4 in about three hours. XP rate during mechanical grind can be supplemented with the RP tick if you know when to time the usage of the enter key and wrote something suitably IC for your party companion, bards, this is where song lyric XP comes into play. Solo, the formula for it is to start with a horc barb charger to get you to level 10 by the fifth hour post creation. You can legitimately hit 15 - 17 then RCR if your intended build has at least one class matured and available when you RCR, and with enough money saved back to purchase your consumables to feed you into the epics this is usually hour number 20 or so. Stoneskin is the lifeblood for your pre epics surviving. Make sure to bind the Default Action key, and get comfortable.

Epics is where the original plan falls apart. 20 - 23 goes by at a much slower tick and 27 - 30 is the absolute worst, but still viable thanks to consumables. Prepared with purchases of wands UMD will absolutely carry surface players through the FGK/GPeak loop even with non min-maxed characteristics in the sheet. Rogues benefit most for AoE multiround functions, STR tend to have to shore up the distance problem for time to kill rates to stay high. Casters, divine/nature/arcane, have no trouble here so long as they recognize their limits, especially well prepped strength bards. I can comfortably say expect at least two days to meet mid 20s, almost four to go from 25 to 30.

If paired with a bard, or a EA/OOBI variant, the travel time and damage involved makes a significant difference to shave at least one of those days off.

Is this fun? Not to others, no. It was fun for me for a while to see how fast I could fly through the numbers, but if I were to have to RCR a character legitimately to reflect a roleplay centric change, the epic level slog is almost never worth it. The underdark has it even worse.

[RoseFrost]

My two cents as a new player. I've been around for just over three weeks, and I've hit level 15 in that time. That seems fine to me, perhaps even a little quick. But I am also slowing down, mostly because I'm becoming less interested in grinding. I can't speak to epic levels.

Ultimately I wonder if the problems perceived to be related to leveling aren't in fact really problems of a lack of meaningful things to do, both at endgame and while leveling up. If people felt like they could contribute meaningfully to the collective story-telling that is the entire point of a PW (as opposed to an MMO) at any level, then it wouldn't really matter how long it took to level up. The goal should be for leveling to be an optional diversion from RP, not a requirement, and not the main course. That goal is very easy to state, but perhaps quite difficulty to pull off.

The sentiment that worried me most in this thread was summed up here and a few other places.

Trying to get anything done on BG feels like your trying to get ‘corporate’ approval for decisions that could or should be able to be done in within a few days.

It really does make me wonder if people are leveling alts because trying to get anything done on their mains feels like too much effort with too little reward. As tedious as it is, anyone can go out and grind whenever they want, without having to wait for anyone else, and make some visible progress toward something.

[ILLY]

My two cents as a new player. I've been around for just over three weeks, and I've hit level 15 in that time. That seems fine to me, perhaps even a little quick. But I am also slowing down, mostly because I'm becoming less interested in grinding. I can't speak to epic levels.

Ultimately I wonder if the problems perceived to be related to leveling aren't in fact really problems of a lack of meaningful things to do, both at endgame and while leveling up. If people felt like they could contribute meaningfully to the collective story-telling that is the entire point of a PW (as opposed to an MMO) at any level, then it wouldn't really matter how long it took to level up. The goal should be for leveling to be an optional diversion from RP, not a requirement, and not the main course. That goal is very easy to state, but perhaps quite difficulty to pull off.

The sentiment that worried me most in this thread was summed up here and a few other places.

Trying to get anything done on BG feels like your trying to get ‘corporate’ approval for decisions that could or should be able to be done in within a few days.

It really does make me wonder if people are leveling alts because trying to get anything done on their mains feels like too much effort with too little reward. As tedious as it is, anyone can go out and grind whenever they want, without having to wait for anyone else, and make some visible progress toward something.