NOTE:
The few sections ahead will be going into details about XP calculation in Shellshock, and how it can be exploited in this farm design. If you want to skip all this science talk and go straight to the farm, head to Part 5: Quick recap of the entire process

XP in Shellshock Live is divided into two main categories: tank xp and weapon xp. Both of these are gained by dealing damage via any method.

Additionally, tank xp can be gained by doing various skillshots, which each give a fixed 5 XP bonus to each shot, subjected by the lobby multiplier.

Accounting for lobby multiplier and ignoring skillshots, gains for both of these for each shot can be formulated in the following way for most weapons:



Two things to note here:

1. Tank XP is subjected to losses from team and self damage, while Weapon XP is not. This means that if your aim is to only gain Weapon XP, hitting yourself does not matter at all.
   
   
2. More importantly, it is not necessarily damage which counts for XP gains, but something what I call xp damage. We will take a closer look into this concept in the next part.

Most projectiles in Shellshock Live are limited to gaining 1 tank hit's worth of XP per each projectile.

In other words, XP damage by a single projectile is limited to single target damage. This means that the maximum XP any given weapon can gain is dictated by the total damage of their projectiles that can be inflicted on a single target.

For example, because a Mega Nuke consists of 1 singular projectile, the maximum Tank XP it can gain (without crit and buffs) by damage alone is:



While the Weapon XP:




where M is the lobby XP multiplier

This does not change no matter how many tanks you hit, be it 1 or 7 enemies.
Additionally, if you hit either yourself or your teammates in the process with the nuke, you will also lose all Tank XP for the shot (but not weapon xp).

Let's check out an actual in-game example of this:


In this scenario, I shot a Mega Nuke on 7 tanks in a Charge lobby with a lobby multiplier of 1.28×, causing 700 total damage (100 per tank), and avoided taking damage myself.







The in-game XP (which is determined by damage and skillshots), is 13, as expected from the formula previously discussed: (100/10) × 1.28 = 12.8, which gets rounded up to 13.


Similarly, Weapon XP gained (as seen by the difference of the xp counter from before and after) is 100 × 1.28 = 128.



Where things become interesting is when multiple projectiles are introduced.

As a great example of this, let's take Fireworks. This weapon consists of 36 projectiles that do 8 damage each. This means, without crits taken into account, the maximum XP that it can generate is (which happens when all projectiles hit):





What should be noted, is that the XP scales purely with how many of the total number of projectiles hit (and single target projectile damage), and not by total amount damage itself.

In the case of Fireworks and similar weapons, tanks standing on top of each other would gain a lower amount of XP compared to if the tanks were spread in such a way that more or all projectiles would hit.

These rules apply to the vast majority of the weapons in the game.

However, there are some which don't follow these rules.

I like to call these weapons limit breakers.

To put it simply, limit breakers are weapons that don't follow the previous rules of XP damage, but instead gain more XP linearly based on the number of tanks hit.

In other words, you could say that their XP damage is the total damage they deal (outside of 2 exceptions. shown below), regardless of how many tanks were hit and how they were hit.

The following is, to my knowledge, a comprehensive list of current limit breaker weapons:

NOTE:

1. Weapons marked with an asterisk are what I call "type 2 limit breakers", more info on those later.
   
2. All upgrades of these weapons are also limit breakers.

The formula for XP gained for limit breaker weapons goes as follows (does not apply type 2 limit breakers):





Where T is the total amount of damage dealt,
T_t is the total amount of team damage dealt (includes self-damage),
and M is the lobby XP multiplier.

As we can see, the XP gains with regular limit breakers purely scale based on damage dealt, regardless of how many tanks were involved, and how they were involved.

Additionally, most (but not all) limit breakers don't inflict self or team damage, but in the few cases they do, it is still possible to gain Tank XP by hitting 2 or more enemies in addition to hitting yourself.

As an example, let's take the Shank and hit 7 tanks in the FFA gamemodel. In this case the XP gained will be (without crits):

Tank xp:

Weapon xp:


As you can see these weapons can greatly benefit from stacking tanks, unlike the regular, "non-limit breaking" weapons.

So what about type 2 limit breakers?

These are weapons that are not technically limit breakers, but due to them activating individually on each tank, their amount of projectiles scales linearly based on number of tanks hit, leading to nominal, limit-breaker style, linearly increasing gains of XP.

There are 2 major consequences to this, that make these weapons differ greatly from the others:

1. When stacking tanks, the damage scales quadratically instead of linearly, while their XP keeps scaling linearly (like other limit breakers). This can lead to very large damage numbers (in the order of multiple thousands) for high number of stacked tanks, but the XP gain will still stay low in comparison.
   
   
2. Because the number of hits grows based on number of tanks, standing on a top of a stack while using these will completely negate any Tank XP gains from all tanks stacked on the user.

For type 2 limit breakers, the formulae for XP gains are as follows:





Where I is the individual hit damage,
H is the amount of tanks hit,
H_t is the amount of hits inflicted on self/team,
and M is the lobby XP multiplier.

As we can see, in terms of XP gained, it does not matter if the tanks are stacked or not. So while stacking the tanks with type 2 limit breakers does increase the damage, it does not increase the amount of XP gained.

Let's do an example with the Radar and 7 enemy tanks in 3 scenarios:

1. All tanks stacked, including shooter
   
2. All tanks stacked, excluding shooter
   
3. All tanks separated

In these scenarios the XP gained (without crits) will be as follows:

Full stack:

Shooter separated:

All tanks separated:

As we can see, all the scenarios are the same in terms of Weapon XP. However, standing on the stack will negate all Tank XP.

Additionally, the damage in the first and second scenario would be 7×7×50 = 2450 and 7×50 = 350 respectively, but as mentioned previously, damage has no effect on XP gain in the case of type 2 limit breakers.

So, now that we have covered the whole system, we will move on to the most interesting part, namely putting all this knowledge to good use.

So as you might see, due to how XP works for most weapons, the notorious "xp farm go mid" farms are very inefficient.

If you want do those kinds of farms, it would be better for the tanks to "carpet", e.g. separate out into an area instead of stacking together, so that weapons like Fireworks get more projectile hits, and thus more XP.

However, improving these farms themselves is not my main idea, but rather introducing a totally new type of farm, that mainly focuses on Tank XP by fully utilizing previously mentioned limit breakers to their full extent.

I like to call these "limit breaker xp farms" or "break-xp-limit farms". This method is based on the common Charge Weapon XP farming method. What's mainly changed is how and what weapons are focused to be used.

The setup is as follows:

Lobby settings:
* - Stadium is unlocked by winning a 16 player tournament

Next is going to be the action plan — players should perform the following steps as fast as possible to maximize xp/time gains. It's highly recommended to turn off "Scene Change Animation" in the options menu to significantly reduce downtime.

The flow of the match is as follows:

1. All players ready up, the match begins.
   
2. Everyone instantly overcharges, receiving a 1.25× damage modifier for the next round, thus increasing the amount of XP gained.
   
3. Everyone stacks in the center.
   
   • Everyone should optimally have their tracks maxed, as a maxed fuel tank will take the furthest players directly to the center, while an unmaxed tank will be just shy of it.
4. All players fire their strongest limit breaker weapon they have.
   
5. Round ends, XP is received, rinse and repeat.

In case someone does not have any limit breakers, shooting time-consuming weapons such as God Rays or Bumper Bombs should be avoided as these tend to slow the rotations too much to be worth it.

Additionally, there are some weapons that can work as a good substitute to limit breakers, giving a low, but much better XP gain than other weapons generally. The next section will cover some of those.

If anything else, avoiding breaking the terrain should remain a priority to let shanks, lasers, and tasers hit effectively.

Additionally, only a single player can use the Relocator effectively at a time, and this should be done with a considerable delay (e.g. by shooting it upwards with power in the 80-100 range)

Type 2 limit breakers (Radar and Confuser) additionally require separating from the stack by the radius of their projectile explosions to avoid self damage and Tank XP losses that come with it. It is thus recommended that you avoid using these if you have other (strong) limit breakers, as this helps in keeping the stacks clean.

In an ideal scenario, each full rotation from start to finish will last under 40 seconds. From testing, Tank XP gains for each round usually vary between 40-120 XP with overcharging, and can rarely reach as high as 160 XP. This means, that theoretically this method can go over 200 XP per minute in one round bursts if everyone plays optimally, but in general maintaining 60 XP per minute seems feasible.

The next 2 sections are optional and will cover more details on ideal weapons to use and specific things to note in regards to them, and also weapons which generally should be avoided when doing this type of farming.

Listed here are some key weapons for limit breaker farms and some notes regarding them, along with some expected XP gains. All XP gain values assume maxed crit upgrades and overcharging.

NOTE:
This section has to be split into two parts, because of the 8000 character limit

In general, all the other limit breakers are great as well and almost always far surpass the non-breaker options, so if you get any, you should use them when farming for XP this way, giving at least a respectable 40+ XP if used correctly, compared to the 2 XP of most non-breakers (which is from the round xp passively gained over time rather than damage).

The next part of this subsection will cover some useful non-limit-breaker weapons.

You should be able to get at least 1 limit breaker most of the time, but invariably there will also be some rounds where you get none. In these cases there are a few good choices that can give some XP even with full stacking reliably.

Even though this is much less that what limit breakers give, it is still better than the standard 2 XP passive bonus you would only get otherwise. Generally speaking, anything you can avoid hitting yourself with can work. Below are a few examples:

Despite being seemingly powerful, there are many weapons that are actually very bad and not ideal in limit breaker farms. This section will go over some of those and explain why they're so bad.

Here is a list of some of the most commonly used methods for grinding XP and their measured average yields in XP/minute and XP/hour.

---

Testing methodology
All tests were conducted using a simple "XP difference over playtime" method, where XP before and after tests were recorded, and was compared to duration to the test. This way, the XP/time can be calculated as:


In general, test duration was between 30-60 minutes (except for 4.08× due to its very long round lengths).

Additionally, 8 player methods were tested similarly, but every player participated in measurements and the end results listed are averages of all 8 players.

If you don't care about semantics and simply want to get onto the farming, here's a detailed overview of everything you should know about setting up and running a limit breaker farm:


1. All players turn off menu transitions in the options menu;

2. All players have maxed out tracks and gun in the skill tree (might not be feasible for low lvl players, if that's the case then prioritise tracks);

3. Host starts a match with the following parameters:

• Charge
  
• FFA
  
• 8 players
  
• 200 KWh capacity
  
• High wind
  
• "All" shot type
  
• 20s turn time
  
• 30 starting weapons
  
• Medium obstacles

For a total XP multiplier of ×1.28


1. Once the match starts, everyone instantly overcharges, in an optimal scenario the first round should take no less than two seconds;

2. On the second turn, all players move towards the centre of the arena

3. After moving into position, all players scan their arsenals in search of limit breakers in the following order of priority:

4. If a limit breaker needs specific positioning (e.g. Shank, Laser, Radar), make sure to call it out. If not, fire away.

4a. If you happen to get no limit breakers, fire a weapon that doesn't deform terrain and doesn't take ages to finish (e.g. Ghost Bomb)

5. During the match, refrain from taking any buffs unless they're easy picks, otherwise they'll simply waste time

5a. Remember that cooperation can go a long way in this farm, a chaotic lobby will be much less efficient

6. After the match is over, repeat the process as many times as you wish

To summarize, typical "go mid" farms are very ineffective, but could be improved just by the simple action of separating the tanks due to how non-limit-breakers work.

Using limit breaker weapons on multiple tanks in any scenario can be a great boost to XP gains, and knowing this can help boost your XP every so often.

Additionally, if you manage to get a coordinated group to play with, limit breaker XP farms can potentially reach an order of magnitude higher XP rates compared to typical play.

It also should be noted that due most high-power limit breakers being locked to higher levels, this grinding method likely does not perform well at lower levels, but rather peaks out in effectiveness at levels over 93 (where you get taser, last of the strong limit breakers for a long time).

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This is my first time writing a community guide, so any feedback, suggestions, corrections etc. are very welcome!

In addition, if you make new discoveries related to the topic (e.g. finding new limit breaker weapons or ways of improving limit breaker farms) that I could add to the guide, those are greatly appreciated as well.

That being said, I hope you, the reader, found this guide useful, and thanks for reading!

We have and maintain a small discord server where we gather and organize effective limit breaker lobbies with people who are in the know. Feel free to hop in and say hello!
https://discord.gg/SF8jfGmk76

I want to give credit to the Shellshock Live community members who encouraged and helped me in writing this guide, especially White I Rabbit, who helped with pre-publish reviewing and provided some parts and images of guide. In addition, I want to thank Spider for doing amazing work at post-publish formatting and editing to make the guide even cleaner and clearer.

I also want to thank everyone who has been passionate about the limit breaker farming concept and who have accompanied me on my journey to research and help me test it to a degree that I could not have done without you.

I want to especially thank 1MIKE, Awein, Horizon, J4ckiee, spider, White I Rabbit and XavierC315 for being very active and helpful in numerous of my test runs!

I want to thank Luggi for taking care and growing our lovely community discord. LB would not be the same without you!

Finally, I want to thank White I Rabbit, J4ckiee, DUAL HEAT SOLDERIN, Phil, Chaostatic, spider, Arctaroll and ZombieCat for participating on the grand test and helping me to measure the true power of limit breaker farming.