Is there max skill gains/mob?

[Serica]

...I forget what level the Calypso punies are, but Carabok are L10 and have a fast attack rate (once every 3 seconds). My guess is that attack rate and mob level are both important to skilling rate. Carabok can be skilled in droves (the radar is a nearly solid red patch) in the woods west of the quarry. They give insane weapon skills too.

The punies on Calypso are L1/2/3.
It's quite interesting comparing the max damage vs Lxx level for mobs between different planets from Entropedia (for those that have max damage recorded anyway):
L10 Calypso:
Argo Scout (30damage); Gatherer (35)
Bristle Mature (30); Old (35)
CalyCod Mature (39)
Daiki Alpha (63)
Foul Guard (41)
Merp Provider (25) ; Guard (29)
Ripper Guard (36); Dom (40)
etc

L10 Arkadia:
Carabok Puny (3) ...

Those really do seem to be a bit of an anomaly

I worked my way up from Fauc > Foul > Molisk today with just a handful of mobs of each, and the molisk Scout gave me about 4 skill messages within the first 2 min. Those are L14's and do max damage of 47. Youngs and matures weren't as consistent though with only 0-1 skill messages each. Fauc Y/M and Foul Y/Adult didnt give me any.

Tomorrow I have RL commitments for most of the day, but Sunday looks pretty clear at this stage, so I'll go look for a molisk scout level spawn after I get the morning mining run done.

[wizzszz]

What we do not do is mix our opinions and moderating.

In a perfect world, yes.

If a mod tells someone to stop posting, i.e. because of low ingame activity, that's not ok.

And a mod should rather take some aggression out of a thread instead of fueling the fire (or let alone start it).

I think you agree with these statements.

I recall two situations:
Knuckles got into some trouble dodge skilling drones back in old Jason Center. He learned that mobs stopped giving defense skills within 1 min. (can't recall correct time rate mentioned, but you get the idea) so he would take his mob trains an dump them on other hunters so he could grab "fresh" drones to skill with.

And received a temp ban for it.

This is one of the events that establish the recent "skillgains are in the mob" theory - no idea how Serica managed to miss all the drama around knuckles ban back then.

I also recall the sweating trick where if you can drop a mob off your radar, you can return to it de-agroed and full of fresh sweat. The trick was that the mob could not be on any one else's radar either.

Exactly. No idea if this little trick still works and if skillgains are "resettable" this way, too - i doubt MA wanted us to exploit that bad design though.


We should make an effort to distinguish between two different scenarios here:
Is it possible to replenish the skillgains in the mob ...
a) ... by legitimate means (like, simply shooting or otherwise producing decay)
b) ... by abusing a design flaw

Scenario b can hardly be considered "mobs are replenishable", as it might lead to a ban or other consequences, hence it is something we shouldn't do anyway.

[Neil Stockton]

The punies on Calypso are L1/2/3.
It's quite interesting comparing the max damage vs Lxx level for mobs between different planets from Entropedia (for those that have max damage recorded anyway):
L10 Calypso:
Argo Scout (30damage); Gatherer (35)
Bristle Mature (30); Old (35)
CalyCod Mature (39)
Daiki Alpha (63)
Foul Guard (41)
Merp Provider (25) ; Guard (29)
Ripper Guard (36); Dom (40)
etc

L10 Arkadia:
Carabok Puny (3) ...

Those really do seem to be a bit of an anomaly

The way it's been explained by the Ark staff is that the L-number is determined by a combination of various factors, only some of which relate to damage (hp, attack rate, speed, regen, aggressiveness, etc). Carabok are very fast (as are all the "cat" mobs), attack fast, regen fast so they get an L10 designation, even though they only do 2-3 damage per hit. I'm not sure if the L level itself directly relates to skills received but they do skill like crazy and you don't need armor. The mobs above do large damage, but most of them are very slow and have low attack rates. These kind of stats are good for minimizing armor decay, but (apparently) not as good for skilling.

[JohnCapital]

And received a temp ban for it.

I'm well aware of that whole situation, but those facts aren't relavent to this, other than saying it was a known case where a player dumped mobs after "sucking them dry" of defense skills.

Exactly. No idea if this little trick still works and if skillgains are "resettable" this way, too - i doubt MA wanted us to exploit that bad design though.

There's an easy test to see if the sweat & skills are "resettble".

• Take sinlge mob like molisk just outside a revive area, so there's no one else around.
• Sweat it
• (You can wear kobold+5B or similar to avoid having to fap too much)
• Note defense skill gains
• when dry, let it kill you
• reviving removes the mob from radar and hopefully it's far enough away that no one else is around either
• run back and proceed to sweat again
• You'll know immediately if sweat's not available.
• Chances are if mob is still dry of sweat, it's dry of skill giving too.
• If it's still sweatable, continue sweating and watch for defense skill gains

Whether we consider this a "hack" or not is another debate and that's fine. But if it works (like it used to) then skills can be reset on a mob.

[Serica]

With the Knuckles example (from 2008) where he was temp-banned, there is nothing I can find to suggest he did anything to try to re-set any defense skills in the mob by shooting them himself.

Without going into the details of that specific case, it would ofc have been cheaper to just agro the mobs, gain the defense skills and then just dump/turret/drown them. As drones can't be sweated, there was no 'free' way to re-set the defensive skillgains on those.

Nor can I see anything posted about other players not getting defensive skills from those 'dumped' mobs.

There's an easy test to see if the sweat & skills are "resettble".

• Take sinlge mob like molisk just outside a revive area, so there's no one else around.
• Sweat it
• (You can wear kobold+5B or similar to avoid having to fap too much)
• Note defense skill gains
• when dry, let it kill you
• reviving removes the mob from radar and hopefully it's far enough away that no one else is around either
• run back and proceed to sweat again
• You'll know immediately if sweat's not available.
• Chances are if mob is still dry of sweat, it's dry of skill giving too.
• If it's still sweatable, continue sweating and watch for defense skill gains

Yep that's pretty much what I'll be doing tomorrow.

The way it's been explained by the Ark staff is that the L-number is determined by a combination of various factors, only some of which relate to damage (hp, attack rate, speed, regen, aggressiveness, etc). Carabok are very fast (as are all the "cat" mobs), attack fast, regen fast so they get an L10 designation, even though they only do 2-3 damage per hit. I'm not sure if the L level itself directly relates to skills received but they do skill like crazy and you don't need armor. The mobs above do large damage, but most of them are very slow and have low attack rates. These kind of stats are good for minimizing armor decay, but (apparently) not as good for skilling.

Thanks for that Neil, I don't follow the Ark forum other than to check for VU release notes.
As I changed from principally hunting with a little mining to principally mining with hunting only for mob-clearing and tidying up some low-level missions (and WoF!) in about mid-2011, mob comparisons haven't been on my agenda at all recently I was just surprised at the difference when I looking for comparable mobs to try from the Entropedia tables.

[JohnCapital]

...it would ofc have been cheaper to just agro the mobs, gain the defense skills and then just dump/turret/drown them.

Well, recall this was VU9 era Jason Center. No turrets/etc. around the Jason drone mob area, (1-2 tp jump outside camp) and letting them kill you and coming all the way back was a waste of time and TP chip decay.

Nope, cheapest, fastest thing to do was what Knuck did. Unfortunately, it was also the rudest.

[jcfuller]

This may be a bit off topic but while merp young hunting it appears fewer skill gains when tanking. It is not for misses as I always use a right click.

I have not done actual number testing as I don't tank anymore anyway.
Just courious if anyone else can relate?

James

[Serica]

I went to the outpost west of Zeus, where the iron mission broker for molisk is.

2012-12-30 09:48:36
I found a molisk scout some 300m north of there, and scanned it to confirm stamina (28), giving expected HP of 280 and max sweat of 280.

I then sweated it unarmored for over 40min, using a Regen III chip for healing. In that time I gained 57 sweat, and went through 7.62ped of synth ME. Then a player showed up on the edge of the radar, and continued to come toward me even though I continuously backed away, asking them not to come closer as I was in the middle of a test. Eventually I backed so far north that I reach the Argo spawn border, and was killed by an Argo that spawned in range.

I added unplated grem and returned to the spot right away, but found that there were now TWO molisk scouts side by side with the Argo that killed me, with no way to distinguish between them as to which was the one I'd started with

So I killed all 3 and started over...

Defense-skills gained on attempt 1 from chat.log:
2012-12-30 09:50:11 Evade
2012-12-30 10:35:31 Test ended

---------------------------------

2012-12-30 10:36:09

This time I stayed in unplated gremlin armor and dragged the molisk scout to the top of a hillside to the NE, out of the molisk spawn zone where we were less likely to be disturbed (other than the occasional Argo Warrior or so )
This time I managed to sweat the molisk dry (280sweat), with only 2.28ped of synthetic ME for heals .. but 6.40ped in armor decay. I also used a Synch chip so that the sweating would go faster.

Once dry, I allowed it to kill me then tp'd back immediately. On return I found the molisk was still dry of sweat. I then let it hit me several times, before killing it fairly slowly with an Opalo+A101. I received no defense skillgains.

Defense-skills gained on attempt 2 from chat.log:
2012-12-30 10:36:26 Athletics
2012-12-30 10:36:40 Athletics
2012-12-30 10:37:15 Evade
2012-12-30 10:38:34 Evade
2012-12-30 11:26:56 Test ended.

-----------------------------------------------------

I'm satisfied that neither sweating nor shooting will reset the defense skills for that player in the way that they used to until fairly recently (possibly in June2011 when space mobs were introduced), and which I expected they still did, and I'd like to thank Neil for bringing this up. I have no way of testing if they remain 'dry' for another avatar, but I'm happy to accept Neil's testing on that point.

In conversation ingame this morning, Neil and I agreed to extend this thread to Ark and PCF Forums respectively to enable wider discussion of the effects of this on gameplay, and possibly extending the discussion to other defense-skill matters that he's observed.

PCF thread here: http://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/fo...related-skills

[JohnCapital]

I'm satisfied that neither sweating nor shooting will reset the defense skills for that player in the way that they used to until fairly recently (possibly in June2011 when space mobs were introduced),

OK, then I admit to being wrong. Thank for testing. As you said, they must have changed something since the last time I've done that test.

Good to know.