Posted 16 May 2011 - 11:22 AM
There are several issues here...
1) People can often easilly kill monsters before they can get exp from those monsters ("less exp from monsters that are too high of a level" - combined with an overall lack of challenge.
2) There is a horrible lack of options for high level monsters in general, forcing many players to grind on weak monsters, because there's nothing of higher level that's practical to level on. If Scaraba Hole was implemented, the high level situation would be significantly easier. Also, if leveling in biolabs offered a reward appropriate for the difficulty of the monsters, that would help aleviate this.
Really I think the problem is that the level range is too narrow. Even this wouldn't be as much of an issue, except that there are hardly any choices for places to level beyond 120. I mean, you go AL 120-130, but after that, you grind there until you hit the exp penalty, then grind there and deal with the brutal exp penalty, because it's still faster than the horrible crappy options otherwise available to you.
There just aren't enough good maps. High monster density is an absolute 100% must now - because there are no monsters that offer rewards that make them worth killing one at a time after level 110 or so. That leaves us with very few maps to level on, and with the level range further restricting us, it's often possible to find only one acceptable leveling ground for a charachter at a time - if that.
The more I think about the issue of the level exp penalty, the more I think that scrapping it entirely may not be the right solution. If we could widen the acceptable level range, and at the same time, fix some existing maps to be useful to level on, that would make the game work a lot better - without having to redo the experience curve, and without having to redo the exp awards from every monster in the game.
For example, thors is supposed to be a good place to level on. Why isn't it? Because the monsters are somewhat painful, the zone spawns were removed (WHY?!?!), the spawn is not sufficient to really mob... All of which would be fine, if killing them one-three at a time gave decent rewards. But it doesnt.
If I was going to fix thors, i'd do something like:
Restore zone spawns like pre-renewal.
Kasa attk should be upped like 25-50% (so the map is a challenge), and exp award should be increased significantly, so killing them with single target skills or in small mobs produces decent exp. Salamanders and guardians would get similar treatment - the idea being to make them scarier than kasas, so people have to avoid them, or prepare for a tough fight to kill them. (It's too easy to just rambo everything in renewal, go in guns blazing and everything comes out dead)
Bio3, obviously, needs to have the rewards on the monsters boosted. Alot. The bio3 monsters are actually challenging. They're alot more than 3 times as challenging as other monsters a few levels lower. Even with the 40% penalty - one bio monster is harder to deal with than a mob of whatever giving you equiv exp (even though you only get 40% of normal exp from the dragons because you've overleveled them). The rewards should be increased to 2.5-5x what they are now in biolabs. Zone spawns should be returned to biolabs, with the exception of the instaspawn HWiz and Sniper on the pillars.
Scaraba Hole looks like it will be an excellent map for leveling as it is now. Like, it looks like that map should have been implemented with renewal, so that there was a good place for high level characters to level in renewal - but no, they added an update to raise the max level, then 8 months later, we get a map for the new classes to level on...
I think it would be a valuable exercise to get a list of the current maps that people find usable for leveling (for level's over 100, when it's hard to level - anyone complaining about leveling prior to level 100 isn't trying. There are plenty of people talking about starting the game, getting 99 in under a week, and then being delayed because they did it so fast they don't have the 1.285m to trans with). This would give an idea of what things make a map useful to level on. Here's what I've got:
Niff 2 (only good at low-mid 10x, but definitely a respectable map)
Magma 2
Jup 1
Nameless 2
Abyss Lake 3
Biolabs 2 (for true badasses only, as the map is one of the few maps that's still painful)
Did I miss any good maps?