Experience: What to Fight
In short: Fight monsters at your own level or above -- anything four or more levels below you pays a fraction of the experience.
The short version: fight monsters at your own level or above it. Anything four or more levels below you pays a tenth of what it should, however fast you can kill it.
On Aurenfall you earn experience as you damage a monster, not only when it dies — the bar ticks up with every blow that lands, and the kill itself pays a bonus on top. That means the experience a monster is worth is, near enough, the health it carries.
It also means the monster's level matters twice over, and the second time is easy to miss.
What a monster's level does to your experience
| The monster is… | You earn |
|---|---|
| 8 or more levels above you | +30% |
| 4 to 7 levels above you | +20% |
| 3 above → 1 below | full |
| 2 levels below you | 80% |
| 3 levels below you | 30% |
| 4 or more levels below you | 10% |
The drop below your level is deliberately steep, and it is steep for a reason worth understanding.
Why killing weak monsters faster does not help
Against a monster well below your level you also hit much harder — several times harder, and the further down you go the worse the beating. So a weak monster dies in a fraction of the time.
It is tempting to conclude that clearing a field of easy monsters is the quickest way to level. It was, once. The experience penalty is now sharp enough that it outruns the damage bonus: a monster four levels below you pays a tenth, and does not die ten times faster.
Measured at level 100: a monster five levels below now earns you about a quarter of the rate you would get from one at your own level. A monster five levels above earns about 17% more, and one ten above about 30% more.
Fight things that fight back.
Hunting in a team
Every living member of your team standing within about 35 cells of a kill is paid a share of it — you do not have to land a blow, or even fight. The share is half the monster's health, doubled when the member is the killer's spouse.
Two things about it are worth knowing before you plan around it:
- The share is paid at face value. An Experience Potion, Heaven Blessing and Rainbow gems double and boost the hunting you do; they do not multiply a share you were handed for standing nearby.
- Being far below the rest of the team does not pay more. There is no bonus for being the low one, and there never will be a shortcut in it.
Sharing the loot
The team window carries two switches, and only the leader can move them:
- Silver - shared by default. A teammate may pick up coin that fell for you.
- Items - not shared by default. Turn it on and your team may take each other's drops.
They matter only inside the first 20 seconds after a monster falls, which is the window its slayer owns. After that the drop is free to anyone who walks past, teammate or stranger, and no switch changes it. If you flip one and are not the leader - or are not in a team at all - the game now says so instead of doing nothing.
Being carried through the early levels genuinely works — a party farming Bird Island hard will take a new character to level 70 in a couple of hours. Past that the level curve does the talking: level 110 costs twenty-six times what level 70 did, so the same hunting that bought two hours of progress early on buys days of it later. There is no ground rich enough to change that.
Why a skill sits at 100% and does not level
Skill levels have a character level behind them, not just a training bar. Scatter's first level, for example, asks for character level 48: train it before then and the bar fills to 100% and stops there. Nothing is broken and nothing is wasted -- the skill is simply full and waiting for you.
The moment you reach the level it wants, the skill goes up by itself and says so in the top-left corner. You do not have to use it again to collect.
If a skill's bar has stopped, cast it once: the server tells you exactly which character level it is waiting for.
What this does not change
- Quest rewards — the daily hunting tasks pay a flat reward for the monsters they name, whatever your level.
- Skill and weapon training — proficiency and spell experience come from use, not from the level gap. Practising on something weak still trains the skill.
- Drops — what falls depends on the monster's own level, not on yours. A weak monster is a poor source of rare drops for the same reason it is a poor source of experience: it is a low-level monster.
- Double experience, Heaven Blessing and Rainbow gems all still multiply whatever you earn — they raise the good hunting and the bad alike.