Shattered Kingdoms

Archery Butts aren't even alive.

Those poor, helpless targets.

Seriously though, I don't think anyone would complain if there was other ways to level. As it stands, grinding is still the only viable option. I think until there is enough quests to easily get to master w/o grinding. I think pleveling is the only thing that will keep people around.

Using the terrain to your advantage is most definitely a tactical thing and not an abuse of the code.

My main question to this is, what situations are you able to cast AoE spells as a warlock for damage, but put yourself at some risk, but not instant death, and not "zero risk"

Granted, earthquaking and running away at speed dart isn't exactly no risk at all, some NPCs do have the ability to climb. However, where is the happy medium to this? Earthquake pulls way too many NPCs in an area to be used in almost all situations. Fireball is an entire room, it can't really be used in groups since if you do use it, you'll be hitting everyone in your group as well, including your elemental which is an issue until you're able to summon a fire elemental, at which point most of your leveling is done anyway.

Cone of cold is the only selective AoE, which is for grouped NPCs only and most aren't grouped in the first place, nor stay grouped if they are, and isn't available until master.

Please, I'm genuinely at a loss of how I'm supposed to use AoE to level at "some risk". I won't even go into the change to ironguard, which negated another method of AoE leveling.

For the TLDR, Warlocks aren't the most powerful class in the world anymore anyway, they were the most directly affected class by the armor enchantment tweaks. Yes, they have art now, which against your normal opponents will bring you somewhere equal or below what they used to be if art is maxed. With all of this on the table, their ways to level have been systematically negated with change after change. Something needs to be done, either give them something else to level with, or roll back some changes.

P.S.: Burning hands is the suck after a certain point.

In my opinion the problem isn't warlocks. Its how areas are set up. If you put areas that are in the air above NPCs and you can range them...but don't make the NPCs fly well thats the builders fault for not seeing the potential abuse. Make the NPCs fly and suddenly all the warlock tricks don't work anymore.

Incorrect. I spent a good 15 levels earthquaking or fireballing things that couldn't hit me back - and they were 15 levels I would have found very irritating to manage otherwise.

Then I guess you just got in under the wire. The change happened in the middle of January. The changes certainly weren't made because I saw you abusing it - I definitely would have remembered that.

Why is it an abuse of the code? It isn't! A big part of SK is dealing maximum damage while taking minimum.

More and more I begin to believe that "abusing code" means using it in ANY way that Dulrik didn't originally see coming.

It's not like I haven't known about this for years. I just haven't had time to fix it to my satisfaction. I also thought it was limited to a few isolated cases of people using it, but it was becoming more and more common as it apparently had become regarded as a super-fast levelling technique by the community.

I think it is telling though that the change wasn't really noticed except by a couple people prior to this thread. This wasn't even the first Bonanza where the change was in effect. The perception you get from reading here is that I've just taken something major away, but in fact the problem was limited to a few situations and it's not going to affect most people's (except warlocks obviously) levelling speed at all.

As long as there is the monotonous grinding to Master, I don't see the issue still. Grinding on hundreds upon hundreds of NPCs is boring as hell. I know that I am leveling a char currently that I was going to go to one of the most popular spots to lvl with a ranged AoE attack. For those level ranges that just got hosed, it is going to take eons to level through them now. Seawatch is what I am talking about. I only know of a couple of places to do that.