Pets
Pets used to take experience if they did the majority of the damage to killed mobs. Mid-Luclin this was changed to pets taking experience only if they did 100% of the damage, but if they did they took even more exp.
I found two possible ways the pet exp taking worked prior to Luclin. There is evidence for both of these ways and this evidence contradicts. It is clear however that when solo, pets took 50% if they did more than 50% of the damage to the killed mob. The question is how it behaved in groups.
Absor seemingly explained how pet exp originally worked here:
(A Developer's Corner post I lost the Wayback link to but it's in my archive)
Topic: Update on pets and group experience
Absor Station Admin posted 03-11-2002 10:16 AM
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Originally Posted by Absor
I was just informed by Scott Hartsman that I made a mistake about the pet experience thing. Pets only take experience from a group if they outdamage the entire group. If they do, then they gain a share as if they were a group member. If they do not, they take no experience at all.
This is how it's been working the whole time, and it makes a lot more sense. I'm sorry for the mistake.
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What "gain a share as if they were a group member" means isn't as clear as it sounds. Pretending like the pet is a player character group member in the math is problematic. Group splits used to be divided in proportion to each members' lifetime experience. That doesn't work well for pets. Also pets generally are much lower level than the caster, and solo owners saw 50% reductions presumably even with lower level pets. The caster's exp or level could have been used in place of the pet's however. Also it's just more difficult to code group splits in a way that makes pets an extra member, as hate lists and group member logic is otherwise very unrelated, which creates some doubt it was handled this way; Sony liked simple solutions to problems. Plus the pet penalty would be rather small in a large group if done this way, which doesn't make much sense if the pet is doing >50% of the damage and outdamaging the entire group.
Incidentally Absor's "mistake" appears to have been this comment from a week earlier:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Absor
A pet will take a fair share of the experience (as if it was an additional party member) IF the pet does more damage than all other group members (individually). If any party member outdamages the pet, the pet only takes 1% of the experience.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20030203...ML/000511.html
2000 era Usenet posts mention that ShowEQ was used to confirm that half exp was taken if pets did >50% of the damage while solo at least:
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/fSNeb3GQi1YJ
In that Usenet thread a player mentions having ran several pet exp tests. (without ShowEQ) His solo tests resulted in 10 snake kills to reach level 2, or 20 kills if the pet did all the damage, as expected. 10 kills would indicate a ZEM of 114. His group test however resulted in 27 snake kills in a group of two necromancers (with only one pet out) to reach level 2 with the one pet having done all of the damage. Knowing the ZEM, we can estimate the experience share the pet took in his two person group, which is about 30%. That is less than expected. (not 50%, not 33%)
Another post in that thread asserts that pets took 50% in groups as well however, which disagrees with the snake guy. I sometimes have to judge the credibility of a claim based partially on how well it's written, and the snake guy doesn't inspire confidence in that regard, however his number is hard to write off particularly when the solo numbers fit so well. He also posted again with "I've seen them take as much as a 23% of the experience in a 2 person group" and that the ShowEQ math didn't work in groups with pets. Since this was pre-January 2001, splits were done from the lifetime sums of the group members instead of their levels, so it's possible that was the reason the split wasn't 33% somehow. Anyway, snake guy's claim is much closer to the 'group share' theory.
Another poster in a different thread two months later disputes the 'group share' theory:
"Pets do not take any experience unless they outdamage the entire group (including other pets in the group)... if pets outdamage the party, they take 50% experience, and the other 50% is divided normally amongst the group." (Nov 1, 2000)
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/cTn_rCz2rZAJ
The June 5th 2002 patch changed pet experience. The day before, Rich Waters (EQ Lead Designer at the time) posted a message on the Developer's Corner forum, which included this:
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Originally Posted by Rich Waters
Pets no longer take experience in most situations
In the past, pets would take a full share of experience if they did the most damage to a creature. We've changed this rule as follows -
* Pets take ZERO experience from a creature, unless no player does damage to that creature.
* Pets take 75% of the experience from a creature - if no player does damage to that creature.
This means that your pet takes no experience from you or your group unless your pet kills a monster with no help from players. As long as you or your groupmates do damage to a monster, your pet will take ZERO experience.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20040910...w.jsp?id=51142
So after that point, players got full exp if they did a single point of damage. It's still that way on Darkpaw servers.
Confusingly his first sentence description of how pets used to work sounds like Absor's "mistake" comment.
That same patch however gave
Dire Charm pets different experience logic. Waters said this in the same post:
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Originally Posted by Rich Waters
Due to the high potential power of dire charmed pets, they will continue to take a share of the experience. In the worst case, dire charmed pets will take a full share of experience - this is the same as it's always been.
The amount of experience taken by a dire charmed pet scales based on how much damage the pet does. If the dire charmed pet is doing the majority of the damage, it's experience share gets larger. If you or your group are doing reasonable damage to a monster, a dire charmed pet will not take much experience. The more damage you do, the less experience a dire charmed pet will take. In most situations, dire charmed pets will take less experience than they did previously.
As with all pets, if a dire charmed pet does the majority of damage, and no player does any damage, the dire charmed pet will take 75% of the experience from the kill.
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Rich Waters then wrote another post to clarify things further.
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Originally Posted by Rich Waters
Pets and Experience –
As there's still some confusion about how experience works with the new pet enhancements, I'd like to talk about it a bit more so that everyone understands. Here are the basic rules, along with some examples -
Situation 1 - You are soloing and you have a summoned pet or a charmed pet (not including Dire Charm)-
* If you do any damage to the monster at all, you get all of the experience.
* If you don't do any damage to the monster, the pet gets 75% of the experience.
Situation 2 - You are in a group and you have a summoned pet or a charmed pet (not including Dire Charm)-
* If you or your group do any damage to the monster at all, your group gets all of the experience.
* If you or your group don't do any damage to the monster, the pet gets 75% of the experience.
Situation 3 - You are soloing and you have a Dire Charmed pet-
* If you do half of the damage to the monster or more, you get all of the experience.
* If you do less than half of the damage to the monster, the pet gets between 25% and 50% of the experience, depending on how much damage it did.
* If you don't do any damage to the monster, the pet gets 75% of the experience.
Situation 4 - You are in a group and you have a Dire Charmed pet-
* If you or your group do half of the damage to the monster or more, your group gets all of the experience.
* If you or your group do less than half of the damage to the monster, the pet gets between 25% and 50% of the experience, depending on how much damage it did.
* If you or your group don't do any damage to the monster, the pet gets 75% of the experience.
How is this different than the old way for non-Dire Charmed pets?
In the old scheme, if a pet did more than half of the damage to a monster, it took half the experience reward.
In the new scheme, pets take zero experience unless no player does damage. If no player does any damage, then the pet takes 75% of the experience reward
This means that it's much easier to make sure a pet doesn't take any experience from you or your group. In most situations where a pet would have taken half the experience before, it now takes no experience at all.
How is this different than the old way for Dire Charmed pets?
In the old scheme, if a Dire Charmed pet did more than half of the damage to a monster, it took half of the experience reward.
In the new scheme, if a Dire Charmed pet does more than half of the damage to a monster, it takes 25% - 50% of the experience reward, depending on damage done.
This means that things are about the same as they were for Dire Charmed pets before, except they take less experience than they used to in most cases. As long as your pet doesn't do a lot more damage than you, you'll get more experience than you used to. In the worst case (unless you don't do any damage at all), your pet will take half the experience just like it used to.
The one exception to this is - If you don't do any damage to the monster, the pet gets 75% of the experience.
What's the bottom line?
With the new rules, players get more experience than they used to with a pet in almost every situation. The only way you can get less than before is if you or your group don't damage a monster. As long as you do any damage at all, your pet will never take the 75% experience share. Make sure you do a bit of damage, and your summoned or regular charmed pets won't take a single point of experience.
For Dire charmed pets it's better also - If you do half the damage to a monster, the Dire Charmed pet takes no experience. If you do less than half, your pet takes as little as 25% of the experience when it used to always take half. It can still take up to half the experience if you don't do much damage, but if you're contributing to the damage you'll get more than you used to.
Rich Waters
Lead Designer, EverQuest
Sony Online Entertainment
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http://web.archive.org/web/200206151...ML/000594.html
The patch note said this:
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Originally Posted by Patch Note
The exception to the above rule is Dire Charmed pets, which will take a share of the experience scaled by the amount of damage they do. In most situations (with an active party, for example) the Dire Charmed pet will not take experience. Like all pets, they will take 75% of the experience if no PC does damage to the target. As long as a player does damage to a creature, a Dire Charmed pet will never take more experience than it used to.
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In that lengthy clarification post, Waters says flat out "if a pet did more than half of the damage to a monster, it took half the experience" followed by "from you or your group". Then goes on to say that dire charm pets worked the same way before the patch. He also calls this kind of experience taking a 'share' even though it's not splitting exp like a pseudo-member of the group.
So I would say that pets splitting exp like a pseudomember of the group was less likely than taking 50% before the group split is done but I'm far from certain of this.
As for dire charm exp scaling, it seems clear that the
exp returned = exp_amount * (1.0 - (pet_dmg / total_dmg * 0.5))
I did a single test on Darkpaw servers and the dire charm penalty seems to be gone. I couldn't google a patch note mentioning it however.
Charm Exp Nerf
In Planes of Power charm became very strong and resulted in a meta where the only good exp was when using charm. Sony made some rather meager nerfs to charm about 5-6 months after PoP's launch on April 8 2003:
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Originally Posted by Patch Note
** Charm Changes **
- Healing a charmed pet now generates an appropriate amount of hate for the healer.
- Charmed pets now take up to one third of the experience for each NPC killed. This amount scales down based on the percentage of damage to the target that the pet does. Dire charm pets still take the same experience they always have.
- Charmed pets are no longer selected as a monster’s preferred target if there are many players available for the monster to attack instead.
- ALSO (we forgot to mention this before), the resist modifiers on several charm spells (such as Beckon, Call of the Arch Mage, Command of Druzil and Word of Terris) have been removed, making them a bit easier to resist.
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Baelish from EQCastersRealm spoke to an unnamed developer right after the patch and got this clarification regarding the charm exp nerf:
Quote:
Charm Experience has been changed so that NPCs will take a more appropriate amount of experience per kill. If the NPC does 100% of the damage it will take 33% of the experience of the kill. This is the most that can ever be taken from the kill. If it does 50% it will take 16.5%, if it does 10% it will take 3.3% etc. It’s a sliding scale based on how much damage the Charmed NPC does to the monster killed.
This new system is independent of any grouping. The NPC will take Experience with this system whether the Enchanter is solo or not.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20030516...628&FORUM_ID=2
That doesn't seem to need any further explanation and is probably this:
exp returned = exp_amount * (1.0 - (pet_dmg / total_dmg / 3.0))
I don't know if Darkpaw servers still do this but since charm is heavily nerfed on Darkpaw servers I wouldn't be surprised if they reverted this exp nerf.
None of these explanations answer what happens when you have multiple pets. Was all pet damage added up into a single pet damage pool? Or if you had multiple pets did the penalties diminish because the penalties only took effect based on the highest damage pet?
Death Experience Loss
I was able to determine death exp with a high degree of precision. My sources for this are a client decompile provided to me by Kicnlag, the 2001 producer's letter and Darkpaw's Live servers. The following outlines my current understanding of how it worked in old EQ but this may omit some minor details:
- Death exp was semi-normalized to that of a warrior of the same race as the player, such that earning it back took the same amount of kills for everybody of the same race.
- Death exp starts off at 12.5% of the amount of exp in the previous level of what a warrior of the same race would lose, with modifications from there.
- Death exp used to be 25% but was cut in half about nine weeks after the game's launch in 1999.
- Death exp was capped at 6 million in old EQ. This results in the exp loss for levels 57 to 65 being the same amount numerically. (except level 61)
- Death exp and the cap were both multiplied by the class_mod after January 2001, which was a necessary step in the class penalties removal.
- Exp loss under level 25 was less than the full amount. It was linear scaling from 0% at level 0 to 100% at level 25.
- No experience loss under level six. A Luclin patch made this level 11.
- HBMs are most likely NOT factored into experience loss. More about this in a later section.
How Darkpaw servers differ:
- All races and classes have the same experience gains and losses now. Everybody might as well be a Human Cleric as far as exp is concerned.
- The linear scaling reduction under level 25 now starts from six instead of one.
- Death exp is capped at 5.4 million instead of 6 million up to level 65. This results in 10% less exp loss for some levels. Unknown why it is reduced.
- The first level of experience loss is six again.
All sources agree that exp loss was a percentage of the previous level's experience. The basics of death exp on Darkpaw's servers is also mostly the same, with the loss being exactly the same as it was in old EQ for most levels. This is how I can verify that my math is correct. For example, the exp loss at level 25 on Darkpaw servers is 10.351% (in-game only has 3 decimals of precision) and it's 10.3505% in my spreadsheet. Using death exp loss also allowed me to verify that Darkpaw's experience required for levels is still the same as well.
The percentage was 25% when EverQuest launched in March 1999. It was halved to 12.5% in the May 24th 1999 patch. Imagine how bad dying was near launch.
We can know that death exp was based on the Warrior's experience table for everybody because the January 2001 producer's letter says so. Also the Trilogy client logic has a 10% reduction that otherwise has no reason to be there.
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Originally Posted by Gordon Wrinn
There is a problem, however, with this 'new' formula. Death penalties are currently based off of the level before your current one. Secondly, everyone suffers the same numeric experience loss on death as anyone else of their race, regardless of class or class-based experience penalties. What this means is: if I am a cleric, and you are an SK of the same level and race, we both die and lose the same numeric value of experience (Example: 100,000 experience points). When we go back to recover from death, you as the SK will get your 100,000 points back faster than I will as a cleric, since all of the experience you get is multiplied by your class-penalty (1.4). Essentially, I lose and gain experience at 1.0, but you lose at 1.0, and gain at 1.4.
This is a balance issue we decided was also necessary to address. If we are going to make the statement that class experience penalties should not exist, we then have to do it on both ends (with exception to the two classes that we've decided to leave as-is). As such, rather than losing the same numeric value, loss on death will ALSO be multiplied by the experience penalty. Since everyone currently loses experience as if they are a warrior of their own race, we do not want anyone to lose more relative experience (e.g. experience such that recovery from death is more difficult). Hence, we further multiply the experience loss on death by the class experience modifier for warriors (0.9).
In our example above, my cleric would lose 90,000 XP on death at my level (Same as before since clerics do not have an XP penalty), but your SK will lose 126,000 XP (Same as before, plus something to offset the experience gain bonus). Death is, however, still easier to recover from for both classes since we create experience out of thin air for every kill.
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In the January 2001 patch Sony eliminated class exp penalties by giving most classes bonus exp on kills, which was done by multiplying gained experience by the class_mod for these classes. The death exp also had to be increased otherwise hybrids and casters would end up with a much reduced penalty from death. The Trilogy client decompile shows us how this was done. For the most part Sony just stopped substituting the player's class with Warrior when getting the previous level's exp. Here's some pseudocode of the client logic:
Code:
if (level < 25) then
levelFactor = level * 0.01
else
levelFactor = 0.25
end
LastLevelExp = GetTotalExpForNextLevel(level - 2, class, race)
ThisLevelExp = GetTotalExpForNextLevel(level - 1, class, race)
xpLoss = (ThisLevelExp - LastLevelExp) * levelFactor / 2
maxLoss = 6000000
if (class != ROGUE and class != WARRIOR) then
xpLoss = xpLoss * 9 / 10
if (classMod > 10) then
maxLoss = classMod / 10 * 6000000
end
end
if (maxLoss < xpLoss) then
xpLoss = maxLoss
end
if (xpLoss < experience) then
experience = experience - xpLoss
else
experience = 0
end
That should be easy to follow except for maybe the block that excludes Rogues and Warriors. Sony needed to reduce the exp loss for most classes there by 10% because Warriors had a class exp bonus in the form of 10% less exp required to level than the baseline. (baseline would be priest classes) And since all classes previously used Warrior exp to determine death exp, an adjustment was needed. With that 10% reduction the effective rate of refilling the exp meter ends up the same as before for all classes. Note that the client logic matched Mr. Wrinn's exp example of an SK losing 126,000 compared to a cleric or warrior's 90k, so that is verification of the client's logic matching the server. (90k * 1.4 = 126k)
The Trilogy client decompile is where I found the 6 million death exp cap. This cap fit the observations. It was commonly known that exp loss at level 60 was about 1 yellow bubble and exp loss at level 65 was about 5-6%. A 6 million exp cap fits this with the results being 18.83% and 5.43% for most classes. I have video capture of myself dying at level 65 and losing 6% on Al'Kabor. (as a Halfling) A 5.4m cap is too low to match observations and the Trilogy decompile did not look like the cap was reduced. Other than Darkpaw's servers using a 5.4m cap, the exp loss for levels 25-65 seems unchanged since 2001 but I can't rule out edge possible cases.
"At level 65 I lose about 5.5% of level upon death (and get most of it back when rezzed, of course)"
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/0Wu9sa5l-ckJ
"It's more like 16% to 20% per unrezzed death in 60, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 to 5 blue bubbles."
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.game...m/SaSgilV2_xkJ
"Level 60 is a short level but a death is a 19% loss"
https://web.archive.org/web/20040707...x?PostID=47517
Because death exp was based on the previous level's experience, it resulted in some levels having double experience loss, as hell levels required twice the experience. In Absor's "EverQuest Third Anniversary State of the Game part 2" post from March 15 2002, he mentions the removal of the double experience loss in levels after hell levels:
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Originally Posted by Absor
the "post-hell-level" experience loss in levels 31, 36, 41, and 46 was driven from the face of Norrath as well.
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Sony removed the double exp loss at the same time they smoothed out 30-50 hell levels. Sony just divided the exp loss in half for those levels, which I was able to verify on Darkpaw's servers. The evidence strongly suggests that Sony never multiplied death exp by the HBMs. See the hell level removal section for details.
Deaths in hell levels also showed an anomaly in that the visible experience loss in the UI meter was half of normal, but in actuality the experience loss was numerically typical and the visual difference was entirely from the level requiring twice the exp to complete, so making the exp back took just as long.
The 25% number along with the May 1999 halving are easily seen in the client logic. I did find an old Usenet post mentioning 12.5% so the ShowEQ guys seemed to have discovered this back then as well or a Sony rep mentioned it. After death exp was cut in half in May 1999 and accounting for the Warrior bonus, typical death exp loss (as visibly shown in the exp bar) for priests would have been about 10.5% for most levels 25-50, 19.5% to 21.8% for post-hell levels, and 5% in hell levels. For the first nine weeks or so of EQ in 1999, dying at level 46 as a priest class would have cost the player 43.5% of their experience bar. The reduced experience loss in levels under 25 also kind of explain why the resurrection spells weren't obtained until later levels before Luclin since experience loss is fairly small until level 20 or so.
Not included in the pseudocode is a level check to skip death exp if the player is under level six, but it was in the decompile. I found old posts going back to 1999 mentioning the level six threshold as well. They reverted the Luclin change to raise the first exp loss level to 11 back to six in 2006.
I found this post by Rashere (Sony dev) from 2006:
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Originally Posted by Rashere
When EQ first launched, XP loss started out low and ramped up smoothly from level 1 until level 25. At level 25, the full death penalty is in effect and from then on the amount of XP you lose on a death is constant.
When the change was made to make players not lose any XP up to level 10, that scaling wasn't taken into account. So, when you started losing XP at level 11, you were starting out with 11 levels of scaling already in place. This made you go from not losing any XP to taking a sizeable hit immediately.
After the changes we just made, the scaling has been adjusted to start at level 6 and ramp up from there. So when you first start to lose XP at level 6, it will be just a small amount and will smoothly increase from there until level 25 when the full effect is in place.
Basically, we just smoothed things out a bit so they're not so jarring when you first start to lose XP. The full death penalty is unchanged and still kicks in at level 25.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20060609...e=1&format=all