Alright for things like Tosha monks and guards etc, I should just influence without it? I have it off right now and at the same time as influencing I am actually gaining willpower even though I am using it simultaneously.

Well maybe not -gaining- it per say.. Just losing it at much, much slower rate.

It's really difficult to tell, I'm afraid; you're just going to have to try with and without it and notice which ones work best for you.

You could influence with it on for a while, then influence with it off as you recover willpower.

Whereas I turn off charismatic aura after every denizen or stack of denizens. Even when I am just going to move to the next room and influence again. It doesn't take away any balance to start or stop, so it's extremely quick.

I keep being amazed at how much trans discipline helps. Aubrey keeps complaining at willpower when bashing, and I had no idea how she was having issues until I realized that she's at Obliviousness and I'm trans.

Tailoring has the practical PK use of the trans benefit of awesome robes - it's sort of like a fullplate, except.. cloth.

Wow! I am level 81 and half way to 82. I have worked out through influencing I am getting roughly 0.08% each time. This works out to be 1025 influences to go from 0%-100% of that level.

I have heard when you are in the 90's that you only get roughly 0.01% per kill/influence. This means you need to influence a mind boggling 10,000 times to raise a level?!

This is not a complaint by the way, its just me sitting here thinking about it whilst I influence. Random piece of factual information

I found there was little difference between the levels until you hit 99. Then it drops like a stone; I got roughly a fifth of the experience during 99 as I did during 98. During 99 I got 0.01% per influence, roughly. That was during double-xp weekend though.

There surely must be some pretty big difference as you scale up the levels. 1,250 influences is quite different from 10,000 hehe. What is it, something like 500,000 exp added onto each level from like 80-90? I am just pulling numbers, but I recall on Aetolia forums they had their exp needed per level posted by the Admin.

Well, yeah, there is a difference. For instance, I would've needed 10k influencings during double-XP for level 99, which would mean 20k during normal times. Since that was roughly a fifth of what I got for 98, I would've needed 4k there. So between 80 (your 1250 influencings) and 98 (my 4000), it's not as huge a difference as you might've expected.

Yeah true enough. Mainly is just a hell of a lot of grinding - but funnily enough I have not got bored of it yet. I have a few more levels in me before I start to get bored I reckon!

I have bitched plenty about the grind, but the best thing I've found to do, and it works wonderfully with influence, is to just make sure that if you're not doing anything else, make sure you're gaining experience. If I find myself standing around at the nexus or something, I'll influence the guards. If I'm hanging out in my manse, I'll move one room out to the portals and influence guards. If I have a power debt, I'll clear elementals. If they dryads are back in Maylea's realm, I'll clear them out. If I'm bored, I'll go find a new quest to do. Even if some of those aren't the most efficient experience, it's something, and doesn't feel quite as grindy when you split it up like that.

Also, leveling a beast helps me. It's more morale boosting to watch your beast get big chunks of experience than it is to keep an eye on slivers of a percent that you're getting.

The post above is true. The key is to not lose your mind, not how fast or how massive your experience gain is!

My inspiration and its a pretty nice one is the esteem I am gathering

Esteem is nice, yes. Paid for my aethership, shield orb and all!

Interestingly enough, a three-room aethership with a shield orb comes out at exactly 1m gold. Hmm.

Just be glad this isn't DragonRealms.

I decided to try that game once, a couple of years back. During my second or third day of playing, I was being mentored by a character who was proud of his high-level climbing skill. I asked him how he'd raised his skill so high, and he said something to the effect of, "I spent several months doing nothing but climbing ."

"Real-life months?" I queried, OOC of course.

To which he replied: "Yes, real-life months."

I stopped playing DragonRealms after I logged out that day. I consider myself an old-school, hardcore gamer, but that is beyond the pale even by my standards. Someone did the math on DragonRealms once, and I believe they estimated it would take six or seven years to max out most of your character's important skills. Not six or seven years of regular playing — six or seven years' worth of hours.

I have a question that seems more appropriate here than in the Simple Questions sticky:

It seems that the "upper limit" for selling "full esteem " is 10,000 gold. Some player shops offer them for this amount, and I think I've seen that figure cited in other contexts as well. In-game, another player mentioned via tell that esteem needles can be sold for 7,500 gold, so I assume 10,000 is a premium price set by shop owners who can afford to wait for an esteem shortage.

However, on the Market channel, I quite frequently (most of the time, in fact) see people competing with each other in a very cutthroat fashion to sell their esteem needles. One person will advertise them for 6,500, then another will advertise 5,000, then yet a third will say, "You can get them even more cheaply from me!"

My question essentially boils down to this: If you're a person who sells esteem, do you consider the process bothersome? Are there significant ups and downs in supply and demand (meaning patience will fetch a higher price than undercutting and selling it as soon as you have it), or is it fairly constant competition most of the time?

Being a competitive salesperson is not my cup of tea, in games or in real life. Heck, being a salesperson period isn't my cup of tea. As a teenager I worked at a 7-Eleven (a chain of convenience stores/gas stations), and I didn't even like trying to pitch muffins and cookies to customers in the morning. (I actually refused to do it, but the managers didn't punish me for it because I was a very good worker otherwise).

So yeah, I'm just curious. And yes, I realize that an unwillingness to engage in economic PvP is a character flaw in online games, and I cannot always avoid it.

There was once a time each esteem item sold for 13,000 gold sovereigns. Then it became 10,000. That was the usual price, but then more and more people discovered influencing and soon the price plunged (the lowest was 1000 gold). Prices nowadays are actually considered high compared to a few RL months ago.

For me, however, I sell half of what I get to my organization, and the other half I keep. There are times when people get desperate enough to buy esteem for 8,000 to even 9,000, and I wait for those juicy desperate moments to let go of my personal stock.

Selling directly to the org sounds good, if it benefits the org. How much do they pay out for them, generally? And, it's good to know that there are in fact little windows of opportunity for selling to players at a premium. How often do these come about, would you say? I am more than willing to be patient and/or strike deals with shop owners.

I'm not really what you'd call a money-hungry player, but I am considering transing Influence in the immediate future, and so I'm fishing for a little preview of what I'm in for as far as putting esteem to good use.

The golden time to sell esteem is right before the ascendance. I think some desperate people were buying them for 3 credits each or something silly like that.

Of course, you'll be waiting the better part of an RL year for that one, and it assumes the shrine economy doesn't collapse due to changes to orders or something! (Not that I think anything like that is in the works, but it's a long time to wait and anything could happen...)