Full Battle, Steady, and Healing Attunement

The Skirmish Experiment continues! I’ve managed to get Almarune up to level 41, and I am still very much enjoying the experiment. I have begun to feel the grind a little, however. Now that levels are not coming quite as easily, the rewards of doing the skirmishes is delayed quite significantly.

I have, once again, been playing with my soldier class and traits, trying to figure out what is best to get through the content fastest. So far I’ve tried:

  • Protector: Good, but not great. I found that my skirmishes where very, very, very slow. Yes, I usually survived, but I did so at a snail’s pace.

  • Bannerguard: Nope, this sucked. This was almost useless to me. I found that, as a Rune-Keeper, the armor buffs where useless. The healing that he did was not enough for me to go full-out attack, and the damage that he did was almost as slow as the Protector, except he died more often, and I did too!

  • Warrior: This was a good soldier. It required me to stay in Healing Attunement for the lieutenants, but I enjoyed going through the trash mobs in Battle Attunement.

  • Herbalist: Now this is awesome! I’m able to stay in Battle Attunement most of the time, if not all the time. I fly through skirmishes very quickly and I enjoy being able to always be on the attack. It is a do-or-die situation, though. If I do get into trouble, I’m most likely going to die. I’m going to stick with this one for a while and try turning Tiny (that’s my soldier’s name) into a battery by giving him healing and power regen skills. I’ll keep you updated on how it’s working.

At this point in the experiment, it’s not very worthwhile for me to do many skirmishes after I’ve finished my daily quests (for those of you who don’t know, you only gain experience once a day for completing each of your skirmishes; after that initial completion, if you run the same skirmish again, you only gain experience for the mobs you defeat). The XP gain from mobs only is minimal, and I don’t find that it scales very well with the level, so a large portion of the XP I’m gaining these days is solely from the daily quests. When I’m level 43 and only getting 80 or so XP per kill, with rare peaks of 200-300XP, it’s just not worth my time. I’ll work on some other characters instead.

If someone were to ask me if skirmishing is the way to level as quickly as possible, I’d have to say that I am starting to waiver as to whether or not ignoring all questing would work. I’ll have to try it with another character to compare, but I think that the lack of the daily quest XP will drop the leveling speed to the point where the convenience of not having to travel will be lost to the low XP output of a skirmish.

Equipment-wise, skirmishes are definitly not the best way to go. The problem is two fold:

  1. The basic skirmish equipment is not as good as some of the quest rewards. The veteran items are on par with good quest rewards, however, but there are not very many of those items.
  2. A new tier of equipment is available on levels ending in 0, 3, and 7 (i.e. levels 40, 43, 47, etc), but even then, it’s not a full outfit, only parts.

Therefore, what happens is that you have a mis-matched set of equipment, a lot of it of lower quality, and most of it low-leveled. This doesn’t really work. Perhaps if you had kin mates crafting equipment for you, it would work better, but on your own through skirmishing alone, your equipment would be pretty bad.

Perhaps the sheen of the skirmish experiment is starting to fade, but the fact is, I’m still enjoying it. After nearly 100 skirmishes, almost 5,000 monster kills and 450 lieutenant kills, it’s still fun. I’ll keep you informed as we go into the final stretch of this experiment, and I’ll then start a new experiment, trying to level a character using skirmishes and the epic quest, to see if perhaps I can get a little more efficiency.

See you in-game!