02/04/2026 Patch Notes - Effortlevel and EXP curve changes

[Martaigne]

A bug was found in the calculations of not-at-level content and sparked an investigation into experience rewards, and ultimately a rewrite.

Effort Level: (settings effortlevel)
Effort Level replaces Effort Percent and lets you fight at a lower level on purpose. This change intentionally makes it simpler to level-match content instead of guessing at the percent ratio you need.

You choose an Effort Level from 1 up to your effective max level.
When set below max:

• Your effective skill output is scaled down to match the effort you’re putting in. Be aware, this could affect mechanics such as armor usage!
• EXP rewards are calculated using your effective level, not your true level.

This is explicitly meant to support things like:

• hunting with lower-level friends without trivializing content,
• intentionally slowing progression during sparse content periods (aka monster gaps),
• keeping hunts fun without pushing your character’s “real” power curve too hard.

EXP rewards:
Combat EXP now accounts for level difference in a clean, tunable way, and is now logged for evidence:

• Fighting something near your effective level gives “normal” rewards, including mobs from -3 to +3 character level (instead of only 0).
• Fighting something above your effective level increases rewards (up to a cap of 2.0x).
• Fighting something far below your effective level heavily reduces rewards (down to a floor of 0.05x instead of 0).
• The -10/+10 Mob cap was removed in favor of this system, however it still affects EXP gained by attacks.

This makes overhunting/underhunting less practical the further you get from appropriate content, while still letting you do it for RP, grouping, or convenience.

What the new EXP multiplier curve looks like:

Code: Select all

 lvl  mult  ...to 0.05
-20: 0.110 |██
-19: 0.123 |██
-18: 0.138 |███
-17: 0.156 |███
-16: 0.179 |████
-15: 0.205 |████
-14: 0.236 |█████
-13: 0.272 |█████
-12: 0.315 |██████
-11: 0.364 |███████
-10: 0.420 |████████
 -9: 0.484 |██████████
 -8: 0.555 |███████████
 -7: 0.633 |█████████████
 -6: 0.718 |██████████████
 -5: 0.809 |████████████████
 -4: 0.903 |██████████████████
 -3: 1.000 |████████████████████
 -2: 1.000 |████████████████████
 -1: 1.000 |████████████████████
  0: 1.000 |████████████████████
  1: 1.000 |████████████████████
  2: 1.000 |████████████████████
  3: 1.000 |████████████████████
  4: 1.097 |██████████████████████
  5: 1.193 |████████████████████████
  6: 1.286 |██████████████████████████
  7: 1.374 |███████████████████████████
  8: 1.456 |█████████████████████████████
  9: 1.531 |██████████████████████████████
 10: 1.598 |████████████████████████████████
 11: 1.658 |█████████████████████████████████
 12: 1.711 |██████████████████████████████████
 13: 1.757 |███████████████████████████████████
 14: 1.796 |████████████████████████████████████
 15: 1.830 |█████████████████████████████████████
 16: 1.859 |██████████████████████████████████████
 17: 1.883 |███████████████████████████████████████
 18: 1.903 |███████████████████████████████████████
 19: 1.920 |████████████████████████████████████████
 20: 1.934 |████████████████████████████████████████
            ...to 2.000

What changed in monster EXP awarding:
Monster EXP awarding was simplified so it doesn’t try to do its own complex over/under-hunt math anymore—it now just:

• awards buffer EXP using the monster’s level as the “target level” input,
• relies on the new experience calculations to apply the correct scaling.

These changes will be live upon the next reboot - I will reply to this thread when that happens.

[Martaigne]

These updates are now live.