77 cap goal completed
I just completed my 77 cap goal and wanted to share it. And who better to share it with than the good old forumers? Here’s my story.
My previous goal was to create two characters of each class with both a “pure” and “hybrid” build. My latest goal was to take all of those 10 characters to 77. I realized this would take a long time, but I figured I didn’t have anything else to do with them, so I dove in and tried not to think about it.
Two things helped speed up my journey. There was a plat sale that let me get some XP-boosting funds, and also a double XP weekend that helped accelerate the process. I think I got about 3 caps’ worth of XP out of that weekend alone.
I also made the decision to play whichever character had a combo blessing. This meant that I would not necessarily drive any one character to completion quickly, but I’d be maximizing the XP I could earn each time. The downside of this strategy is that it wouldn’t make sense to use week-long double XP elixirs, since I’d never know if I would come back to the same character within the week it lasted. I did the math and found that I’d have to do about 8 or 9 hours on the same character for it to be worth using, and I thought the odds were slim of the same character getting a combo at least 2 times in 7 days (since my best case was 3-4 hours grinding per day maximum).
I started my leveling in the new area. However, I quickly realized that this would make for an unreasonably long journey given the instant wipe-out capabilities of the foes there and the lack of good teams running it, especially given that most of my pure characters are quite squishy. Then I tried plasma pyramid leveling and discovered that not only did I advance faster there, it was also more plat-efficient (as measured by XP gained per plat spent). After that, I did nearly all my leveling there. This was the only cap where I did most of my leveling outside the new area. It felt strange not to be capping in the new area, but the going was just too slow there for me to stick with it.
I also got some good benefit out of the Halloween event. I had only one character left to cap by the time it started, but I was able to use the runs going on there to level pretty effectively. It was a welcome change from running plasma alone for hours on end.
All told, it took from when the new area opened (the last day of July) until today (nearly the end of October) to complete. That’s almost exactly 3 months, which is a lot faster than I figured it would be.
Once I finished, I got curious about the amount of XP gained on all my characters. I had just done 3 million in 77 caps, but how did that compare with other XP gained? I decided to figure it out.
Cap XP per character
Fusionstrike: 61, 66, 71, 76, 77
Tuftedcrow: 71, 76, 77
The rest: 76, 77
Total cap XP earned: (10@77)x300k + (10@76)x100k + (2@71)x100k + (1@66)x100k + (1@61)x100k = 4.4 million
Regular XP per character
I got my regular XP numbers from the XP table here (big thumbs up to Apa): http://www.spacetimestudios.com/show...uirement-Guide
Fusionstrike: from table skipping 61, 66, 71, 76, 77: 50,837 + 12,824 + 22,794 + 36,239 = 122,694
Tuftedcrow: from table skipping 71, 76, 77: 93,149 + 36,239 = 129,378
The rest: from table skipping 76, 77: 138,044 x 8 = 1,104,352
Total regular XP earned: 122,694 + 129,378 + 1,104,352 = 1,356,424
Total XP earned for all characters
4,400,000 + 1,356,424 = 5,756,424
So I’ve earned about 5.7 million XP in my PL career. Of course, these numbers aren’t 100% accurate because there was some XP curve flattening a little over two years back, so my one character I had then actually had to earn a little more of the “regular XP”. Unfortunately, I have no way of going back to calculate the difference (or even remember what level he was at when the XP curve changed). In any event, it was eye-opening to learn just how much grinding it’s been since starting 3 years ago.
Thanks PL for keeping me out of trouble. Who knows what I would have done with those hours otherwise…
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