level ranges and exp slowdown or not

[Sirrocco]

This was originally a response to a post in "Endgame Fight" over in the Spoilers section, but it grew into something that seemed like it might need its own thread. The poster had suggested slowing the experience curve across the board to account for the large number of new explorable locations.

I'll note that I haven't been to endgame myself, but there is a question to ask on the new content before doing anythign to the learning curve. Is it intended that all (or most) characters complete all (or most) content? If we're expecting that (almost) everyone is going to do (almost) everything (almost) every time then it makes sense to slow down the leveling curve to accommodate that, but if we're intending/expecting people to pick and choose their fights, and perhaps hit different locations with different characters, then it may be that upping the total number of dungeons doesn't imply that we should the number of expected dungeons per character.

On the other hand, if we are intending to have people only doing a fraction of the dungeons each game (which I prefer) it becomes more worthwhile to slap an explicit level range on each dungeon/quest, that people can use to judge for themselves. Something like "5-12" would mean that if you go in before level 5, you should expect to die, and it's not really worth bothering to go in after level 12 for anything more than racing to the bottom and collecting the artifact off the boss (and may not be worth it even then). That would give people a better idea of when to hang around finishing off dungeons they'd already uncovered, and when to go haring off after new ones. Of course, estimates like these won't be accurate for every player, but people could learn their own playstyles and adjust relatively easily if they had the baseline numbers to start with. Having a place to put the info might look a bit tricky at first, but if every dungeon gets a quest (even something like "I found some ancient elven ruins. I wonder what's at the bottom?") then you could easily toss them into the appropriate quest descriptions.

How do people feel about this? Anyone want to toss any ideas at what various level ranges should be? Honestly, you could do worse than to have it be lowest commonly available enemy level at the top of the dungeon at min charlevel on the low end and highest commonly available level at the bottom of the dungeon at max charlevel on the high end.

[Dervis]

Although this is a good topic, there will be changes to xp and leveling on SVN and beta14...

In a nutshell, regular mobs give very few xp while bosses give tons of it. For example, your typical Trollshaws experience will be to reach the bottom at around level 3 and killing Mr. Bill will boost you to level 6.

Although I believe there's balancing to be done, we should hold on while people play with the new version.

[Sirrocco]

Ah. Fascinating. Yes, by all means let's hold back a bit, then.