>What potential change or addition, if any, would make the
>sub-hero levels of the game more interesting to you?
>Interesting in this case being defined as: you'd be more
>interested in PKing/exploring/RPing/etc. in them (vs. powering
>through them) than today.

Some of this may have been said already.

The biggest thing for me is probably damage scaling. I find that until the mid 40s people, particularly warriors, are doing much more damage compared to hitpoint pools than they would at hero. At the low and mid levels it's much easier to lose 30% in a round Edit: of melee. Recently for example I was in a fight against a warrior and figured that I was at 60% or so, and losing, but I thought that since I normally don't fight warriors in the low ranks I'd give it a shot. Well I was dead in the two rounds of lag on that command, which wouldn't have been even close to a guaranteed win for me even if it had worked (and it failed because of low skill). And that's fine, no big deal, but at hero if I'm at 60% it's almost always safe to try one more command to see if you can turn the tide.

More edit:
And that's much of what it comes down to. Even when I'm on the other side of that matchup, going bam-bam-bam and dropping a few mages with my village app wasn't very satisfied. It just seemed kind of stupidly easy. I didn't even have to do anything "murder" was enough or just "oh you failed your spell now you die before I even bother entering a command" The problem is that at low levels you only get interesting fights if you have two highly defensive characters. At mid levels this is less the case, but still applies somewhat.

Part of that, admittedly, is gear. I tend not to gear as much at low levels, and much of that is because I don't value the low levels. There is a circularity there. At the same time, there's much more risk. I've taken numerous mob deaths while trying to grab a piece of gear that's decent and immediately thought "damnit I'm an idiot why didn't I just powerank to hero and then I wouldn't have this exp hole). Even if it is gear, the fact is that melee benefits far more from gear than non-melee.

Possible way to address: scale +damage on gear the same way weapon averages are scaled by level, and/or apply +damage to spells in some way.

The second thing is skill gains. I hate skill spamming. So basically if I fight before hero I haven't had all that time fighting mobs, receiving level gains and so forth, in order to let my skills mature naturally. By hero I'll have a lot of things perfected without having to waste a lot of time skill spamming. And maybe it's supposed to be balanced in the earlier ranks, but my impression is that defenses, for example, make a pretty hefty difference. Overall the lower level of skills in the mid ranks makes fights less predictable, which would be tolerable, except that it also leads to the kind of sudden deaths mentiond above.

The third big thing for me is con loss. Personally I think that all practices and gains should be based on the greater of your current stat or the max you have ever had that stat trained to.

I see no reason hp gains at your level should be based on your current con rather than your racial max con. It doesn't add anything fun that fighting extensively in the midranks means having to wear crappy con gear while ranking. I'll also admit that I'm just an idiot and frequently screw up wis/int gear and fail to wear the right thing when leveling or practicing. It's ultimately no fun at all to have your character permanently weakened because you were too stupid to remember to wear the right hat when you went to the trainer.

To a lesser extent I just don't want to end up at hero, where I consider the real action to be, with half my con. Maybe if midrank fighting were more important to me this issue would go away.

And if I had my druthers con wouldn't reduce with deaths. Instead you just have a death counter that starts at con * 3, goes down one when you die, and can be trained up like a stat.

What the #### is that attachment? I didn't attach anything