Hi everyone.
I've been crunching numbers a bit. It's probably been done before, but I needed it done for myself.
I wrote it all down, so I figured, why not share.
For a while, I've felt that I get too few levels from a hunt; Often just ~7 levels on ~14.5k stamina.
So I wanted to try to calculate optimal buffing setups for my situation to see if I could improve anything. I'm all done. And unfortunately I didn't find a better setup than what I had. But hey, maybe you can punch holes in it, or use some of it yourself. Who knows 
Priorities when optimizing
- Maximum XP
- Not wrecking my wallet
- Not wrecking my kill streak unnecessarily
Expense limit per hunt is 10-20 FSP. That means I'm not buying a fancy pantsy christmas box for 100 FSP. I do however have access to gear, and composed potions.
Basic buffs
Regardless of optimization, I find no reason to exclude these buffs, and they will thus be part of any leveling buff setup I'm considering:
- Doubler (Level 750+)
- Adept Learner (Level 345)
- Librarian (Level 345)
- Conserve (Level 345)
- Summon Shield Imp
- Smashing Hammer (There is no good setup without 1-hitting)
- Reckoning (Level 230)
A note on Summon Shield Imp: For pure XP optimization, I'm aware that SSI will cause you to sometimes win a battle in 2 rounds where you could instead have died. Death is the more efficient outcome with the 1 stamina spent and XP loss is easily recouped by the stamina you save from not having to do a 2-round battle. I choose to weigh my gold and my kill-streak higher, which I would otherwise lose on defeat.
Smashing Hammer could in theory be replaced by any other damage-improving buff; It just so happens to be the only buff that is powerful enough to provide all damage necessary for 1-hitting in a single buff.
Base gains
Before playing with buffs, let's establish a baseline to calculate the relative effect of adding a buff.
The baseline will be simple. Assume that you have activated all the basic buffs at the designated levels, I will then assume that 1 kill = 100 XP and 100 gold.
Reckoning or all the buffs in the world?
You've probably seen this debated before, but before piling on buffs, we have to calculate the consequence of doing so. And because of reckoning, there is a cost for each buff added. So out with the calculator.
I'm going to assume we're using Reckoning 230. That equals 46% chance of doubling the level of another skill. Doubler and SSI doesn't count though, so that leaves these buffs that we can activate reckoning on:
- Adept Learner
- Librarian
- Conserve
- Smashing Hammer
With 46% chance to active, and 25% chance to double one of the four buffs, each buff ends up having 11.5% chance of being doubled. So what does that mean for each buff when it is doubled?
- Adept Learner will add 7,935 XP on average (69% extra XP before reckoning)
- Librarian will add 5,197425 XP on average (34,5% chance of double XP before reckoning)
- Conserve will add 3,28310625 XP on average (17,25% chance to use no stamina before reckoning)
- Smashing Hammer already causes us to 1-hit. Reckoning is wasted here.
Adding these numbers together, Reckoning turns 100 XP into 116,41553125 XP. A nice boost.
Now let's try to add a single buff into the mix. Reckoning activates 46% of the time, and when it activates, there's 20% chance that it will activate a given buff, down from 25%.
Let's see what that does for the XP buffs.
- Adept Learner will add 6,348 XP on average
- Librarian will add 4,15794 XP on average
- Conserve will add 0,19876485 XP on average
Here, reckoning is only able to turn 100 XP into 110,70470485 XP. A net loss of 5,7108264 XP for every 100 XP gained. This means that for any single buff to be a viable addition to our setup, it will have to add 5,7% or more XP to the mix. Otherwise it's literally making it all worse.
XP buff candidates
There are other buffs that affect XP, and now we know that a given buff needs to add almost 5,7% XP to be viable - Otherwise you were better off with reckoning. These are the candidates:
- Arterial Strike - At level 175, 17,5% extra XP per extra combat round. 17,5% sounds good, but as long as you can land 3 out of 4 hits, reckoning is still better. Not worth adding.
- Overkill - At level 175 it's 43,75% chance to get 4,375% extra XP. Quite a long way to match the 5,7% that reckoning would have given.
- Sacrifice - At level 175, 7% extra XP. This actually beats reckoning, but also reduces gold gained by 43,75%. I don't find this tradeoff reasonable.
- Stalker - At level 345 adds 3,45% extra XP. Not good enough.
- PvP Prestige - Up to 10% extra XP. This is actually worth it if you have it, but not if you need to grind it for each hunt.
Stamina saving candidates
All the stamina saving buffs have one thing in common; You use them to move less or to not use stamina when moving. These are the candidates:
- Animal Magnetism
- Light Foot
- Gold Foot
- Teleport
Let's make a few assumptions. We're using Doubler 750 distilled to become level 863. This gives us 17x stamina use for 17x XP. In our case we say that 17 stamina = 100 XP to keep using our baseline.
We already know that adding a buff costs us 5,7% xp, so all we have to do here is translate potential stamina savings into extra XP.
Here's a wild assumption. Let's assume that all these buffs work 100% of the time. With Animal Magnetism you never have to move. Light Foot/Gold Foot works every time. Teleport is free and costs no stamina. On the other hand, let's assume that there's only 1 mob/square. This means that without one of these buffs, we have to spend 18 stamina per mob, instead of 17. The XP reduction due to wasted XP would be 5,88% in this very pessimistic scenario. Very close to the 5,7% that reckoning gave us. In other words, there's no reason to consider any of these buffs, although you can pop teleport to get from A to B, then deactivate it again once you're ready to start killing mobs again. No harm done.
All the buffs in the world...
So far there are very few reasons to use anything save for the basic buffs. But we have also been calculating all buffs individually. So what if we ignore reckoning entirely, and pile on all the buffs in the world?
Let's start from the index 100 and see what we can pile on top of the basic hunting buffs:
- Arterial Strike (Level 175) - 0,345% extra XP assuming 2% of all battles have a second round.
- Overkill (Level 175) - 1,9140625% extra XP
Sacrifice (Level 175) - 7% extra XP.Still ignoring this one.- Stalker (Level 345) - 3,45% extra XP.
PvP Prestige - Up to 10% extra XP.Ignoring this one due to having to spend a lot of stamina to get the 10%
Summarized, the XP buffs gets us to 105,709 XP per kill.
- Animal Magnetism (Level 460) - 92% chance of respawn
- Light Foot (Level 175) - 8,75% chance to not use stamina
- Gold Foot - 8,75% chance to not use stamina
- Teleport - ???
The stamina-saving buffs are harder to quantify. But let's keep using the crazy idea from earlier that all of these buffs are 100% effective, and that there is 1 mob per square. This will let us reap the benefit of a 5,88% XP gain here, because we save 1 stamina to move with for every 17 stamina used.
The grand total now becomes 111,589. 4,82653125 XP per 100 XP less than with the reckoning setup.
Conclusion
Reckoning definitely holds it's own, delivering more XP than any other combination of buffs - And this is in spite of me actively skewing the numbers away from reckoning when I can.
- The stamina-saving buffs are not as good as I gave them credit for
- There is usually more than 1 mob per square.
However... We didn't look at other types of buffs. In limiting ourselves to very few buffs, we also skipped out on:
- Treasure Hunter
- Merchant
- Unbreakable
Meaning that we get a lot less income in exchange for the additional 4,8% XP that we lose using a fully buffed setup. Even if the 4,8% turns out to be 6% or 7%, losing half of my income aint cool.
Personally, without better buffs, it seems best all-around to go for the all-in-buff-out.
This does drastically change though, if you have access to high-level buffs such as AL/Lib/Con level 500+
