Back in the day when i got demi, I had to walk up hill both ways for 10 miles just to kill a single baby rat. grumble grumble grumble

Also, taking people out to kill dragons with 20 lessons in aethercraft is a super bad idea and not a good way to get anyone to demi unless they already have it and want to lose it so they can get it again.

Only if they're the pilot. Or if all three gunners are new.

Who is Teo?

This is not true. You won't get many if any criticals with just a hanful of lessons in aethercraft regardless of your proficiency.

I just had two people mention that they're getting criticals at Apprentice, and I'm only Master and I was getting them quite regularly by ten percent. So yeah, it's true, if by handful I meant a hundred or two, which I did.

Edit: Unless it mainly scales with skill level and proficiency has little effect on it, but I don't think that's the case. Right?

You've got some pretty big hands there, or maybe lessons are just very very small.

From everything that I've seen and the testing that I've done crits are very heavily based on skill level. Proficiency may have a hand in it as well but it's not the deciding factor.

I'm new around here, from Aetolia as you probably guessed from my post. In game I'm still unknown and mostly unseen (all I've been doing so far is afk mastering my viola while adding Lusternia's 10 bazillion triggers into my system). You will eventually see me around as Traithe though, I promise.

I am still curious about the comparison to normal bashing though. When going from 99 to 100, how much is a creature in astral worth?

Not a very good comparison because dragons are the supermobs of aethspace.
Normal linked astral mobs are top tier fodder but still fodder so you go through them much much faster than dragons and would only be worth a small fraction of them.
Also, linked astral mobs get stronger depending on how many people are on their sphere so their xp worth can vary dramtically.

Your numbers are wrong. As a Human Titan with Harmony Domoth + Harmony blessing I was getting just over 0.02% per kill after the last nerf, which is somewhere between 4-5000 gargantuans for Titan-Demi. Even with Bloodrage, Autumn and Facebook blessing there is no way anyone could be getting 0.06% per kill.

As an aside, do you know how the various experience blessings stack, Chade? I'm wondering if I should grab the karma blessing.

You should definitely get it, no reason not to maximize your XP potential when you're hunting, especially in aetherspace as its the only blessing worth anything up there.

I mean, will it stack? I thought like, experience bonus could only go up to lvl 3.

I've always assumed it stacks, at Titan there is no way to tell though, you'll need to ask a Human Demi how much essence they're getting with and without to see if it really stacks.

I somehow missed this post until I saw Chade quote it. I was a bit unclear I guess. The 1800-2500 creatures per level was the average for the levels in the mid 90s to 99. That is, the levels which are 80-120 million xp per level. 99-100 is approximately 3 levels all in one, because it is 330 million experience. On the other hand, you are critting at maximum speed, and you are titan (tekal in Aetolia) so you are more capable of bashing safer and quicker. I am only assuming that the levels are the worth the same raw experience in both muds, but that may not be true.

My xp tracker predicted a bit of 6000 kills for 99-100, and while the risk is "high" I died very, very rarely. I didn't die once in the 90s at all, if I remember correctly, and I was semi afk for most of it (bashing on laptop in front of tv, while cooking, while working - keeping an eye on it and moving from room to room so I didn't get shrubbed for botting).

@Llandros
You said the astral mobs are fodder but you go through them fast. When you say fodder, what do you mean exactly? They go down in 4-5 hits and there are loads of them? Roughly how long (and please mention a level as well as an approximate number of minutes) would it take to get 1% while bashing them?