XP Off at Level 5 to Finish Atlas Park - An Experiment

[RikOz]

I'm one who likes to level by doing missions. My usual progression through Atlas Park goes like so:

 

Matthew Habashy's initial quests -> Officer Fields or Sondra Costel -> Aaron Thiery

 

and by the time I've arrested Thiery and defeated Arbiter Mesten, I'm level 8. At that point, I typically go talk to Twinshot and do the Shining Stars missions, then I'm off to Kings Row.

 

Every time I've done the Shining Stars stuff I find that I'm confronted with Orange-conning "Arachnos" lieutenants, and they are quite a challenge, regardless of AT and powersets (though, naturally, I've gotten better at dealing with them as I've done it more). The main challenge has been those lieutenants' Web Grenade - it kinda sucks having all your recharge speeds slowed down when you only have maybe three attack powers to work with.

 

That got me thinking, "Atlas Park is a level 1-5 zone. Are these missions even doable at level 5, when Twinshot first becomes available?" So I set up an experiment.

 

1) Rolled alt #47, a Radiation Melee/Regeneration stalker.

2) Train only first two powers in each powerset. So took Contaminated Strike and Hide at creation, Radioactive Smash at level 2, and Fast Healing at level 4. Also allowed myself to use Brawl and my origin power, Mutagen.

3) No XP buff (unnecessary), no Prestige Enhancements. Took Ninja Run to make it easier to get around.

4) Complete all of the storylines and all of the missions from the origin contacts in City Hall, and the followup missions from other AP contacts I'm introduced to, as long as those missions take place in Atlas Park (so ignoring any missions that send me off to Kings Row).

5) No starting Inf from other characters, but converted first three Merits earned into Converters, sold for starting Inf.

6) Used Inf to purchase and equip full load of level 5 TOs (2 +ACC in each attack power, 2 +DEF in Hide, 2 +Healing in Fast Healing), then used TOs from drops to eventually upgrade all TOs to 5++.

7) Turned off XP at level 5. Capping at zone level, preventing outleveling any contacts so that I could take and complete every single mission available.

8 ) And, finally, talking to Twinshot after everything else was completed, and attempting the Shining Stars missions up through "Save Manticore", at level 5.

 

It was ... much easier than I expected. In fact, it was probably the easiest run through the Shining Stars missions I've had. And I'm not sure why.

 

A couple factors I've considered:

 

Being a stalker gave me a bit of an advantage, via the big crits when attacking from stealth?

 

Previously waiting until level 8+ to start the quests meant that the "Beginner's Luck" buff was lower than it was at level 5?

 

Thoughts?

[biostem]

AP peaks out at level 6.  You are meant to be leveling up as you run such missions, and they probably expected a certain amount of random street fighting to get in a bit more XP.  Don't you have an NPC helping you in Twinshot's missions?  You also don;t get XP debt until level 10, so perhaps it is meant to be a little "tough love" early on, to help you learn not to get in over your head...

[RikOz]

My question was about why it felt so much easier at level 5 than the same missions at level 8-9, when my initial thought was, "If these are so tough at 8-9, they must be a real bear at 5". I know we're meant to be gaining XP - that wasn't the point.

 

As far as NPCs helping, the screwed up pathing of the NPCs in the Shining Stars base makes their help extremely unreliable. Half the time they start to follow you, and then turn around and run back the other direction. When you go to rescue Dillo, Twinshot doesn't want to budge past the room's entrance, so she's no help unless you can kite the mobs over to her. The last few times I've done the mission that introduces Grym, Flambeaux hasn't shown up for the final fight at all - she's still back there running between the elevators or something. And the Save Manticore mission is entirely solo.

[Nimruht]

As a person who has only worried about leveling up as quickly as possible, I like this idea.  I will definitely have to make a content character. One who goes along, zone by zone clearing out all the story arcs. Thank you for that inspiration.

[Kigo]

I think it was partly the character choice you made. When I first came back to City my very first character made was a pain/psi defender. And I leveled through AP just like you did but without capping my xp. Missions were long and tough. Yes, I could self-heal. But the damage I could do was barely visible even against minions and bosses or large groups would wreck me. And do not even get me started on the first time I tried soloing a boss despite the game's suggestion to bring a group - I won in the end but only because the boss when it killed me didn't regen faster than I could get back to him and he slowly wore down because I was persistent. Now, mind you I did not cap at 5 so I can never quite know whether I would have gotten the same issues, but it certainly seems to me that logically character choice matters for soloing.

 

Overall I like the concept of clearing every single zone out this way if you can do it... but I feel like the powers of incarnates are just too important to delay for weeks or months doing the slow zone progression. Still, a concept worth having at least one alt to use just for when you want a different City experience.

[RikOz]

20 minutes ago, Kigo said:

Overall I like the concept of clearing every single zone out this way if you can do it... but I feel like the powers of incarnates are just too important to delay for weeks or months doing the slow zone progression. Still, a concept worth having at least one alt to use just for when you want a different City experience.

Yup, like I said, this was alt #47, so it's fun to take different approaches on different characters.

 

Amongst my alts I have two themed "super groups" of ten members each. But since I can obviously only play one character at a time, I have to spread out my time on each character to keep the characters within a particular "SG" at or about the same level. So in those cases, the "RP" outweighs the leveling.

[Kigo]

I actually ran with this concept and testing it with a meme alt. The "Common Civilian" is exp locked at level 1 and using Assault Rifles and Ninja for powersets since I wanted it to be In Character.

 

I ran three DFB's to get the bonuses to dmg, acc, and survivability. Would have done the recovery as well but decided it was unneeded since at level 1 I can't spam powers faster than my recovery anyway.

 

I also was lucky enough to get from those DFBs some useful lvl 4 single origin enhancements that made my assault rifle single skill damage a lot better and vastly improved my accuracy on the inaccurate single power from ninja making it more useful.

 

I then proceeded to do all content that I can do at level 1. It was ridiculously easy compared to doing it at higher levels despite only having the starter powers.

 

You are definitely on to something here. But I still say that for "most" of your alts the ability to hit 50 asap and unlock incarnates is more useful than getting all the story arcs done early since you can redo them later with Ouro anyway. But for RP purposes or if you want to keep one alt just for meme purposes this works amazingly well.

Edited August 31, 2019 by Kigo
Broke up paragraphs a bit as they seemed too long.

[RikOz]

Ouro, heh. One problem I found with that is the limiting to level-appropriate powers while I'm leveled down. Due to rearranging things as I've learned more powers, some of those powers gained at lower levels are now scattered across three power bars, or even removed completely if I found them to be no longer useful (like my fire/fire blaster's Ring of Fire immob, which never ever worked when I needed it to). It results in awkward gameplay when the available powers aren't grouped neatly under my fingers, and I have to click some of them because they're on different bars now. I mean, doable, but annoying.

[MnemonicLight]

I still really wish they removed levels on quest givers instead of work arounds like this. It gets to the point of if you're not careful or you don't turn off EXP gain you end up missing content and stories getting wildly unfollowable. I'm doing a Praetorian right now and I'm just going through Neurotropis, each quest I'm just going "Who are you and why do you act like you know me, what is even going on in this storyline"

 

It also defeats the purpose of missions when you just take away one of the things that missions were made for. Ouro is cool and all, I like the idea of being able to replay missions but it shouldn't be a requirement to follow a story, same with being able to turn off EXP gain. This shouldn't be an either/or situation, just turn off quest givers having a level.

 

As a new player this kind of turns me off from the game and after venting about it to friends they all thought it was the weirdest design choice for a role-playing game to have.

Edited September 1, 2019 by MnemonicLight

[boggo2300]

53 minutes ago, MnemonicLight said:

I still really wish they removed levels on quest givers instead of work arounds like this. It gets to the point of if you're not careful or you don't turn off EXP gain you end up missing content and stories getting wildly unfollowable. I'm doing a Praetorian right now and I'm just going through Neurotropis, each quest I'm just going "Who are you and why do you act like you know me, what is even going on in this storyline"

 

It also defeats the purpose of missions when you just take away one of the things that missions were made for. Ouro is cool and all, I like the idea of being able to replay missions but it shouldn't be a requirement to follow a story, same with being able to turn off EXP gain. This shouldn't be an either/or situation, just turn off quest givers having a level.

 

As a new player this kind of turns me off from the game and after venting about it to friends they all thought it was the weirdest design choice for a role-playing game to have.

While I agree with you, and think missions should just level with your character, it's not that weird a design choice as pretty much every MMO did it 

[MnemonicLight]

Wait really?? That's still kind of weird given the nature of a lot of MMOs being rpgs, stories and quests are a main part of RPGs. 

[boggo2300]

28 minutes ago, MnemonicLight said:

Wait really?? That's still kind of weird given the nature of a lot of MMOs being rpgs, stories and quests are a main part of RPGs. 

Ultima Online, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online just for starters

[DR_Mechano]

2 hours ago, MnemonicLight said:

Wait really?? That's still kind of weird given the nature of a lot of MMOs being rpgs, stories and quests are a main part of RPGs. 

Guild wars 1 and 2 were unique in that the quest content leveled with you. In fact that was one of the major selling points of Guild Wars 2 that the world, and its content, remained relevant (and if you wanted the Legendary weapons, had to be done). However you still had level minimums for each zone. Like 1-20, 20-40 etc. So yeah MMOs do this stoof all the time. It's only really single player western RPGs like Elder Scrolls that do the 'the entire content levels with you' schtick.

[RikOz]

4 hours ago, boggo2300 said:

While I agree with you, and think missions should just level with your character, it's not that weird a design choice as pretty much every MMO did it 

WoW stops showing the yellow "!" over questgiver's heads once you are too high-level to get any XP from them (though a few years ago they added an option to "Show low-level quests" to make things easier for completionists*), but you could still talk to the questgivers and get the quests anyway. If you're RPing (it is an RPG after all, even if you're not actively and formally roleplaying), that makes sense because, while your character may be too "high level" for the quests, those threats are still threats to the locals.

 

Contacts in this game telling you, "Oh, my missions aren't worth your time" basically encourages the exact problem Aaron Thiery was describing in his story arc - heroes becoming complacent.

 

* A few years back WoW also added a special weapon for completionists: The Foam Sword. It does exactly one thing: "Mortallly wound trivial monsters". If you use it on a mob that is far below your own level, it reduces the mob to 1 hit point. The reason (which I discovered for myself many years ago when I was trying to earn the "Loremaster" achievement for completing every quest, and was trying to complete low-level quests at level 80), is that there are a good number of quests that require you to wound/weaken enemies and then use a magic item on them. Unfortunately, at a certain level discrepancy, you're going to kill every mob with one hit, even if you strip your character of all gear and just punch them. One-shotting the mobs made these quests impossible to complete. The Foam Sword solved that problem.

Edited September 1, 2019 by RikOz

[THEDarkTyger]

4 hours ago, MnemonicLight said:

Wait really?? That's still kind of weird given the nature of a lot of MMOs being rpgs, stories and quests are a main part of RPGs. 

Hold over from the early days. Used to be you could clear every quest available in your level range and still have to grind levels to reach the next tier of quests. That's assuming there were even that many quest. EverQuest 1 had a notable lack of quests for a game called EverQUEST. It was pretty much all grinding for levels. ><

[RikOz]

9 minutes ago, THEDarkTyger said:

Hold over from the early days. Used to be you could clear every quest available in your level range and still have to grind levels to reach the next tier of quests. That's assuming there were even that many quest. EverQuest 1 had a notable lack of quests for a game called EverQUEST. It was pretty much all grinding for levels. ><

As I understand it, that was actually one of the main selling points of original WoW - "More quests! Less grinding!"

[EmperorSteele]

The game is just easier overall at very low levels. I'm pretty sure the level 1-5 Arachnos and the level 6-10 Arachnos are two different sets of characters, not just a scaled version of the other. So the level 6+ guys will have more HP and more attacks than their 1-5 counterparts.

[Justisaur]

Level 1 is easier.  That's why the level 1 single boss/eb farms exist in AE, even going from level 1 to level 4 makes a marked difference in kill times. The mobs have relatively less hp at level 1, and you get 95% base to hit at level 1 against same level mobs.  Both of those slowly get worse as you level.  The origin attack powers also do considerably more damage at level 1, and actually decrease as you level.    Then if you take the prestige attack powers, you'll have 5x the attacks the game is balanced for.

 

 

Edited September 3, 2019 by Justisaur

[RikOz]

1 hour ago, Justisaur said:

The origin attack powers also do considerably more damage at level 1, and actually decrease as you level.

Yeah, I've just noticed on newer alts that those origin attacks often do more damage than either of my first two attack powers. Kinda discovered this on a level 2 toon with slow-recharging powers. Fighting 2 mobs, used powers on first mob, and then Mutagen + Brawl on the second, who went down just as fast.

Edited September 3, 2019 by RikOz