Is level 200 even attainable?

[Androdion 884]

Hello folks!

Not that I'm not into lengthy posts, but basically, title?! I've recently gone back to slaying Kobolds here Kobolds there (Kobolds are everywhere!), and since I'm playing with PFP I'm with vanilla XP gain. And even though I've started at level 75 (thank you Char Editor), with all difficulties unlocked, I began at Gold because I actually went in "undressed". So basically I ran the entirety of the MC for gearing up, and without side-questing I defeated the Guardians and started Platinum at a measly level 82. That means that running MC alone in Gold netted me just 7 levels post-mastery, which seems really low. I know that XP gain from Platinum up starts getting better with questing, and not as good with mob killing, but since I intend to leave questing mainly for Niobium, where I plan to do all quests and exploration, is it really possible to reach max level? I know that there's a lot of quests, but that's also a lot of levelling up! Even if I end Platinum at level 100, given the XP penalty from then on, just how far should I be able to get?

Asking it in a different way, is reaching level 200 only possible if you go heavy on questing on both Platinum and Niob? If not, just how much XP can Niob quests alone net a player?

[Hooyaah 2,825]

Yes sir, it is. However, one should only go for it if the effort of (punishment for) getting there is not a concern. One will have to do all the quests in Niob and then keep slaying foes to attain level 200. I have only done it once (with a Seraphim) to my recollection.

[Androdion 884]

Always an uphill battle! Yeah, I figured that it'd probably be possible, yet a royal pain to do it. Guess I was right. 

[Lindor 438]

1 hour ago, Hooyaah said:

Yes sir, it is. However, one should only go for it if the effort of (punishment for) getting there is not a concern. One will have to do all the quests in Niob and then keep slaying foes to attain level 200. I have only done it once (with a Seraphim) to my recollection.

Congratulations and kudos to your endurance! Very impressive

[idbeholdME 394]

It is possible, but if you are going for it with the vanilla experience penalties past level 100? Oh, are you in for a grind. Past level 150, killing enemies basically becomes pointless and you have to constantly spam-farm high star quests to even meaningfully move the experience. The only reason that works is because the experience penalty does not work on quest rewards. And we are talking hundreds, probably thousands, of purely running the same quests over and over. Due to how quests have been lazily designed in the expansion in the Blood Forest, every little minute movement forward through the quest chain gives a 4 star reward of XP. So that was what everyone was running back then if you wanted to reach 200 "legit". Although you were exploiting the lazy quest design of whoever did the Blood Forest quests. 4 and 5 star quests are pretty rare in the game overall and someone just willy-nilly slapped that on everything in the Blood Forest area.

At level 150, you will only be gaining 28% of the experience for killing stuff. This goes down to 10% at level 175 and ultimately, at level 199, you will only be gaining less than 5% XP per kill. However, killing stuff maintains somewhat of a relevance until the 150 breakpoint. When the XP from kills starts losing relevancy is purely bound to your level, not to difficulty or anything else.

Also keep in mind, that by level 167, you will have gathered only half of the total XP (946,471,400) required for level 200 (1,889,443,000).

 

Even with the experience penalty removed, I pretty much never play characters past level 175 and have only ever brought one character to the 200 cap. The XP requirements for levelups go up by several hundred thousand for every level near the end. With the penalty, the highest I ever got was in the 125+ range, before I usually got bored. I think the penalty was one of those "Diablo 2 did it, so we are going to do it too" things, that got put in purely to slow down peoples' progress in multiplayer.

 

Lastly, some enemies have experience bonuses attached in the PFP, that were not present in the vanilla. Refer to the last post in this thread:

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72563-how-to-adjust-the-experience-a-specific-monster-gives-when-killed/

You can either remove that bonus to have vanilla conditions, or farm those specifically as they give egregiously high XP in PFP compared to anything else. IIRC, Flix said it was a leftover from some other mod that made its way into PFP.

Edited April 19 by idbeholdME

[Hooyaah 2,825]

Remember this, for one may always play Multiplayer quests over again with each new log in. That would certainly aid in achieving level 200 without the continual grind of slaying mobs.

[Androdion 884]

27 minutes ago, idbeholdME said:

It is possible, but if you are going for it with the vanilla experience penalties past level 100? Oh, are you in for a grind. Past level 150, killing enemies basically becomes pointless and you have to constantly spam-farm high star quests to even meaningfully move the experience. The only reason that works is because the experience penalty does not work on quest rewards. And we are talking hundreds, probably thousands, of purely running the same quests over and over. Due to how quests have been lazily designed in the expansion in the Blood Forest, every little minute movement forward through the quest chain gives a 4 star reward of XP. So that was what everyone was running back then if you wanted to reach 200 "legit". Although you were exploiting the lazy quest design of whoever did the Blood Forest quests. 4 and 5 star quests are pretty rare in the game overall and someone just willy-nilly slapped that on everything in the Blood Forest area.

At level 150, you will only be gaining 28% of the experience for killing stuff. This goes down to 10% at level 175 and ultimately, at level 199, you will only be gaining less than 5% XP per kill. However, killing stuff maintains somewhat of a relevance until the 150 breakpoint. When the XP from kills starts losing relevancy is purely bound to your level, not to difficulty or anything else.

Also keep in mind, that by level 167, you will have gathered only half of the total XP (946,471,400) required for level 200 (1,889,443,000).

 

Even with the experience penalty removed, I pretty much never play characters past level 175 and have only ever brought one character to the 200 cap. The XP requirements for levelups go up by several hundred thousand for every level near the end. With the penalty, the highest I ever got was in the 125+ range, before I usually got bored. I think the penalty was one of those "Diablo 2 did it, so we are going to do it too" things, that got put in purely to slow down peoples' progress in multiplayer.

 

Lastly, some enemies have experience bonuses attached in the PFP, that were not present in the vanilla. Refer to the last post in this thread:

https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/72563-how-to-adjust-the-experience-a-specific-monster-gives-when-killed/

You can either remove that bonus to have vanilla conditions, or farm those specifically as they give egregiously high XP in PFP compared to anything else. IIRC, Flix said it was a leftover from some other mod that made its way into PFP.

Thanks a lot for the lengthy post, I appreciate it!

So it seems that some mobs retained some non-vanilla bonuses, but I really don't want to go nitpicking through the game files just because of a few occurrences. Regarding the XP penalty past level 100, that does seem to be the main issue with levelling to 200. I think that the highest I ever went was somewhere between 110 and 120, but it was a few years ago so I can't really remember the exact figure. I do remember that it was really slow to level up, and like you say, even with the penalty removed it's not that fast. I'm not sure if I want to dabble into "vanilla turtle grind to 200", probably not to be honest, but I think I'll try a full clear in Niob with my current build and see how far it goes like that. If I feel like it gets me nowhere fast I may remove the penalty on subsequent runs, or even turn that negative penalty into a positive one as to increase XP gain past 100 instead of diminishing it. Time will tell.

Now, for legit levelling I assume that it's better to leave the I&B regions for last then? Clear every region from 1 to 10, follow the main campaign and do all the quests in the middle, and then go for the Crystal Planes and Blood Forest? Eh, I always leave those for last anyway.

And assuming I want to turn the negative penalty past level 100 into a positive one, does anyone know which values would be reasonable enough as to not increment it way too much? I've tried several times to adjust the XP gain in single player by editing the first value on the "MP_experience = {1000,1150,1325,1550,1825}" line, but the multiplier ramps up exponentially and it gets freaky very fast, so I gave up on trying to balance that for 1-200. If I could however balance an increase in XP gain from level 100 onwards, turning the "ExpLS100, ExpLS125, ExpLS150, ExpLS175" values from "985, 980, 975, 970" into something slightly above 1000, but in a way that it wouldn't ramp up too heavily, it'd be an interesting way to play a build up to 200. It certainly would be much more fun than running around killing stuff for an hour in order to climb one level. Any ideas on this?

[Hooyaah 2,825]

1 hour ago, Androdion said:

Thanks a lot for the lengthy post, I appreciate it!

So it seems that some mobs retained some non-vanilla bonuses, but I really don't want to go nitpicking through the game files just because of a few occurrences. Regarding the XP penalty past level 100, that does seem to be the main issue with levelling to 200. I think that the highest I ever went was somewhere between 110 and 120, but it was a few years ago so I can't really remember the exact figure. I do remember that it was really slow to level up, and like you say, even with the penalty removed it's not that fast. I'm not sure if I want to dabble into "vanilla turtle grind to 200", probably not to be honest, but I think I'll try a full clear in Niob with my current build and see how far it goes like that. If I feel like it gets me nowhere fast I may remove the penalty on subsequent runs, or even turn that negative penalty into a positive one as to increase XP gain past 100 instead of diminishing it. Time will tell.

Now, for legit levelling I assume that it's better to leave the I&B regions for last then? Clear every region from 1 to 10, follow the main campaign and do all the quests in the middle, and then go for the Crystal Planes and Blood Forest? Eh, I always leave those for last anyway.

And assuming I want to turn the negative penalty past level 100 into a positive one, does anyone know which values would be reasonable enough as to not increment it way too much? I've tried several times to adjust the XP gain in single player by editing the first value on the "MP_experience = {1000,1150,1325,1550,1825}" line, but the multiplier ramps up exponentially and it gets freaky very fast, so I gave up on trying to balance that for 1-200. If I could however balance an increase in XP gain from level 100 onwards, turning the "ExpLS100, ExpLS125, ExpLS150, ExpLS175" values from "985, 980, 975, 970" into something slightly above 1000, but in a way that it wouldn't ramp up too heavily, it'd be an interesting way to play a build up to 200. It certainly would be much more fun than running around killing stuff for an hour in order to climb one level. Any ideas on this?

Good sir, I would take a serious look at the quoted post below and the other relevant posts in its associated thread. You will, doubtlessly, find them instructive and enlightening. I might suggest that adjusting the first line like this to start: "MP_experience = {2000,1150,1325,1550,1825}" Dive in!

On 6/14/2015 at 12:25 PM, Flix said:

 

I use the line:

MP_experience = {1000,1150,1325,1550,1825},

Increase the first number. The subsequent numbers are for additional players in multiplayer games. The first number is 1000, or 100% xp. You could probably increase it to 10000 or higher if you wanted insane leveling speed.

[idbeholdME 394]

2 hours ago, Androdion said:

Now, for legit levelling I assume that it's better to leave the I&B regions for last then? Clear every region from 1 to 10, follow the main campaign and do all the quests in the middle, and then go for the Crystal Planes and Blood Forest? Eh, I always leave those for last anyway.

If you want to min-max, you should optimally turn in quests as late as possible, because the XP from quests scales with character level. You can probably complete 1 and 2 stars right away, those don't give that much XP either way, but keeping 3+ stars for later turn ins might be viable for maximizing XP gain. And yes, as Blood Forest is pretty much exclusively 3+ star quests (the designer for that area didn't really bother assigning proper difficulty ratings to them unlike the rest of the game), it is best saved for last as far as XP goes.

 

As for the experience penalty, here is a graph:

from here:

https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Experience

As you can see, the penalty ramps up very quickly, with very noticeable jumps every 25 levels above 100.

2 hours ago, Androdion said:

And assuming I want to turn the negative penalty past level 100 into a positive one, does anyone know which values would be reasonable enough as to not increment it way too much? I've tried several times to adjust the XP gain in single player by editing the first value on the "MP_experience = {1000,1150,1325,1550,1825}" line, but the multiplier ramps up exponentially and it gets freaky very fast, so I gave up on trying to balance that for 1-200. If I could however balance an increase in XP gain from level 100 onwards, turning the "ExpLS100, ExpLS125, ExpLS150, ExpLS175" values from "985, 980, 975, 970" into something slightly above 1000, but in a way that it wouldn't ramp up too heavily, it'd be an interesting way to play a build up to 200. It certainly would be much more fun than running around killing stuff for an hour in order to climb one level. Any ideas on this?

As Hooyah said, adjusting the first number in MP_experience should be safe. The numbers say how much XP you get from kills, depending on the number of players in the game. 1000 is 100% for 1 player, 1150 is 115% for 2 players and so on. So by increasing the first number, you can easily tweak how much of an XP multiplier you want from kills. The XP penalty above level 100 will still apply though, so in later stages, even if you put like 4000 there, you will only be getting 40% of the kill XP at level 175.

As for ExpLS, I can't confirm that increasing them above 1000 is safe. It can very likely break some internal math as those are exponential multipliers and I honestly have not tested how numbers higher than 1000 behave. If you do try it, be absolutely sure to backup your save first as it might cause an overflow or something like that and cap your level instantly.

But simply removing the penalty does wonders for smooth levelling without requiring excessive amount of grinding. Up until the 160+ range or so. Then you have to grind either way.

You might also run into a problem where monsters in some areas will start hitting their level caps, effectively reducing farming effectiveness in that area. This is caused mostly by Survival Bonus, which can bump enemies 20-30+ levels above you once you are very high level, so that they start hitting area level caps. You can change the limits by raising the numbers for Spawn_OffsetHigh in balance.txt. It has 5 values, 1 for each difficulty respectively, so raising the last number will increase the max possible levels for monsters on Niobium. But this won't be a problem until the last stretch (level 180+ or so). Also, don't put that number too high, or monster levels will start overflowing back to 1, if the maximum area level surpasses 252.

Edited April 20 by idbeholdME

[chattius 2,531]

In ewarly Sacred2 times I allways considered it very strange reading guides with skill and stat distribution for level 200. Most used an edited level 200 char. They very seldom mentioned how to reach that level.

I remember the work we put to calculate the curve from last post.

Level 200 is possible. Our family smith reached it after only playing for 8 years. Lots of blood forest quest runs. So yes, quests aer the way to go.

 

[lujate 578]

Earlier in the game's life cycle, with thriving online play, I'm sure it was easier (although by no means easy).  You could grind away while chatting with your friends.  Solo it's much harder to keep motivated.

[Androdion 884]

17 hours ago, Hooyaah said:

Good sir, I would take a serious look at the quoted post below and the other relevant posts in its associated thread. You will, doubtlessly, find them instructive and enlightening. I might suggest that adjusting the first line like this to start: "MP_experience = {2000,1150,1325,1550,1825}" Dive in!

Yeah, that was what I was talking before. Editing the SP value gets freaky very fast if you level up from level 1 onwards, because you start getting a lot of XP early on and you climb more than one level at a time, so a few years back I tried several times to find a playable value there but I just gave up with trying to balance it properly. Considering that I'm starting at level 75 though, that may be the easiest way to avoid having to grind too hard from then on, since getting from level 75 to 76 already requires nearly 2,5 million XP, and the most that veterans give at that point is around 10K. I may need to test this on my next build, with and without the XP penalty, to see just how much it ramps up and how much faster levelling gets. Since each save game has an internal clock on how many hours you play, it should be very easy to compare build level vs time played. Thanks! 

 

16 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

As Hooyah said, adjusting the first number in MP_experience should be safe. The numbers say how much XP you get from kills, depending on the number of players in the game. 1000 is 100% for 1 player, 1150 is 115% for 2 players and so on. So by increasing the first number, you can easily tweak how much of an XP multiplier you want from kills. The XP penalty above level 100 will still apply though, so in later stages, even if you put like 4000 there, you will only be getting 40% of the kill XP at level 175.

As for ExpLS, I can't confirm that increasing them above 1000 is safe. It can very likely break some internal math as those are exponential multipliers and I honestly have not tested how numbers higher than 1000 behave. If you do try it, be absolutely sure to backup your save first as it might cause an overflow or something like that and cap your level instantly.

Indeed, changing the SP value on the "MP_experience" line is something easy to do and that doesn't break anything, assuming that you don't ramp it up way too much. Like I mentioned above, it's very hard to properly make it work from level 1 onwards without overlevelling in early Acts, but it should be fine for post-mastery levels, or post-100 levels. It doesn't change XP from quests does it? You mention that it dictates mob kill XP, and from what I recall that is exactly that. If memory serves there's another line in balance.txt that rules the amount of quest XP, with one value per difficulty level to a total of five, am I right?

Regarding ExpLS, I never did try to put a value above 1000 (100%), and I understand what you're saying about causing an overflow. It's possible that it may happen, and I too have no idea how the game will interpret a value above 1000 there. In theory, going from the formula in the Wiki, and with my limited math knowledge, adding a 0,1% each 25 levels would probably be reasonable (1001, 1002, 1003, 1004). I've tried calculating the inverted values from 98,5% into 101,5% and so on, but the end result at near level cap was more than 19 times as much XP! That is, assuming I calculated it correctly.  You're probably right when you say that turning that penalty into a bonification may do more harm than good.

 

9 hours ago, chattius said:

Level 200 is possible. Our family smith reached it after only playing for 8 years. Lots of blood forest quest runs. So yes, quests aer the way to go.

I don't really want to be playing the same build for 8 years, ha ha. But I get what you meant. 

 

5 hours ago, lujate said:

Earlier in the game's life cycle, with thriving online play, I'm sure it was easier (although by no means easy).  You could grind away while chatting with your friends.  Solo it's much harder to keep motivated.

It must've been fun back then to play in teams online and levelling up next to your buddies. I agree that solo levelling in SP can become tedious, as the motivation to keep it going depends solely on your own perseverance to keep grinding. I guess that that's why I'm trying to find a way to try to get to level cap without breaking both my mind and the game's XP balance. 

[idbeholdME 394]

19 minutes ago, Androdion said:

Indeed, changing the SP value on the "MP_experience" line is something easy to do and that doesn't break anything, assuming that you don't ramp it up way too much. Like I mentioned above, it's very hard to properly make it work from level 1 onwards without overlevelling in early Acts, but it should be fine for post-mastery levels, or post-100 levels. It doesn't change XP from quests does it? You mention that it dictates mob kill XP, and from what I recall that is exactly that. If memory serves there's another line in balance.txt that rules the amount of quest XP, with one value per difficulty level to a total of five, am I right?

Yes, QuestExplow = {20,25,30,40,50}, and QuestExpmax = {4020,5025,6030,8040,10050},

Can be adjusted to whatever you like. Basically, the low number is the reward for 1 star quests and the max numbers are for 5 star quests. It's base values, which then get multiplied, depending on character level in some unknown formula. Just make sure you never make the low number higher than the max number. If you do, it will cause an overflow and give you like 2 billion XP the moment you turn in a quest.

Edited April 20 by idbeholdME

[Androdion 884]

It's good to know that my memory isn't hopelessly lost. Thanks for the tips!