View source for Post:Weapon xp - 7/22/2009 - 22:35:08

{{Post
|a=DR-DARTENIAN
|t=Re: Weapon xp
|d=7/22/2009 10:35:08 PM
|n=5623
|f=Abilities, Skills and Magic (4) - The Experience System (11)
|c=m
|p=''> Yes, I am sensing weapon {{PRel|experience}} was increased also''

Yes, I sorta kinda increased {{PRel|Combat|weapon}} experience in [[Platinum|Plat]] and later in [[Prime]] yesterday. I did not say anything because I wanted to see what, if anything, people noticed. The results were more or less what I expected.

Let me begin by stating that this is just a temporary fix until I get finished with the combat rewrite. So do not get too used to it, but this is the general direction I am hoping to go.

Here is a brief summary of what changed:

(1) The amount of experience from damage dealt has been reduced.

(2) The amount of experience based on the challenge (ie the defense skills of the enemy) has been increased substantially.

(3) A small base constant has been added to insure that any attack that hits at all will give at least a certain minimum amount.

What the above means is that while damage is still a factor in experience, the actual challenge involved is now taking a much more prominent role. As long as you are hunting reasonably near your level, you will probably see an increase in experience, moreso if you were using weapons that are not noted for high damage.

And now for the big one:

(4) All attacks are now using the same basic experience calculations. At some point in the near future, targeting and aiming longer may grant a bonus to TM and ranged attacks that can be aimed, but for now, everything is on the same scale. Let me expound on this a bit.

All ranged attacks were getting a bonus to experience based on an equation that was, to be completely frank, based on criteria that was totally arbitrary. Without going into details, let's just say that melee attacks were getting far less experience than ranged attacks for the same damage and challenge level, and no two ranged attacks were getting the same bonus -- slings, not surprisingly, were at the bottom of the barrel and being treated much like melee weapons (ie such a small bonus as to not really be noticeable) whereas {{PRel|Targeted Magic skill|TM}} was getting the xp awards more than doubled. All other ranged attacks were better than slings, worse than TM.

I met somewhere in the middle, and now all weapons are using the same calculations. If everything else had stayed the same, this would mean that TM and thrown weapon exp in particular would be going down and melee and slings (among others) would be going up. However, because of other changes, including the addition of a base minimum constant, most xp will be as good as before or better. It is possible that TM may see a reduction of xp at the higher end IF it was being used in such as way that it was inflicting massive damage and generating a bulk of its experience through that damage, AND the challenge is below the sweet zone.

As noted before, I will be looking at adding some bonuses back in based on time taking to aim or target, and very likely some small bonuses for anything that takes more than x seconds to load/use, to balance out the xp for those weapons (Yes, I'm talking to you, HXBow users!)

- GM [[Dartenian]]
}}