Squad Leader Archive
Thread: Squad Leader Experience from our guild hunt last night...
Well I was a little concerned at how this new formula would work but heres my experience with it and then you can make your own mind up. On our hunts I am generally leading a full group of 20 people, I dont allow pets in the guild hunt groups but we do use them as meat shields.
So I guess the important thing to note here is a full group of 20 people. We were out hunting nightsisters, rhoa kias and spider hunters for around 3 hours. I led my the group as usual and found the following.
The experience per kill was a LOT less, however, seeing as it was the groups experience for every mob killed and not just my own the rate at which I was getting ticks of experience gain was very fast. So whats important to notice is that say you take down an entire nest of mobs, before I would get experience for only the mobs I fired on, in the mean time the group might have taken down another 5 mobs that I would get no experience for. However, now I would get exp for the mob I was attacking as well as the experience for the other 5 mobs the rest of the guild killed.
This meant my rate of experience was pretty similar to what it was pre patch. The big difference being that you need to be in a large group and filling a group full of loads of pets with a few people wont work. That said killing for 3 hours I gained about 300k SL experience so its not all that bad.
Conclusion
1. Less exp per mob
2. Faster rate of experience
Dont know if that helps or just makes you angrier.
That said, it is nice getting xp for anything the group does.
However, the xp per kill drops off drastically as the group size diminishes. Pets do not seems to enter into the formula much at all.
Even at 300k a night, it still takes 16 days to master.
3 weeks is 3 times longer than any other profession than BH.
It was 300k in 3 hours. So I assume if you could get a grinding group of about 15 people and just hunted all day long you could get around a million SL EXP in a day. Im not saying thats easy to do and even if it takes 3 weeks to master SL is that really such a bad thing ? I mean 3 weeks!! Its not that long.
Pets dont enter the formula muchand thats why I said its best to get your goup full of as manyplayers and not pets as possible
I just got the creature handlercommand, group,last night. Although pets may not contribute the to SL xp, a solo player with a grouped pet still gets some, albeit a very small amount, of sl xp for his own kills.
This is what others have been finding, too.
The new formula works provided you have a group of 20 players with you and you're going after BIG targets. Do anything else, and the xp you get is pathetic.
That is where the problem lies - the SL is not a particularly viable profession without another serious combat profession to back it up anyway, and the changes to xp mean that you won't progress in this non-viable profession unless you get yourself in as leader of a BIG group.
Lets look at the requirements for being a SL:
Two trees in scout, 1 tree in marksman. This is29 more skill pointsthan the requirementsto beaCH, so theoreticallya pure SLshould bring as much to the group as a CH/Apprentice TKA. Possibly slightly more as we are a hybrid of scoutand a combat class, while CH is purely a scout elite. Possibly a lot more group benefit, as we don't really work as a solo profession and the CH does.
As the above situation is blatantly not the case, we cannot get into a group on the strength of being a squad leader. It is only by being something else - a medic or pistolier or CH or whatever - that we can get ourselves into squads.
In short, you're right. In a group of 20 players hunting on Dahtomir, the xp is only slightlyworse than it was pre-patch.
In a group of 5-6 players - which is much more the norm - the xp is about 10% of what it was pre-patch. That's why we're unhappy.
Mr_Bigglesworth wrote:
This is what others have been finding, too.
The new formula works provided you have a group of 20 players with you and you're going after BIG targets. Do anything else, and the xp you get is pathetic.
In a group of 5-6 players - which is much more the norm - the xp is about 10% of what it was pre-patch. That's why we're unhappy.
Yes, and 10% of the pre patch amount means 10 times longer than it used to be.
Plus you still have pathetic "skills" to give to the group that kill your action and mind pools faster than if you were naked and sat on a Kamurith Defiler. (because they don't always work and must be used in special cirumstances to be effective at all when they do)
It's a hell of an ask to force us tomaster SL for a (chance at a) FS slot then mess with the xp like that.
I have to congratulate Captain V for his efforts to save us from drowning in our own spit, he's really gone in to bat for us!
Greetings,
Sorry to sidetrack here but...
"Even at 300k a night, it still takes 16 days to master.
3 weeks is 3 times longer than any other profession than BH."
Are you insane?
I hope your next Holocron says Fencer 
Enjoy!
SL as it stands does, unless you happen to find 19 other players who want to kill big targets.
I'm happy to hear that the formula is being fixed again.
Ivoni---
I'm sorry to hear that you had to kill your commando to go get Ranger (but I don't blame you). I read your Commando guide recently and have already shaped up to Flamer II. Thanks again.
And good luck with your mastery of SL.
---KnghtHammr
But, back on topic, the SL xp I got yesterday before the patch was significant in that we had 20 members and we were routing 10K HAM or better mobs. To re-iterate what someone said earlier, prior to the patch you had to be in a large group attacking heavy mobs to get significant xp. With this new hot fix, we should see significant increases in SL xp when in smaller groups. Here's hoping.
My point exactly in the other thread. These new changes are ridiculous and people are getting SL experience when in groups of 3 people that should be reserved for groups of 15+ people. Like I said in this thread, I thought the formula prior to last change was better than this one.
/sigh