SCF? please

[TerjynPovar]

If you are talking Kite groups...well, that's not soloing is it?

I can solo an AA in 2 hours at 65 easy, and I'm not Tactics+ flagged and I'm certainly not uber.  If I work at it I can do it faster than that.

And I have no downtime either.

Whatever, I don't really care.

[katahn]

If you are talking Kite groups...well, that's not soloing is it?

I can solo an AA in 2 hours at 65 easy, and I'm not Tactics+ flagged and I'm certainly not uber.  If I work at it I can do it faster than that.

And I have no downtime either.

Whatever, I don't really care.

At 54 I was making real xp faster than I was at 65, had I been doing AA, I would have been making faster AA at 54 than 65.  That was the point.

My second point is that in sub-raid gear (non-raider here) its easier to farm AA against weaker mobs then to wait to be weaker against stronger mobs since player power does not scale nearly as fast as mob power, and the higher your level, and the later the expansion, the worse it gets.

Grats you for farming an AA in 2 hours or so, I have a few ideas where you are probably doing that, although I suppoe you might suprise me.  They are places I went to farm AA at 65 and found I could do it fairly well, but virtue of already having a nice collection of vital AAs, and marginal gear improvements via LDoN when I could find it.

[Soriab]

Depending on where I am hunting I can get about 2AA per hour

High DPS Groups in PoEarth
Sewers in GoD
Furabi Crawling Single group named "NOTE: Exceedingly High DPS Group requited."

[Tastian]

No offense sor but that seems completely irrelevant to the discussion that was going on.  It was mentioned ele groups and such could do an AA in ~30 mins depending.  The main focus for exp'n was on solo'n and kite groups and stuff.  Even if the person went to 65 they wouldn't be ele flagged, in a time guild, etc.  If you'd thrown out solo'n at 65 in BoT or HoH or PoN or whatever maybe, but really this just seemed out of place to me.

[Xuthaz]

At 54 I was making real xp faster than I was at 65, had I been doing AA, I would have been making faster AA at 54 than 65. That was the point.

Hi hi this is very poor logic.

I'll throw out some fake numbers here to make it easier.

Lets say it takes 100 exp to go from 54 to 55 and you earn 1 xp point per kill.  or you will level in 100 kills.

Lets say it takes 1000 exp to go from 65 to well, max xp 65, and you earn 9 xp per kill.  or you will level in 111 kills.  You are earning exp faster at lvl 54 than you are at lvl 65 for the time invested, HOWEVER:

Now pay attention because this is the important part, AA points cost 80 exp points.  They always cost 80 xp whether you start farming them at lvl 51 or wait until lvl 65, and for every single lvl between.

It takes you 80 kills to solo an AA at lvl 54.  It takes you 8 kills to solo an AA at lvl 65.  Yes these are make believe numbers but the ratios are the same.  It takes you 4 hours to solo an AA at lvl 54 and it takes me an hour and a half to solo an AA in CoD, a zone that is available to anyone.  Takes 2 hours if i'm lazy and want to /afk solo in any tier 1 zone (Innovation my favorite to /afk solo in).  I dont have elem access or any gear that is much of an improvement over bazaar gear.

I dont particularly care about the AA vs lvling debate, play however you want, but don't use false logic please )

[Hrann]

Xuthaz, what you say is true except for the last paragraph.  What you are forgetting is the player level vs. mob level bonus/penalty.

So, for the level 54 guy getting one point per kill, he is killing say level 47 dark blue mobs.  The level 65 guy getting 9 xp per kill is killing say level 55 dark blue mobs.

There may be sweet spot mobs that are exceedingly easy or difficult that may sway the AA equation.  In addition, say there were some easy level 55 mobs that the level 54 guy could kill, he would get a huge multiplier for killing them; whether it would reach the same xp per kill as the 65 guy is anyone's guess.  Also, if there is some pushover low level mobs that the 54 guy just mows through, they may be useless to the level 65 guy who gets no xp for them whatsover (because they are green).

Most likely the 65 guy will still have the advantage imo, but the comparison gets very difficult as you bring the level 54 guy to level 60 or so.  It's just not a cut and dried case either way, which is why this debate will continue to go on for as long as EQ is around hehe.

[TerjynPovar]

I understand the sweet spot theory, but heres the thing:

Katahn is claiming that I must be using certain locations to get an AA in 2 hours soloing.

Pretty much every place I solo at 65, without all that many AAs, I can get an AA per two hours soloing.  This includes all of Luclin...and every place I have tried to solo in the planes.

I don't know what method he was using to solo...I can't fathom honestly what he could be doing that would make him XP faster at mid-50s even with the XP bonus than at 65.

Your pet and you are both so much lower in level that you are going to literally get smeared by the "sweet" spot mobs, unless they are severe severe undercons.  And if they are severe severe undercons, at 65 you will plow through them like mad.

Maybe that's the problem...when Kat goes to kill at 65 he does the same mobs as he does at 55 and thus sits around waiting for spawns?  Otherwise I really don't know.

[Hereki]

At 55/56, with 0 to 6 AAs, I took 3-4 hours to get an AA.  This was in Jaggedpine on dryads.  I tried at various places at higher levels, but Dulak through to 58, Nadox to 60, ME 58-60, the Deep/Grey/Ssra at 60-62 and Fungus Grove at 60 all looked like taking 6 to 10 hours per AA.  

Then at 62 with 12-18 AAs in Nurga it took me roughly 3.5 hours per AA.  This time steadily decreased as I gained AAs, so with SCR3, Paragon and BF (ie 30+ AAs) it was 2.25 - 2.5 hours per AA.  It hasn't decreased much since; in fact I think at 65 it is still the same (I haven't timed it).

All of this is without KEI - the decreased gained isn't great compared to the run there and back and waiting around time.  The fastest AAs were all on a mix of roughly 2/3 dark blue and 1/3 light blue mobs.

My point isn't that these are sweet spots for AAs, but that AAs make a big difference to the rate of gaining AAs.  I'd be very surprised if I could get 2 hour AAs solo anywhere in Luclin; maybe Griegs End or Inner Acrylia, but I'm not sure of that - certainly not ME, the Deep, the Grey or Umbral.

The other is that the rate of gaining AAs seems consistent regardless of level - on mainly caster mobs on the dark/light blue cusp.

[TerjynPovar]

Maiden's Eye and Umbral Plains both have super high hit point mobs, which lower the rate of XP gain significantly.  The Grey is too much of a pain to get the mobs which are worth killing, and the ZEM of the Grey is really weak anyway.

The Deep on the other hand I can solo at about 50% of an AA per hour.

Along with Grieg's, Acrylia, or Akheva.  Never really tried SSRA so I don't know either way.

I hunted XP in Jaggedpine from 55-57, and I didn't get XP nearly as fast as that.  I don't know what I was doing wrong, unless you were better equipped than me.

[Tastian]

Yeah her I think we've had this talk in a few other threads lol.  At 62 I was doing AA's as fast as I was originally at 65.  It took a lot of extra AA's and some solid upgrades to actually make a noticeable shift in exp rate.  Also it's easier to be geared beyond the lower end mobs.  What I mean is it's very easy to have DR high enough and ac high enough to cover mushroom in FG dmg output.  Then it's just a matter of having mana regen to cover buffs and having high enough haste/atk/weapons to kill them fast enough.  Later on it's much harder to totally offset the damage of higher level mobs.  I remember when I first started killing in some tier one zones like Justice and innovation I'd have to cast heals on myself, sometimes even back out.  Eventually I hit an aa/gear spot that simply allowed me to mow through them non-stop with paragon being my only "heal".  

The person of course should do what they want it's what I always say.  I feel like the discussion of AA rate here is simply because some people think she's running on false information.  The truth is AA's can be almost as fast as they are at 65 at a few other levels at a few places.  Not everywhere, not for everyone.  Certainly ele groups and what not will go faster.  Certainly better geared and what not will as well, but overall it's not that big of a shift for some people.

[TerjynPovar]

Well, I got some AAs at 55 and solo I was looking at 5 hours minimum per AA at 55, including a lot of hunting in Jaggedpine.  All I can think of is that my equipment was really weak (which it was).

At 65 I can do better than that killing light blue shrooms in Fungus Grove...as I can clear a phenomenal number of Shrooms now. heh

[Hereki]

I have to agree with "do what you want to do".  I also want to get the knowledge out there so that people can calculate what exp they can get where rather better than when I had to do it; I would have done things considerably differently from what I did if the information that I now have was freely given.

As for Jaggedpine: at 55/56 I was killing dryads, almost 50% of them light blue.  3 - 3.5 hours/AA at 55, worse at 56.

And I notice that I did include all the high HP and AC Luclin zones :).

For me, the breakpoint on speed of AAs came with Paragon/CA/BF.  SCR made a minor difference.