Workaround for 50% XP Penalty on Pet Damage?
 

Regarding the xp penalty when your pet does >50% of the damage while solo, I recall from live, you could group with 1 person (perhaps another necro soloer) and stay far enough away from each other so as to not leech xp from each other's kills, and you would still receive "Party Experience", negating the XP Penalty. Is this valid for P99?

Lokked

PS. This also worked for getting the XP bonus due to being in a group, but in classic this was so small that it didn't matter, until they juiced it up in PoP, I believe (but then later nerfed it).

Yes, group with 1-5 others and the pet can do 100% of the damage for no penalty (often popular with a cleric/enchanter/charmed pet combo) :p

Not sure how it would work being separate in the same zones. There was a bug that was abused for quite sometime where you grouped with someone but in different zones and it disregarded the 51% rule but it definitely doesn't work now.

Test it let us know! ;D

I tested by creating a new Iksar Necro.

All kills were done against the same Level 1 mob type (Scaled Wolf Pup). All kills were done at Level 1.

When I say with group, I mean grouped, but outside their XP leeching range.

Without Pet. No Group: 6%
Without Pet. With Group (Level 20): 6%
Without Pet. With Group (Level 1): 6%

With Pet. No Group. Pet Does 0% Damage: 6%
With Pet. No Group. Pet Does less than 50% damage: 6%
With Pet. No Group. Pet Does 53% damage (10/19): 3%
With Pet. No Group. Pet does 100% Damage: 3%

With Pet. With Group (L1). Pet does 58% damage: 3%
With Pet. With Group (L1). Pet does 100% damage: 3%

In this next section, I tried to work out how much XP it takes to go from 1-2 and how much XP each kill is worth, but I couldn't get the calculation to give me a number that makes sense (unless Experience can be a floating point number, even then something is wrong):

From the Wiki:
The experience required to obtain a given level = L^3 * C * R * H
2^3 * 1.10 * 1.20 * 1.0 = 10.56
To an L1 char, an L1 mob is worth L^2 * ZEM
1^2 * 0.75 = 0.75

To get to 100% with 6-7% gains per kill, it would require 16 kills. 10.56 / .75xp/L1 = ~13 Kills, so there is something about the equation that I don't understand. It's possible the ZEM of Field of Bone is actually 0.66

Either way, it seems like we cannot get around having to either out-damage our pet or just eat the penalty. Was worth a shot.

Happy Hunting!

The mage focus items work on shaman pets. Prolly necros too. Get that mana back and nbd

now what if you tried with Pet grouped with someone out of xp range and % dmg done by pet and % xp you get?

Fantastic. Solid test. I agree with the previous post, would be useful, just for absolute certainty, to attempt pet doing less than 50% damage on the With Pet, With Group, out of range scenario.

Or out of zone.

Start the fight with a low lvl nuke - send in the fire pet - heal the pet and med - reclaim pet when the mob walks or is at 12% - finish off the mob = 100% exp. I took a mage to 24 in less than 2 weeks playing 2-3 hours a day, and I didn't even play every day.

At low levels the reagent cost is a bit prohibitive. Once you get to 16 (maybe 12, if you're hitting cash mobs) this becomes workable (or have a twink feeding you cash).