You have been "assisted" if you are soloing or fellowing and another solo player or fellowship comes along and does anything at all to you (or your pet) or your tagged foe during the course of a fight. It does not matter whether their assistance is to buff/heal you, debuff your tagged foe, or damage your tagged foe during the course of your fight. It does not matter if they do only 1 point of actual damage to your foe or they do most of the damage. The player(s) who assist you in this manner are known as a contributor to the fight.

The mechanics of "assist" exp are essentially the same as for determining your experience award in a Fellowship, with several differences:

• Every "contributor" to the defeat of a foe constitutes a "temporary fellowship" for the purpose of calculating the experience award, and this number can go much higher than only 6 people.

• The fellowship bonus modifier is not applied if you are solo when somebody assists you.

• The fellowship bonus modifier, if applicable, is based only the size of the fellowship who tagged the mob.

• Only the player(s) who tags the mob get their share of the final adjusted experience award. The contributor(s) who "assisted" do not receive what would normally be their experience award.

Examples

When you are assisted in this manner, the game effectively treats the total number of people who did anything regarding the fight as a "temporary fellowship" for the purpose of determining the divisor to the bonus-adjusted experience.

So, if you're solo and another solo player "assists" you, then you get exactly 50% of the experience you would have normally received. (instead of the 60% you would have received if that person had been in a fellowship with you). If a fellowship of 2 players assists you (and you're solo), you get exactly 33% of the experience (instead of the normal 48% you would have obtained if you were all in a fellowship together). If three completely different, random players assist you (none of you are in a fellowship), you receive exactly 25% of the experience (instead of the normal 43%). And so on. In all these three examples, you're just dividing your normal "solo" exp by the total number of people who were involved in any way, and remember this includes buffs, debuffs, heals, or anything---not just damage to the foe itself.

The same thing essentially happens if you are in a fellowship and another fellowship "assists", or if other random solo players assist your fellowship. The difference is that since you're in a fellowship, the fellowship bonus and all the other fellowship experience mechanics are applied first. Still, though, the other players who are not in your fellowship take their portion and it's "thrown away". For example, if you're in a fellowship of 3 people and a solo player "assists" your fellowship, you get the bonus modifier for 3 people, but that bonus-adjusted experience is then divided by 4 instead of by 3. So instead of you getting your normal 144% / 3 experience award, you instead get a 144% / 4 experience award.

Why does Turbine do this? A likely theory is that its done in part to encourage ad-hoc formation of groups when you run into other solo players in the same area where you're hunting. Why not group up if you'll get better exp for it, right? And also to prevent (to some extent) a common technique of power-leveling that is a particular favorite of farming operations, where a high-level player lets a low-level player tag a mob and then the high level player kills it to give huge exp to the low-level player.