Seliph stuck at level 19

[Ackron64]

Alright, so I'm on chapter 7 in Genealogy of the Holy War and got Seliph to level 19 after clearing the arena. I was a little bummed out and whatnot, because I really wanted to promote Seliph before actually starting the chapter, but whatever, I'll just feed him a dark mage then return staff him back. The problem is, he just randomly stopped being able to gain experience. What's even more bizarre is that all of my other units are able to gain experience from the very same dark mages, but Seliph is getting absolutely nothing. This has never happened to me in any of my other playthroughs, and I've scoured the forums to see if anyone else has experienced this problem, but nothing. I tried resetting the game, selling the paragon band, waiting several turns, and even loading a save state from chapter 6 to try and fix the problem, but nothing has worked. If anyone has any idea as to how to get rid of this problem, I'm listening.

 

TLDR: Seliph stopped gaining exp at level 19 but everyone else can still gain exp and I don't know what to do.

[Eltosian Kadath]

You are just facing enemies too weak for Seliph to gain experience from killing them. If you look at the experience formula from the main Serenes Forest site

Quote

Experience

Property	Calculations
Experience from doing damage	= 10 + (enemy’s Level – Level)
Experience from defeating enemy	= 30 + [(enemy’s Level – Level) x 2]

we can see that if Seliph is 10 levels above an enemy he no longer gains experience from simply damaging it, and must kill to gain xp, and if he is 15 level above an enemy he no longer gets xp from killing it, which is the case here where your level 19 Seliph is killing a level  4 Dark Mage

Edited March 13, 2020 by Eltosian Kadath
typos

[Ertrick36]

I'll add that the Paragon Ring doesn't help in any way since its effect is applied after the initial calculation previously mentioned, and zero doubled is just zero.

Also, it's very early on in the game to be promoting virtually anyone, so it stands to reason that you might run into difficulties doing so.  Seliph probably won't promote until he kills a boss in that chapter, since most bosses in it are level 20 and will give a Paragon Ring-equipped Seliph 64 experience.  As much of a pain as it might be, I'd recommend that course of action because you don't want to rob everyone else of precious experience trying to gradually nudge Seliph to level 20 with the EXP equivalent of breadcrumbs for him.  Plus, if you have him take the castle that holds the first boss (the dark bishop all the way in the north), I think a path opens up directly south that lets you immediately scale down the mountain, so he could be quickly taken back to the castle if you didn't have anyone inherit the Return or Warp Staves.

[Ackron64]

On 3/13/2020 at 1:03 AM, Eltosian Kadath said:

You are just facing enemies too weak for Seliph to gain experience from killing them. If you look at the experience formula from the main Serenes Forest site

we can see that if Seliph is 10 levels above an enemy he no longer gains experience from simply damaging it, and must kill to gain xp, and if he is 15 level above an enemy he no longer gets xp from killing it, which is the case here where your level 19 Seliph is killing a level  4 Dark Mage

Wow, I can't believe it took me this long to realize that this was a part of the game. I'm still not sure why I couldn't find any information about it through my own research, so I thank you for for your service.

On 3/13/2020 at 6:53 AM, Ertrick36 said:

I'll add that the Paragon Ring doesn't help in any way since its effect is applied after the initial calculation previously mentioned, and zero doubled is just zero.

Also, it's very early on in the game to be promoting virtually anyone, so it stands to reason that you might run into difficulties doing so.  Seliph probably won't promote until he kills a boss in that chapter, since most bosses in it are level 20 and will give a Paragon Ring-equipped Seliph 64 experience.  As much of a pain as it might be, I'd recommend that course of action because you don't want to rob everyone else of precious experience trying to gradually nudge Seliph to level 20 with the EXP equivalent of breadcrumbs for him.  Plus, if you have him take the castle that holds the first boss (the dark bishop all the way in the north), I think a path opens up directly south that lets you immediately scale down the mountain, so he could be quickly taken back to the castle if you didn't have anyone inherit the Return or Warp Staves.

I ended up leveling Seliph up by killing a level 10 melgen soldier or two. The reason why I grinded Seliph out so quickly is because the pace of your FE4 playthrough is basically determined by how quickly Seliph promotes. Also, I'm not too worried about exp distribution since it's pretty easy in this game. So many generation 2 units have access to staves, and staves give you a ridiculous amount of exp in this game. And even if they don't have staves, everyone can one round basically any enemy in gen 2 if given proper inventory (e.g. Dermott with Sigurd's crit Silver Sword, Fee with the Brave Lance, Arthur with Forseti, etc.) so exp gain for them isn't much of an issue for them either. That doesn't even include Lex's two children, who can promote by only doing arena battles.