Tinker's Guide to Power-Leveling

[Lujo]

^ That figures into why it's kinda dissapointing to watch. Every time I felt good during a run and thought I was making fine decisions, I'd take a look at the replay and facepalm at everything I could've done but didn't. It meant a lot of facepalming, and most things I could say would be contrary to what I was looking at on the screen... except they weren't, as whatever logic I was following worked, it's just that there was other things I could've chosen to do there and they proably would've worked, too. There's a million good moves in a run, so it's often about expression rather than sucess or doing the optimal thing. For this reason. I always found Tinker's entire approach to things an excercise in overkill (mine, on the other hand, was an excercise in lazyness). The old "how much can I get if I pay attention to everything" vs. the "how little can I be bothered to pay attention to and still get away with it".

So if you could watch the replay, what you'd learn is that whatever you do, there's a ton of things you could've done instead, most of the time.

[Tinker]

So, being a walking exercise in overkill, here's a run I just did... Western Jungle lit up so I decided to take a build I like, low preps, and do the chain:



I had fully intended *not* to L1 over-explore, but I found fireball very late. Found Mana Pendant, which was really good; I would've preferred an Elven Boots or something as well, but that translocated Yendor was also fine.

Thing is, because I had both Dwarven Gauntlets and Fine Sword, I switched between fireballs and melee, which works really well on a low-difficulty map like Western Jungle. I had to convert a glyph to do my L8 kill, and then I used the remaining resources to dispose of the boss (and then mop up). Binlor spawned but I just desecrated him for good measure... Of course, if you have better items, or a more spellcastery class, you don't even need the Melee angle.

[~'(^ + ^)'~]

Sometimes, I am surprised by what I can do, Managed to make better use of Imawal for greater XP shenanigans, sorry Tinker, beat your score even though I thought I couldn't, (Was at 76/85, just missing 10 CP for another conversion shot, so could have got even more XP, too bad there were no shops left to buy from, even used the potion shop already)

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... FB0A0024E/

If I had known, I would have not used my Translocation Scroll to nab the Vampiric Blade (lost half of its CP which is 25 CP). Could have skipped taking or postponed taking Learning Level 4 and used the gold for the Vampiric Blade instead. Translocation Scroll can also be converted. But, how would I have known, I still had around 15+ gold in the end.

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

I did 3 reference runs, trying to go for "pure" conditions on a two-boss map, ignoring all additional XP sources (petrification, slow, extra subdungeon monsters, learning, goblins, chaos avatar, humility, etc.). So basically, taking the 40 monsters, and defeating them in a given sequence, gaining only the basic monster XP and the level difference bonus.

I. Efficient Power-Leveling (a.k.a. "The Chain" )
Selecting the next target to ensure each kill only levels me up once (but gets me maximum XP within that):

So the standard 4/5/7/8/10/10/... chain.

II. Maximum Level Kill
Always killing the highest-level monster on the map, not worrying about level-skipping:

So the chain was: 10/10/9/9/8/8/8/...

III. Double Maximum Level Kill
Always killing the two highest-level monsters on the map, not worrying about level-skipping:

So the chain was: 10+10/9+9/...

Base XP is always 169 (the standard 38 monsters' 149 plus 2*10 for the bosses). Bonus XP varies based on the method used. I think it's interesting to note that the efficient chain is only 10 XP behind the maximum-level chain; however it requires considerably less amount of resources to pull off. The double-kill chain is only interesting for the first two kill-pairs, afterwards my character out-leveled the remaining monsters, making subsequent double-kills pointless. The big bonus compared to the maximum level chain is getting the L9 difference twice (as both bosses yield bonus XP based on the character's current level, L1).

Of course, XP modifiers like slow, petrification or Humility can push the XP numbers way beyond these figures.

[William]

Perhaps you could include a kill chain involving IMAWAL. I think it's roughly 3 > 4 > 6 > 7 and then probably bosses, havent done the maths yet. Probably quite a bit less resource intensive considering it's only 2-3 levels higher than player level. I did something like that on my one Android daily recently.

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

I did one more reference run, no modifiers except Humility, going for maximum bonus XP per level without double-dinging:

So 24 more XP versus the comparable Humility-free reference run, this is a bit lower than what my gut feeling was how much Humility is "worth" in terms of XP (though GG also offers Enlightenment, which should be able to provide more XP if needed). Funnily, Pactmaker's Alchemist Pact offers 3 XP per potion, which - on a non-potion race - is usually 8 potions, or 24 XP...

[zayyeh]

Tinker,

Are you at LV8(28/40) after the double bosskill at L1?

[Tinker]