Shattered Kingdoms

Also, it's good to bring others along with you in a group who are less familiar.

You will not hurt others by being more familiar.

Fridge,

Leveling now requires a fair bit more planning than it used to. If my post above about the use of the area command doesn't make sense, I'll be happy to elaborate, but the days of using 3 areas to hit GM - or even just Teron as some people used to do are gone. On average, you'll go to probably a dozen different places to level if you choose to grind solo. It's still very doable however to GM solo, just requires slightly different methods.

Keep in mind too, just because you're yellow, doesn't mean you have to leave the area. You can still get good XP in an area while yellow. Some places you'll even do well in red.

sleeper

I always leave at back of hand, sometimes even at familiar. There are so many leveling areas it doesn't mean anything really. You can also get a bunch of levels just going to places and picking up ticks even if you don't intent to train there. Leveling is alot easier with the familirity system really, not harder. If you have people you can switch with, people who haven't been to the area, you can get like 8 levels in one place. Just bring fresh blood into the group.

Leveling is pretty easy. I gmed Ivas in 98 hours, though had I not been in the Hammer and doing hammer stuff, I would have done it in seventy. That's a human barb though. My new priest will probably gm in like 125 hours, but that's the way it's always been with me. With the exception of my first GM Drebbin, 456 hours I believe, and Bromus, 198 hours. The rest have been 125-130ish.

And believe me, I am not a great leveler. I can barely level at all. Half my time is spent browsing the internet while I spam spear of faith then sleep.

My current took me 225~ hours to GM.

The area command is horrible because most of it is just a list of differant major cities. So unless you want me to go level in someone elses city and spend half my time in jail afterwards, that list is garbage. I understand that the game is trying to get people to move around a bit, but it seems like they want you to move quicker then it should.

Does this new xp take into account that people spend xp on training new skills, or is it just a continual number that once reached says you need to go somewhere else? I'm not looking to stay in an area forever, but I would like to be able to pop off 5 levels in each zone I head to at least with out getting penalized, plus I don't find being forced to go differant places so often very newbie friendly for people who haven't the slightest clue of whats available.

No.



This argument has been made, and summarily ignored, before.

The bonus and penalty is modest. I believe it's been described as +10%/normal/-10%/-20%. If an area is oustandingly best-in-class, it's worth the -20%. If not, leaving isn't such a loss.

Note that all wilderness NPCs (or quasi-wilderness NPCs like at Shinlaken) are +10% forever, no matter how long you train. So now they're actually attractive for solo levelling. That's pretty much the biggest change of the system. As noted, for group levelling, it's pretty much positive or neutral.

Sickest thing I've tried is having a character who dealt rather tremendous damage, especially to darkie type NPCs (Daemon's etc) and then spending a loong time in an area that had an abundance of those, along with a character who dealt considerably less damage than me... That meant her familiarity moves loads slower than my own, and I leveled from 36'ish to 48 or something in like...4 - 5 hours.

I paid her back though, walking around semi-afkish behind her in Tlax'cala to "reset" her familiarity there.

Ahem... and who was tanking for you?

I never get any credit.

This comment is untrue and makes it sound like you haven't tried experimenting with the area command since you've come back to the game. Quite a bit of time has gone into improving it. It displays every open area except wilderness, not just cities, that is within your level range. You can use it to search by kingdom and by how familiar you are.