Quantifying the Ruthless Character EXP Penalty

Please disregard this thread if the math wizards have already figured everything out with cleaner data and have predictions for level 99. I'm just not able to find the info anywhere and I've spent more time looking than doing these tests.



Anyway, I was playing a bunch of Ruthless mode and got curious as to exactly how the exp penalty worked there. I wanted to obtain some fresh exp values for Standard PoE for comparison, just in case there's been some recent ninja nerf/buff again.

My guild and friends killed 4 mobs to see what exp they gave in Standard at each level from 90 to 98. 2 low level mobs and 2 higher levels, one unique and one normal in each pair. No thought was put into selecting them, they were just the first things I ran into in R. I just wanted a mix of normals and uniques just in case something weird started to happen between them in either Standard or Ruthless.



STANDARD:

Guard Captain (Act 3 unique miniboss):

Lv90 - 83exp
Lv91 - 83
Lv92 - 83
Lv93 - 83
LV94 - 83
Lv95 - 71*
Lv96 - 61
Lv97 - 52
Lv98 - 42


Enraptured Beast (Act 7 bears infected by parasites outside town, counting only the bear's exp, not the extra you can get from the attached parasite accidentally by shattering or otherwise destroying corpse):

Lv90 - 83
Lv91 - 83
Lv92 - 83
Lv93 - 83
LV94 - 83
Lv95 - 70*
Lv96 - 61
Lv97 - 52
Lv98 - 42


Bone Husk (Act 10 version of Ossuary):

Lv90 - 555
Lv91 - 452
Lv92 - 372
Lv93 - 309
LV94 - 259
Lv95 - 186
Lv96 - 164
Lv97 - 118
Lv98 - 92


Tolman, the Exhumer (Tier 1 Mausoleum map boss, note that his Noble Dead minions give no exp, only the mobs he spawns in first phase do, so I made sure they were all dead first before recording exp):

Lv90 - 5177
Lv91 - 4167
Lv92 - 3393
Lv93 - 2792
LV94 - 2321
Lv95 - 1655
Lv96 - 1456
Lv97 - 1043
Lv98 - 729


*Guard Captain's expected raw exp should be 8360 (1520 base x 5.5 because uniques have a 450% exp boost, I believe). A normal Enraptured Beast's raw exp should be 8342. 83 makes sense as their minimum exp until 95, as it is 1% rounded down. At most levels these 2 mobs gave the same exp, there was only a rounding difference of 1 exp between them at level 95, where one gave 71 and the other 70. Nothing strange about that. It's just a huge coincidence that I accidentally picked 2 mobs that give almost the same exp.

[Sidenote: I'm surprised to see at level 95+ that it's possible to get less than 1% of a mob's base exp in Standard. Weird. The formula on the wiki and all the online exp calculators just stop at 1% and ignore the fact that penalties can make you get even less than 1% at 95+. The wiki article on Experience has a 0.01 term in the max(x,y) function. This can't be correct, because clearly the 95-99 extra penalty lets you get even less exp than 1% of the mob's base. Those guys need to revise their formula ASAP]

Anyway, now that we have some values for Standard, time to look at some for Ruthless.



RUTHLESS:


Lv 80:
33 from Guard Captain A3 (idk % - don't have recent STD numbers to compare)
33 from Enraptured Beast A7
3378 from Bone Husk A10
33020 from Tolman T1

Lv 82:
26 from Guard Captain A3
26 from Enraptured Beast A7
1435 from Bone Husk A10
14603 from Tolman T1

Lv 90:
13 from Guard Captain (15.66% of what a 90 gets in STD - huge rounding error)
13 from Enraptured Beast (15.66% of STD - huge rounding error)
92 from Bone Husk (16.58% of STD)
864 from Tolman (16.69% of STD)

Lv 91:
11 from Guard Captain (13.25% of STD - not losing much to rounding error here)
11 from Enraptured Beast (13.25% of STD - again, lucky with rounding here)
60 from Bone Husk (13.27% of STD)
554 from Tolman (13.29% of STD)

Lv 92:
41 from Bone Husk A10 (11.02% of STD, thanks to Zrevnur/Thyrvish for testing)
376 from Tolman T1 (11.08% of STD)

Lv 93:
29 from Bone Husk A10 (9.39% of STD, thanks to Zrevnur/Thyrvish)
265 from Tolman T1 (9.49% of STD, thanks to GarryOnMain/Aasabde)
2611 from T12 Erebix

Lv94:
21 from Bone Husk A10 (8.11% of STD, thanks, Zrevnur/Thyrvish)
192 from Tolman T1 (8.27% of STD, thanks to GarryOnMain/Aaaaaaabde)

Lv95:
122 exp from Tolman T1 (7.37% of STD, thank you LightDarkness/mageckCreep)
992 exp from Erebix T12 (ty Zrevnur)
1124 exp from Vision of Justice T13 (ty Zrevnur)

Lv 96:
96 exp from Tolman T1 (6.59% of what a 96 gets in STD, thanks to Pools)
10 exp from Bone Husk A10 (6.10% of STD, thanks to Pools. We're at really huge rounding errors at this point - note that if we take a Husk's 164 exp that a Lv96 gets in STD and take 6.59% of that, it still rounds down to exactly 10exp, so it is still probably the same real % as we saw for Tolman at 96R)
777 exp from T12 Erebix (thanks to Elezra for the test)

Lv 97:
462 from T12 Erebix, so this is about 5.99% of STD exp (thanks Pools_Ruthless for Ruthless test and thanks Mercenary4u for verifying it gives 7713 in Standard)


We have a bunch of samples now and it's always roughly the same % of Standard exp, with rounding errors, regardless if doing low or high level mobs, uniques or normals.

So I conclude that the Ruthless Penalty is just a % of what exp the mob would give you normally in standard at that level, with no further complications. It gets worse with each Ruthless character level. The increase in the penalty per level doesn't look linear.


I don't particularly care if the Ruthless 68+ penalty acts the same way as the 95+ penalty does in Standard, whether it replaces it or acts alongside it. I only care about roughly what % of actual final Standard exp I'm getting in Ruthless, so we have a ballpark figure on just how big of a project each level up is. The math wizards can figure out the exact formulas later.



So in short:

The penalty for 90R makes you get about 16.69% from any mob, of what a STD player would get at 90 from that mob.

The penalty for 91R makes you get about 13.29% of STD at 91.

At 92 you get around 11.08%

At 93 you get around 9.49%

At 94 you get around 8.27%

At 95 you get around 7.37%

At 96 you get around 6.59%

At 97 you get around 5.99%

And so on. We need to complete a table for more levels, higher and lower.



Tolman and especially A10 Bone Husk are NOT good mobs to test on. They are crude approximations and we're already losing way too much accuracy to rounding errors in the early 90s. I did not expect the penalty to be so huge when I started, otherwise I'd have collected data in higher tier maps.

We are changing the test to T12 Erebix for now.

Maybe.

Who knows?

Feels like, sure yeah
Why not.

The 90-100 grind is too long anyway.

Bumping thread to maybe get some volunteers of various levels to help test, to get smarter eyes to look at this and do better tests, and above all, for people to inform me if all this work has already been done elsewhere in more detail and I just failed to find it.

Bone Husk Ossuary @ 92 gives 41 XP

"

Zrevnur wrote:

Bone Husk Ossuary @ 92 gives 41 XP

@93 its 29. Not sure this fits with my @92 number. If not I may have messed it (the 92 number) up.

Thanks for testing and grats on 93!

Your numbers fit everything nicely.

@92 you got about 11.02% of the exp a 92 player would get in standard off A10 Bone Husk. A slightly bigger penalty than @91, and slightly smaller than @93.

@93 you got 9.39% of what a STD player would get at 93 from Husk. Makes perfect sense. Garry got 9.49% with the slightly more accurate Tolman T1 test @93. It's actually the exact same % for both of you. Just losing a bit of exp because the game rounds down so it seems like a small difference.

"

Zrevnur wrote:

"

Zrevnur wrote:

Bone Husk Ossuary @ 92 gives 41 XP

@93 its 29. Not sure this fits with my @92 number. If not I may have messed it (the 92 number) up.

@94 I get 21 for the Bone Husk in Ossuary. This is inconsistent with:

"

Lv94:
19 from Bone Husk A10 (7.34% of STD, thanks Demon7310/ZdropEnjoyer for test) Something is fishy about this sample. Going to have it repeated. The penalty couldn't be close to the same % 2 levels in a row before continuing with bigger jumps, could it?

"

We'll have to pick a relatively safe higher level mob to test at high levels, and I'll have to bug a whole bunch of standard players again for that data because I don't have characters there aside from 100s so I can't collect STD data personally.

Just did 2 map bosses in their own area:
T5 Ivory Temple dual boss: 946 XP @94
T13 Orchard(*): 1955 XP @94

"

OR! We could rely on online exp calculators like FyreGrass' or Harest's. But then there's extra work that needs to be done first to make sure they are accurate in 3.20 Standard.

poedb has entries for Experience such as "138,039Experience" in https://poedb.tw/us/Ara%2C_Sister_of_Light#Lvl79SolarisMap Dont know if these are correct or useful though.


(*) I may be able to do another higher Tier if thats not "relatively safe". T12 Cemetery, T11 Dry Sea, T15 Overgrown Ruin maybe. Or T10 Defiled Cathedral, T10 Forbidden Woods, T8 Leyline.

Cool project. Looking forward to a nice graph when the data is collected.

Thanks for the correction, Zrevnur, and grats on 94!

Sorry been busy and barely even playing so I forgot about this. lol

I'll look more into it this weekend. We'll have to add gem exp to the testing too because I noticed something fishy tonight.

My 92R char's gems seem to get exactly 9% of a Bone Husk's 18025 exp, rounded down. Weird, that's almost the same that a standard char gets in general, 10%.

Then I tried on my 80R char and he got exactly 4% rounded down. Seems like Ruthless gems get a lot less exp at lower char levels, then as your char levels up the gem penalty decreases and comes closer to what they get in STD. That's good news for the Empower I just found.

edit: Looks like I messed up something real bad here. After checking again, it's just 4% for all gems in Ruthless, even Empower. sry