This is in response to a battlefield thread. Here's the relevant portion, first speaker me, second speaker Daevryn

>>And I'd like to, but there are just too many mechanics that
>>make fighting sub-hero stupid if you also want to be at your
>>best post-hero.
>
>Explain to me why you think this is true, and I'll explain
>what you're not seeing?

First, let me admit that on the con front I was just wrong, because I didn't realize it had changed. There are two separate things, really: reasons it's more fun to fight to wait until hero to fight (besides the fight dynamics themselves) and reasons you're more powerful if you go straight to hero.

Here are the reasons why you're more powerful if you power-rank:

Con loss: Now that I know that the way level gains work has changed, this is not as big deal. That said, if you're fighting and losing con, then you need to switch back and forth from pk-effective gear to con-gear. I can't really remember to do that. I always end up fighting in my traveling boots and fine leather belt because I never remember to switch them. It also means spending more time ranking, which I hate. Wearing con gear is also a liability in pk, so if you do get jumped you're a softer target. If dodging is important, carrying extra gear around blows. Finally, con is also to some extent a pk stat vie rot, saves, etc. Having less of it, or needing to gear for it is a disadvantage.

Age: The ideal situation is to hit mature exactly when you hit hero. This gives you 20hp more than you would've had otherwise, unless you choose not to train wis or str at all. Fighting a lot sub-hero means less time at the ideal age range at hero.

Player ability: Fighting at hero and fighting at hero is different. The longer you spend at hero the better you'll be at fighting at hero, which means having more con and less age. Sure, there's some carryover from lower ranks to hero but I think you'll agree it's not the same. I would say that for anyone who isn't basically their plateau (and as a pretty mediocre pker I'm not) that they'll continue to improve at being a hero-level character throughout the time they are a hero level character. Bashing down people at level 20 doesn't contribute a whole lot to that, and takes time away from it.

These are reasons why I personally really don't like fighting sub-hero, though strictly speaking they aren't ways you are made less-powerful by waiting.

Risk of mob death. Maybe I'm retarded, but when I spend time wandering around and not ranking, eventually I end up taking a mob death that I wouldn't have if I'd just stuck to ranking. Sometimes it's a random aggro mob out of its natural place, sometimes it's falling into a trap, sometimes it's pvp-related, but one way or another, if I wait long enough without ranking I'll eventually take a needless mob death. This obviously makes ranking take longer, which is just unacceptable. Focusing only on ranking pretty much minimizes the window in which that can happen.

Skills: By racing to hero you spend the least time explicitly practicing skills before beginning to pk. If you practice before hero you waste all those level gains, imm exp boosts, and seemingly endless hours of ranking drudgery that could be giving you free skill points. If you pk before you're stuck with the crappy choice of either more painfully awful time spent practicing or being at a disadvantage. Also skill percentages matter less at hero than they do at low levels, imho.

Gear disparity. Gear is more important at lowbie than hero, again imho. A sweet set at lowbie is much harder to overcome than at hero, or so I have always found. I hate playing conservatively so acquiring similarly elite gear for me at low levels is a waste of time, which means I'm at a disadvantage against people who protect the gear they can't get for themselves. Also I'm just not a gear whore so the less impact gear has, the better it is for me.

This is a long post, and more things will probably occur to me, but I'm sure this is more than you'll really feel like bothering to address anyway. :)

I'm not going to come out and say that you're wrong, exactly, about any of this; I'm not interested in having that kind of argument.

Rather, I'd like to point out a bunch of things you may not have considered.

>Here are the reasons why you're more powerful if you
>power-rank:
>
>Wearing con gear is also a liability in pk, so if you do get
>jumped you're a softer target.

Eh... sure, but your power-ranking dude probably doesn't have an awesome full set of gear anyway. There's probably some slot where you can stick one of many unlimited +2 con items in which you don't have anything great anyway.

Personally, I tend to just train my con if I need to on the way up. (I understand this is giving up 10 hp in your view.)

Another take on this:

In practice, I've taken characters and I've powerlevelled them as fast as I could, and I've also levelled characters who had already seen a good amount of exploration/RP/PKs/cabalstuff/etc. Almost without exception, the latter group of characters had a much, much higher standard of gear and, even swapping out a piece of it for con gear if I needed to, would still have much better gear than my not-much-more-than-fine-leather powerleveling characters.

Now, maybe you're a transmuter and the quality of your gear isn't a big factor in how you can level (although it could still save you a PK or mob death if something goes wrong, as it so often does). On the other hand, I think we can both agree that a warrior or A-P with an awesome set of gear can potentially level a lot faster/easier than one with just the basics.

>Finally, con is also to some
>extent a pk stat vie rot, saves, etc. Having less of it, or
>needing to gear for it is a disadvantage.

I would say that, while this is technically true, no one's play of CF is so flawless that something this small is something they should give consideration to. Yes, the 4 con guy is going to struggle a lot more with the enemy shaman than the 25 con guy, but...

>Age: The ideal situation is to hit mature exactly when you hit
>hero. This gives you 20hp more than you would've had
>otherwise, unless you choose not to train wis or str at all.
>Fighting a lot sub-hero means less time at the ideal age range
>at hero.

I just don't see this as all that ideal, to be honest. You can make a case for it, but you can as easily make a case that it's more of an advantage to come into hero range as an older character because of any of the many things they can have going for them that a younger character can't to the same degree. Better skills, more edges, cabal advantages, etc.

>Player ability: Fighting at hero and fighting at hero is
>different. The longer you spend at hero the better you'll be
>at fighting at hero, which means having more con and less age.
>Sure, there's some carryover from lower ranks to hero but I
>think you'll agree it's not the same.

Yes and no:

I've been the first to say that I think hero-level PK and low level PK require some different skills, but I think there's more overlap than you think. For example, hardly a day goes by that I don't see a hero-range character successfully evade an enemy by ducking into or moving more quickly through a low level area that they know well and their pursuer doesn't know as well. I could write a whole paragraph about the different kinds of advantages area knowledge can give you in a PK and it's just one thing. Lots of things are honestly pretty universal throughout the levels.

>I would say that for
>anyone who isn't basically their plateau (and as a pretty
>mediocre pker I'm not) that they'll continue to improve at
>being a hero-level character throughout the time they are a
>hero level character.

The question I would put to you there is: do you always basically play the same character, mechanically? I'd assume you don't. You've seized on the differences between hero and lowbie PK, but glossed over the differences between PKing with different characters.

Starting to try to fight and do things with only a fraction of your skill set and slowly leveling up and adding more to it, to me, is a much better way to learn what a character is capable of and how to best capitalize on it. Even if you have, for example, played a half-dozen fire A-Ps, the first time you take your first d-elf A-P into a fight in the teens you'll become acutely aware of all the strengths of a fire A-P that it very much does not have. As you experiment with its skills and spells and limitations, you discover ways to minimize its weaknesses and utilize its strengths. Equally, with your opponents, you'll start out learning how to use your specific character against the subset of skills they have, and learn how to adjust as they too level up and add new abilities. My d-elf A-P that fights on the way up will die more on his way to hero than your straight-to-hero d-elf A-P, true; but I really believe he'll make it up in taking less deaths before hitting his stride at hero.

I've seen a lot of heroes over the years, particularly of classes like invoker that tend to level as fast as they can, who seem to have no idea of when one of their lower or mid-level abilities is the winning move in a fight. I believe that had they seen more action in a level range where maybe these spells were the best they had, they'd have a better sense of their use. To a speed-levelled hero, often their capstone abilities look like a hammer and everything looks like a nail.

>Bashing down people at level 20 doesn't
>contribute a whole lot to that, and takes time away from it.

Without arguing about the skill it does or doesn't take to bash someone down at level 20 -- what if you're not playing a warrior? What if you're a transmuter instead? Would trying to kill your enemies at level 20 teach you anything useful at hero? Why or why not?

>These are reasons why I personally really don't like fighting
>sub-hero, though strictly speaking they aren't ways you are
>made less-powerful by waiting.
>
>Risk of mob death. Maybe I'm retarded, but when I spend time
>wandering around and not ranking, eventually I end up taking a
>mob death that I wouldn't have if I'd just stuck to ranking.
>Sometimes it's a random aggro mob out of its natural place,
>sometimes it's falling into a trap, sometimes it's
>pvp-related, but one way or another, if I wait long enough
>without ranking I'll eventually take a needless mob death.
>This obviously makes ranking take longer, which is just
>unacceptable. Focusing only on ranking pretty much minimizes
>the window in which that can happen.

This may be too there-is-no-spoon for you, but consider:

If you're not trying to race to hero or even really trying to level at all, does a mob death really matter?

>Skills: By racing to hero you spend the least time explicitly
>practicing skills before beginning to pk. If you practice
>before hero you waste all those level gains, imm exp boosts,
>and seemingly endless hours of ranking drudgery that could be
>giving you free skill points. If you pk before you're stuck
>with the crappy choice of either more painfully awful time
>spent practicing or being at a disadvantage. Also skill
>percentages matter less at hero than they do at low levels,
>imho.

I'm not 100% sure I understand what you're saying here, but I think I disagree with you.

At low levels, maybe you haven't worked your skills a whole lot, but most of your range really won't have either. Probably most of your range is just trying to level on through. Up to a point it's a wash.

On the other hand, any long-lived hero character is going to have nearly every skill they actually use at 100. I promise you, the skill gulf between your power-levelled elf warrior and even a 300-500 hour old fire giant warrior hero is going to be at least as immense as the gulf between two level 15 characters, one who's worked his skills for a little while and one who hasn't, ever could be.

>Gear disparity. Gear is more important at lowbie than hero,
>again imho. A sweet set at lowbie is much harder to overcome
>than at hero, or so I have always found. I hate playing
>conservatively so acquiring similarly elite gear for me at low
>levels is a waste of time, which means I'm at a disadvantage
>against people who protect the gear they can't get for
>themselves. Also I'm just not a gear whore so the less impact
>gear has, the better it is for me.

Honestly, if you think this you've never had to deal with a hero with really good gear, or you've never realized the full weight of the difference their gear made.

If I'm a lowbie with basic scrounged gear, I can kill another lowbie with the kind of gear that people freak out about and post to the log board with accusations of cheating is I play my cards right. I promise you that you don't have the same chance as a hero to take down a hero with twenty unique items that you've never heard of.

I mean, is what you're true in the sense that maybe the disparity between a warrior with a 20 dam set and a warrior with a 40 dam set is less at hero than it is at level 20? Sure, I can buy that, but the limitations or lack thereof of a hero character and the things that are going on with their gear are so much bigger than that. In the grand scheme of things it's not very important.

>This is a long post, and more things will probably occur to
>me, but I'm sure this is more than you'll really feel like
>bothering to address anyway. :)

Hopefully I've addressed it all, although I've largely run out of steam to talk about the advantages the non-race-to-hero character has. (vs. just trying to point out things you might have missed about the advantages you think he's missing.) I'll see if I can work up the energy to do it properly tomorrow.

>I'm not going to come out and say that you're wrong, exactly,
>about any of this; I'm not interested in having that kind of
>argument.

Okay, I'll try to do likewise.

>Eh... sure, but your power-ranking dude probably doesn't have
>an awesome full set of gear anyway...
>Almost without exception, the had a much, much higher

I'll point out that for you it is easy to picture getting an awesome set by killing people at all levels. For me that is highly impractical. Part of it is just being conservative. You build a great set by taking some risks early, then picking your battles more carefully (albeit with a wider range of options due to increasing power). I just don't really want to choose only fights that I don't have a significant chance of dieing from.

Now you might argue that if I'd just go ahead and play a lot more in the lower levels I'd get better and it would become practical. A fair point, but ultimately the question of where it makes sense to spend my cf-learning-time is answered by in part by personal preference for the hero vs lowbie tactical dynamic, which is a can of worms I'm trying not to go into more than necessary.

>On the other hand, I think we can both
>agree that a warrior or A-P with an awesome set of gear can
>potentially level a lot faster/easier than one with just the
>basics.

Sure. Honestly I don't know what the most efficient possible ranking method is. Maybe it's camping cabals to swipe hero gear, maybe it's pking up a big set. The first is somewhat scurrilous, the second is certainly fairly time consuming, even if you can safely assume it's within your means. Exploration I tend to do with a hero-level character then apply that knowledge to lower-levels. Sure there are some things you don't learn that way but in terms of what gear is attainable I don't think you miss too much.

>I would say that, while this is technically true, no one's
>play of CF is so flawless that something this small is
>something they should give consideration to.

Well much of that argument is based on past statements about training wis and int being worthwhile because of gameplay effects outweighing hp trains. Maybe int and wis are more important than con, though regen rates are kind of important, which I failed to mention (but I suppose you can lug around +con for that).

>Better skills, more edges, cabal advantages, etc.

Can you expand on this? My argument is that if you spend 50 hours ranking and then 50 hours practicing skills, you'll have better skills than a guy who spends 100 hours puttering around in various ways that don't necessarily contribute to skills.

Edges: I assume you mean via explore/observation exp? Do you think it's fair to say that heroes get more imm attention than low and mid range characters? Also, I don't know about anyone else's experience but with Edimus I basically started buying edges just because it seemed silly not to, even though I didn't really want or have a use for them. But edges were new then, maybe the costs and awards have been tweaked.

I'm not sure what cabal advantages means. You mean like progressing up through blade to elite to warmaster and such? That's an interesting point, but in many cases cabal progress is based on your contribution. Generally it seems as easy or easier to make a contribution at hero. Raiding is the obvious reason.

> but I think there's more overlap than you think.

Certainly area knowledge is a valuable tool. But you don't even have to be playing the same character to gain that. In fact, I would say you're better off rolling a shifter to go explore places you think might be of interest to your real character. With few exceptions you can learn all you need to faster that way. And since area knowledge is permanent (at least theoretically, I tend to be lazy about saving that data) you get a benefit for yourself without handicapping any particular character.

>Starting to try to fight and do things with only a fraction of
>your skill set and slowly leveling up and adding more to it,
>to me, is a much better way to learn what a character is
>capable of and how to best capitalize on it.

This is an interesting point that I hadn't considered. I think there is some truth to what you're saying, that there is a tendency to gloss over lower level skills. However, the counter I would make again is that it's more efficient to dedicate time to exploring those skills when you're a hero than when you aren't because of the various resources at your disposal (for your invoker example, a simple example is the better mana pool allowing more casts before resting). Anyway, your point about the capstone ability as hammer to the world's nails is well taken. On a personal level I try pretty hard to use my whole skillset, though I'm sure I fail and underestimate lower-level abilities sometimes.

> Would trying
>to kill your enemies at level 20 teach you anything useful at
>hero? Why or why not?

It very well might. The question is, would it teach you anything useful about hero-level fighting that you couldn't learn as or more easily at hero? As above, I see that there may be a tendency to overlook skills and whatnot, but if you think it's a good learning experience to use a limitted skillset, then just spend some time doing that at hero. You're also less squishy at hero, which probably means you'll take fewer deaths in the process of figuring it out.

>If you're not trying to race to hero or even really trying to
>level at all, does a mob death really matter?

Yes and no. The exp penalty obviously doesn't matter if you aren't planning to do any more ranking ever. What I'm saying is as true for any arbitrary end-point as it is for hero, but if you ever gain a level (or try) after mob-dieing then you have cost yourself some time. This is predicated on the idea that ranking is more or less akin to torture, which I realize isn't your position. That's not to say that I absolutely always hate ranking always, but let's face it, most ranking is a very monotonous process, because it's more efficient that way, and it's tough to find a group of people who want to go die a bunch of times trying something weird and different enough to be fun. This is going off on a (dead-horse) tangent a bit though, so I'll leave it there.

>At low levels, maybe you haven't worked your skills a whole
>lot, but most of your range really won't have either.

See, everyone says that but I'm not so sure. It seems like pretty much every warrior and assassin I rank with, will go off at certain key levels to practice. Generally they say quite explicitly "I have much to work on" Now this is anecdotal, and you have a better statistical view of it than I do, but it always looks like most warriors, assassins and rangers are going off to practice defense and weapons at low levels. I can easily see that being a psychological memory effect e.g. it impacts me when they do leave my ranking group, so I remember it more strongly.

>Honestly, if you think this you've never had to deal with a
>hero with really good gear, or you've never realized the full
>weight of the difference their gear made.

Yes, the extremes of hero gear are more intense than the extremes of lowbie gear, but the extremes of lowbie gear seem more common to me. Maybe that's not true, I dunno. It makes sense though when you consider how many there are of the gear that makes a monstrous hero set vs how many there are that make a monstrous lowbie set.

>I promise you that you don't have the same
>chance as a hero to take down a hero with twenty unique items
>that you've never heard of.

That's true, but he also doesn't have as much chance to take you down. At lowbie, that gear disparity tends to be lethal, while at hero it might only mean unbeatable.

>Hopefully I've addressed it all, although I've largely run out
>of steam to talk about the advantages the non-race-to-hero
>character has. (vs. just trying to point out things you might
>have missed about the advantages you think he's missing.)
>I'll see if I can work up the energy to do it properly
>tomorrow.

Well I definitely appreciate that you took the time to respond as thoroughly as you did, and I do agree with some of your points that hadn't occurred to me. So at least your time isn't totally wasted (hopefully other people are getting something out of it too, I know I'm not the only straight-to-hero guy out there).

Note to laxman: The reason I say skills and gear matter less at hero boils down exactly to what you're saying about being killed out of the blue. It's more likely to happen at lowbie than hero, and the reduced range of available skills means the basic defenses/weapons are even more important. How many fights at hero are ended in the lag from one bash or pincer? How many at low levels?

Just tossing a few more thoughts out here:

>I'll point out that for you it is easy to picture getting an
>awesome set by killing people at all levels. For me that is
>highly impractical. Part of it is just being conservative. You
>build a great set by taking some risks early, then picking
>your battles more carefully (albeit with a wider range of
>options due to increasing power). I just don't really want to
>choose only fights that I don't have a significant chance of
>dieing from.

Not everything has to be taken to its most extreme level. I don't have to sit at level 15 for 200 hours until I amass a 70 damroll set before I decide to level. Maybe I sit there for 5 and manage to get a couple better weapons and maybe 10 more damroll. It's not about an 'awesome' set necessarily,j ust a better one.

>Sure. Honestly I don't know what the most efficient possible
>ranking method is.

It'd be important to decide what your measure for efficiency.

Is it to hero in the least number of hours possible?

I'd argue that a better one is to spend the least amount of time on actively getting XP.

I've had characters well into the 30s who had never joined a ranking group and never spent that kind of time. From a certain perspective they'd leveled inefficiently because maybe they're 100 hours old at level 35. From another perspective, they've spent zero ranking time.

>>Better skills, more edges, cabal advantages, etc.
>
>Can you expand on this? My argument is that if you spend 50
>hours ranking and then 50 hours practicing skills, you'll have
>better skills than a guy who spends 100 hours puttering around
>in various ways that don't necessarily contribute to skills.

I don't think that's necessarily true, for a number of reasons.

First, there's the skill improves at level. Hero-fast guy is getting his 1-3% improve on something that's probably close to 75%, unless it's one of a very few skills he's using a lot as he levels up. Level-slower guy is probably getting it on a skill he has in the 80s or 90s. It's true that both might have similar or very high skills in something like, say, sword without stopping and practicing, but a lot of other skills or spells that the lowbie guy will use reasonably often are just going to be higher from use. Stuff like stone skin or haste if you're a shifter, for example. Getting 3% added to your 95% haste is a much bigger deal than 3% added to your 79% haste, in terms of active practice time it probably replaces.

The second point is that, because of those generally higher skills, lowbie time guy is going to level more quickly/efficiently if he does go at it. You're not going to have to shrug and go back to sleep because you blew concentration on sanc five times and now have no mana.

The third point is that you're going to better know what you do and don't need to practice because you've been in the trenches with those skills. Most of the best PKers I've seen typically do not spend a lot of time working their skills -- rather, they have a sense of which couple skills are most key to their strategy and spend their time there. If you're playing a character very similar to one you've already played, maybe you already know which skills those are. If not, you probably don't.



>Edges: I assume you mean via explore/observation exp?

Sure, plus commerce, plus PK, plus cabal stuff, etc.

>Do you
>think it's fair to say that heroes get more imm attention than
>low and mid range characters?

Generally, sure, though there are a lot of exceptions both ways.

Definitely I would also say that characters that are part of a cabal, religion, etc. get more imm attention than characters that aren't a part of any of those things. I think this at least counterbalances the hero factor.

>I'm not sure what cabal advantages means. You mean like
>progressing up through blade to elite to warmaster and such?

Sure, among other things.

>That's an interesting point, but in many cases cabal progress
>is based on your contribution. Generally it seems as easy or
>easier to make a contribution at hero. Raiding is the obvious
>reason.

What you may not be factoring in here are other heroes.

Here's a situation I've seen frequently:

Empire has a powerhouse hero team on but not a lot of midlevel presence. Fortress has one hero on and one midlevel guy on. Empire has Fortress' item.

Do you think it's easier to contribute and shine there as the hero, who will almost certainly be one-rounded if six Empire heroes can catch him, or as the midbie, who maybe has one guy to beat or run off and then can get the item back?

>Certainly area knowledge is a valuable tool. But you don't
>even have to be playing the same character to gain that. In
>fact, I would say you're better off rolling a shifter to go
>explore places you think might be of interest to your real
>character. With few exceptions you can learn all you need to
>faster that way. And since area knowledge is permanent (at
>least theoretically, I tend to be lazy about saving that data)
>you get a benefit for yourself without handicapping any
>particular character.

In theory that's true. In practice... yes but only up to a point. Even if you're very thorough and don't discover, crap, I don't know where the key my warrior needs is because my shifter just passed through, there's still a decent amount that changes from character to character just because the character's needs and abilities change.
Maybe a shortcut that's not valuable when you're fighting for a key is pretty good if you're a character who can pick locks. Maybe being a character with pathfinding makes something a shortcut that wasn't before, or makes cutting through the wilderness just as fast and less likely to find an ambush than going on the road. Maybe now you're playing a character who will be wanted a lot and the routes you take needs to be influenced or informed by that. Maybe a certain fight is really hard for you as a bard because it's not safe to area, and playing a shifter you never realized that. Maybe there's a quest for midbie thieves that you're never going to even realize is there going through the area as a hero shifter.

Note: I'm not saying it's not valuable to have already been through the area and understand the general layout.

>It very well might. The question is, would it teach you
>anything useful about hero-level fighting that you couldn't
>learn as or more easily at hero? As above, I see that there
>may be a tendency to overlook skills and whatnot, but if you
>think it's a good learning experience to use a limitted
>skillset, then just spend some time doing that at hero.
>You're also less squishy at hero, which probably means you'll
>take fewer deaths in the process of figuring it out.

I think the squishiness actually forces you to be smarter and hone your strategy with a more ruthless efficiency. The other thing to consider here is that the disadvantages of being a lowbie can pretty well approximate some of your worst case scenarios at hero and teach you how to survive them. Do you think a warrior who had to do a bunch of low to mid level fighting without Battle powers and without magic is better or worse prepared for being without the head at hero? What about the hero invoker who has to deal with a scenario in which he won't have a reliable protective shield? Being in a situation where you can't afford a new return potion and haven't had time to regather one pretty well approximates having insect swarm or sequester on you, and so on.

>Yes and no. The exp penalty obviously doesn't matter if you
>aren't planning to do any more ranking ever. What I'm saying
>is as true for any arbitrary end-point as it is for hero, but
>if you ever gain a level (or try) after mob-dieing then you
>have cost yourself some time. This is predicated on the idea
>that ranking is more or less akin to torture, which I realize
>isn't your position.

My position is more, if you don't like ranking, don't. Do other things and you'll gradually gain a level from all the incidental XP you gain going about your business.

>See, everyone says that but I'm not so sure. It seems like
>pretty much every warrior and assassin I rank with, will go
>off at certain key levels to practice. Generally they say
>quite explicitly "I have much to work on" Now this is
>anecdotal, and you have a better statistical view of it than I
>do, but it always looks like most warriors, assassins and
>rangers are going off to practice defense and weapons at low
>levels. I can easily see that being a psychological memory
>effect e.g. it impacts me when they do leave my ranking group,
>so I remember it more strongly.

I think it is, or you select for the groupmates where it is. (Or possibly they're making an excuse to get out of a bad group -- I've seen that done too.)

I wrote up a giant post on what I see as the advantages of being caballed etc. early and our crappy forum software ate it.

I'll try to work up the energy to have another go at it later.

Digest version meanwhile:

- There's quests/edges/observation/exploration/stuff you can only do/get at some subset of levels that doesn't include hero

- Caballed characters aren't free to level all the time, but when they are levelling, they often can level somewhat to ridiculously faster.

"Also skill percentages matter less at hero than they do at low levels, imho. "

smooth purple crack?

"Gear disparity. Gear is more important at lowbie than hero, again imho. A sweet set at lowbie is much harder to overcome than at hero, or so I have always found."

More crack?

as for skills mattering less at hero... they matter several times more at hero simply because the pool of people your fighting against is likely to have higher skill percents. If you land one in three commands and I land one in two I have a big advantage over you straight up, thats why its easy to be beefy at low ranks if you spend time spamming because you prey on the people who statistically are going to have a lot more skill failure then you.

As for gear the lowbie gear hog is mitigated by the fact that lower skill percents mean you can die an ugly out of the blue death (this is magnified by the generally lower hp totals meaning mistakes can cost you more since you have less time to recover).

I agree though that for me the game doesn't really start until the mid 30's before that your stuck roleplaying with trees and rocks without the skills to really DO things.