Experience

Revision as of 12:02, 7 May 2016

Back to Game Mechanics

What Is Experience?

Asheron's Call 2 is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) where players evolve the characters they create by earning 'experience' (known as XP) through completing quests and killing creatures.

Character Development

Levelling
Character progression is measured in levels. Player characters begin the game at level 1 and are required to earn a certain amount of experience in order to 'level up' to the next level.
With each level, the amount of experience needed to reach the next level increases exponentially - so too does the experience rewards from questing and hunting but to a slightly lesser extent, meaning that levelling takes progressively longer the higher level you get. There is no way to reduce level or lose experience in this game, so it's an ascendant progression game.
The maximum level is 150, however there is insufficent game content to reach this level, with the highest character being level 106 as of May 2016. The highest quest XP caps as a percentage of that needed to reach level 86, while the highest hunting zone includes level 86, 88, 90, 92 and 95 creatures.
Skill Training
Each level up from 1-50 earns you 1 'skill credit' (totalling 49), which you may use to train skills with and specialize your character - a skill can cost between 1 and 5 credits to train. You may increase the strength of your skills by allocating experience you have earned to increase its level. From level 45 and after becoming a Hero of Dereth, each level up earns you 100 'hero credits', which you may use to train hero skills and perks.
Skill Untraining
Skill credits and experience allocated to skills can be retrieved in order to redistribute them and 'retrain'; doing this requires selecting the skill, clicking the untrain button and then proceeding to earn the amount of experience you have invested in that skill. Note: if a skill required 1,000 XP to untrain, you would have 2,000 XP available after earning 1,000 XP to untrain it. You do not lose XP by investing it into skills.
Equipment Requirements:
Weapons and armor have a usage minimum requirement in terms of player level from 1-50 and then in terms of Arcane Lore to dilineate items beyond level 50. Arcane Lore is a hero skill that requires experience to level up.

Enhancing XP Gained

Percentage Rewards
Quests may give a fixed XP reward or a percentage XP reward. Those that give a percentage XP reward do so as a percentage of the total XP needed to level for your level - the XP needed to level value is taken from the beginning of the level and does not change as this value decreases with the player getting closer to levelling up. This means that XP rewards for quests can increase as your level increases. All percentage rewards are however capped at a certain level. For example, S.H.R.E.T.H. Base Ultra is a level 46+ hero status quest that gives a 4% reward, capping at level 85. This means a level 46 will earn a 3,359,921 XP reward while a level 85 will earn 3,296,185,479.
Felowships
See http://web.archive.org/web/20051224122026/ac2.turbinegames.com/index.php?page_id=377
Note: A player must be within 5 levels, higher or lower, than the fellowship leader in order to share XP. Mana

Weapon Totems
Uncommon weapon spell effects include 'Inflate' and 'Lasting Inflate', which act as a debuff against the target monster, increasing the experience reward for killing it by 3% for 15 and 30 seconds respectively.

Hero Perks
Hero Perks are passive skills which can be trained in order to improve a players character. Under 'Miscellaneous', there are 'Fast Learner' perks that, when trained, slightly increases the experience earned from killing monsters. There are 6 in total, with each costing 350 hero credits to learn and increasing XP by 1%, up to a maximum of 6%.

Chain Combos

Nerfing XP Gained

Hunting
When a player is too high or too low a level in relation to a creatures level, experience earned for killing it will be reduced. The level range varies for non-heroes and heroes. A non-hero may gain 100% XP at 10 levels below and 10 levels above a creatures level whereas a hero may gain 100% at 8 levels below and 4 levels above a creatures level. Being one level outside of these ranges will mean that you earn 80% of the reward; two levels outside will mean you earn 60%; three levels outside will mean you earn 40%; four levels outside will mean you earn 20%; and five levels outside will mean you earn 1%.
In a fellow with a player outside of the 100% range, XP will be nerfed for all fellows but only as a proportion of the damage contribition to the killing of the creature by the player outside the 100% range. This means that if a player contribues 50% of the damage to a kill and is one level outside of the 100% range, XP will be nerfed to 90% for all. It also means that characters which contribute less or no damage to a group such as debuffers and healers will not be as much of a concern as to the reduction of a groups experience gain.
Quests
Certain quests and vaults are nerfed in experience when a player reaches a significantly high enough level - for example, a level 60 doing a level 20 quest may get 1% of the XP reward. However many other quests are not - specifically, hero quest content is rarely nerfed.

Pass Up XP

The games allegiance system is based on a patron-vassal schema that is created when a character swears allegiance to another character. This creates a pyramid-like guild system, with each character having up to 12 vassals underneath them.

Within this system is the feature of experience being passed up from vassal to patron. Whenever a vassal earns experience from killing a monster, their patron will receive 25% of this experience as a bonus known as 'pass up'. This does not subtract from the experience earned by the vassal. Experience earned from quests do not contribute to pass up, nor does experience earned as a result of a mana bonus. The maximum amount a player can gain in experience from their vassals is 35% of the total amount needed to reach their next level. If a player reaches this limit, they will receive no more pass up experience until they reach their next level.

It is also possible to gain experience from those characters sworn under your vassals. The experience gained from a grandvassal is 2.5%.

Experience Per Level