Monolith Quest XP is an alt character penalty?

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1

I tried searching for this but haven’t found a post for it which makes me think I am misinterpreting something, but I don’t see how…

Completing individual monoliths for the first time awards (lets keep it simple) 100k XP
You complete 5 of them - lets say that’s 500k XP
This is worth X progression of your character in terms of levels for your first character. It’s quite a lot especially at ~L50 or so.
You create a new character
You complete the campaign
You enter the monolith, all mono quests autocomplete giving you an XP bonus, but it ISN’T the value of the quest. This appears to be capped at 4(?) levels. This might be anything from as little as 20k XP at level 17ish to a couple of hundred maybe at 50? I dunno the absolute numbers at ~50 but I know for sure it’s capped there and it’s giga capped at the low end

So, if your first character completes all 10 monos they get 100% value from each of the monolith quest rewards.

However, subsequent characters enter the monolith area (which they have to at some point if you plan on doing any end game), and boop they find out that they’ve just received an effective XP penalty.

I don’t think I’ve heard of a game which penalises players for playing additional characters before.

It seems to me you have a choice. Either make the quests not autocomplete (probably the lightest touch/most sane solution), or autocomplete them at 100% value (this would POOOOOWERLEVEL characters tho so maybe you don’t wanna go this route). Or leave it as is because you’re banking that people will think I GOT BONUS XP WHEEEE and won’t realise that they’ve actually been screwed over. In fairness, it’s a solid position to take now I say it out loud.

Screw it, I’m an optimist (and a liar, apparently) so lets assume the correct solution is to not autocomplete the quests.

The game appears to know your unlocked timelines before you go into monoliths (shows x/10 in the End of Time map screen), so if that’s the case it surely could be made such that it doesn’t need to the quests themselves to be in a completed state to enable the monoliths you have unlocked on your account. Unlock the monoliths based on the global monolith progress, and lock the XP behind actually DOING the monos.

Perhaps you could even split the difference: completing a monolith’s quest could also complete all uncompleted quests for monoliths preceding it. That way you can opt in for full value XP (going start to finish individually or in sections), or sprint it, but capping your XP reward by doing The Last Ruin, or starting empowered monos right away. The player therefore would have agency about what deal they want to make, rather than just be force fed an unsatisfying penalty no matter what.

The next character I take into the monolith for the first time I will get some actual numbers for what XP I get at what level, and will update, but it might be a couple of days.

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The quests amount to a tiny amount of exp in the grand scheme.

I have the opposite take, I think its rad that as soon as I get all my idols/passives I pop into echos and immediately get like 5 levels.

But yes, the exp is capped. This is true of any character actually, characters only may gain so much exp at once. This was done because people were taking fresh characters to monos (you can do this as soon as you finish chap 2) and blasting up to really high levels letting them essentially power level.

Tdlr; ignore the quest exp its not real, its not an “alt” penalty, its nothing. sometimes its a nice little mid range level boost. Thats it.

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If the reason is to prevent powerlevelling, then code to defend against the powerlevelling. Sure, this does it, but it doesn’t give a crap about the collateral damage it does to a random’s experience. The solution to a check engine light is not to just crush your car.

It’s possible to pretend that because something had a why, that any how is good enough, but it’s not. Good hows are good enough. Bad hows are not. Any amount of penalising alt characters is, in my view, wrong - and it’s better off to design in a way that enables the boost feeling that you mentioned if possible (like the solution I described above) without the deleterious impact to hobbyists, or, really, anyone.

As such, it feels like an exotic take to say “alts need to eat it, it’s nothing”. I am 100% sure that this is reasonable if you ran a solved season starter, or your alts are in essentially BIS gear, or you’re an experienced player, and the content is irrelevant until the monsters catch up to your gear/ability which is a mile down the line.

Think of it this way:

“Chinese water torture is bad, I don’t think I’d like that happening to anyone” the response “It’s no big deal, it’s just dripping water, they just need to ignore it.” is objectively true and, possible. Except experiences are not solely about “what objectively is”, are they? It’s about how something is going to make people feel.

If the XP was awarded in a little more sophisticated way, the only hit a blaster would suffer is that they couldn’t/might not want to take their XP bonus mid-levelling. They still get it at the end. Is that more or less impact than screwing over the non-blaster? I’d say far less. Are the blasters the ones that really need to be looked after here? I’d say no.

To me, and I therefore arrogantly presume others, blasting isn’t what a game experience should really be centered on. If someone wants to play the game that way, that’s fine, of course it’s an option - but it shouldn’t feel like a necessity to counteract the unsatisfying feeling of an XP penalty that they’ve implemented by flinging the problem into a metaphorical car crusher, where it probably has better potential solutions.

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I don’t feel penalized at all. When I ran every character through the story line (pre-season 3), my main would be around L58, while my Alts would be around L62. Now, since I skip what I can with Alts, I usually hit Monos right after getting my mastery, usually a 10-level bump.

By the time you hit the mid-point of Normal Monos, your level should be consistent with everyone else.

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Oh you’re getting a 10 level bump? It sounds like the cap is proportional to the number of completed monos you have, which would make sense if each autocompleted quest is individually capped (as a % of a level?). Good data point, thank you :slight_smile:

Ultimately, as DiceDragon said, the absolute value of the XP is relatively low so at some point whether you got 20k XP or 2M XP it isn’t going to feel any different the longer you keep playing.

It sounds like you’ve played a bunch tho, I do wonder if you fit into one of the categories which I described that aren’t so impacted. If you’re breezing the content smoothly, you get to that breakpoint rather quickly so the detectable impact on you is diminished to near zero.

Come to think about it, I suppose the amount of impact a player may feel will also vary based on whether they’re playing HC or SC. No reason that they should feel the same of course, but that choice may well have an impact on their overall experience. HC players may repeatedly not hit the breakpoint on their characters so may repeatedly be exposed to a situation where the penalty is detectable. This doesn’t sound like an eventuality that you want to force any of your players to endure. Sure, GIT GUD could be an answer to this but it’d be another poor, facetious one, that handwaves the reality that they have been penalised. Players should not be penalised unless it’s an opt in choice.

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I thought the devs had said something along the lines that the xp from those quests could take you to the next level but wasn’t carried over? Or something along those lines.

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Seems more likely to be ‘Each quest is worth, at max, the total amount of XP required for the level you’re currently in’. When I got the bonus I didn’t finish with 0/95000 XP for the new level I was in, I was at some point through it.

This would sound like the reasonable limit to defend against powerlevelling 30 levels in one go, and would explain why ajgringo was getting 10 levels if he’s completed all 10 base mono quests.

Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if this constraint was applied for your first character playthrough as well… it’s just that as you have played more by each turn-in point that the quests are worth more/all of the absolute quest value. But this is never true at lower level, you’ll always hit the constraint. It would be interesting to see if you hit the constraint even if you’ve completed all 10 acts of the campaign…

edit - checked the VOD of my first fall of the outcasts clear this season, I was 64.85 at the point of hand-in and went to about 65.15 so first characters aren’t really even close to being impacted by any cap

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Yeah, that’s what I meant.

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You don’t get the XP for all monolith quests when you enter them. You have to enter a few of them separately and you’ll get more completion XP.
I always hop to all monoliths when I’m doing this, because some will give you XP only after you go into those and I never remember which do and which don’t.

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I should have added that I always enter Fall of the Outcasts first, then jump to Spirits of Fire to get the XP boost.

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I think the left side also gives you one, if you completed them with another character.
Overall I think I get 4 xp boosts when I run around the place.

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Interesting, I’ll have to try this with my next Alt.

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Ahhh hang on so it does segregate the XP rewards?!

This would diminish the impact somewhat as due to natural XP progressing within the monos you’re almost certainly going to be hitting higher levels prior to triggering the rewards for the later monoliths so you are going to be getting better “value” for them. If that’s the case then this further reduces the impact of it (perhaps even to zero for later reward “stages” depending on when you do them). So, as long as this is actually the case and no one’s mistaken or lying to me :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: , I was actually missing something, and it is not quite as bad as I thought.

Perhaps it does even work kiiind of how I described it:

  • ajgringo said they do spirits of fire and get 10 levels (but they’re choosing all rewards all at once but for overall worse value) - I thought they were getting those 10 levels when they walked through the door - if they’re not that’s WAY WAY WAY different :rofl:

  • DJSamhein said it’s split into 4 reward stages (get rewards staggered, but better value), but just not as granularly as I’d described - but at least XP rewards are split out into distinct sections.

I still legit don’t know if you get 100% value if walking into monos after completing the campaign in full - if so then I might need to chill tf out entirely, because then “opting in” is entering the monolith at all before completing the campaign :stuck_out_tongue:

If anyone does happen to know, I’d appreciate knowing which of the monoliths are ones which are XP triggering ones, and which of the quest rewards are applied when walking through the door too?

Thanks for your feedback everybody, this has made me feel marginally less cranky about the whole thing, so unless completing the campaign eliminates impact, I’d still consider the implementation to be a bit weird. However even if it does, it offends me far less that this has some degree of intelligence applied to limiting the negative impact early rewarding of mono quest XP. If they have thought about this, and it appears that they have, quite why it’s not fully granular (per my described solution) is mind blowing to me, but what the hell do I know. For now I am gonna chill my beans about it and see whether I do get full bang for my buck next time I complete the campaign prior to entry of monoliths, assuming a) I remember to check when I walk through the door and b) do my duty to science and finish A10 before entering monos.

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I didn’t say anything about value. I have no idea what the value is because I never really paid much attention to it.

From what little experience I’ve had with this so far, I’d say that the best use of these bonuses is after doing the campaign. I did this with one of the alts, got the same level boosts. Got like 4 or 5 levels while being level 55-ish.

In fact, every time I jumped into the monoliths, no matter what level, I always got 4 or 5 levels. I don’t know how some people are getting so many levels.

So, given that each level requires progressively more XP, I’d say that getting the bonuses at level 55-ish or 60 is worth more than at a lower level.
On the other hand, getting a few levels boost at 20-ish can also be great.
And on the 3rd hand (AAAAHHH! Mutant! Lock it in the vault!!), even at level 60 getting a new level is a matter of minutes, so that’s not really too relevant anyway?

So maybe it’s more of a strategic choice, depending on your build?

As for the original question of whether we’re getting the full XP from the quests or not? I don’t think it even applies. The XP we get from those quests was always minimal when playing the monos regularly.
Definitely not enough to give you 4-5 levels at 55-ish.
So I don’t think we’re getting the XP from those quests, we’re getting some weird reward instead.

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Oh, sorry, I know you didn’t, I was saying that :stuck_out_tongue: I was just drawing my conclusion from what you were saying - that you end up getting better absolute value if you’re getting “regular” XP/levels prior to getting the later mono quest rewards because they’re not forced on you the second you walk in.

ajgringo said he was doing the 9th(?) mono (but still a L100 one) and getting 10 levels at that point: presumably it is behaving as I proposed - all previously unawarded XP rewards up to that mono are awarded simultaneously. So if you’ve been doing each mono incrementally, the rewards will be awarded incrementally, which is why you’ve not had a large XP spike? That sounds most likely to me.

I am pretty sure that walking into monos at ~L49 I got something like 4 levels too, but then I’m not 10/10 unlocked. I don’t know about alts that were higher than that though, I wasn’t looking out for it at the time.

There is definitely something to be said about making the call based on when the “wake up” point is for a build. Maybe if a build only becomes viable at 25 and until then it’s REALLY bad then it would make sense to frontload the initial mono bonus XP just to expedite hitting that point. I like that this is an option, as long as it’s not overly punitive - which it sounds like ultimately it isn’t - if the rewards are split.

I don’t know about how the rewards feel deeper into the mono on an alt: like I said there was some nuance that wasn’t clear to me in my original interpretation - I think I’m not best qualified to make that determination for an alt playing into a 10/10 unlocked mono.

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I don’t think so. The first time I actually even knew this was a thing was a couple weeks before the season launch when I was playing an alt and went to monos after finishing the campaign. I was aware that you only needed to finish one of the top ones on an alt, so I jumped into Spirits of Fire and was surprised to get the sound notification of leveling up as well as some notification like a quest ending (which I didn’t read and I still haven’t read). I got like 4 or 5 levels at that time.
Then I decided to jump around the other monos (which was a pain, since this was in offline before 1.3, so I had a loading screen for all :laughing:) and I got more levels, though I never remember which ones gave me more. I think Reign of Dragons was one and the entrance one as well.

So going directly to one of the top 3 won’t immediately give you all of them. It works in some weird way I haven’t yet understood.
Maybe next alt I make I’ll create a copy of the save and try it out in all the different ways and combinations to see how exactly this works.

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Oh okay. Well that’s that theory borked then :smiley: Don’t stress about testing it on my account, but if you do get any results I’d like to hear them :slight_smile:

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To be honest, I’m curious about this as well.
The only reason I’m not working towards testing it already is simply that I got covid and haven’t been up to playing this week yet. :stuck_out_tongue:

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OK, I have a minor update. New char, finished A10 at level 59, 1754550XP. Went into mono, dinged to 62, 2274550 XP. 520k XP, which is the full Q rewards for FotO, Stolen Lance, The Black Sun, and Blood/Frost/Death which are the monos I have completed this season.

So actually if you finish A10, it looks like unlikely that you take a penalty at all - can’t say for sure because I don’t know what the Q rewards are for later monos, but I think it’s safe to assume that they aren’t worth a full level in the 60s. I think the new act progresses you way far enough that you’ll never hit the cap. I went in after A9 on my previous char and DID get a penalty, but now that A10 is out it can actually be said that that’s a player choice and therefore opt in. aka I came out swinging far too ignorant, and I think I can pipe down now. I think I carried over my irk from prior seasons where you didn’t have A10, so you didn’t have a choice outside of farming for XP in the campaign (and what lunatic would do that?)

It looks like level 56(?) is the no penalty point for mono XP/quest rewards - if not that, then it’s close to it. Deep breaths … aaaaand relax, me. Thaaat’s right… shhh shh shhh, yes, yes, we kill again in the morning.

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I have no direct comparison vs what a new character gets but I do know that every alt I just go to the last mono and instantly go from high 50’s to 64-65 every time.