Is this possible?

[Madrel]

No power-levelling... depends on how you define it. I'll bet my next paycheck that he was getting KEI from level 45+.

As for the tradeskills... I'd expect that he stockpiled tailoring components beforehand so all the mage had to do was "carpal-click". Probably stockpiled leather padding as well, and other farmed components.

[kiztent]

Originally posted by Madrel
No power-levelling... depends on how you define it. I'll bet my next paycheck that he was getting KEI from level 45+.

Powerlevelling is one of those great undefined words, which generally is like the word "kinky" in that the definition applies to what other people do, never what you do.

Is powerlevelling having a druid sit out of group and DS and heal a melee? Maybe. How about having a 46 shadowknight in group with a 65 druid/sk/enc and heading to chardok royals? Could be. What about a 39 cleric (*complete heal*) grouped with a 55 SK at a camp that the SK can't solo without complete heal? Maybe, maybe not - I know I don't do a "/ all 43 65 cleric" when I want a cleric to group with even though 43 is in range. Is it spending all your time online in exp groups? I've heard it used that way. Buying buffs is powerlevelling? um... ok if you insist. What about logging in the 58 cleric/64 shaman you have on a second account to buff? Would that be soloing? No one else assisted you.

In short, it's a pretty vague term, so who knows what it really means.

[Madrel]

I agree, Kiz. Different people interpret powerlevelling in different ways. I happen to think that buying buffs can be considered powerlevelling. They radically increase the rate at which one can gain experience.

As you say - no one but the original poster (on Mage Compendium) knows what he or she really meant.

[Shinianad]

The horse helped a lot, and FT1 helped... well, 10 mana per minute. I didn't reach 200int for a long time, though. I believe my early life was spent around 140ish. 2k of equipment was a lot less even a few months ago (my mage started life in May). I wore Gatorscale sleeves into my 60s, for instance, and I'm still wearing summoned items. I didn't start to get decent equipment until the Dulak era, when cash rolled in.

I will be honest: I have, throughout my toon's life, been generally lucky with camps and /randoms. Quillmane took me 20 minutes (two pops in that time), the earth staff took 3.5 hours, and my longest epic camp (by far) was the 9 hours spent in SolA. None of the 8th shawl was too horrible (the fifth was by far the bear of the bunch), and almost every step was an experience camp. None of my tradeskills are at 200 to this day... my goal was always to achieve a 90%+ success likelihood (with geerlok), although I did do one tailoring combine at lower than that. I had a total of two failures through the whole process (ARGH the fifth shawl was one of them). I did buy stuff on occasion for tradeskilling... spiderling silks when available cheaply, and a friend gave me six stacks of spider silk at one point. I never bought any advanced/expensive stuff.

Here is more on how he did it.. Lucky randoms indeed!

[Shinianad]

Originally posted by kiztent
Powerlevelling is one of those great undefined words, which generally is like the word "kinky" in that the definition applies to what other people do, never what you do.

...

In short, it's a pretty vague term, so who knows what it really means.

LOL Good point.. I remember someone telling me her husband was helping her out in PC starting a new toon.

I told her Oh thats nice, getting some powerlevelling eh?

She said "Oh, he isnt power levelling me, just buffing, healing and pulling for me.."

Uh huh..

[Shinianad]

Originally posted by Dunthor Warsmith
65 and 6AA in 21 days /played doesn't seem outlandish to me at all. I've heard of a number of similar accomplishments, but even more proof to me is my own little mage.

He's currently lvl 33, with 8days 5hours played. The only "twinking" he got was 2 opal steins in exchange for approximately 2kpp worth of tradeskill materials (spider/ling silks, lava rocks&mercury, wind stones&essence of wind, swirling mists, iron oxide, etc), which most people probably wouldn't label as a twink. He had KEI only once, and promptly died on the 2nd pull with it The closest he's come to being powerlevelled was grouping with a similar level ubertwinked necro, but the actual xp rate didn't change much during those times, much to my surprise (the higher level mobs were offset by the necro's higher level, increased downtime, and my periodic deaths). Oh ya, did I mention he dies a LOT? And all unrezzed, too

I levelled him pretty slowly, staying in steamfront until low teens (~13) doing elementals, then to Lavastorm 14-16, then najena 16-22, SolA 22-~28, Elemental island in Twilight sea 28-31, and then assorted places including ToFS, Iceclad, and South Karana. My mage is also one of my "just sit online and talk to people" chars, since he's the only one with summoned food and drink.

If I can get a mage to 33 in 8 days of hyper-casual playing, wearing primarily newbie quest armor and cloth, a determined person should be able to get to 50 in far less time. With LDoN, I've found on my 50s char I generally get ~10% of a level per adventure, which would translate into approximately 10% per 2.5 hours. Doing that for 51-60, that would be 100 adventures, or 250 hours, or about ten and a half days. Those are pretty conservative numbers overall I think, allowing for a lot to go wrong and still come in under. 50-65 could doubtlessly go much faster in PoP, too.

The only point of contention I see is the amount of questing claimed to have been done. The 4-49 focus staves are a random drop, and they took me a few hours alone to acquire. Getting tradeskills up to reasonable levels for the 8th shawl, even ignoring component gathering time, is still a LOT of clicks, which takes time. And its claimed mostly farmed components were used, plus there's the farming for the shawl itself. The mage epic has fun aspects too, like the Quilimane camp, which can easily go 30+ hours. Sure, he could've gotten lucky on every single aspect here, had all the camped items drop rapidly and the RNG god loving his int for skillups, but it just doesn't seem likely.

I have no trouble believing the levelling aspects of the claim. But all that questing ... really does raise some questions.

Yes, and it was the questing/tradeskills I was questioning (Seeing as how this is THE tradeskills site )


Hyper casual? Isn't that an oxymoron?


I would find doing this (fast levelling) extremely difficult, simply because I would get bored/burnt out and want to do something else..

[Dunthor Warsmith]

I was just thinking about the tradeskills part a bit after I'd made the post.

Lets make some assumptions:
-) Define a "transfer" as moving an item from inventory to a combine container, or clicking combine and dealing with one product (hence a combine yielding multiple items counts as 1+0.5*(# of products-1) transfers)
-) You can make 1 transfer per second.
-) Define a "combine" as transfering all necessary ingredients to a container, clicking combine, and dealing with the results.
-) All combines are non-trivial
-) There is a constant skillup rate of 1skillup per 10 combines.
-) Our "goal skill" is 150 unmodified in all 7 basic tradeskills

A combine has a minimum of two transfers (a one ingredient, one product recipe) and a maximum of 12 transfers (ten ingredients, three products - I can't think of any recipe that has more than 3 separate items yielded). For the sake of finding a minimum, let us assume all combines are two transfer combines.

With a goal skill of 150, and a rate of 1 skill per 10 combines, that's 1500 combines. For each transfer required, that's 1500 transfers. For seven tradeskills, that's 10500 transfers, or 10500 seconds, which is 175 minutes or 2.92 hours.

That seems like a rather safe absolute minimum for a non-macro to skillup to decent levels. If you take a 3 transfer combine, multiply the above by three, and it yields 8.75hours. And this entire formulation is completely ignoring supplying time (3000 ingredients for a 2 unique, non-recycling stackable item combine is 150 slots, and a char has only 80 inventory slots on their body, or 70 if using a carried combine container), time to find world containers, and subcombines. Many skillup routes are heavily dependant on 3+ item recipes and subcombine recipes (metal bits, wu's, etc) which would inflate that number enormously, as would hell levels (but quick points would deflate it) and miscellaneous distractions.

Interesting math