taultunleashed

I'm in a guild that macros the spawning of clouds in the water quest (run a search, it's in confirmed).

I know that they all use my auto-it macro for spawning clouds, ao we all spawn them at the same rate.

last night, I was on a mid level 15 shaman with a guildie (also same class) doing clouds letting the bears tank and kill the clouds.

Near by, a group of 4 guildies were also spawning them, one of the people was level 16 when we got there.

A couple hours later, us shaman's were level 19, the level 16 was level 18.



Now then, they had 3 players spawning clouds with my macro program, 1 player attacking/looting/and shareing (al macroed). we had 1 person shareing/looting, 1 person spawning, and letting the pets do the killing. They spawned 3x as many clouds for only 2x as many people, yet we were getting more exp. Yes, they have to share each cloud 4 ways, instead of 2, but then that's 3/4ths of a coud per person vs 1/2 per person on our team.

so there is quite obviously an exp penalty for groups beyond 2 members when grinding clouds. this fits in with the observations that 2 person teams seem to get more accomplished in general than groups, but then I never really had a compairison befre last night that would rule out "time flys when you're too dam busy to watch your exp bar" when going with 2 people. at 6, you can slack off, and it doesn't relaly matter.

It could be a bonus for useing a smaller group, either way, it's far more efficient to run a small group than it is to run a large one.

I noticed this as well. I did 4-5 dot quests with a highlevel buddy and seemed to get way more xp than when i was the high level character in a 5-6 man group.

Uh...XP is split up when you're in larger groups?

I think it's the same as in EQ, xp percentage bonus for the player whose level is the closest to mob's level.

no, it's not the same as eq2, and it's deffinately not just the split between more players.


Take this example:

A cloud is worth 600 exp.

a 2 person group would get 300 each, a 6 person group 100 each (assumeing it's working correctly).

in 4 seconds, a 2 person group spawns and kills 1 cloud for 300 each.

a 6 person group spawns and kills 5 clouds for 500 each.

Most mmo's will give a group exp bonus per kill of around 5% per group member, so the 6 person group would get about 650 exp every 4 seconds while a 2 person group gets about 315 exp every 4 seconds.

Vanguard on the other hand gives the 2 person group exp at more than double the rate of a 6 person grind fest, so either there's a SEVERE penalty for killing 2 dot mobs witha full party, or there's a hefty bonus for doing it with only 2. (Even if they didn't devide the exp per kill for a 2 person party, that 630 exp per 4 seconds isn't enough to jsutify the more than doubled exp gain rate of a duo over a full party).


I'm not sure how gimped the exp is on 3 and 4 dot mobs for duo vs full groups, but I don't believe it's anywhere as drastic as the 2 dot mobs.