A Complete Guide to Experience Mechanics - Page 2

Written by and adapted with permission of Shannong (US Forums)

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The Basic Pattern of "Assist" Exp


The mechanics of "assist" exp are essentially the same as for group exp, with several differences:

  • Everyone involved in the kill in any way constitutes a "temporary fellowship" for the purpose of calculating exp, and this number can go much higher than only 6 people.
  • The group exp bonus is not applied if you are solo when somebody assists you.
  • The group exp bonus is applied only according to the number of people in the actual fellowship who tags the mob.
  • Only the person(s) who tag the mob get their share of the final adjusted exp. The involved player(s) who performed the "assist" do not receive their share of the adjusted exp.

Yes, all that can be confusing at first glance so let's elaborate a bit.



You have been "assisted" if you are soloing or fellowing and somebody else comes along and does anything at all to you (or your pet) or your tagged mob during the course of the fight. It does not matter whether their assistance is to buff/heal you, debuff your tagged mob, or damage your tagged mob during the course of your fight. It does not matter if they do only 1 point of actual damage to your mob or they do most of the damage.



When you are assisted in this manner, the game effectively treats the total number of people who did anything regarding the fight as a "temporary group" of sorts and divides up the exp for each person in the "temporary group" without applying the normal fellowship group exp bonus. Only the player(s) who tagged the mob actually gets their share of the exp--the other player(s) who "assisted" do not receive "their share".



So, if you're solo and another solo player "assists" you, then you get exactly 50% of the exp you would have normally gotten for the mob (instead of the 60% you would have gotten if that person had been in a fellowship with you). If a fellowship of 2 players assists you (and you're solo), you get exactly 33% of the exp (instead of the normal 48% you would have gotten if you were all in a fellowship together). If three completely different, random players assist you (none of you are in a fellowship), you get exactly 25% of the exp (instead of the normal 43%). And so on. In all these three examples, you're just dividing your normal "solo" exp by the total number of people who were involved in any way, and remember this includes buffs, debuffs, heals, or anything---not just damage to the mob itself.



The same thing essentially happens if you are in a fellowship and another fellowship "assists" somehow, or if other random solo players assist your fellowship some how. The difference is that since you're in a fellowship, the group exp bonus and all the other group exp mechanics are applied first, so you at least receive the usual bonus exp. Still, though, the other players who are not in your fellowship take their portion and it's "thrown away" just like happens for solo players. So if you're in a fellowship of 3 people and a solo player "assists" your fellowship, you get the group exp bonus for 3 people, but in the last step of the process the baseline group exp is divided by 4 instead of 3. So instead of you getting your normal 144% / 3 share, you instead get a 144% / 4 share (group exp bonus for 3 people but divided by 4 to include the other solo player who "assisted" you).



Why does Turbine do this? Partly to encourage ad-hoc formation of groups when you run into other solo players in the same area where you're hunting. Why not group up if you'll get better exp for it, right? And also to prevent (to some extent) a common technique of power-leveling that is a particular favorite of offshore farming operations, where a high-level player lets a lowbie tag a mob and then the high level player kills it to give huge exp to the lowbie.



Grouping Still Has Problems, but Not Because of How Experience is Divided


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align="center"> style="font-style: italic;">Why solo? It takes longer and is more dangerous if your goal is xp.

As you can see, the raw mechanics of group exp are actually quite good. A strong fellowship can easily rake in far more exp flow over time than you could possibly get by soloing on your own.



Instead, the current problems with the overall exp design is based on two facts:

  • There is a pervasive misconception among most of the player base that per-kill exp is very very low compared to quest reward exp, so most people feel that it is far more worthwhile to focus on completing quests instead of just grinding out mobs like so many other games require you to do. In fact, solo killing 12 even-con "white" mobs gives you the same exp on average as one quest reward. (Yes, Epic fellowship quest rewards are higher, but you need a group for most of those anyway.) At pretty much every level, you need to solo-kill the equivalent of roughly 300 "white" mobs to gain enough exp to be promoted to the next level. Once you factor in the group exp bonus, the actual time involved in grinding out mobs becomes even less. For example, you have to kill only around 20 "white" mobs in a duo (10 x 2) to gain the same exp as killing 12 mobs solo, etc. So although "grinding" mobs to level is undesirable by many folks (and you're missing out on the great storytelling in LOTRO), it *is* very feasible and very productive to just take a good group to a fast respawn area and grind your way up. In other words, grinding is pretty much equally feasible to questing as far as leveling speed goes. The moral of this story is that you shouldn't really care whether the fellowship you're in is completing *your* quests or not. You're still getting very good exp flow just by being in a group and reaping the benefits of the group exp bonus.
  • Quests are very sequential and interrelated rather than being independent. Unlike in WoW, where you could easily share most quests with your teammates, in LOTRO you can share very few quests because chances are very good that your teammates have not performed the prereqs.

Of these two disincentives, one is a false belief/opinion that can be alleviated over time if players spread the word around. The second bullet point, however, can be fixed only by Turbine, and it would require somehow reducing the length of quest chains so that players can more easily "jump in at any point" by having their fellowship members share the current quest they're working on. Long chains are great from a storytelling perspective but are a strong disincentive towards grouping.

Thanks again to Shannong for permission to reproduce her great guide!

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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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