Some of the skills you can level up in Melvor Idle are a bit strange. There is no better way to understand how something works than trying it out. Some of these skills seemed to be worthwhile and others not so much. So, I decided to look at the agility skill.
One that was a bit strange to me was leveling up Agility. While this is just a 2D game you can have a course your player is running through that you don’t get to see. Every time he runs through the course, he gains some experience and a little bit of gold.
From a gold standpoint, it does not seem to be that worthwhile. At least up to level 56 that i played around with the agility skill. Agility courses seem to be a bit of a gold sink trying to offer you some possible skill gains elsewhere in the game at the expensive other skills you more than likely should not be using at the time.
The way it works is quite simple. At different levels, you unlock more and more obstacle courses. At my level, I can have in a single run 6 out of the 7 different obstacles for my character to run through.
Each one of these obstacles allows you to select a variety of different tasks. Some of them stack while others almost seem to offset the positive or negative effects of others. So, these things do require a bit of planning and thinking about what you plan to be doing for at least a little while in this game.
The level 1 obstacle course has three different options you get to select from. You can only have one active one for each of the obstacles you can have running at once.
At the time I was considering leveling up fishing at some point while I was playing around with the agility system. While I don’t care for global mastery expereince from the first option it would at least help a little bit till I had mastery maxed out in fishing.
The first option also offered the most agility experience for the least amount of time it took to run this section. So, I was getting some quick levels early on just by running this one.
You might also note that it cost 10k gold to build. Quite a cheap rate to start if. If for whatever reason I decided I wanted to replace the cargo net with rope swings instead. I start to get a small discount if I need to rebuild the cargo net and switch this back.
The game even has an option to save your obstacle setup as blueprints. Making it quick and easy to switch between one setup that might be more in favor of fishing experience than another that might be for mining.
The neat thing is that you can’t run agility courses or do other things like fishing at the same time. The bonus these obstacle courses offer is passive. So, this ends up being one of those things if you are trying to min/max this game to put some effort and thought into it.
After gaining some experience you then unlock obstacle 2 and you get to stack with the first one. This one offers a different set of bonuses than the first one. Allowing you to boost multiple different skills you might consider using.
You might notice this time around the cost not only jumped from 10k to 50k gold. The one that reduced the time to run the fire-making skill not only has a log cost it has a level requirement as well.
The good news at least at this point is there are no negative results from any actions you have taken. Everything is still offering a positive bonus. I mostly went for agility experience more than anything. Since this was a skill, I would leave running when I could not be around to check in on the game.
The third obstacle course starts to open things up with a lot more options. This is also when the costs of building each different course start to ramp up. They also started to introduce in some of the options a negative effort for choosing it.
If it was purely a gold cost to switch out between different setups, I don’t think this agility system would be quite so bad. However, once you start adding in construction costs between different skills such as logs from woodcutting, ores from mining, and so on. That starts to make it a bit more complicated to keep track of the amount of time you must spend farming to switch between different setups.
The agility system then keeps repeating this over and over again with more options, more negative effects, and higher costs till you have seven in total if you wish.
You might notice I stopped after having four of these setups. I somewhat lost interest in the whole agility skill. The next one up wanted 500k gold and lots of items from the profession you are looking to boost. They also start to have some rather heavy negative efforts towards other skills. Making it easy to hinder yourself if you are not checking your passives.
The one after that then costs 1 million gold and I hate to think how much the final one costs. The material costs then start getting rather out of hand. I just don’t see myself spending 50k Slayer tokens with how many Slayer points I even have just for a small gain that I might end up replacing the next day if I decided to focus on something else.
Some of the negative effects also seem to counter any positive for the skill in question. Such as running the agility course faster but getting less experience overall. While sure there was a small net gain of experience. It seems kind of odd to hinder the player like that.
At the very least they do allow you to view all passives from the agility skill at once. This makes it quite easy to see what passive you have from this skill that is currently running. Even more so double-check checking you are not negatively impacting a skill you want to go out and train for a while.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, I just did not see it worth my time spending millions of gold and lots of resources to set up the agility course to boost a couple of skills. To then need to spend millions again to switch out and boost a different set of skills when I'm still at the point of the game of testing out what skills I even want to run.
This entire system is really for someone looking to min/max their gameplay in Melvor Idle. I’m sure if I was looking to grind out a skill for farming purposes for a week, I'd make the time investment of getting to level 80 to unlock the next slot and invest the gold and resources to set up the course to benefit that particular skill the most.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Melvor Idle. If you wish to further support my content you can use enjargames at checkout or this referral link for Melvor Idle on the Epic Game Store.
Disclosure: The game was received for free.
Disclosure: As a creator of the Epic Games’ Support-A-Creator Program, I may receive a commission from certain purchases.
