Mythic has stated that they don't want people to get so caught up in leveling that they ignore the rest of the game. Levels 1-5 might take 1/2-1 hours per level, 6-20 might take 2-5 hours, and 21-40 may take 4-12 hours per level, while the final levels, 40-50 are reminiscent of EQ, and may take 20-30 hours per level.

     Kill some baddies!
This is your normal experience gathering mechanism.

Tasks
A task is a little mini-quest you do mostly for experience and some money. They are an excellent source of experience, but you can only gain 2/3 of your level through tasks, and you can only do tasks until level 20. There are two types of tasks - Merchant Tasks and Guard Tasks.

Merchant Tasks: Visit a merchant and type "task" or "help" while the merchant is targeted. The merchant will give you a package to deliver to another merchant. Deliver it and you are granted experience and money.

Guard Tasks: Visit a Guard with a name (not "Some Guard" but possibly "Captain Rainbow") and type "task" or "help." Captain Rainbow normally has a monster infestation in his town, and would like you to kill one of those types of monsters for him. Kill one, and then return to him for some good experience and money. These also give you a greater monetary and experience reward than Merchant tasks. If Captain Rainbow doesn't have a kill task for you, Captain Fancypants down the road may have one, so don't be shy to shop around.

Also - if you type "/task" in game, it will give you information on your current task, but it's not normally a big deal cause you can only have one task at a time. If you wait too long to complete a task (2 hours), or die, it'll disappear.

Post-20 kill tasks are a quest/task hybrid. You get them by right-clicking on an NPC; if the NPC has a task available for your level, the NPC will tell you a story, basically naming a monster and an item you should retrieve from that monster. When you then kill that monster, you may get the item named by the NPC - though it will not drop every time. The item will appear like a regular item, except that it will be capitalized. When you return the item, you will get experience determined by your level.

Quests
Most quests give experience. Normally, quests won't be a significant portion of your experience at lower levels - although you do get some nice quest rewards (uber gear). After level 40 the number of quests that you can do, and the amount of experience you get from them increases dramatically. There's more on quests in the quest section of the FAQ.

RvR
While it isn't a significant source of exp, you can get small amounts of experience by killing other players in RvR (or PvP on the 'Dreds). You won't *lose* experience in RvR, though.

     You sure are leet - you found something to kill that no one else has killed for a while. What happens is that all monsters in an area (you know how there's normally a little group of the same type of monsters that you're killing? That's what I'm calling an area) are on a timer. If monsters in that area have not been killed in a while (the timer is at max) you will get between 20% and 25% experience bonus when you kill those monsters. As you kill more and more of the monsters, that bonus goes down, little by little, until you stop getting a bonus for them. If you leave the monsters in that area alone for a little while, and come back later, they will have that bonus again (assuming no one else was killing them while you were gone). This is what Mythic calls Anti-Camp Code, and it is supposed to encourage you to move around a little bit, and to not sit at the same spot for hours upon end killing the same monsters. At lower levels this is a nice little bonus for you, but not a huge deal. At higher levels, 25% extra experience is sometimes enough to get you to move around a bit.

     First, let me say this group bonus is not due to the fact that you, as a player, are grouped with any number of people. This group bonus is because you killed those two DragonBeetles that were grouped together. Unlike the general experience bonus I explained above, this bonus never goes away. As long as you kill grouped monsters, you get a little extra experience because they were tougher than killing two DragonBeetles that were not grouped. Please note that the group bonus applies to monsters that group naturally, and monsters that grouped because of Bring a Friend Code, but NOT monsters that came because the monster you were killing called for help.

     There are two other ways to get experience bonuses. One is generally referred to as the 'keep bonus'. When you kill monsters that are pretty close to a keep that's claimed by your realm, you'll get an additional 10% experience for every kill. This experience prints out on a seperate line from your normal experience, so it's easy to tell when you're close enough to the keep to get it. Also, if it's your guild that owns the keep you'll get a 20% bonus.

Finally, there's a sort of hidden bonus for killing monsters in dungeons and in the frontiers. The way this bonus works is that the camp bonus comes back much faster. So, you can usually get away with camping the same place for much longer without losing the bonus experience.

     You can receive the group bonus, the camp bonus, and the keep bonus at the same time.

     You’ll never see an experience penalty, but they do exist. This is also part of the anti-camping code. When you first visit a monster that has not been killed for a long time, it will have a 25% bonus on it, and you’ll see it as “You gain 500 experience! (+100 bonus)!” Over time, if you keep killing the same monster, the bonus will disappear, and then if you continue killing it past that time, it will give less and less experience, down to a –25% penalty. The interesting part is, it will no say, "You gain 500 experience! (-125 penalty)!" it will just say, "You gain 375 experience!"

     O.K. let me list the only two times you will get less experience than normal -which is not to say penalty, because as I said before, there's only one way to incur a penalty, and that is for over-camping the same monster.

So, you're level 18 and you grouped with some level 34's. They're probably killing stuff that's very purple to you. Everyone else in the party will get much more than you do as your experience will hit a cap for your level. Depending on how tough the monsters are relative to the party, you'll usually end up getting about the same amount of experience as you'd get for soloing a monster that's orange-con to you.

     Well, I guess you weren't as leet as you thought you were, eh? =) When you are slain by a monster, you enter what's called "ghost" mode. In ghost mode, you are dead, but not completely dead. You are the ghost - you can send tells to other people and look around, but you can't move or speak aloud. This is the only period during which your character can be resurrected. If you don't want to wait to be resurrected, or can't find a healer, type /release to release your soul, set down a gravestone, and officially die. If you do not /release or do not get resurrected after a certain amount of time, you will automatically get /released after 10 minutes.

     If you get resurrected, you will lose 1/2 the normal amount of experience, and no constitution. You will magically come back to life at the feet of the healer who resurrected you, losing any buffs you had, and the HP and Mana you have when you are resurrected are based upon the resurrecter's healing skill.

     Up to level 5, nothing happens other than a teleport back to your bind spot. After level 5, there are four events that occur after you die:
1. You lose experience. The lost experience is less for your first and second death during any given level. On the third death, you lose the full amount of experience, which is dependant upon your level, but will not exceed 10% of your level.
2. You lose constitution points. Not permanently, but it's bad nevertheless. Visit a healer in a town and pay him some coin to get your lost constitution restored. The amount you pay is based on your level. Players cannot restore your constitution. Your first death you will lose one point of constitution, the second death you’ll lose two, and all other deaths after you will lose 3.
3. You gain resurrection sickness. This is a general debuff that lasts around 5 minutes or until cured and halves your WeapSkill stat. Only a town healer can cure resurrection sickness - but it's at least they do it for free.
4. You get a free teleport back to your bind point, or starting town. If you want to change your bind point, just type /bind in front of a bind stone in any of the towns, and then next time you die you'll get sent back to that town.

     If you /released, you can return to your gravestone and /pray to regain some of the experience you lost from dieing. If you pray at your gravestone, you will get the same amount of experience back as if you got resurrected. Please note that you can only have one gravestone at a time (Sorry, you can't spell out your name with gravestones, but you can do that with loot bags if you're quick).

     No. You can only be resurrected if your soul has not risen to its final resting place (in other words, you can only be resurrected while you are in ghost form).

     You must be pretty talented then, because you never even drop a corpse in Camelot, so how could you lose it?

     Levels 40 through 50 are special. During these levels, there are "halfway points" like halfway between level 40 and 41 is level 40.5. At this halfway point, you get extra skill points (woohoo!) but also, your deaths for the level get reset. So, if you died more than three times in level 40, but then reach level 40.5, the game will reset your deaths to 0, so the next time you die, you'll only lose a little experience - just as if it was the first time you died that level. The extra skill points you get at 40.5 is half of what you got at 40, and at 41.5, you'll get half of what you got at 41, etc.

     Nope, nor can have negative experience in your level.

     You will go back to wherever you are bound.

     Well, if you've never changed it, you are bound to the town you first began your life in.

     You can only be bound in towns with BindStones in them. You should know a BindStone when you see it - they are very large, ornate stones in the middle of town. To bind yourself to a certain town, walk over to the BindStone and type /bind, but make sure you watch your Battle Text Box, because it will tell you if your bind was successful, or if there was a problem with it.

Please note you can also bind at a bindstone in a house in the housing expansion area. The game keeps track of which house you're bound to separately from your normal bind. So, when you die, you can choose to either /release to your normal bindstone, or you can use /releasehouse to go back to your bindstone in the housing expansion.

     Walk well outside of town and type /bind, it will tell you where you are currently bound.

     8 people big.

     The experience reward for a group is determined by a part of the game known as the challenge code. We don't know exactly how it works, but in general it determines the experience reward based on how much of a challenge the battle was for the group. So if a high level group has one or two low level characters, the experience shouldn't be too bad. But if a group has a few high level characters and a lot of low level characters everyone will probably be hit with a sizeable experience penalty.

     It's not, but you need to group with people in your level range for the best experience rewards.

     This is called "Bring a Friend Code." Basically, for every two to three people in your group, you have a chance the monster will know that there are more people than he can handle by himself, and will ask a friend monster of his to come help kill you. If there are no monsters of the same type in the area, then he can't bring any friends. From my experience, here are how many monsters you can expect to get:

1 person - 1 monster
2 people - 1 monster
3 people - 1 or 2 monsters
4 people - 1 or 2 monsters
5 people - 1 to 3 monsters
6 people - 1 to 3 monsters
7 people - 1 to 3 monsters
8 people - 1 to 4 monsters
9 people or more - 1 to 5 monsters

And when I say people, you can translate that to group members, and when I say group members, it includes any pets your group may have! So an Eldritch and a Druid grouping should never pull more than one monster due to 'Bring a Friend Code', but if the druid summons a pet, there's a chance they could get two.

Please note that some monsters just group up naturally - this isn't 'Bring a Friend Code', this is just monster grouping. When we talk about 'Bring a Friend Code', we're talking about monsters that don't normally group. If 8 monsters are grouped before you attack them, they will all attack you, even if you are by yourself.

On the other hand, there are some types of monsters that will never bring a friend no matter how many people are in your group. Even monsters get lonely sometimes.

     Mousemaster's Guide to grouping has everything you ever wanted to know about grouping etiquette, strategy, and you name it.

     Well, all of them. Every class will be able to solo at least blues to level 50, depending on their specialization. Most classes can solo yellows, and a few can solo oranges. As a rule of thumb, thief/assassin classes will be the hardest to solo, and rangers and pet users will be the easiest to solo.

     Having played one of the best soloing classes in the game, and then grouping with that class, I can tell you if you find a good group, the experience will always be better than soloing! (Note the use of "good group." I will not be held responsible for idiots ruining your day =P)

     Well, soloing serves two purposes. Soloing greens is an excellent source of money. Trust me... if you are low on cash, solo greens. Also, if you ever want to just log on for 20 minutes or a half-hour and kill a few things, that option is always open to you. Also, if you are one of those people that always gets me killed, feel free to solo all the time.

Before You Buy
Character Creation
The Interface
Chat and Comm.
Killing Stuff
Training
Miscellaneous
Abilities & Skills
Non-Magic Skills
The World of Magic
Experience
Items
Quests
Geography
PvP Combat
Castles and Sieges
Guilds
The Herald
ToA Info
Miscellaneous 2
Help