Hunting (the regular kind, not the aether version) is far, far faster than influencing unless you're something along the lines of a level 60 faeling. As someone who originally obtained demigod when aetherhunting did not exist, that's still a far more rewarding effort than squatting on a turret or glazing over after empowering the thousandth guard since it also teaches you how to know when to stick in a fight, when to run, and most skills necessary that cannot be coded into a system.

Yeah, I noticed that after the mid-80's, influencing slows down HARD. Well, everything does...but there isn't much to influence that still gives you a decent amount of xp after that point.

I think people recommend influencing because it's certainly easy to stand in the same spot and empower guards all day...but boy it's slowwww. If I'd not been tk so I could hunt as a trill, I never would have gotten to demigod, because I can not stand to spend that much time influencing over and over and over and auugh.

Man, what are people bashing that is better than influencing? High-80's human researcher and influencing (not guards!) is easily twice the XP per hour, with infinitely less risk. Also more gold. :|

No matter what, it's going to be pretty boring, especially if you're planning to do it all at once. And once you're there, what's next? Just keep in mind there's a lot more to the game than the 'endgame.'

This is what I wonder. The strongest things that I can find and kill without too much risk are garwights (not enough of them) and the stuff on Frosticia, and neither really outpace influence as a Titan. Am I just doing something wrong? Am I too squishy, or do I kill too slowly, or would I magically get a ton more xp from doing dangerous crap that might kill me?

Maybe possibly all of the above?

In all seriousness though, it's questions (and their subsequent answers) like that which also help just as much in pk since there's some overlap between survivability and speed in bashing and survivability in pk. Besides, why aren't you cleaning out the Illithoid prison regularly as a titan?

There's a huge difference between the races and classes for when influencing is better than bashing. For some, bashing is best from the very beginning, such as for Illithoids, Orclach and other low cha races. For squishier guardians/druids, it won't be until late 90's where you get a ton of criticals.

There's also a dependence upon how many credits and artifacts you've spent on survivability. Having splendour robes can make a huge impact on if your bashing will be good or not. Same with stuff like RoA. There are far more and much better artifacts to help with bashing than with influencing, as the influencing runes are rather weak.

For me, it was once I started getting a lot more crits that the pace really picked up. You don't have any chance of critical influences, so it pretty much will always be staying at the same speed to influence things. But if you go out hunting and start one-shotting things with WSCs every now and then, I mean, it's still slow, but in my experiences it's faster than influencing.

Because Malarious magically shows up when I try that, so I stopped bothering.

There's also TK making bashing much better for typical mage types, especially Trill, due to making charisma their constitution and getting a major "health" boost.

There's also not many incredible high-level influencing grounds. All the areas suggested for high level bashing can't be influenced.

tl;dr

Bashing is less monotonous than influencing and has critical hits, which let it outpace influencing at level x.
Influencing provides a steadier stream of experience and gold/karma, however, there is no such thing as a critical influence, so influencing will eventually slow down in comparison to bashing.

P.S. There also aren't high-level influencing areas, but high-level bashing areas that give decent experience with a lot of mobs (e.g. Illithoid Prison).

You can influence Illithoid, so I'm unsure why people keep saying this. Bashing might be faster, but you can influence them too, if you want.

Probably because you can't influence Muud, or Astral, or Xion, or the catacombs.

They're usually dead, plus if I'm not mistaken they don't have friendly personalities, which makes begging not as effective as in the kephera hives or Tosha.

You can weaken them and make your gold from selling the generated esteem.... or weaken then kill!

By the time you finish the whole prison, the ones up top are ready to be influenced again, so killing them doesn't even increase the experience earning uptime. Works if you get bored with influence, though!

To clarify what Zynna meant: lol, ur doin it rong.

I think elaboration is needed instead, because I don't see why weakening illithoid is so much better than begging from kephera.

I'm not saying it's better, just that you can. I'm saying that writing it off completely is really odd. If you use it as an example of a high level bashing ground, you have to include the Prison and Hives as high level influencing grounds. You simply can't say there aren't any high level influencing grounds in the same breath you say to go bash influencable mobs.