Leveling Pact

This article contains information that no longer applies to the current version of City of Heroes. It is provided for historical purposes.

Overview

A Leveling Pact is a feature introduced in Issue 13 (and disabled in Issue 21 after changes to the Sidekick system had reduced the need for it) and an innovation to MMORPGs; this system allows two players to create new characters (or use existing low-level characters) and have their experience be permanently synced, whether or not both characters are online. They will always be the same level, even if one pactmate plays ten times more often than the other.

Creation

As of Issue 21, creation of new leveling pacts has been disabled.

Prior to Issue 21, a pact could only be created between characters who were Level 5 and under. To begin a pact, a player right-clicked on their intended pactmate and chose Invite to Leveling Pact. Alternatively, one could begin a pact with the /levelingpact slash command.

This created a special Friends List subsection labeled Leveling Pact. The following options are found there:

1. A list containing the player's character name and their pactmate's character name.
2. A button labeled Leave Pact which will break the Leveling Pact.

Characters could join and can remain in leveling pacts regardless of alignment.

Details

All sources of experience - glowie clicks, critter defeats, Mission/Story Arc completion, etc - are split between pactmates. Any modifiers (Debt or Patrol XP) to the XP is applied before it is split. Sharing of experience may be delayed briefly.

If the two in the pact do not have the same experience, as can be the case at the creation of a leveling pact when, for example, a level 4 character gets leveling pacted with a level 1 character, then the higher level character will receive no experience and the lower level character receive all the experience until they catch up to the same level.

inf is always evenly split.

Item drops (enhancements, inspirations, etc.), and Prestige are not split.

If a player goes into debt while pacted, they will earn less experience for the pact until their debt is paid off. The experience gained from their pactmate is not used to pay off debt.

Pactmates do not need to be on at the same time, or even on the same team, or any team at all, for their experience to go toward their partner. If one player is Exemplared/Malefactored and has the exemplar option set to "double inf and no XP", they will not earn experience for the pact. However, they will still receive half of their partner's experience.

If one player has turned off experience earning in options, they will not earn experience for the pact. However, the experience earned by their partner will go into a "bank" of sorts, and will be awarded when the player turns experience earning back on, bringing the character up to their partner's experience level.

Renaming a character will not break the pact.

Quitting

Players can break a Leveling Pact at any time by:

• clicking the Leave Pact button mentioned above in the Friends List subsection;
• right-clicking on their pactmate and selecting Leave Pact; or
• using the /unlevelingpact slash command.

In all cases players will be asked to confirm that they want to break the leveling pact. However, if their characters are above level 5, they cannot re-create the pact or join a new one.

Additionally, a leveling pact will be broken automatically if one or both members move to another server, or if one of the accounts becomes inactive.