Is there a limit to pet dragon level gain per battle?

[TinyMage]

I've been trying for a while to level my pet dragon from level 2 to over 20 in one battle so I could grab astral strike ( or whatever it's called ).

My hero is level 8 and my pet dragon starts the battle at level 2. I get a huge amount of experience ( like 60 ) per mana ball. Using some cheap tricks that involves sacrificing goblins I can put down like 50 mana balls in one battle. So after the battle I should get like 3000 experience right? Well apparently not, although the results screen does indeed say my pet dragon earned over 3000 experience it only gives me like 800, getting my pet dragon to about level 8-9.

So is there some kind of hard cap to dragon experience gain during battle and is there anything that I can do about it?

[the benevolent adversary]

there is no hard xp cap but there is a soft one.
the xp you get for using your dragon is basically in relation to how many enemy are left and how many troops you have.
to find out better details search for it; there are many great threads here dealing with this issue.
800 xp is a great number my best was 1000 and some odd from a tough elenhall battle.
dragon dive seems to give the best xp for single use, while crushing blow gives the best xp to rage ratio.

[Fatt_Shade]

Just to add some more info on this :
Pet dragon exp is connected to relation of your and enemy army. SO if you start battle with X total leadership (example 1 paladin , 10 bowman, 3 inquisitors = 1020 total lds), and enemy have Y lds (10 black dragon = 25000 total lds). And if you use some pet skill that say you`ll get 10 exp final gain is 10*Y/X. Meaning more enemy units bring more exp. During battle you kill enemy and lose some units also, so total leadership ratio decreases bringing less exp each turn. And in the end you`ll probably get 0 exp, when enemy army is almost destroyed.
There is cap for this, but i`m not sure what value it is. So you cant start battle with 1 unit cast invisibility on it and kill whole enemy army with rage for 1 million exp. But for lvling pet dragon, you must take in consideration whole battlefield leadership ration enemy/you.

As for your question, first turn in battle mana ball gain is lets say 60, but each turn after you get less, and less. So it`s not 3000 for maybe 50 turn, but 60+50+40+30+20+10+...+1+0. So 800 exp per battle so soon is great gain.
In the end, i`m still on old patch 1.3. Maybe in latest patch is some change making you stop getting exp after certain number of turns. Like for medals, spells counted toward medals are just first 10 battle turns. Check exp on turn 9 , 10 and 11 in battle without killing any enemy units, to see if there is some difference.

Have fun

[TinyMage]

Well I guess I should have stated earlier that the screen told me I was getting 60 experience per mana ball all throughout the battle. It even displayed the correct amount of experience after the battle ( something like 5000 ) but then it had in parentheses only like 800. So It seems the game mysteriously reduced the amount of experience I got based on something which is mentioned nowhere.

Yes I know that the experience your dragon gets is based on your leadership vs enemy leadership and all that, but the whole time I had far less troops then the enemy and the experience displayed was always 60 per mana ball.

Basically I had a group of orc shamans and 2 stacks of goblins hiding behind a pet wall. I killed all the enemy stacks but 1 stack of slow moving troop which was still much larger then my army total. Then I just ran around with some royal snakes ( I think ) and sacrificed goblins and put down mana balls. I did this about 100 times or so until the display started glitching and I could no longer see the mana balls and had to quit. But the game always told me I was getting 60 exp per mana ball, at least until the very end where I started killing off the enemy.

So beyond the your leadership vs enemy leadership factor ( of which I was well aware of ) there is apparently some other limiter that is not mentioned anywhere.

[Fatt_Shade]

Hm ... what patch you have ? As far as i know in 1.3, this is only thing that can change pet dragon exp. Maybe something changed in 1.3.1
Sry for not giving any solution

[TinyMage]

1.3.1 build 6171.

The whole idea here was to see how fast I could cheese through the game with a warrior using high level pet dragon abilities like astral strike. I figured I could get my pet dragon up to level 23 in one battle while my warrior was still only level 8, thus being able to break through the guards to Montero and then beating that one lizard lady so I could get the flying ability, then making the rest of the game far easier to kite. It looks like this isn't possible unless I can figure out what the holdup is here. I can find no info on this game that mentions this at all, kind of frustrating.

[Fatt_Shade]

No idea what block there is, sry
What i know is there is no block for Asmodeon exp/battle. I had Asmo 16 lvl more then me, last time i played him solo.
As for your plan with strong pet dragon, for easy early-middle game. But knight are severely limited comparing with mage. Intellect bonus for spell dmg is limitless, and late game mage with 80-90 int can destroy anything with little problem.
Knight on other hand can get pet dragon on max lvl, faster then other classes. But when you hit pet dragon 60 lvl, that`s it no more. Other classes will get same pet dragon only later.
So dont count to much on pet, to solve your battles. Knight is best with large army/high crit%. Pet dragon become just a companion after 30 hero lvl.

[TinyMage]

Yes I'm well aware of the mages advantages, in fact I've rushed to Montero and killed Hagni early with a mage several times now. However there's a reason I want to use a warrior, mainly because I want to abuse a trick I found to get unlimited experience ( not for the pet this time ) and it works better with a warrior then it does with a mage because the warrior has a higher leadership.

[Fatt_Shade]

Now you got me interested
Any tip for unlimited hero exp ?

[TinyMage]

Basically it involves abusing ghosts soul draining ability.

Find an enemy group with ghosts in it and kill off all the other stacks. Then let the ghosts kill your troops for many turns until the ghost stack is however big you want it. Flee the battle and comeback and kill the ghosts for a lot more experience then the original army would have given you. Theoretically you could make the ghost stack as big as you want, up to whatever limit there is for armies in this game ( which I don't know what that is ).

There are several ways to pull this stunt off. The usual inquisitor / phantom trick and use the phantoms to attack the ghosts since ghosts soul drain off phantoms ( which doesn't make sense but whatever ). This gives you unlimited mana through rage and fodder for the ghosts to soul drain from. Only problem is inquisitors are slow and so you have to get the real inquisitor stack close to the ghosts which can be dangerous and requires you to cast slow or something.

Then there's the transmute / resurrection trick. With transmute level 3 you can have a stack of, say, peasants and just let the ghosts hit them and resurrect the peasants ad infinitum because you will get 20 mana whenever the peasants are killed, which is enough for a level 1 resurrection. The problem is even with around a 80+ int and a level 3 magic light a level 1 resurrection still doesn't resurrect that many peasants, so its gonna take a while to build that stack of ghosts.

The third way which I have not quite tested fully is to phantom veteran orcs who get 3 potions of rage at level 3 adrenaline, which is 15 total rage, which = 15 mana which is = to a level 1 phantom. If you surround a stack of veteran orcs with enough level 3 totems of adrenaline ( a chaos magic spell ) then when you make a phantom of them the phantom will get max adrenaline and access to all 3 potions of rage PLUS he gets +20 health and PLUS there is an artifact called "the peace pipe" that decreases orc attack by 50% and increases their health by 25%, a perfect candidate for soul draining. Also the orcs with potions of rage have a really high speed, like 7+ depending on how much adrenaline, so your original orc stack can be on the other side of the field well out of reach of the ghosts.

The fourth way is to use summoners like Chosha's to summon gobots ( probably the best ) and have those get killed by the ghosts. Doesn't take any mana but doesn't work too well either after a certain point. However you can combine this with another trick to get unlimited gold, using phantomed marauders and search to search the corpses of the summoned troops. More on this below.

As for the ghosts themselves you can slow them down by 1 with that artifact that slows flyers. As long as you have a target near them they will attack that and won't go closer toward your other troops. Making some walls with your pet can help too. The computer doesn't like to waste time knocking down a wall when it can go around, even if going around would mean a huge waste of movement.

As you can guess doing this with a warrior would be better since a warrior has a lot more leadership then a mage. This means more phantomed troops to throw at the ghosts and faster overall ghost growth. And really, assuming you can get enough magic runes, a warrior can come pretty close to a mage in intellect.


Just for the record, as I'm sure you know there are several ways to get unlimited gold and a way to get unlimited runes.

The runes is obvious and I'm sure you know that you can just start a battle, dig all the chests and then run and repeat, ad infinitum. A small percentage of chests will yield runes. And you can get unlimited gold this way too, and unlimited ancient knowledge scrolls, and theoretically eventually any spell you missed ( I think ). The trick is getting enough rage, but it's pretty easy since you can just summon a chaos dragon near your own troops and its initial damage spell will kill them and give you rage, plus you have a highly mobile troop to go around and open all the chests without running into the enemy. It's best if your facing a slow group of enemies like dwarves on techron.

Another way to get gold is to abuse the search ability ( marauders and one of the goblin troops ) combined with a summoner troop like choshas, just have the gobots die and search their corpses with a phantomed marauder. Do this on the Reha continent for maximum gold. You don't have to actually fight any monsters on Reha, you can just go to Reha and suppress or upgrade an item and the battlefield will yield the Reha gold bonus from chests. I assume the same with spells.

Another way which is probably the cheesiest of all is if you have the UN-UPGRADED snake ring and go to the wizards tower in Debir. Go inside and load up on troops, then choose to upgrade the snake ring and run from the battle. As far as I know the snake ring is the only artifact that lets you run from the battle. After you run you will appear in Debir in and you will receive a certain amount of gold based on the troops you had. Since you can fully recruit to max leadership for free in the wizards tower this can be a pretty hefty sum, especially when your leadership is 10000+. This is the fastest way to gain unlimited gold as far as I know and by far the closest to cheating.