Please reduce XP Penalty for Groups <Lv99 and <6 players.

[Aysha]

What I wish SE would do, is reduce the severe penalties for grouping up.

Seriously, there is something wrong when, in an MMORPG, I find I get better XP solo (far, far better XP) than in a group until you get to Apex.

They kinda-sorta did that in Adoulin Dungeons, but it's ONLY in Adoulin Dungeons. Everywhere else in the world, you are strongly discouraged from grouping up with a friend. Trusts are better than human players because Trusts don't eat 30% of your XP gains.

I've been wanting to XP with a couple people I know, but the penalties are just too harsh, and I find myself saying "screw it, I get better XP solo".

The only place where XP really matters these days, is at Apex Mobs and those are usually only done with a full group of 119 players. Therefore, if we reduce the penalty Pre-99 and <6 player groups, we wouldn't be hurting anything, and we would encourage friends to group up again.

[Nyarlko]

Copy/Pasted from my response to your other post:

I believe that there is no reason for the Group Experience Points Penalty to still be a thing personally. The experience gain rate is so high at this point that the dev stance on the issue doesn't make much sense to me anymore, and barring severe technical limitations, should be removed from the game entirely. (It's possible that it's embedded at such a low level of the code that they are just terrified of changing anything for fear of bringing down the whole system.)

The group experience point penalty does not apply in any SoA "gate" zones or Escha zones. (There might be some other zones w/o it, but I can't think of any.) You can group up in Escha-Zi'tah w/ no penalty and the mobs there can comfortably take you from 40-85 (30-89 if you have enough vorseals and willing to stretch even when exp starts to drop off at the end.) So, grab those buddies and start killing for full exp. XD

[Khiril]

Copy/Pasted from my response to your other post:

I believe that there is no reason for the Group Experience Points Penalty to still be a thing personally. The experience gain rate is so high at this point that the dev stance on the issue doesn't make much sense to me anymore.

Even 12 years ago it didn't make sense (logically) to make exp go down the more people you partied with. It made sense (mathematically).

The point is to group, but you get penalized for it. A serious fail.

[Aysha]

Copy/Pasted from my response to your other post:

I believe that there is no reason for the Group Experience Points Penalty to still be a thing personally. The experience gain rate is so high at this point that the dev stance on the issue doesn't make much sense to me anymore, and barring severe technical limitations, should be removed from the game entirely. (It's possible that it's embedded at such a low level of the code that they are just terrified of changing anything for fear of bringing down the whole system.)

The group experience point penalty does not apply in any SoA "gate" zones or Escha zones. (There might be some other zones w/o it, but I can't think of any.) You can group up in Escha-Zi'tah w/ no penalty and the mobs there can comfortably take you from 40-85 (30-89 if you have enough vorseals and willing to stretch even when exp starts to drop off at the end.) So, grab those buddies and start killing for full exp. XD

This is assuming you have lots of silt to keep buying mollifiers every hour because vorseals keep wearing off and you gotta leave and come back to re-apply the vorseal which dumps your mollifier... because TBH, even if it's a small chance, I don't really want to get murdered by the overpowered enemies that randomly pop when you kill anything in Escha.

I remember my first incursion into Escha... 2nd Coeurl I killed popped an NM that wiped the floor with us. And we weren't even in there for XP, we just happened to get aggro by two of them and decided to just fight the stupid things. Ya. That went real well.

It'd help if the mollifiers weren't so freaking expensive too. I really don't understand why they are so expensive when you can only get an hour out of them... especially in Zi'tah when they should know that 500 silt takes ages to make. Maybe you get several thousand in an hour in Reisenjima, but you sure don't in Zi'tah.

And this is also assuming that everybody in the group has Zi'tah access.... what if I had a friend that I want to introduce to the game... group up with them for some Level Sync, but the XP sucks... nothing entices a newbie to join the game more than much slower than usual leveling, lol.

I think we should just get rid of the group penalty. And btw, all "dungeon" or "indoor" SoA zones qualify -- Cirdas and Ra'Kaznar included. I can personally vouch for both; Cirdas gives a 2-man group far better XP than Kamihr Drifts, even though the latter is higher level.

[Songen]

Get rid of the penalty when you have atleast 2 people in your party, and add high bonus exp straight up from level1-98 for every additional member if your exp range is the same or similar to a 5 level degree if everyones level is below level 99? so this will allow level sync to be useful again since you can even join a lower level person and still get more exp. also would be nice to see the penaltys on armor when level sync'd lowered so that higher level people will find further more reason to level in lower level sync'd partys

[Aysha]

Eh, I think merely dumping the penalty is good enough. I'm not going to go adding all kinds of junk on there just for them to shoot the idea down.

I just wanna be able to group up with a friend or two and not feel penalized for doing it. I want to group up with a friend or two and not have the XP be horrible. I don't want to be falling asleep at the keyboard because levelups take so. stinking. long. because the XP has been slashed by a huge margin.

[Nyarlko]

This is assuming you have lots of silt to keep buying mollifiers every hour because vorseals keep wearing off and you gotta leave and come back to re-apply the vorseal which dumps your mollifier... because TBH, even if it's a small chance, I don't really want to get murdered by the overpowered enemies that randomly pop when you kill anything in Escha.

I remember my first incursion into Escha... 2nd Coeurl I killed popped an NM that wiped the floor with us. And we weren't even in there for XP, we just happened to get aggro by two of them and decided to just fight the stupid things. Ya. That went real well.

It'd help if the mollifiers weren't so freaking expensive too. I really don't understand why they are so expensive when you can only get an hour out of them... especially in Zi'tah when they should know that 500 silt takes ages to make. Maybe you get several thousand in an hour in Reisenjima, but you sure don't in Zi'tah.

And this is also assuming that everybody in the group has Zi'tah access.... what if I had a friend that I want to introduce to the game... group up with them for some Level Sync, but the XP sucks... nothing entices a newbie to join the game more than much slower than usual leveling, lol.

I think we should just get rid of the group penalty. And btw, all "dungeon" or "indoor" SoA zones qualify -- Cirdas and Ra'Kaznar included. I can personally vouch for both; Cirdas gives a 2-man group far better XP than Kamihr Drifts, even though the latter is higher level.

Anyone even slightly interested in grinding efficiently should have EZ access from completing the first bit of ROV. The only requirement for that is nation rank3, which you can get pretty easily solo with any 30+ job. Not only do you get zone access, you also get a bonus base exp+60%, which any grinder should be prioritizing. Trying to justify not having access is trying to justify absolute laziness. :x

If you are grinding in EZ to level up, at least most of the random pop NMs for non-ilvl targets pop unclaimed and don't agro last time I checked.. I popped Voso (coeurl) twice while skilling up and neither time did it agro. I even ran around in front of it trying to agro since I wanted to check for my own knowledge since I am leveling mules.. It could be possible that certain other ones might agro, but Voso most definitely did not. If you are still worried about it, then the 500 silt cost should be quite easily be made up for with the income you get from the grinding itself. Silt gain is similar to all the other region based currencies and you get something like 1-2% of exp gained as silt. So, while it's true that the lower your level, the lower exp and silt gained per kill, you should most definitely be getting more than enough exp to cover the cost of a mollifier every hour.

If you are dying too fast to cover the cost, then it sounds like a legitimate case of "L2P". ^^;; Just don't be lazy, stay aware of your environment and avoid agro/links. You may need to shuffle up your trust lineup as well if you don't usually use the more optimal trusts.

I repeat that I 100% agree that the penalty should be removed entirely. The stance from the devs has always been that since groups kill faster than solo, the penalty is made up for by the increased kill/chain rate. I fuzzily remember something even last year that confirmed that they still believe in this concept, though I don't remember if it was from the AMA or a dev post... They don't want players grouping up to kill multiple things solo for some reason. :/ Even though solo+trust grinding is astonishingly fast and I can't imagine any gaming of the system if the penalty was removed would really result in that much of an improvement on grind time. 6-8hrs if you know what you are doing for 2+ jobs on average for me (and done the grind a total of ~26x combined between my characters,) so I don't see any sort of possible harm that could result from removing the penalty. If a soloer can do it in 6-8hrs and a group in 5-7hrs, would that really be a bad thing?

I was mentally including Cirdas within "gates", sorry. XD Never tried stepping foot into Ra'Kaznar before being ilvl, and given the reqs for access, I would consider it to be the worst possible grinding spot for a leveler personally.

Something that you may not be taking into account is that the base exp/kill amount is both based on and limited by your current level when below lv99. A lv20 player will get the same amount of exp from a lv70 mob and a lv112 mob. And no matter what your target is, you can never gain more than TNL-1. (EX: If your TNL is 10k, then the max you can get from a single kill would be 9999.) Harder targets are not always the most rewarding on an exp/time basis. After doing the grind soooooo many times, the most efficient grind zone is most definitely Escha-Zi'tah.

AH, and don't forget to use your exp rings. XD