Yes, it was serious.

I've had caballed, tattooed characters reach level 25 in 20 hours - and accidently have their heart burst. Never stopping, at any level. More than one level an hour and still a heart burst.

I've had multiple characters in the late twenties to mid 30s, with 30-40 hours, with heros in range. Guess what? Your skills DO NOT WORK on heros. Period. It's not a matter of "Tougher foes" - once you distend more than a little you are done.

Fer'ex. I had a thief at 32 with human heros in range. I stalked a human shifter (lion/eagle) until I caught him in human form, without fly. Perfect time to cheapshot him to death, right? Situation couldn't get any better? I missed four trips before he noticed he was in combat and shifted lion. One round, dead.

Fluke? Nope. I have 100 misses in a row on trips against heros.

It is not mechanically possible for a level 30 to beat a hero. Even an afk hero. Invoker? One spell, you're dead. Major form? Yeah, right. Warrior? Funny. Paladin? Necro? Shaman? It gets worse and worse.

Now. Set the issue aside that 90% of the skill code in the game was never intended to be balanced outside a 10 level differential. In fact, several skills intentionally do much better or worse with a level differential to make them more useful for certain combinations or more useful against certain combinations. With distention there's a pretty good argument for changing that.

But, seriously. Once your pk range is heros... why the hell would you NOT race up to hero as fast as you could? Which is the topic of this discussion.

My point was not "Distention is bad" - my point was "Distention encourages racing to hero."

I rather like the "rank once every ten hours." In fact, that was about perfect with my preferred method of play. Only problem? At the low end, say you average 2-3 kills an hour. 3 of those 10 hour sessions and you're distened. 4-5 of them, you're seriously distended. By the time you get from 25 to 35 your pk range is all heros.

>And I think it is, so I'll answer it.
>
>If you are able to kill enough to distend, you are probably
>sitting in a range where the challenge is not nearly enough.
>You should be glad to distend and have some tougher
>opponents.
>
>What's fun about shooting fish in a barrel?
>
>Rank once every ten hours from 11 to 51, and you are not
>likely to distend in a fashion that will cause you problems
>after gaining each rank. That gives you 400 hours sub-hero.
>How is that not enough?
>
>Sounds to me like you want to level sit at one of a few levels
>for ages, which is not the same as taking your time to hero.
>I bet you didn't decide to spend lots of time at the level
>just below that crucial skill or spell.