Powerleveling and You

[MongoJerry]

2) Join a party of ONE additional player and ram through the harder quests fast, just to get them done.  Why only one player?  Because two-player parties are the most expedient party configuration.  I have found that while two-player parties can often more than double your killing speed and safety, the returns diminish with additional players.  A 5-player party does not kill five times faster, due to all of the "overhead" that comes about - having to find new monsters to kill, looting issues, afk-ness, etc.  Two player parties are ideal for non-elite quest slamming if it's not an easily-done quest.  If you really need more than 2 players to beat a non-elite quest, either the quest is really too hard and you should move on, or at least one of the two players is doing something wrong.  Plus, having more than 2 players just exacerbates the issues I listed above in the parties section.

Until I got to this paragraph, I was formulating a long response in my head espousing the benefits of the 2-player (and only 2-player) team. I find I level much more quickly in 2-player teams, because the kill rate is faster, the downtimes are smaller, and you can quickly blow through yellow quests or even an occational orange that might bog you down if you tried them solo. As you say, what you want to do is hit as many quests as possible in one trip out of town. If for example one of the quests in a given area is a yellow or orange one (say, to kill a boss), then you might have to skip that if you're solo. But if you're teamed up, you can get that quest done at the same time you're doing other quests, boosting your exp gained/time. Kill quests go much quicker, and while it appears that collection quests go slower, in fact because your kill rate is so much higher and the downtime smaller, it really doesn't take all that much longer to do collection quests in a 2-player team. I tend to find at least a 50% boost to my experience gained per time when I party with another person, provided that we are both working on the same set of quests. The only time partying with someone else bogs things down is when we have to go back and redo a quest that one of us has already done to help one person "catch up" to the other person -- but even then, at least both of us get experience points from killing the mobs.