The XP difference is probably because the rank of the ships. When you're at higher level only captains will spawn which worth more than other pirates. With more levels pirate lords start to be way more common and those worth a lot. But yes, defiance effectively means 4 times the healt compared to the default (100%+300%, especially with higher challenge level as the pirates' skill also improve with level) so it is pretty hard to kill them during that. It helps a lot if you have overhelming damage stat. Questing maybe a close second to a combat with insane pirate spawn rate. After you buy a flying ship you can do quests very fast. Actually the combat is the favorable for most players because as much as I see everyone goes for pure damage or diplomacy and either the cannons or the grogolov will do overhelming damage. If you join players with very high level the received XP will be above your level, though sooner or later your level will be higher than the half of the high level player's level. Online the received XP is divided equally between players in the same region. This means a level 375 player receive full amount of XP in a level 750 combat with an additional player. A level 100 player in the same region receive around +50% because there is a cap to prevent powerleveling.

Yes, I seen the alpha value too and tried to do something about it but nothing. During item creation the game ignore any value above the 3 bit RGB color (FFFFFF for pure white for example, FFFFFF80 for half transparent end up the same).

Interesting. It's certainly safer, especially how dead online seems to be from what i'm reading online, to do quests. I may try looking for a server at some point once the grind gets a bit rough. I'm curious: how are you trying things? I'm trying to get specific colors of paint, but they seem random or tied to whatever the factions currently have.

With the developer build using the commands from the help file that requires that version. I was an admin on the official server so I can prove that the online community is dying. There are several gameplay breaking bugs that never got fixed despite my continuous asking. The bugs including the wrong stats for the frigate and galleon (those have lower stats than what the ship tab displays for you making them as weak as a stronger brig), crashing because of memory leaks, general balance issues (including not working armor and piercing stats as well the overscaled Acid Essence damage), and the Support specialization's grogolov damage's wrong calculation (it do way more damage than it should +120% instead of +60 or something like that).

Online most players get discouraged because of their weak performance, however that isn't their skill but the above mentioned issues. But instead of fixing it, the development tries to silence those who mention the issues. The same happening to Project 5: Sightseer which is dead right now despite being newer than Windward lol.

Wait, armor and piercing don't work? Wouldn't these issues also be really easy to fix? Yeah, that's what happens when you're dishonest: what you want you rarely get anyway..

Piercing is not working for sure. The armor worked some times ago and maybe does now, at least when I had 0 armor and compared to 50%. However as much as I tried there is literally no difference if you have 75% damage reduction or just 20% because the NPCs doing the same damage. It is possible the armor works against players but I did not tried that. I even tried having ridiculous 15000 armor which is two times of the requirement for the 75% damage reduction cap. Generally it would mean the piercing and everything affects the "over armor" first before touching your actual defense, yet the NPCs did the very same damage.

By the way piercing is obsolate because both explosive ammunition coating and the dragon essence ignores around 50% armor.

===EDIT===

Actually it is quite an amount of armor ignored. Even with 15000 armor... 70% ignored when someone using shock ammo... the remaining armor is 4500. At that level every pirate have at least 2200 piercing. I don't know the exact calculation but that is at least another -30%. So against a heroic level pirate my 15000 armor get reduced to 3100 or so. That is 45% damage reduction but I can be wrong. If someone hit me with noxious that is another -70% armor but I don't count that now. From 15K to literally no damage reduction and 15K armor is impossible to have without special items. Now imagine this with a standard setup that has 3300 armor to start with.

How can this guy miss these variables in his math? That explains why one would build for speed, diplomacy, and/or attack, then.

I mentioned it before so everyone from the team is aware of these. But yes, this is why you usually see only high diplomacy support, high hull tank, and high damage DPS players online. The more experienced players at least stick to these. Me being no exception, I like being overly tanky lol.

How viable is focusing on speed to kite the high DPS players/AI?

It is required. High speed or high hull is a must have to stay alive. With decent speed and mobility you can evade most of the cannon fire in flying ships, much harder to do so in sailing ships though. Be aware of the pirate kings, dragons and players with 1° deviance for accuracy as those has nearily 100% hit chance and impossible to evade all the shots.

I hear dragons are near impossible to solo.

I could say trivial things like "possible but tricky" or "perfection defeate everything", but honestly the dragons are out of pace. They have a single cannon (all of their offense is focused in single shots) and all of their shots is critical. The damage output of theirs is like the better DPS players'. The dragon fly a little higher than other flying ships so they can fly over anything on the field making it impossible to stop them when they're moving or escaping for healing (if you seen dread lords, dragons act the same at low healt). Their fire breath instantly kills most ships and only resistance help against, luckily they don't use it against flying ships for some reason. The hard part is when they capture a town and spawn pirates every time they lose 25% HP. If you fight the dragon then the pirates takes the towns effortlessly, if you destroy the pirates the dragon heals himself back to full healt no time. Alone it is impossible to take one down without cheating. Maybe setting the challenge to 10% and the damage to 200% help but you have to be very skilled.

As for general strategy, the dragon has elemental only damage thus resistance negate it. If you have 95% resistance (maximum possible amount: 8 x 10% +15% from defensive specialization boost) the dragon's damage will be minimal. For a second strategy, single cannon means single fire arc. The dragon can fire only forward and while turns extremely fast you can overspeed it if you use noxious cloud on it. Be aware of that he still fly faster than you even with noxious and just turn slower than you. When the pirates spawn however you're in tight situation, that is the point when more players are required.

So, basically, get a blimp (easier said than done) and prioritize speed over everything, then play jousting matches with his sides. But don't you need to kill the dragon to get the strongest resistance items, or have i read wrong?

And high diplomacy to max out the damage done by grogolov as that is the blimp's primary weapon, yes. Items with resistance dropped randomly everywhere. In heroic and raids nearily all the items will have resistance against the instance's element.

That could be interesting. Farm res parts then make a bunch of sets, then whatever seems to be majority you just equip that set before the boss appears?