Aw. I remember when I was wondering about this.
Here's the skinny, LJ: every mission spawns a group of enemies proportionate to the heroes inside it. So when you're fighting Clockwork alone there are three minions, maybe a minion and a lieutenant. When your team of 8 fights Clockwork, there are three bosses, four lieutenants, and six minions, or something like that.
(Difficulty Levels 2 and 4 spawn for one extra hero at even level.)
The XP you get from defeating an enemy is multiplied by some factor based on team size and then split evenly among team members, unless there's like one guy who's higher-level than everybody else, then he gets the lion's share.
So why does anybody team if they get more XP alone? In that team of 8, that's a 1/8 share of three bosses four lieutenants six minions and a gearbox in a pear tree. It's generally a little higher than the 100% share of three minions you'd get on your own.
Welcome to the game. Sorry you got ganged up on and curbstomped, but this stuff happens, especially at lower levels. If you're running with people new to the game, stick to smaller teams with tighter level spreads until you're, like, 10 or so?
Also, unless they're especially built to be lowbie friendly, the bag of tricks that custom mobs get to tap into is death on a stick to very low characters.
(and if you're looking for something to play, "Bricked Electronics" should be manageable, and "Dream Paper" a bit of a stretch.)
Up with the overworld! Up with exploration! | Want a review of your arc?
My arcs: Dream Paper (ID: 1874) | Bricked Electronics (ID: 2180) | The Bravuran Jobs (ID: 5073) | Backwards Day (ID: 329000) | Operation Fair Trade (ID: 391172)
Yeah I figured there was some sort of XP gap in it, but considering I was the highest level character and only getting 7 XP, it just seemed kind of lame to me. I'd rather spend the same amount of time going through the content myself, instead of trying to find a non farm team out there.
I don't even really want to mention farming on the boards, because I would rather this thread not turn into a flame war, but after my experience last night I now see the benefit of XP farming. I don't rally care about the influence or the tickets, those are added benefits to me, but when I can run through a map with my main and alt alone and get a level or 3/4 level every time, there just seems to be something screwy about running a mish with a group, spending more time doing it and getting less reward.
/shrug just my .02 inf on the subject. I really think that the AE has a lot of potential to reach a variety of players, whether it be those looking for farming or actual mishes. but I'm just frustrated that I'm playing a defender and it seems that I get less XP because I do less damage to a mob. So exactly what is the point of doing missions with a group over doing them as solo? I know this is an MMO, and I do on occasion enjoy grouping up with individuals, but then you get that horror group that makes you run and solo for a while because your psyche has been scarred.
/rant off
Sorry, I'm just a little frustrated at the moment.
[ QUOTE ]
Yeah I figured there was some sort of XP gap in it, but considering I was the highest level character and only getting 7 XP, it just seemed kind of lame to me. I'd rather spend the same amount of time going through the content myself, instead of trying to find a non farm team out there.
I don't even really want to mention farming on the boards, because I would rather this thread not turn into a flame war, but after my experience last night I now see the benefit of XP farming. I don't rally care about the influence or the tickets, those are added benefits to me, but when I can run through a map with my main and alt alone and get a level or 3/4 level every time, there just seems to be something screwy about running a mish with a group, spending more time doing it and getting less reward.
/shrug just my .02 inf on the subject. I really think that the AE has a lot of potential to reach a variety of players, whether it be those looking for farming or actual mishes. but I'm just frustrated that I'm playing a defender and it seems that I get less XP because I do less damage to a mob. So exactly what is the point of doing missions with a group over doing them as solo? I know this is an MMO, and I do on occasion enjoy grouping up with individuals, but then you get that horror group that makes you run and solo for a while because your psyche has been scarred.
/rant off
Sorry, I'm just a little frustrated at the moment.
[/ QUOTE ]
Dude. Did you read the whole thing or just the parts that made you mad?
You get less XP for killing a minion on a team of X people because that minion's XP reward is being divided more or less evenly among X people. If you get XP slower on a team, it's because your team can't kill enough stuff to get you three minions' worth of XP as fast as you can kill three minions. Which can happen on low level teams before your support people get a lot of their force multipliers.
Also and perhaps I should have said, nothing awards an absolute amount of XP. It's all computed relative to your level. So if it's your level 7 and a level 3 guy fighting a level 5 minion, the level 3 will get a little over half of his "level 3 orange minion XP", and you will get a little over half of your "level 7 green minion XP".
It has nothing to do with how much damage you did. The only way you won't get XP from someone in your team killing something is if you weren't in the mission (or out of range outdoors).
Up with the overworld! Up with exploration! | Want a review of your arc?
My arcs: Dream Paper (ID: 1874) | Bricked Electronics (ID: 2180) | The Bravuran Jobs (ID: 5073) | Backwards Day (ID: 329000) | Operation Fair Trade (ID: 391172)
Here's some rules of thumb for teaming and XP:
- Teams defeat enemies faster, but earn less XP per defeat.
- Soloists tend to have best XP/time performance against +1s or +2s; beyond that the to-hit rules and damage scaling make them take too long, even with XP bonuses for higher levels. Conversely at even-con or below the lowered XP overcompensates for the additional speed at which foes can be defeated.
- Given the above, the team overall operates at highest efficiency when everyone on the team is near the "sweet spot". Highly efficient superteams or the like can routinely handle +3s or even +4s, so the rule of thumb has some flex, but generally keeping everyone close to the sweet spot is best.
- When you have a wide disparity in level ranges, the highest level members of the team contribute more than their fair share to the enemy defeat rate, but may earn the worst XP rates due to "sweet spot" distance. If the enemies are high enough level to be in the highest member's sweet spot range, then the lower level members of the team contribute almost nothing, but still earn great XP, while the highest level teammate is basically defeating everything on their own but still splitting the rewards.
I had a discussion with Arcanaville regarding the above effects, where she claimed the problem was inherently unsolvable. I disagree, and even created a formula that I believe would correctly distribute XP according to "effort" (though it relied on having datamined evidence of what "effort" means giving level differences); the problem is that said formula made teaming so punitive for lower-level characters that I feared it would discourage teaming entirely.
Generally when I form teams, I choose teammates that are either my level, one level below me, or able to SK up to someone at my level. That makes the level disparity no more than 1 level between highest and lowest member. I can then run my own missions at the 3-5 difficulty level so that nothing is more than +3 to the lowest member of the team.
When I've been in your situation - a high level disparity with me as the highest level teammate, and the enemies even-con or blue to me - the XP has been terrible, far below what I could do solo. So I tend to avoid those situations unless I just happen not to care, for example if I'm helping newbies learn the game, or am playing on a 50 for badges or merits or whatnot.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
Last night I decided to roll an alt on Virtue server. Instead of running the old intro quests for the first few levels, I decided to try out AE missions. I did a few solo at first but that got boring really quickly, and while I was wandering around the AE building I was randomly invited to a group. I joined up and we started on a mish. That one seemed to work out well until the leader needed to go and the leadership was placed in my hands. Considering that I have only been playing CoX for approximately a month, I'm not exactly comfortable in the role of leadership in a group, but I decided to roll with it this once.
I decided to try and look for a non farming arc, so I looked at the dev's choice missions. I picked the Butterfly effect one, and we went through the first arc with little issues. A few of us died here and there, but I take into consideration the level of the group (ranging from 3-6) and the fact that they were custom mobs. So during that process I level up and grab a few replacements, at this point we are running 6 people ranging from 2-7, a broad level variance I know.
Let's just say that we couldn't get past the first few pulls during that second arc. One of us would pull and the mobs would stand back and just blast us to death before we could get close enough to do anything. Not to mention the fact that I was the only one in the group with a heal and playing a dark/dark is new to me. I ended up growing frustrated and called it a night as it was getting late and consistently wiping on content was not worth missing out on sleep for me.
Now that you have the background story I can continue with my questions. I was noticing that I was getting minimal XP for the slaughtering of same level minions with the group. The level 7 minions were giving me approximately 7 xp per kill and the lts were only giving me around 23ish. At one point before the end I killed a minion by myself, as the rest of the group was concentrating on something else and received more xp than the lts were giving me (confirmed to my suspicion when we killed a LT and it give me under 20 xp if my memory serves me correctly). It seemed off to me, but as I am a new player I may not be noticing the xp difference when grouped. I usually do not pay attention to the xp distribution while I am grouping, but as it was seeming to take longer for my XP bar to move I decided to finally pay attention. This morning I decided to sign on and test out the xp while soloing a mission. Settings were the same, I was by myself in the mish and decided to run another one. The level variance of the mobs was enough to give me a broad range of XP during this mish and here is my breakdown:
Lvl 5 Min - 7
Lvl 5 Lt - 33
Lvl 6 Min - 10
Lvl 6 Lt - 32
Lvl 7 Min - 14
Lvl 7 Lt - 46
In both of these missions the mobs were custom mobs, so it seems like I am pulling from the same pool. Am I just now noticing the difference in xp distribution while grouping or was there just something off on the first arc I was running. Also, both arcs were dev choices, so I was still trying to pull from the same pool of resources while trying two different arcs. Maybe later on today I will try out the original arc I was running last night as solo and see what the xp distribution was like. I pose this question to everyone on the boards because it is the easiest and quickest way to get a polite answer to my questions.
Sorry about the length of the post and thank you for your assistance.