TomeNET

(3.10) Experience, level-ups and skill points                                   
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By killing monsters your character gains experience. In general, harder
monsters on deeper dungeon levels give more experience than easy kills.

If your character accumulates a certain amount of experience, it will gain
a 'level-up', meaning that you become noticably more powerful than you were
until now.
Each character level requires your character to accumulate more experience
than was needed for the level before, up to millions of experience points!
All characters start the game at level 1. At level 50 they are supposed to
fight the bad boss of the game, Morgoth, Lord of Darkness.
Depending on race and class, characters need to kill a different amount of
monsters in order to reach the next level. Yeeks get experience fastest,
while Maiar are slowest. (See (7.4) and (7.5).)
The exact amounts you need are shown in the subsequent paragraph (3.10a).

Each time your character gains a new level, it also gains 5 skill
points that you can distribute on your character's skills, press 'G' to invoke
the skill chart where you can raise skills of your choice. Do this at a safe
place, so your character won't be attacked and killed while you are looking
at the skill chart. The different skills are described in (7.2). Which
skills your character may specialize in depends on his class,
and sometimes also on his race; skills that are not available to your
character's class are greyed out and cannot be raised.
On the skill chart you can press 'Up'/'Down' keys to select a skill and
'Right' key to invest one of your spare skill points into it. Choices cannot
be undone, so be careful here.
For details about skill point distribution and the different skills see (7.2).

Hanging out on easy dungeon levels compared to your character level (for
example a high level 50 character on an (to him) easy dungeon level like 60)
may result in diminishing returns of experience points for killed monsters.

On the other hand, killing monsters of higher level than the player's level
will give bonus experience.

Experience is shared automatically in 'parties', see (7.9).

Note that if your experience is drained (it will be displayed in yellow instead
of in light green to indicate that it is drained), your maximum experience ie
the amount you used to have before getting drained still profits by 10% of any
experience you gain, so it is not completely wasted if you don't have a potion
of restore life levels at hand, or some other means to restore your experience
back to normal. Yet it is highly inefficient as you waste 90% of the experience
gained and you should use some means to restore your XP as soon as possible
before continuing to kill monsters.

If you died and turned into a ghost you will still gain experience from killing
monsters, but all experience gains from any source are cut to 50% while you are
dead.


Recommended minimum depths for optimal experience gain
------------------------------------------------------

These are only minimum recommended depths above which your experience gain
will - depending on your character level - suffer quite a severe reduction.
Your character might not always be strong enough to survive on these depths.
In that case, despite the experience penalty, you should consider moving to
easier dungeon levels anway until you found decent items and maxed out your
vital stats (constitution, etc).

Note: Your depth display in the bottom right corner of the main window will
indicate the appropriateness of your current depth in relation to your
character level by its colour:

- If you're on a far easier depth, it'll be dark grey, indicating that you
  cannot expect to gain experience here.

- If you're on a slightly easier depth, it'll turn yellow, to tell you that
  you're getting closer to the depth required for normal experience gain, but
  there is still a penalty.

- On the minimum required depth for normal experience gain, or deeper, it's
  plain white.

(On a side note, while Word of Recall is pending, your depth indicator will
actually turn orange, since it's also used as a Word of Recall indicator.)

Here is a list of this relation between character level and the minimum dungeon
level required for normal, non-penalised experience gain, showing some steps:

 Character level  |  Dungeon level
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         1..19       optimum exp is gained anywhere, depth doesn't factor in!
          20             15  \ exponential increase of optimal depth
          23             17  |
          25             18  |
          28             22  |
          30             25  |
          35             30  |
          38             36  |
          40             40  |
          41             43  |
          42             46  |
          43             50  |
          44             54  |
          45             59  |
          46             65  |
          47             72  |
          48             81  |
          49             92  /
 -------  50  --------  100  \ -------  Must beat Morgoth to reach level 51+!
          55            110  | medium linear increase (moderate depth increase)
          60            120  /
          65            130  \ fast linear increase (steep depth increase)
          66            134  |
          70            150  |
          74            166  /
          75            170  \ slow linear increase (easygoing depth increase)
          80            175  |
          85            180  |
          90            185  |
          95            190  |
          98            193  /
          99         no exp gained (this the maximum reachable player level)

If you are below the optimum depth, your experience gain will decrease.
The experience gained will be multiplied by 2 / (2 + leveldifference).
So for 1 level missing to optimum depth you would get 2 / (2 + 1) = 67% of
the optimum experience, at 2 levels difference you'd get 50%, 40% at 3, etc.
At level 64 and higher, no dungeon except for the Cloud Planes and the
Nether Realm (see (4.5c)) will be deep enough to deliver optimal experience
and after attaining level 70 only the Nether Realm - by far the deepest
dungeon in the game - can deliver optimal experience points.

These depth restrictions regarding experience gain are applied to all dungeons
except in Ironman Deep Dive Challenge and Halls of Mandos (which is Ironman).