I will break this article into 2 parts: The main leveling job + Improvements that help.
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The main leveling job:
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The fastest way to level up a new merc is to have that merc in your formation but hidden and go to a lower level skirmish where you kill very fast. The result screen will show you that the new merc got zero experience, however you will see that it does get experience. As I am writing this my formation is killing in Lijiang village skirmish and my noob merc is getting 12k around exp per fight.
The experience that the new merc gets is capped, so no point killing the hardest you can kill. The more levels the new merc gets the more exp it will start to accept per fight.
Naturally if you have read my TBS grinding article, it is best to have an all range party with rang and pricess for the fastest killing in skirmish and this is especially true for low level grinding to waste as little time moving as possible. It is also quite nice to have this on auto battle as i have right now.
At a certain point (which I don't care to spend many hours to discover) the new merc can benefit more from a higher level skirmish. I suggest you stay in the lower level one as long as you can visually see the new merc rising all the time. Once you see her experience bar is not moving much then this is where you must go to higher skirmish level.
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Improvements that help
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There are a bunch of things you can do to speed that up even more.
(in random order)
1) If you kill super fast use a title like Kind for highest exp %. If you could kill faster then choose the highest attack title because the rate of killing is more important than the title exp %.
2) Get into an LDP with high level people who are grinding Village and above skirmishes. For each fight that they finish you will be getting around 100k experience (is what I see on my friend's level 60ish party which is LDP with me right now). This is actually a lot of experience and over hours is millions of experience. If you can get 2 such people to feed you on top of your grinding = super.
3) If you have a house, rest in your bed for whatever % exp bonus that you get from your house.
4) Shout out asking who is about to level. Add them to your friend's list and when they level you will get +10% experience bonus.
5) Creating a feast or participating in a feast will give you attack bonus which will make you kill faster which will make you earn exp faster.
6) Blessing licence of course is super to have and will give and 50% more attack and 50% more experience.
7) The weekend exp bonus of 150% or 200% of regular of course helps a lot too.
8) And do not forget to leave the new merc at home when you afk so that you can give gifts when you are not active (unless your nice LDP friends are pumping you).
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Leveling new mercs is one of the most fun things I find in AO. I have about 20 mercs I think and most top people if you ask you will see have also like 20 mercs. This is not just for fun but we use the correct mercs in the different situations to kill faster, easier, better.
And to finish up I did now 20 auto battles in Lijiang Villange while I wrote this article and my new merc is level 26 and my level 60 friend got 2.3 million exp from me.
