Outleveling Story Arcs, Contact Completion, and Flashbacks

This is going to sound weird, I think, but this has been bothering me for a while, since I started playing again last week.

I feel like I'm leveling too fast. Just tonight, I was in the middle of Cho Ge mission and leveled up to level 22. I was bout halfway though the progress bar on his contact status window thing. Now I'm too high leveled to talk to him about missions, and he's gone to inactive. This is NOT the first time this has happened to me in the middle of an arc, and it is rather annoying. It happened with the Hollows, too.

If I go back and do this arc in Flashback, I'll have to start from scratch.

I realize you can complete such missions in the Flashback system, but that is less than satisfying. For one, you still gain XP in the Flashback system, so use it enough and you're going to out level MORE contacts. Two, it doesn't update the contact progress bar, so it looks like you never finished the contact's story arc.

I've completely missed 4 or 5 contacts at this point because I out leveled them due to dying a lot and having to re-run certain missions over and over. This really annoys me since I was really interested in running them, and even if I run them in Flashback, they'll be listed as Inactive, Incomplete contacts forever.

Does this bother anyone else? Does anyone have any ideas on how I can not level so fast?

Thanks.

If you think your going to out level a contact before you finish their story arcs you can always turn off earning xp under options.

I don't think you can, because you don't actually own the mission so you won't get credit for mission completion.

Hiya! You are not the only player that is upset by incomplete contact meters. My first contact on the first toon I made seven years ago, was incomplete, and I've been all "grrry" about it since.

And then they gave us a way to turn off exp. So, that, combined with my alta-holism, has left me with dozens of toons frozen at levels 14, 19, 24, and 29 across all the servers.

Sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease.

And, sorry, no, you cannot fill in the contact's meter once they go inactive.

Happy Gaming Anyway,
Red

/macro XP optiontoggle noxp

This will create a button labeled "XP" that you can click to turn XP earning on and off, rather than digging through the options menu.

First, you're certainly not the only person that is bothered by outleveling things. It frequently bothers me, too.

As has been said, you can always turn off XP for stretches, as needed.

You can also adjust the difficulty down. While this might make it too easy to be fun/interesting/challenging, it also makes it award less XP. If you can find the low diff sweet spot just barely challenging enough to be interesting, but minimal XP gains, that also helps slow the rate at which you advance, without having to turn XP off altogether. I prefer turnig it off totally, myself, because then I can turn the Diff up and get more enemies, for more drops, and more challenge, without making the outleveling problem worse. And, as some of those levels, the extra drops are really nicely in demand, since people do tend to fly past some of those points.

Either way, sadly, once you pass something you're pretty much out of luck, except via ouroboros.

My understanding is that whatever you set the level bar on the difficulty slider, (-, 0, 1, etc, up to +4) will get ya an even mix of that level and the next higher level, and that this is intentional, and WAI. The exception is that +4 I don't believe even spawns any +5s.

Not sure why this is the case, and it does seem slightly counter-intuitive, but I suspect it is in part a relic from the older difficult system.