[CF List] Experience Categories

[Henric Karlsson]

On Thu, 25 Apr 2002 
     
     erhard.sanio at gmx.net
     
      wrote:

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      Playing Crossfire for a while, I consider the chances to obtain experience
     
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      in the different categories seriously imbalanced. As far as I see it, there
     
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      are six categories reflecting a number of skills.
     
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      Three of them, namely physical, intelligence, and wisdom, are combat
     
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      oriented, while the other three, personality, agility, and mental, widely are not.
     
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      The non-combat skills are scaling poorly if at all:
     
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True, they do scale, but unlike combat skills like melee you can't improve
the result much with equipment. Take singing as an example, I find it that
either you sing and calm monsters or you don't succeed at all. If you
wield a sword and bring enough healing potions you can kill significantly
tougher monsters.


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      Personality:
     
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      singing: Ok, to some extent, it scales (first kobold, then goblins, ogres
     
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               etc.). But i felt it virtually impossible to pacify anything above
     
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               those monster levels. I fail to see that it will ever be possible
     
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               to pacify even a fairy dragon or similar little beast - not to
     
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               mention angels, demons, or hill giants.
     
     
You just need more levels in personality.

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      oratory: I never succeeded in orating to anybody
     
     
You need to pacify monsters before you can orate them. Try to orate a
cleaning woman, you should succed even at 0 xp i Personality.


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      Agility:
     
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      disarm:  Ok, I disarmed a shitload of traps. But especially as a young
     
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               player, I died often thus suffering a net loss rather than gain.
     
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               In higher levels, I am succeeding now most time. Yet, the reward
     
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               is far too low to win anything with that: when you are level 42
     
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               slaying lots of retributioners, balrogs, or dragons, 5-50xp for a
     
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               disarmed trap are nothing less than a challenge. Much more, any
     
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           death will deprive you the gains of patient experience gain. So
     
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               you will stagnate at best.
     
     
There are higher level traps out there that would give you more xp. Still
not compareable too 100k xp you can get from monsters though.


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      stealing: Sure one may stand in the mid of a gang of monsters who use
     
     [...]

Stealing scale nicely when monsters get tougher. Same problem as with
singing though. Either you can steal or you can't.


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      Mental:
     
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      literacy: For a low level character, literacy grants some steady flow of
     
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                a bit of mental xp, especially once the character obtained a
     
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                library card. Identifying and reading spellbooks also helps
     
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                a lot. So does identifying stuff with the literacy skill.
     
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      smithing, Identifying stuff using the skills listed beneath is a great
     
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      alchemy,  help for general playing, and the gain of some xp is warmly
     
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      woodsman, welcomed. But again: As a young player, you profit a bit in
     
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      alchemy,  terms of xp, but later, the gain is - in relationship to combat
     
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      et alii   gains - simply ridiculous. It is possible to gain some 10,000-
     
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                25,000 xp per hour by slaying, say skeletons in the raffle1, and
     
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                identifying the remains and the loot. In the same time, a good
     
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                player may have slain monsters with tens of millions of xp gain.
     
     
Try use some alchemy recipies. You still get rather low xp even for
complicated recipies, but this is slightly compensated with, that you can
make large batches.


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      Though the situation for mental is slightly better than for the others, the
     
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      complaint still remains: xp does not scale. Identifying a winterblade does
     
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      not considerably add more xp than identifying an orc's dagger does.
     
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     I find mental skill to be the hardest to gain high xp lvls in.


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      As a result, you find level 110 players who are level 1 in personality, and
     
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      level5-10 in agility and mental at best. You will encounter better values
     
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      quite seldom.
     
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The problem here is that few (none ?) quests or maps require any other
skills than combat skills to finnish.


[...]
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      just some ideas. If I missed something, and it is already possible to gain
     
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      noncombat xp better than i found out, forget my post.
     
     
It is possible but it's alot harder than to gain combat xp.

/Henric