Grinding Push Through Surplus? Thoughts, Experiences

[Lord Robert]

Doing some math to get an idea of how long it will take to reach Rank 50 and have read some other posts/blogs from people who have reached levels into the 40s. Judging by the amount of time they spend SP'ing daily they must be hitting surplus. As me and my friends hit surplus we tend to back off of leveling that particular job. Does anyone know the penalty/hit you take to SP for grinding through surplus? Would like to hit cap in about 60 days but there is no way to do this without hitting surplus walls. Anyone have experience leveling past surplus. Please share

[Katlan]

at first its 90% xp, and goes down 10% for every "SE hour worth of accumulated SP" until reaching 0%. Now that "SE hour" is not a realistic hour worth of grinding, its longer because they seemed to of based it under the assumption you are getting skill for every mob at a consistent rate

[Nevex]

Right now the fatigue is barely noticiable and you'll most likely get bored of grinding and log off way before it can severely impact you.
I don't have the exact numbers, but anyway at rank 32 fatigue seemed to kick in after ~50k SP and didn't get any worse 20k SP after (i.e. it was still in the 90% stage).

[qpoiuwer]

at first its 90% xp, and goes down 10% for every "SE hour worth of accumulated SP" until reaching 0%. Now that "SE hour" is not a realistic hour worth of grinding, its longer because they seemed to of based it under the assumption you are getting skill for every mob at a consistent rate

It's somewhere between 7-12k per hour but I've never really paid attention that closely (seems like somewhere between 1 and 2 levels worth of exp at 30-35ish). I've done over that several times.

[Blackdreamr]

Usually kicks in at 100k for me, and I can go to 200k and not notice a particular decrease in XP/Hr duoing (average 200-300 skill per mob).

By the time it has any chance to get a lot worse, it resets. We XP about 30 hours a week right now and surplus is pretty much a joke. It might be worse at the 9hrs per day you need to grind to be 50 already though.

[Carraway]

All surplus does is reduce your skill cap per mob in increments of 50. It seems to kick in around the 80-100k mark, and though you will see "your bonus rank increases" quite a few times, each additional 10% increment only kicks in after a certain number of "bonus ranks". I was taking it pretty easy until around R25 then started party-grinding, and it was only in the past two weeks or so that I've hit 350 cap per mob. Surplus doesn't hurt you all that much if you're not capping on the vast majority of mobs you're fighting. And if you're getting 15k/hr without surplus, 13.5k or 12k or 10.5k/hr is far preferable to 0k/hr.

[qpoiuwer]

All surplus does is reduce your skill cap per mob in increments of 50. It seems to kick in around the 80-100k mark, and though you will see "your bonus rank increases" quite a few times, each additional 10% increment only kicks in after a certain number of "bonus ranks". I was taking it pretty easy until around R25 then started party-grinding, and it was only in the past two weeks or so that I've hit 350 cap per mob. Surplus doesn't hurt you all that much if you're not capping on the vast majority of mobs you're fighting. And if you're getting 15k/hr without surplus, 13.5k or 12k or 10.5k/hr is far preferable to 0k/hr.

I was under the impression that surplus was applied to individual skillups, which when combined with rounding accounted for being able to achieve over 450 sp while in surplus.

[Carraway]

I was under the impression that surplus was applied to individual skillups, which when combined with rounding accounted for being able to achieve over 450 sp while in surplus.

I didn't collect any data, and I know that the way the reduction in skill cap has some kind of error rounding involved, producing xx2~4 skill at the end of a fight, but on the way to R50 I noticed no drastic difference in skill per proc while under 10, 20, or 30% surplus. I could cap at 354 per mob and get that skill from one weaponskill in a large enough party.

[Enygma55]

My notice on surplus is that your sp gain per action is reduced by the same amount as cap (10%). Very noticeable when soloing/duoing for xp in deep surplus.

When u start at like say 40sp per action and it slowly dwindles down to 10sp per same action it hurts. Of course when you're in a large enough party, party bonus kicks in and boost sp gain per action where you don't notice anything because you're still raking in 300+ per mob on average. That 300 would be 450+ without surplus but not that big a difference if you grind it out.

[Chakra]

Like others have said, you really don't notice a huge decrease in SP gains when you have a good party bonus going on. Also, In my experience, gaining large amounts of SP on another class speeds up the cool down on your classes in surplus. More so than if you don't gain any SP at all and leave your character be. I hit bonus SP on Pugilist and probably gained about 10k after I hit the bonus before the party called it quits. Decided to rank CON from 8-20 (took about a day and a half and also went into bonus xp orz >_<). Went back to Pugilist and noticed surplus was gone. Took about 30k SP for it to show back up.

[theonemav]

Surplus does reduce your skill per proc and your skill cap per mob, but even grinding all day on one job to 50, I never saw it get higher then 30% (350 sp cap per mob) its really not that bad was still getting 12-18k an hour with 30% surplus.

[miokomioko]

It's obvious on gathering/crafting since you get a pretty consistent skill per success and you can see it drop when you hit fatigue.

[Zubis]

Surplus does reduce your skill per proc and your skill cap per mob, but even grinding all day on one job to 50, I never saw it get higher then 30% (350 sp cap per mob) its really not that bad was still getting 12-18k an hour with 30% surplus.

Yeah I never managed to get it worse than to 30% either.

Something I noticed though is that surplus seem to decay much faster the closer you are to the time of full reset. Over a night I went from 30% to only 10% the day before reset last week. This week I hit 50 to soon to be able to tell but maybe someone else has noticed something similiar?

[natethegreat]

at first its 90% xp, and goes down 10% for every "SE hour worth of accumulated SP" until reaching 0%. Now that "SE hour" is not a realistic hour worth of grinding, its longer because they seemed to of based it under the assumption you are getting skill for every mob at a consistent rate

This has not been my experience what so ever. Without keeping track of it it feels like my cap per mob is decreased by 50 sp every 75-80kish gained. The lowest I have seen my cap is at ~300

Surplus is a big deal to me. If it was not for surplus I would of hit R50 awhile ago. Grinding at almost 50% sp per mob after two days of grinding is insane!

@Zubis I just noticed the same thing. During my resting time I would only usually get 50-100 sp back to my cap. However, the day of my reset I got 150 back.

[miokomioko]

I know it's not fatigue, but I was noticing something while doing that initial easy push from Rank-1 to 10 on every class.

There was no obviously static cap to my skill gains, but on most mobs I was fighting (mostly yellow~red Beady Beetles, Fireflies, and Glowflies) I would very often see a good 2 or 3 big, fat skill gains (70~100) and then, I would get a stupid little one ranging from 1~15 or so. Then I would never get any more skill gains after that on that mob. Is the skill gain per mob capped a lot lower for low ranks? I never seemed to get more than 250~270 per kill and when I did get that much, it was always halted on the amount after a tiny little skill gain (which wasn't from parrying or anything like that).

example:

Phantom Dart - 78 skill!
Phantom Dart - 89 skill!
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart - 71 skill!
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart - 11 skill! (hit cap?)
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart
Phantom Dart - Kill

Total: 249 skill

[natethegreat]

I know nannys goats you can easily cap out on from rank 10 to about 16ish. At the lower ranks if you really want to cap out every fight you really have to fight stronger monsters. Some reds would get you about 200-300 while a few level higher would get you 500. It is all just a matter of finding the best mob for a particular level range. I know at about rank 10 you can start nannys and they last until about 16 or 17.

After spending about 50-100 hours grinding with a large group since R36 if I am not capping out every fight I am in a bad mood. I think they have spoiled me and now I am expecting to always cap out no matter what I am doing.

It may not be realistic to expect capping out every fight until you move onto efts and then onto raptors.

[miokomioko]

Well, I'm taking party-exping out of the equation here... and I was capping out my skill per mob, but it was at odd, varying amounts ranging from 250-ish to 270-ish... Not to mention I was as low as Rank-1 soloing a level 9 or so Glowfly with the same results.

[Kaiyoko]

Grind through surplus > get 50 > profit!

From what I noticed I never reached lower then a 350 skill cap from surplus. That is exping everyday 7~10 hours for a week getting roughly 150kish a session.

Wasn't really bothersome to me at least.

[kindrell]

That is exping everyday 7~10 hours for a week getting roughly 150kish a session.

With surplus is pretty damn good