This is another post about Experience.
Last evening I was online pretty late. I’m not really sure why, which ought to have told me to it was time to log. Instead I began doing Silverwaste to help out the guild in collecting Shovels.
I pressed Y to find a group. There I noticed in Open World something I’d never seen before, people asking for help 100%ing things. I was on my Druid at the time. I thought, “Wow, this is great! I can go 100% with some people and try to sort out what the Druid is now.”
So I set off to do that. It ended up being quite fun, though I noticed there was something different about the Druid. Largely, I was to discover, that it was unusable. Rangers are just never going to get to do any ranged damage nor healing apparently. Won’t happen. Anet hates us. I changed classes a few times after that to find something else I wanted to play.
We spent a lot of time doing little things I haven’t done in ages. Hearts, POI, Vistas, and Events. It was a lot fun to be back doing this again. I’ve already 100%‘d on all of my characters Open World, not having any reability like daily repeatable hearts, etc has been a place I really haven’t done much with except when a friend needs something.
As we wandered around I noticed my Experience bar was moving. No surprise, right? It does that even after 80. Still, it was moving. Quite a lot actually.
Better still, it was Mastery Experience that was moving!
I don’t think people realize this yet. Most of the treadmill-runners (exp-grinders) are doing Fractals right now along with CoF and CoE.
There are a few reasons for this, mostly covered in my other posts. The base reason is that, at present, a person can play hours without moving the Experience bar at all in Heart of Thorns. It’s a complex problem that comes down to their being no reliable sources of Experience post Elite Level 41 or so.
This has lead to a lot of weird rumors. The most common rumor is that there’s still good experience from Spiders from Jaka Itzel Waypoint. Apparently they gave 5000exp plus at one point (they only spawn at night). That must have got nerfed because I’ve never seen more than 1,500 exp from them. Still, it’s a place to go if you’re really stuck. Yeah, there are still hours of non-existent experience gaps between there while you get to a map that can organize long enough to get back to Nighttime in Verdant Brink.
So, there is this open, but yeah, it’s another ‘if-maybe’ scenario.
Another big rumor I think everyone has heard is that you only get Central Tyria mastery-experience IF you are doing Dungeons are Fractals. Apparently this isn’t true. All of last evening while I was running around with people in Kessex Hills of all places I was getting mastery experience and quite a lot of it.
The average experience everywhere in the game right now is about 350 experience, which is pretty MMO standard. However, with the bonus experience now coming from creatures a typical kill can net you anywhere between 350 exp and 750 exp. This is very important. Killing Veteran Chak Blitzers down in Tangled Depths nets this much. So does CoF.
What this means is that if your and your party is organized CoF is by far not the only camp site out there able to produce reliable experience gain. The only real difference is your entire group is going to be traveling rather than the one odd person. Tak on top of this any local with a bunch of creatures in one spot, Events, and some incomplete Hearts and the Exp bar really starts to move again. Also, keep in mind some of these locations are simply not frequented so the experience from the bonus experience is going to be super high. We even tried out killing some water creature all throughout Orr after some coordination. That turned out not to be all that bad too.
So anyway, it’s really about wrapping your head around these base numbers:
Target-creature kill time
Travel time to target creature
Downtime (timers/health recovery)
Number of creatures in area
Experience Values
Average Global Creature
- 350
Average bonus value
– unknown
Observed bonus value average
– 150 to 750 (normal creature to veteran)
– Killing elite creatures does not seem to yield more base exp than does veterans
If you’re trying to exceed CoF rates of Experience that’s pretty easy too. Just go to a location with quite a lot of creatures near by and bring a Mesmer, some Sinister Druids, and get to work. You can portal and teleport about to maximize on getting experience to move your bar a bit. Sinister lays out the condition damage, which is about all the Ranger has left now for utility. These are fairly quiet/gentle-noise classes too so if you’re sick of the bang-bang-bang constantly while traveling this really minimizes on that.
So yeah, Central Tyria has a lot of experience options. Not so much with Maguuma. That’s pretty much dead stick in all directions after Mastery III of any track.
Hope this renews some hope and de-mystifies a few more discussions going on.
P.S.
Nope, haven’t worked out at all how we get Skill Points/Hero Points or whatever for crafting Legendaries. I’d imagine these converted into Spirit Shards some how, but it isn’t clear how those are gotten now either. Farm PvP for Tomes of Knowledge maybe? No idea.
Also, I haven’t gone to see if WvW grants Maguuma experience. It should since WvW is a 24/7 thing for people into that. But, I just haven’t had time to go see.