Gains

Levelling Gains

Gains refer to the increase in hit points(HP), mana(MP) and Movement points(MV) achieved upon increase in Level. The value amount is varying on a spread based upon game code.

You have now obtained experience level *!

Your gain is: */* hp, */* mana, */* mv */* prac.

Factors influencing levelling gains are kept secret by the creators/moderators of the game. Speculation of these factors are held differently by players and below are some theories based upon limited anecdotal and experimentation info. Confirmation and further information is required, and the following discussion is provided for further sampling and a bit of fun speculation:

Levelling explained (Credit Yageth)

First off, you get experience for dealing damage to a mob, be it skill, spell, or standard melee.

The mud determines how much experience to give per attack is in very simple terms based on the monsters exp/hit points.

So in the first example shown below, you kill the monster in one hit and thus get all the experience it can give in one hit. In the 2nd example on the other hand you only do 1/10th the damage required to kill and only get 1/10th the experience.

Quote: Hitpoints. Mob Experience. Damage. Experience Gain. 10 100 10 100 100 100 10 10

Experience Cap

Now RoD can't make it that simple, so there are some modifiers the most annoying being an experience cap. Using the first example show above, you should get 100exp, but RoD dislikes that so they cap the exp at lets say 10, meaning you wasted 90 exp because you did too much damage in one hit. To get the most experience out of the mob, you would want to try and only do 1 point of damage. Thus 10 attacks, 10 exp each, and the full 100 experience.

Quote: Hitpoints. Mob experience. Damage. Raw exp per hit. Exp cap Experience wasted 10 100 10 100 10 90 10 100 1 10 10 0

There are a few ways to change how much damage you do, the easiest being the style your in (Will explain later), your weapon, and finally your DR. So play with your prompt a bit, and set it to show exp to next level, and keep an eye on how much you get per attack.

The style your in is a simple modifier, In evasive you do 80% damage, Defensive 85%, Standard 100%, Aggressive 110%, and Berserk 120% So if you attack a monster try changing your styles if you get the same experience in evasive as you do in aggressive you know your hitting the experience cap.

Now the exp cap isn't totally set in stone, the higher your wisdom, the higher the exp cap goes. So instead of capping at 10 with lets say 10 wisdom, you would cap at 20 with 20 wisdom. Intelligence also modifies the cap, but far less so than wisdom.

Relative Experience

Next, lets say your a normal guy walking down the street, and you step on a bug, it makes sense that you wont learn anything from that. The reverse is also the same. Your walking down the street, step on Jet Li's toe, and before you have time to say sorry, your staring up into the sky with a bloody nose wondering what the hell happened.

Kill Buffer

That brings us to the kill buffer. Simply put the more you kill something, the less you can learn from it. After you kill something 50 times in a row, you will gain no experience from it. So it's a good idea to try to kill a variety of monsters.

IP Leveling

Another problem most new players wont have to worry about is IP leveling, to explain this, it is best to give a history lesson.

In the good old days people used to have avatars following them around, keeping the chr they were leveling healed and such. Immortals didn't like this and so IP leveling was born.

So now if you have multiple chrs in the same room, you get less and less experience. (Something like a 4000% drop in exp if you have 8 characters in the same room) But it is only in the same room, so if you happen to have a cleric/mage, you can park them a few rooms away and still get full experience with some of the convince of the good old days.

Now that you understand some of the basics lets move onto how to get the best rounds.

Old RoD code capped HR out around 30 or so, and for a lowbie that is more than enough. HR affects how many hits you get a round. The more hits, the more exp you get, the faster you level. So try to keep bless cast on you (+6 hr) and try to pick out eq with some HR...

Next always practice second/third/fourth attacks, they give you extra chances to attack each round. Another big skill is Dual wield, it in effect doubles your chances for melee, so this is also something you should get as fast as possible.

When looking for mobs, Always consider them first. Look for mobs with High consider experience, and low health. Sorry but I don't remember exactly what all the consider levels are, after a while you will learn what's high and what's low for both exp and hp

When fighting, you are also able to use skills. The most common being strike, its a small attack that you can use to do an extra little bit of damage and thus an extra little bit of exp. It might seem small but it adds up fast enough. As your levels increase you will gain new skills like leap, punch, spinkick, vault... The damage increases slightly with each so you are normally best off using the latest skill you can.

THIEVES

As thieves we have 2 special skills of note, Backstab and Circle, both do a fair amount of damage, too much so in fact, so RoD decided to nerf their experience, and so using them will in fact only cost you experience... If you are in a fight and aren't getting any decent experience, start circling the mob to kill it faster so you can move on and find something better.

Levelling gains testing (Based upon Thief)

Your initial hit point setting at level 1 appears to be solely dependent on your race. This is may be due to the different CON settings on new characters of each race. There does not appear to be any influence for diffferent gender selections.

The level 1 hit point bases observed are:

	drow	dwarf	elf	gith	gnome	h-elf	halfling	h-ogre	h-orc	h-troll	human	pixie	sea-elf
Level 1 HP	21	26	18	24	17	23	17	25	26	27	20	15	18

Your gains per level is reliant on having a maximum constitution. If your stat is not maxed you can expect to observe lower than typical hit point gains. The range of hit point gains on a thief with maximum constitution stat is 12 to 17 hit points per level which results in the following graph of typical avatar hit point bases. Theoretically a minimum base is 12*49=588 + level 1 base and the maximum is 17*49=833 + level 1 base. Statistically speaking there is no reason why the game would need to have any code to suppress these bases, the formulas show the odds of achieving a base below 692 or above 771 is less than 0.0001%. For every 10,000 thieves leveled you would expect to see at most 1 such base. Special factors such as the Deck of Many Things or other special quest prizes may alter a characters base post-leveling.

This graph demonstrates the percent probability for each race and final avatar hit point level. When you ask "what is a normal base" you would have to be specific with regards to race and confidence. A strict statistical answer is possible, but for simplicity, looking at the "50% of characters will have this base or higher" line we see values ranging from 725 to 735 depending on race. On the other hand only 10% of half-ogre thieves ever leveled are expected to be observed at or above 750 hit points (only 1.61% are expected to be exactly 750).

We see from these charts that the explanation for why some races produce higher based thieves than others is entirely explained by level 1 offsets. More experimentation is required to see if level 1 con is significant in the non-max level 2 advancement hit point gain, thus favouring higher bases on characters who have higher/max con stat selection in preauth.

It is worth noting that beyond base hit points many players find inherent resistances/affects, deity options, access to equipment pieces like froggy girth or race equipment sets like the drow set, Vast Horizons totem items, racial skills like tinker or prestige dual class options to be more critical in character planning.

Various Levelling Gains Theories/Speculation (Compilation)

Theory 01

Gains are a function of stats or a combination of various statistics particularly Constitution for hit points HP gains, Dexterity for Movement points MV gains and Intelligence for mana MP gains (see help file for reference). Race and Class also play a roll in the spread range. Gains are purely random beyond this.

Theory 02

Gains are a function of a number of different fixed factors and dice roll factors (TL;DR - Experience Ratings influence dice roll for level gains towards desirable value, Blithe).

• Fixed factors included in this theory are:
  • Constitution for hit points (HP) gains, Intelligence for mana (MP) gains and Dexterity for Movement points (MV) gains directly (see help file for reference).
  • Mental state through factors such as hunger and thirst and affects like poison impacting MST.
  • Race and Class also play a roll in the spread range.
• Dice roll factor included in this theory are following :
  • One of the dice rolls is influenced by the relative experience rolled on level gain (due to variance in dice roll of damage, mobs level, mob defense values (AC, con, etc), etc).
    • • Experience gained on hit on level up is relative to mobile Experience Ratings and to the players level (and reference exp at that player level).
        • Note: Experience gained by attacking mobile beyond 10 level difference, the game code implements lower experience gained (this is originally to stop power levelling).
        • Note: Difference in level of mob to player also influences damage output of player relative to level of mobile effecting damage output and therefore effecting hit/damage value influencing the dice roll gain.
        • Based upon this, speculatively the sweet spot is attacking a mobile approximately 5 levels above player level give or take a few levels.
        • Levelling up on a mobile below your level is suboptimal due to the experience gained relative to Experience Ratings and therefore presumably negatively influences the dice roll and therefore level gains.
      • All statistics effect level gains, however this is due to the indirect influence on the diceroll (outside of Constitution, Dexterity and Intelligence). See following:
        • Damage (and therefore relative exp) is effected by player's DR/HR, weapon damage or spells/skills which are in turn is effected by players other stats (Strength / Dexterity / Luck for (most) attack skill / melee and Intelligence / Wisdom / Luck for (most) attack spell).
        • High Wisdom directly influences increased experience, therefore indirectly influencing the relative experience gained and subsequently the chance of desirable level gain.
      • See also ingame: HELP LEVEL for additional factors that may influence experience bonuses (and therefore potentially gains if level gained on kill).
      • Using melee skills and shields like fireshield iceshield and shockshield provide less exp per hit relative to the reference experience at level and negatively impact gains; for example the hit on strike causes a level.
        • This doesn't mean that a max/min hp/mn gain is mutually exclusive from using skills/spells, however it is theorised that it influences the dice roll due to the impact to relative experience gained.
      • Kill Buffer Tracking influences gain indirectly in so far as the relative experience gained on hit is impacted (due to experience dropping on killing the same mobile repeatedly).
      • Whilst a mobile may provide a lot of total experience (EXP) and be desirable to gain experience with due to having poor defensive statistics (low AC, no dodge/parry/etc dice rolls) and thus making it useful for levelling due to total experience provided and/or ease of killing relative to total experience provided, with respect to gains at level the relative experience of Experience Ratings and the players level the mobile provides may be influencing the dice roll and subsequently the hp/mn gain in a desirable or undesirable way seperately.
      • Having said the above, this does not preclude a maximum level gain or guarantee a poor level gain, as the damage (and therefore experience gained on hit) may be exorbitant mitigating the Experience Ratings. This is particularly noticeable at low levels with a well geared character.
      • Similarly damage is increased as mobile is nearing death, so mobiles health may influence dice roll due to relative experience gained on hit improving with damage output.
    • Levelling up through quest hand-in provided exp is not recommended, due to the dice roll being missing from the equation (or potentially requiring a different formula calculation) and anecdotally having poor outcome.
• Combination of fixed and dice roll factors are combined (likely additive) to output the final gains for HP,MP and MV.

Theory 03 and beyond

Please add further theories below for discussion.