Game Guides Archive
Thread: How will CU affect my leveling speed?
Paragon_Lich wrote:I was wondering how the CU will affect the the speed at which you level in this game. Most people say it will slow a lot, but most people PL with huge DOC buffs and I am always unbuffed. Of course I always solo and the CU looks to be based on grouping. I also dont wear armor, just cant get over the encumbrance thing. So will the leveling speed increase, decrease, or stay the same. Remember that I am asking in respect to my play style.
In respect to your playstyle? First, let me say kudos to you for playing the game on hard mode
You will probably notice your speed increase a little, if anything.
Modo77 wrote:
To early to tell yet, the devs have stated that the xp rate is too low at the moment and will be increased
This, I think, will be the game killer if not for a lot of people then at least for me and my three accounts. A lot of players in these forums have whined about other players who grind professions in a few days. Hey! I'm one of them (a grinder that is). I do not think it should take a month of steady playing to master anything as the content is ALL at the master levels, and more will move there after CURB. If this is how the devs want to see the game played I think it will be a huge mistake.
I'll wait until the CU is released but I do not have much hope.
captenjonny wrote:
Modo77 wrote:
To early to tell yet, the devs have stated that the xp rate is too low at the moment and will be increased
This, I think, will be the game killer if not for a lot of people then at least for me and my three accounts. A lot of players in these forums have whined about other players who grind professions in a few days. Hey! I'm one of them (a grinder that is). I do not think it should take a month of steady playing to master anything as the content is ALL at the master levels, and more will move there after CURB. If this is how the devs want to see the game played I think it will be a huge mistake.
I'll wait until the CU is released but I do not have much hope.
I agree.
Other MMORPGs have a tough grind because the entire game is well... Leveling. SWG though isn't about the leveling. In SWG the whole goal isn't to max your characters level as it is in EQ2.
Leveling is boring, tedious and creates an end-game goal. In SWG we don't have levels, or least used to not, and the game was so much more than leveling. I too master in two days because after you master the entire game is open to you to explore and do what you want. There are virtually no restrictions in the current SWG and the same was true for UO.
SWG was more than a game, it was a virtual world. But with this whole level thing the world no longer feels alive or as free. The new and dehanced SWG feels like a game which is boring. The grouping thing also sucks because in EQ2 and FFXI it is impossible to progress through the game w/o grouping. And now, I like to group, it's fun, but when you are forced to group... Not fun. It takes too long to create a group, people leave, people get you killed, etc etc. Grouping is fun with friends, not strangers. FFXI takes 1-2 hours to get a group going. In EQ2 it wasn't as bad but just very bad considering the game just launched with full servers and was still difficult to get groups going.
Needless to say I quit EQ2 after three weeks and FFXI after two.
The new SWG I will be quiting before it even launches.
Paragon_Lich wrote:
I was wondering how the CU will affect the the speed at which you level in this game. Most people say it will slow a lot, but most people PL with huge DOC buffs and I am always unbuffed. Of course I always solo and the CU looks to be based on grouping. I also dont wear armor, just cant get over the encumbrance thing. So will the leveling speed increase, decrease, or stay the same. Remember that I am asking in respect to my play style.
Well, you can now wear armor with no worries about encumbrance. Encumbrance has been removed. Now you have penalties called hindrance that will slow your movement speedand your weapon speedand one other stats that I can't remember right now instead. But at least you'll be able to wear all of your armor.
Fighting creatures that are higher than your "level" will be very difficult because they get a bonus to their damage based on their level, which I (and several other people) strongly disagree with.
All in all I would say it will probablystaythe same for you and your playstyle. It sounds like you already fought things pretty close to your level so it won't change too much. It will really slow down the power levelers who used to fight fully buffed and wearing strong armor against creatures that they couldn't normally defeat otherwise. For them it will slow down considerably. But in my opinion that's not really a bad thing.
Message Edited by DeQuosaek on 04-19-2005 04:27 PM
Paragon_Lich wrote:
I was wondering how the CU will affect the the speed at which you level in this game. Most people say it will slow a lot, but most people PL with huge DOC buffs and I am always unbuffed. Of course I always solo and the CU looks to be based on grouping. I also dont wear armor, just cant get over the encumbrance thing. So will the leveling speed increase, decrease, or stay the same. Remember that I am asking in respect to my play style.
Considering your playstyle, leveling will probably stay the same or at the least increase slightly. When you solo in CU, providing you are killing mobs of the same level as you up to 3 levels higher (to maximize xp gains), then you will find that it will be a little more difficult than what you do on live now. I love to solo myself and this was the first thing I tested in CU and I found it a little more challenging than live servers mainly because you can't speed cap anymore. This makes engagements a bit longer because you simply can't raise your DPS up too much.
In a group, you will level at 2 times the speed you can grouping on live servers. In my group experiences (always takingmobs 1 - 3 levels higher than the group), you kill creatures really fast and being that xp is not divided up based on how much damage you do (everyone gets max damage even if you only got 1 shot in), Your xp gains come very fast. Starting with just one novice box (brawler, medic, marksman) you can have master in those profession in a few hours. THe key is grouping with a very high level player. When you group with a very high level player, your xp gains increase ten fold, but the high level persons xp drops just some. So in CU, grouping with a high level person who doesn't need lots of xp or any at all can benefit you more than soloing.
Anyway, if you want to stay with soloing, then if you want to play it safe, you'll have to stick with mobs of your exact same level or lower. Npc's are bugged right now. Even when they are your same level, they do much higher damage than they should at times. It's probably due towhat type of weapons they use verse your armor (needs more testing to be sure though).
Now if I had to make a choice to solo or group in CU, I would choose grouping for the simple factthat soloing in CU is about asboring as grinding jedi inlive servers. IT just takes too long to killa durni by yourself. Sometimes you can spend 5 minutes just trying to kill one creature while a 2 man groupcan kill10 or more in the same amount of time.
Keep in mind that it was hard to fully tell how the expereince would be to solo grind vs grouping due to the fact that xp has been changed on a number of occasions. At one time I was getting 2k per kill solo and 1800 in a group. Thenthey changed xp and I was getting 1700 solo and 2.2k in a group. THen they changed it againI got about1200 - 1500 solo and about 1800 -2000 in a group. But as I said, it also depends on what level charactersyou group with.
For the armor issue, if you are not high enough level ordo not have a novice elite profession, you can't wear armor anyway. You'll get a message saying you do not qualitfy to wear this armor or something like that. Whenyou are able to wear armor, you will suffer from movement, attack speed and accuracy penalties. The can be pretty servere at low -intermediate levels. The can be as bad as make you shoot once every 7 seconds instead of your normal once every 3 or 4 seconds depending on the weapon. Your movementcanbe slowed a lot. I once was noviceTKM with exploration 4 and had armor on that gave me -29 or so movement penalty and Icould only walk up hills. Also, the penalties for movement from wearin armor seem to stack with the penality for carrying a weapon also. So although armor doesn't hurt your HAMof stop you from wearin a full suit, the penalties are still pretty bad.
In solo grinding, Armor doesn't make a whole lot of difference because everything youcould kill and should be killing, you can kill without armor. The things that you would need to wear armor to kill, are simply too high of level and will oneor two hit incap you even with armor on.
For example, I was a masterrifelman, master commando, novice doc wearing advanced assault armor with 4100 health bar and had no penalties from wearing armor (at master, you get zero penalties for your professions armor type). I was level 80, wearing a Mark III PSG and had all the enhancements and buffs that the game allows. I went to dath to check out some nightsisters and ran into a level 50 baz nitch. Easy fight right!......wrong! He double incapped me in about 4 -5 hits.....I barely escaped the third incap. Even with stim D's using BE enhancements and all my medic and doc healing, I couldn't keep myself healed. Had I been grouped, it would haver probable went down pretty easy. Considering I have the most powerful gun in the game....commando's proton rifle and riflemans advanced laser rifle....both have max 900 damage and I think around 400 min damage.......I was hitting the damn critter with 1k, 2k and on occasion 3k damage per shot.....it was blocking about 70% of my damage.
Now it's possible that baz nitches hadn't been balanced yet.....but it was only level 50 and the devs did say only do testing of mobs between level 15 - 54. then to make matters worse, I got to the nightsister vs SMC battlefield and sentry NS were conning at level 25 to me, sentinels were around level 74, spellweavers were about 104, rangers were near 50......I slaughtered them all except the spell weaver.....This just goes to show that CU is still not balanced and needs another month of testing before it goes live. But the devs have plans to push it live anyway and fix stuff as needed.....so the next few months (maybe even until the end of the year) we are all gonna have a lot of issues and grouping or soloing will have their problems and set backs.
I was killing things tonight that I killed several days ago for 1000-2000 XP.
Today I got a consisent 1 point XP per kill.
Should take several weeks of hardplaying at that rate to get 1box.
Mastering elite should probably only take a year of hard playing.