Friday, March 19, 2010

I don’t wanna come back down from this cloud

I’m on the thief last night looking for a party. I had in my search comment “no level sync, need to skill ranged attack”. Seems fairly straight-forward to me. So I get several invites, all asking me to level sync to Dunes or Qufim levels.

Like last post here’s a crash course. Level sync is a feature SE added awhile back to help people form parties. It used to be to make an XP party you had to find people close to your current job level; in fact, you took a penalty if the difference in levels was more than 3 for the whole party. Level sync allows people of higher level to temporarily drop to a lower level, adjusts gear stats down as well (which generally makes your gear crap), and prevents the XP penalties from being applied.

However, it has its downsides too. Your skill is capped at whatever level you sync to, meaning if you are a higher level syncing to a lower level you are just widening the skill gap from what you should be at for your real level to what you are at. It also means that because you can’t really do anything at your real level--your skills being too low for any effective use--that you will actually hurt any party you are invited to. The wider the gap, the more of a liability you are.

Now here’s the problem, if you won’t sync down to help the other guys you are seen as a selfish prick, but if you join a party at your real level without your skills being up to par you are an XP leech since you add nothing to the party and they are just carrying you. And the only level ranges where XP parties seem to exist these days are below 25 or above 68. You may be lucky enough to find a static party that is willing to XP together, but that isn’t easy since everyone has to have the same availability, and you need to be ready with gear, supplies, etc. If you have a lot of time commitments already it’s difficult to do, since you need to make game money, do your shopping and crafting and such on your own time.

In any event, one of the inviters actually decides to argue with me about the “no level sync” part of my comment. I have a few responses for him:
1. Thief/dancer I can XP solo, and make a lot of gil while doing so.
2. If he read the part about needing to skill up he should know that level syncing would make the problem worse.
3. I was probably already aware that the no sync would hurt my chances for a party when I wrote it, and yet I didn’t care.
4. You can’t find skill-up parties for ranged weapon skills, and with Martial Master active I probably am hoping to take advantage of it.
5. You can earn XP in a skill-up party--in fact, if the mob doesn’t give XP you can’t really cap, unless the other party members are much higher than you and thus you are fighting tough or higher monsters.

So at any rate, I decide to go kill some level 37-40 monsters for gil. I must be approaching my range skill caps because I’m not getting any skill-ups off of them. I pick up about 2.5k xp and 3.5k gil before I get bored and log out for the night.

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