[General] Make leveling through hunting viable and other ideas

[volture777]

The meat and potatoes:

Currently, the only viable way to level seems to be mining. As a player who is fairly new to the server (currently level 32 rogue) I have found that anything besides mining is quite ineffective.

Hunting yields around 40xp per kill, but the mob spawns are seriously lacking. In an open field at night, I am lucky to find one pack of 2-4 mobs per 5+ minutes of running. Monster spawners give less xp per kill than mining coal, which is only further hampered by the fact that mobs are quite buffed here.

IMO mining is relatively risk free, plus its the fastest way to gain money as a newcomer (10c per gold seems to be significantly better than any other early method of monetary gain). With all of the previously mentioned fathers in mind, it seems to be rather pointless to do anything but mine if your goal is to level.

So whats the big deal? Well, its minecraft. We've all been there, and we've all done that. Forcing new players (like myself) to mine for a few weeks before they can even unlock their advanced class is really a fun killer. Mining is fun, but there should be an alternative! This is HEROcraft after all.

Great, so whats your plan hotshot?! Well, the easiest solution would be to drastically increase the natural mob spawn rates in darkness/night. I have gone through 100s to literally 1000s of underground caves/abandoned mineshafts/etc and can count on two hands the number of natural (non-spawner) monsters that I have encountered. This would also make traveling the world much more exciting and dangerous!

Assuming that this can not be done for one reason or another, a hunting area would be awesome. By this, I mean a large structure/cave/fortress/dungeon or whatever that is packed with all sorts of nasty, full experience giving monsters. This area's sole purpose would be hunting (pvp enabled? up for debate!). The EXP would be similar or perhaps slightly faster than mining, but with massively increased risk and FUN!

Feel free to comment, criticize, and ridicule!

Misc Ideas:

Consider resetting the lower levels (0-20 or so) outside zeal. It is literally a hollowed out shell of crisscrossing mineshafts.
Allow rangers (perhaps BMs as well?) to summon a small stack of arrows on a short CD (say 16 on a 20min timer)
[IMPORTANT] Allow minecarts to be broken on the railroads from zeal. Traffic is become a serious issue, making the railways nearly unusable at times due to abandoned carts.
<more to come>

 

[GraRona]

Well written and very good suggestion. Being a budding rogue, just like you, I find it quite boring just mining and only mining. Something like this would definitely make leveling up more dimensional. Unfortunately, 1.8 is trolling on our developers by bringing sky-rocketing amounts of lag to the table. Adding even more mobs would probably not help.

 

[Spicycheez]

I agree, as being a Beastmaster myself, I remember the tough times of endless mining just to hit another level. It was quite tedious and a massive time consumer. Took me about two weeks to finally get to 50. In my opinion, mining is the best and safest way to level. While still being an un-spec'd class I believe that fighting hostile mobs can be dangerous as all the mobs are buffed in this server(one skeleton shot is 4 hearts damage for you guys, I think.) So no matter how hard or boring it is to mine, it is the fastest and the safest way.

 

[G4M3R_117]

Honestly I got too 47 by mining as a rouge, I am so tired of mining its insane. I agree with a dungeon/forest area closed off with pvp and mobs spawns, on entering the area you would be prompted to make sure you have what you'll need to survive as the only way out is to DIE, this would mean that no one is going to go in there and be able to run away if they get into a pvp battle (happens so much its insane) And would mean that people who enter would have to LOSE something to gain a good battle! But then again this would probably troll the server by causing to many entities in one area but meh my two cents are out now.

 

[Iarbobray]

I thought they had a mob arena a wizard could get to with port? I did hear that there was so many mobs there that a 5 person group would have trouble though.

 

[GraRona]

I don't know.... even after training with my newly found mob spawner, I had a net-loss in exp.

 

[DanteThanatos]

Mob Spawners(not Dark rooms if thats what you meant disregard this post) dont give Exp. Or barely give any exp.

 

[jmoney222]

There is a place called the Training Grounds, that has 5-6 mob spawners. I don't recall the exact coords, but theres always plenty of mobs there.

 

[GraRona]

Is the exp nerfed on mobs spawned from spawners there?

 

[jmoney222]

Mhmm, just like everywhere.

 

[Kophka]

+1 man! I'm soooo tired of mining, there needs to be a viable alternative. Quests, more mobs to hunt, more xp per mob, something, pls?

 

[SupaSkwirrel]

...on entering the area you would be prompted to make sure you have what you'll need to survive as the only way out is to DIE...

That's Hardcore. Would be very cool, and I can imagine alot of pvp around there, perhaps groups creating forts so their members survive longer and benefit from the exp flow. Kind of like a Warshard map, except th eonly thing oyu cna come back with is levels.

 

[Kophka]

I would LOVE to see warshard come back. Tieing the only viable form of leveling to finite resources just makes it harder on newcomers. The old-timers already came in and cleared everything out, only thing left for the new guys is tons of cobblestone. We NEED a renewable xp-income stream.

 

[Kophka]

Sorry for the double post, but this is such a great idea.

Honestly I got too 47 by mining as a rouge, I am so tired of mining its insane. I agree with a dungeon/forest area closed off with pvp and mobs spawns, on entering the area you would be prompted to make sure you have what you'll need to survive as the only way out is to DIE, this would mean that no one is going to go in there and be able to run away if they get into a pvp battle (happens so much its insane) And would mean that people who enter would have to LOSE something to gain a good battle! But then again this would probably troll the server by causing to many entities in one area but meh my two cents are out now.

Bring back the Multiverse! Give us a portal to a dangerous, mob filled land where we can party up and go level. You can even make mining disabled if you want to, so people can only use what they bring, and have a choice between mining on the regular world to get xp, or loading up and going hunting on the other world.

My suggestion to help keep mobs where we can fight them : mobs won't spawn underwater, right? Flood the whole world! Then make a couple of continents which is where all the mobs spawn. If you need people to lend a hand in the building, I'd gladly volunteer my time to have a new place to level.

 

[SupaSkwirrel]

Bring back the Multiverse!

They've brought back the sanctum portal, it's just north east of Zeal. At the moment its only got portals to the old maps, but it looks like they could set up a warshard/hell too.

 

[Shadownub]

I kinda like the idea of a no-return death world where you cannot mine to add to the multiverse, but it might take a bit of the PvP away from the main map.

Agreed completely with mining being the only way to get xp though. After 6 months I'm level 20, simply because I don't enjoy mining either mob xp needs a boost or there need to be more ways to gain xp.

 

[GraRona]

Right now my Herocraft experience is just mine mining for the whole time I'm online and if I hear new of a big fight, I go there thinking I can rack up some exp, but only to get owned by the people who have already mastered a specialization. Then, I am forced to go mining. However, recently I have discovered some new techniques in beating mobs with taking minimal damage. The only problem is that I can't find any mobs.

 

[volture777]

A few great points were added in the comments, and I think it is relatively clear that people are in favor of adding alternative leveling methods. What we really need now is some kind of dev/admin response. Is anything of this sort possible, and if so, would it help if we continued to provide ideas and opinions? It does really feel as though this server is dominated by the "original" players who were able to level on un-mined maps and farm mobs (I asked around in off chat, multiple people claimed that they received 10k+ exp an hour before the spawner nerfs). While I am not asking for anywhere near this level of exp gain, I would really like to see some form of hunting that is more rewarding (exp/hour) than it is now.

 

[G4M3R_117]

If your looking for a response try adding a " @Kainzo " Or and "at" before any other mods name

 

[madsplatter]

Personally, I think that a large flaw in the heroes system as a whole is how unbelievably tedious it is to level up. No matter what you are doing, mining, killing mobs, etc., 99% of it is mindlessly hacking away for XP. In addition, a very large portion of the map is mined out, not only all caves explored, but it is hard to find an area that does not have a labyrinth of mine shafts. There needs to be some alternate form of leveling that is more interesting. I think the amount of time/effort required to spec/master is appropriate, but the way one does it is not. To experience the heroes system as it was meant to be played, you need to spend hours upon hours mindlessly digging for ores, or killing mobs. Mining would be a lot more bearable if there was actually unexplored caves remaining, but there isn't. Even the 1.8 expansion area is mined out now. Since I have no creativity and have no further ideas, the only solution I can think of is the reinstatement of Warshard. Seeing as I know you guys are already working on it, I best not complain further about it. Hopefully we will see Warshard once more soon, and hopefully there will be some new ways of gaining XP in the future.