Shattered Kingdoms

I personally make it a point to max my charisma out of n00b school, no matter how worthless max charisma is when I finally GM. I just don't want to spend the time leveling. And you can't mod it either. D has stated that only your base charisma is taken into account when leveling.

sleeper

QFT. I already announced that in a recent thread.

I'm not sure why you are making that assumption. The helpfile does not support that claim, nor have I ever stated that it is the case.

Sorry, I said it wrong. From what you said in the past. Art only affects magical bonuses from items, and had nothing to do with natural bonuses. The priests and necros under morea has no items and therefore art doesn't affect them.

I'm sure that I never said that was true. It's possible that I was misunderstood, but it seems more likely to be some mutation through word-of mouth. From the help file: "Training art improves your magical technique, making it more difficult for enemies to save versus your spells that you cast or from spells by your magical devices." There is nothing there about it only working on people with anti-magic equipment.

Again do not quote me on this but I think art is more like taking a spell penetration feat in D&D. Lets say a creatures save score is 15. You have to roll a 15 or better to get your spell off. An extra train in art would give you a +1 on your roll to beat 15.

Again, I do not know the mechanics in this game and I hear art trains are not a 1:1 ratio but I feel the premise is still the same. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

Difficulty in leveling is entirely class and aura-dependent. It sucks balls no matter what you're playing, but in general:

- Casters have it much slower until ~21, which is when most of them start getting some useful spells. Necromancers are the exception, as cause light is one of the best leveling spells around.

- Grey auras have it slower almost the whole way. The only benefit is that you can take advantage of more areas, and thus ride the familiarity bonuses longer. However, this bonus doesn't seem to compare to the aura bonuses that lighties get from killing darkies and vice versa. This becomes especially problematic at later levels.

- Some classes don't get key leveling skills for a stupidly long time. Rogues, for example, have only second attack, backstab, and circle stab to work with until Veteran, at which point they receive hamstring, third attack, AND enhanced damage all at once, practically doubling their killing speed.

- Characters without a need for CHA will suffer the most. Hellions and swashbucklers are a breeze to level for this reason (among others), as CHA is a worthy investment for them, while priests, shamans, and rogues will have a hard time justifying putting points towards CHA. This is further exacerbated by the fact that modded CHA has no effect on XP gains. Why this is, I cannot fathom.

While downtime is definitely too large (anything more than 20% of my time being spent asleep is too much), I'd say the pacing of the battles needs to be sped up. 25+ rounds on a single NPC at Novice is insane. NPC health should be decreased, but damage should be increased accordingly. Exp on NPCs between areas needs to be looked at, as well, as some potentially useful areas are worthless for leveling, while others are too good, forcing one to grind past full familiarity (never fun, fighting in the same area on the same NPCs gets exponentially less exciting) as the exp remains better than any other available options.

In the end, most of one's speed at leveling just comes from pure knowledge. If you know the right combination of places, then it's a little less of a chore. If you know the right people, then it can be a breeze. But you simply shouldn't have to. This is the most basic RPG mechanic that we're talking about, you shouldn't have to hit up your buddies to make leveling less hellish.

Harder leveling is exactly what everybody wanted and now that they have it, it's QQ this, QQ that.

If you want to level as fast as you possibly can, just suck it up and put those points into charisma.

Modding charisma to get more xpz would make it a moot point in having made leveling harder.

If you, as a player, would prefer to have lower charisma, you should have to suck it up somewhere for that little extra power you think you're getting in exchange.

Yes, I'm pro harder leveling, but because I want it to cut down on the reincarnate+call armor combo. That thoroughly annoyed me about several paladins in the past.

I've actually always been against making leveling any harder. As, I'm sure, several others were and are.

I'm fairly certain the desire for harder leveling (from others, not from myself) was in reference to Expert+ progression. I don't think leveling should be anything like this. My only frustration is when GMs pop out of nowhere and RP themselves as hardened, knowledgeable veterans at the ripe IC age of 18. A simple hour/age requirement would solve that, IMHO.

As for CHA, you should know that you're gimping yourself in PK by throwing anything into it. Unless you've got CHA-dependent skills or need tight NPC control, it's only a comfort stat. Also consider that some races can't get much CHA in the first place.

Also, the core of any MMO community's technical discussion is QQ, both of the reasonable and unreasonable type, and I've yet to see a game prove me wrong on that. QQing about the QQ doesn't do much good.