The great experience challenge

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Yeah, that's what I thought. I've never been able to do it again when I come back for Nicodemous's quest, either.

(People often recommend doing it in Chapter 5 on these boards, however, so I assumed there was something changed with my game, i.e., maybe a mod rewrote the ability to do it in Chapter 5 or something).

 

Vunarg has a small troupe of followers hanging around just a bit closer to Yquog, but the exp difference is small in either way. Solo and duo teams might opt for the quest exp if they're at higher level at the moment.

Good idea about the Archimandrite. So you mean the rest of the monastery won't attack once they're on their way out first? I missed that one this time around.

I've only seen Veira's stash once, when I had a Dreadmaster take on my diplomat duties. So you need to be a Dreadmaster and have the talking skills to match, and by the sound of it I'm guesstimating Intimidate, possibly even Spellcraft and/or Knowledge:Arcana.

The best time to tackle the Battle Squares isn't about the chapter number, but when you can get there with the lowest possible level. Often times this is when you finally add the remaining members of your party, or the very first time you get there.

 

No, sorry, I was unclear. The monks all DID attack. But I was going to slaughter them all and skip the trials anyway (I find the monk trials, Battle Squares, and the entire Time Loop sequence very tedious and generally slug through those parts of the game as quickly as possible). I can't remember the XP but Aruma and Dolan were both higher level than everyone else in the temple, so they rewarded some decent XP. I can't remember their specific items, though each had several that were worth decent money at that point in the game, and I do remember that Dolan had a wand of Melf's acid arrow, which I've never seen anywhere else in the game.

 

Oh, most of the stuff I've learned while doing research for this specific mission points to the fact that you're actually better off concentrating on what you want your party members do at various parts of the game, rather than blindly stare on the total exp tally.

In cleartext: Starting as solo might give you a few thousand extra exp but it's just so much easier to get at least three to begin with that usually it's not worth the extra hassle. Very small long term gain vs huge short term penalty and all that. And depending on your party composition, there can be anywhere between one to four characters you might want to bless with a bit of a headstart at the cost of the remaining five to two, and THAT's much more of a consideration that squeezing out a bit more exp by playing the average level roller coaster with optimized weights.

All I want is to finally get rid of the remaining hand-wavy parts of my theorycrafting, as nothing short of proof by playtesting seems to be enough to bust some myths...

Edit about Battlesquares: No, you'll want to do it when you're at your lowest average level (the CR values are fixed just as the amount of rewards, so no extra spawns to muddy the waters as usually) AND can actually expect to pull off the Rank 10 fights, apart from the more obvious consideration of when you might want to get your hands on some of the rank rewards. Sure, with a "bit" of reload cheese applied on the actual fights, all you really need is to be able to complete Rank 6 to get the Club of Disruption, which in turn has a flat 5% chance per hit to destroy a good 90% of all the opposition in the upper ranks. But with an estimated 25 to 50 percent chance to actually get an exp reward for completing a level, having to reload for anything more than that is bound to add several HOURS of real-life time for the ordeal so I'd strongly advise against it for the sake of YOUR sanity.

 

So, regarding Vunarg and his pack underneath the Horde fortress: there are TWO dialogue options that get him to leave voluntarily without fighting.

1) This is the first dialogue option on the dialogue tree. Option 1 is to tell him, up front, that you want him to take his pack and leave, or die. I think it is probably reliant on Intimidate, maybe Bluff (at this point my human sorceror's Bluff and Intimidate are around a +10 or +12, at most, which includes the CHA bonus). Vunarg gets up and leaves, but says it has nothing to do with my party & he's leaving to go mining or whatever it is he wants to do. This gets the party about 1050 XP, I think.

2) This is the one I always used to do, but I'll never do again, since option 1 (which seems risky when you glance at it) actually gives the party more XP. Option 2 on the dialogue tree is where your "talker" basically helps Vunarg rationalize leaving the tunnels, and he basically talks himself into leaving. You get 750XP for that conversation.

3) Then fighting him and his pack (the pack is relatively small--a couple of archers, maybe 2 brawlers, and a shaman, plus him), adds up to maybe 1000XP total, I think. I think Vunarg and the shaman are each worth about 300XP, but the other goblins aren't worth much. Treasure is medicore, just gold and a couple of low-value gems if I remember right.

 

For comparison, I replayed the party from before doing the Battlesquares, and thus cleared the latter part of Chapter Three (as discussed above) as a trio. Sure, my average level was higher, but I still managed to squeeze out 29,800 exp. This further proves the point that body count doesn't matter much if all of it is low CR.

However, adding three fresh members AFTER cashing in all the saved quests but PRIOR to starting the Battlesquares increased the exp tally for the complete Battlesquares from just above 100k to a whopping 170k.

 

New record, breaking the magical million total exp barrier! Edit: Oh, I already did that.. Anyways, a record is a record even if it only improves by a few thousand. Total 1,060,052 this time around.

In terms of total exp gain, the best way to go (so far) is to only add up to three characters prior to the Horde Fortress and not add any new ones until you're done with the Monastery quests. That way you can really cash big on the Battlesquares and all the golems just around the corner.

At the end of Normal mode, just prior to the final battle sequence, my characters read as follows:
#1 DG Rogue/Wiz tank: 300786 exp (level 21)
#2 DG Druid: 249836 exp (added right after completing Emma Moonblade's quest)
#3 Drow Sorcerer: 218023 (added right after completing Yquog's delivery quests)
#4 to #6 Drow Battleclerics: 108034, 107875 and 107498 exp.

Almost all NPCs in Severed Hand are safe to kill after their quests, with the notable exception of the Mage's Tower, adding a few thousand exp to the standard tally. New ones this time around were Vuly and her elementals, Kav, Zaem and the two mages that ask you to kill their construct (just attack them yourself instead). Also, there are a few "civilians" that try to flee the battle in the large room in the Cleric tower, so you'll need to concentrate firepower to get them before they escape.

 

I see horns growing from your head in the near future....

 

What, slaughtering the entire monastery right AFTER I've fullfilled their contrived and menial tasks to the letter isn't enough?

 

does the 1,060,052 number include camping the drums and fell wood until you get no xp from them? Also do you know of any way to re-do battlesquares? I could really use another holy transference :/

EDIT: It would appear not. I failed to read all the posts between the first and last posts.

Side note, have you played TOEE, and if so general thoughts?

 

Hey Jukka, I don't want to highjack your thread, but how would you feel about a hypothetical mod with no kill xp and no dynamic xp, but xp awards every time you enter a new area, to balance things out?

You would still need to kill monsters to complete quests and advance the plot.

Also invisibility and sanctuary would probably need nerfs so players don't skip 95% of the game under them

 

JT, while it would most certainly take away the pain of losing exp for any sub-optimal solution, IMHO it would face the fate of communism: there's just no push to try harder than the bare minimum.

In before the obvious: There are several methods of measuring how to do things "better", highest exp total being just one of them. I would NOT consider it optimal in terms of making the game "easier", just that high score is a reason in itself in terms of academic interest.

 

Back to the topic at hand with yet another thread resurrection. Time to put the old record to shame once again!

One of the major hurdles of optimizing the spots where to add new party members is that you can't get very far without any quest exp, skipping the part where kill exp is at its peak prematurely. Adding insult to injury, Chapter Two is ridden with extremely high quest rewards left, right and center while its kill exp tally is also very high. So what to do?

As earlier theorycrafting points out, the main selling point of adding new members mid-game is NOT gaining extra total levels, but being able to (sort of) trade levels between characters. Looking this from the opposite point of view dictates that the further you can keep the character levels apart, the more total exp is required to get to same average level.

Alas, the dynamic kill exp system also means that any significant length of kill exp with a higher than usual party average level is going to eat into the profits. However, this doesn't actually matter if a vast majority of pushing is done with quest experience alone! So, is it actually possible to string together quest rewards? It's quite possible to delay cashing in a few but that's still peanuts in the grand scheme of things.

Turns out the answer is YES. Made possible by -- drumroll -- STEALTH of all things! And not just sneaking past static, already present mobs, but almost everyone. The AI response to the entire party going into stealth/invisibility is to start to move themselves to the position of the player, all the way until they reach melee range. Notice the wording: the AI actually follows the player character(s) until they reach melee range, leading to the false sense of them seeing through invisibility. With this knowledge it becomes possible to park any number of mobs into any spot on the map.

Hence, the procedure would look something like this:
1) DG Illusionist tank sounds like a good fit for the task. You can buy the spell scroll for Invisibility from Sabrina, make absolutely sure to get it! Deep Gnomes can do it naturally, but having just one per day is rather limiting. Play through both Prologue and Chapter One solo, WITHOUT cashing in any quests until you absolutely must. There's more than 20k quest exp that can be delayed. This will minimize exp losses due to the soloer's high level.
- Veira the ghost
- Family Kerdos affairs, including Loki the cat
- Dereth, Sabrina and Emma in Shaengarne stay put
- The dam can wait
- Feeding the rest of the spiders to Pondmuk
- The whole Yquog quest chain
2) Start Chapter Two, but skip almost every single mob on all four maps using stealth/invisibility.
- Not killing the beetle nest only disables resting on this map. Big deal, let it wait. Only five of the about 20 beetles spawn until you actually get to them later.
- It's NOT necessary to intimidate your way through Andora, as Odea herself is CR7 or CR8 so losing her to a script is a sizeable kill exp loss later. Just smash through the barrier, it's possible to Evade it completely (Cone of Cold effect). This way you'll have to get the Belladonna from Zack instead to avoid a slaughter now.
- Sneak to the falling rock traps to release the amulet to open the doors. Note that Remorhaz (apparently) see right through invisibility, so once you've parked the rest of the mobs, only the big R follows you. Lead it to the Queen, both of them turn non-hostile and you get even bigger quest exp reward for destroying the blockade.
- Dash past Regnar to Zack, kill the Remorhaz, get Belladonna and a diamond from Zack, backtrack to Oswald. Losing Odea earlier or the Remorhaz here is pretty much a wash in terms of wasted kill exp. And, while there's a diamond right inside the Ice Temple, getting back from there won't be easy.
- Dash right past Sherincal (Haste, anyone?) and into the Ice Temple, the stairs are functional for a couple of seconds to begin with.
- Sneak your way to Nathaniel and the prisoners, free everyone and get the quests started.
- Both High Priestesses on this level are happy to follow your hidden self to a safe spot where they can be disposed of without any other mob kills. Doorways are perfect for this. Just go invisible and the rest of them forget about you.
- Use the painting to get to the lower level (Lysan). Aligning the mirrors and using the prism do not break stealth so take your time.
- Play a round of Battlesquares to get Oria's key, go invisible, park mob(s) away from it. Oria herself happily follows you back to BS for a quick, undisturbed double disposal.
- Banish the tempest (no skill req after killing all three priests).
- Get Nathaniel's items (prism again) and return them.
- Once back outside, all you need to kill is Sherincal herself for Nathaniel's script to kick in, giving you a free ride to the other side of the map!
3) Chapter Three is much more linear, just skip past any and all opposition on your way to the heart of the forest. While you technically could kill the undead on your way as they'll respawn, you'll be coming back for them later so no double kills to keep it fair.
- You only actually need to kill Limha, the Death Candles and the Dark Treants just prior to Cold Marsh. (Playtested today by yours truly.)
- Not a single mob needs to die on either of the first two Cold Marsh maps. Just the dragon(s) and wyrms in the cave past them; the hole isn't usable with enemies nearby.
- Zero kills to get the key for Duergar stronghold and for the mining equipment, as well.
- The final map is a bit trickier: You must NOT enter the final fight in stealth, the script gets stuck (on my computer at least). Just kill the leader, get the key, dash past the rest.
4) Chapter Four continues with the stealthy approach but only to the Monastery and its Eight Chambers. Pushing past that would forfeit most of kill exp in the entire Duergar outpost map and the Monastery itself.
5) Backtrack all the way to Chapter Two, cashing in all the delayed quests.
6) Add the rest of the party, kill anything and everything that moves (Battlesquares included) with exactly zero quest exp to spoil the fun!

To further optimize the idea, following considerations are to be tested:
- While solo most certainly is by far the most effective way to pile on experience points with minimal effect on average party level, doing entire Prologue and Chapter One including kills as solo is a sizeable exp loss. But which one is the better of the two?
- Going solo is a sure-fire way to get to the point where each and every map spawn extra mobs for later. Are there specific cut-off points where cashing in a quest or even an extra mob kill to get to a higher level would outweigh the extra kill exp penalty on the few mobs actually killed between chp 2-4?
- Is it better to cash in big for the kills by adding ALL remaining five party members, or is it better to leave one, or maybe even two, to cash big on the high CR mobs available in Chapter Five and Six? Note that for all practical reasons you really should bring in the extras already, but in terms of maximum attainable exp total at the very end of Normal mode.. questionable.

Too bad I don't have the time to actually do the whole run (just the critical parts) to confirm for a while.. but I'll be back.

 

Edit: never mind the prisoners question. you answered it already. reading comprehension fail.

I was never much of a success with solo-ing. I tried once or twice, but the difficulty, and the feeling I was missing out, made me give up early. If I give it a try, would bringing a duo instead be a big difference?

I'm a stickler for my old party, and I think the best stealth solo would be my DG Rogue1/IllusionistX. 12-20-18-18-5-1. Am I right?
Or would a Drow Cleric be able to sneak? How about the Human Pal1/SorcX, or Human Monk1/DruidX? Or would a F. Drow Cleric1/BardX stand a chance?





SUGGESTION: If Chapter 1 has so much quest XP to be gained (which is 6x as profitable if you have a full party), why not play with 6 in ch1, then export/save the characters at the start of ch2? Then you can solo chapters 2-4 as you described, and re-add them later...

 

The quest exp tally in Prologue and Chapter One is only like 63 k altogether, so it's not like you can play with all that much. Anyone that easily reaches upper 20's in AC should manage to do it solo, or you could substitute that with summons.

I'm consciously keeping away from questionable tricks like exporting/importing characters, unlimited spawns and such to keep the question about maximal attainable experience tally as simple as possible. Allowing for reloads at Battlesquares could technically be considered an exploit, but I'm letting it slide since you pay for it by skipping valuable loot instead.

---------- Added 16 hours, 3 minutes and 34 seconds later... ----------

Ok, some corrections here.
- The dam gets destroyed all by itself once you fetch the piece of wood and actually put it down to get to the Shaengarne Bridge battle and cannot thus be skipped.
- The dialogue with Pondmuk is a disaster - the only way to cash in all three exp rewards is by doing it all in one go. Once you leave the map, the Spider Queen part of the quest is forever lost and returning the remaining spiders ends up in combat.
- I missed Kaitlin from the list. She stays put, waiting you to inform of the saved villagers and killing Torak.

Managed to squeeze only 117 k exp at the end of Chapter One for my soloer, leaving me a bit over 40 k behind what a three-person party can expect to see.

On to Chapter Two..

---------- Added 23 hours, 30 minutes and 57 seconds later... ----------

Now this was fun.. kinda. In a masochistic kind of way.

The thing that I did NOT account for when parking mobs is that any time you drop stealth in that particular map, for whatever reason, every single mob that has been aggroed so far will start homing in on you. With the confined spaces in the Ice Temple, this proved to be challenging, to put it mildly.

Here are the things you can actually do while stealthed/invisible without breaking it:
- Open doors
- Use potions (targeting self, ie. no flaming oils.)
- Use scripted devices (the double rotating arrows)
- Search and disable traps (invisibility only)

These WILL break stealth:
- Doing just about anything to any NPC. Attacking, talking, pick pocketing, you name it.
- Picking up items.
- Opening containers.

On top of these, the sheer amount of mobs that happily ignore stealth altogheter is high enough to make skipping anything but optional monster packs a chore. Any encounter with dialogue turns at least the head honcho into a see-it-all, and using the barbarian Gate-of-Stones (Cold Marshes) turns ALL of them into homing missiles.

To make matters even worse, the game has some safeguards in place so that you can't skip quests or even mobs the way you'd expect. These include:
- The Shaengarne dam (mentioned above)
- Freeing the Abishai. If you turn the quest in when there are still mobs alive, some sort of a map-wide Power Word Kill kicks in.
- Thvara Baelm's pack of barbarians at the very beginning of Chapter Three apparently come to their senses and disappear as soon as you progress further into the Fell Wood quests. A sizeable kill exp loss.

But for whatever it's worth, my soloer sits now at 243 k exp (level 19), after having completed the Monastery quests and gathering the very few quests that do not require killing that he postponed.

 

Thanks for all the effort and research Sir Rechet.

It is interesting that invisibility was done that way, but not really surprising. I wonder if you could use that to your advantage though? Walk past the mobs, then lead them back to a trapped area. Say, 10 skull traps? It is a pity that IWD2 does not have rogue traps ala BG2.

So most enemies will ignore you if you are invisible, but then as soon as you drop stealth, head straight towards you, no matter where you are? And other more important enemies are able to see straight through your stealth from the beginning?

I'm going to start playing this game again, but I'm still thinking about what party I'm going to use. Also, since they have announced IWD:EE, I am really hoping they make IWD2:EE!

 

You can already do that without Invisibility, as aggroing any of the mobs in a pack will alert them all.. although some 'packs' are rather curiously interconnected, not necessarily by proximity. Stringing together several packs to lead them elsewhere requires lots of room to maneuver around them, and can thus only be reliably pulled off in places like Kuldahar. Besides, you'd want to set up a kill zone in that case rather than a bunch of traps that will just go boom on the first mob to get there, leaving everyone else unharmed.

To clarify, the mobs seem to have only three distinct states of activity:
- Unalerted (or neutral where applicable)
- Active
- Waiting

Without invisibility, you're only ever going to see the first two. The 'waiting' state is entered by aggroing the mobs first, and then parking them by letting them walk to your party's melee range, presumably to their last aggro target if there are several player characters. However, the mobs are still actively searching for you, and WILL resume 'active' state as soon as there is anything to kill, anywhere on the map. In case there's no path (such as the Ice Temple treasury room since you teleport there), the mobs will still try to get as close to you as they possibly can, resulting in massive groups tightly packed against walls and what have you.

In practice: Even if you leave the map and reset everyone's movement routines, every mob that you have aggroed in the past WILL start homing in on you as soon as your stealth breaks. Only the mobs that remained unalerted during your first visit will stay put. This makes skipping mobs in a large scale extremely impractical.

Edit: Surprisingly enough, the whole Chapter Two only netted me 96k kill exp for my newborn trio, just as any decently sized party would. Hence, no gain whatsoever so far in bridging the 40k exp deficit from doing the first two chapters solo. While I still have the Battle Squares ahead of me once I add the remaining three, I can't see how I'd get to the point where I'm actually gaining much of anything out of this. Looks like I get to do all of it again with a full six-man party to really capitalize on the exp pull. Oh well, such is the nature of research, I guess.

 

Quick question on battle square experience - you mentioned somewhere that the tweaks component to skip it gives you 7425 experience. Is that per character, or total? Just wondering if it is worth my while doing the entire thing, although to be honest, even if the exp rewards are huge, I think I would be better off just using the console to cheat in experience!

I remember what you said in your guide that you can't really cheat the system (with certain exceptions), you can only shuffle your levels around. So you can end up with a high level caster by the end of the game, which is potentially more useful than 6 level 16 characters. Seems to apply here too.

 

Heureka! I think I've solved the problem, without losing ALL the practicality in the process.

Skipping mobs is fine and all, but there's no reason to go overboard with it, either. As my playthrough above pointed out, doing the whole first two chapters solo is just wasting away perfectly good kill exp.

Also, while the game doesn't spawn all that many extra mobs when you're at somewhat higher than expected level, it DOES reduce the amount of mobs quite a bit if you're entering areas at much lower level. For example, almost half of the mobs at Horde Fortress courtyard were suddenly missing as I got there at level 4 in one of my tests, and both Goblin Warren maps lost at least a third of their population with the same level. I noticed the same pattern throughout the game back then when level-squatting was included in my bag of dirty tricks.

However, it's always positive if you manage to spawn areas as high level and get around to killing the mobs once you've added some more characters. All you need to do is to be able to skip ahead to areas without alerting any or at most very few mobs on the way.

Specifically, once a solo Deep Gnome (by far the easiest soloer IMHO) pushes through the Shaengarne Bridge battle and is heading for the Horde Fortress, he'll be at or very close to level 9. That's enough to spawn a few extras here and there.. but you can't get into the fortress without wiping the areas clean, right?

As it turns out.. no, you don't actually need to do that. It's quite possible to kill nothing but Trugnuk in the entire first map to get his key using the same invisibility mob parking method described above. And just to make sure it's possible for every Deep Gnome and not just the Illusionist kind, I playtested to make sure that you only need your daily racial plus the potion you find in Shaengarne. Plus, a druid or a cleric variant gets Flamestrike by the time you get there, giving you some serious firepower for the job.

To make matters even more interesting, it's ALSO possible to get to the Fortress courtyard without the ward stones. You'll get hit by a Fireball and a Cloudkill if you just push through, but since you're getting there invisible just to return shortly.. no big deal.

So.. rather than pushing all the way to Chapter Four solo, you only need to be able to hit every map on your way there with a reasonably high level, skip the optional mob packs and return for them once you're done with the Monastery. Considering the highest known breakpoint for maximum spawns per map in the early chapters is at average level 13, a soloer is actually overshooting it with quite a margin.

Sounds like the perfect job for a duo, methinks!

Back to testing with this one. Thank goodness for old saves, all I need to do is to continue from the successfull Trugnuk gank, saving me several hours' work to get there as the new procedure will be identical up until then.

---------- Added 0 hours, 16 minutes and 34 seconds later... ----------

It's just 7425 quest exp, divided amongst party members. Actually, you only get the same experience reward as you'd get by playing through it normally, but with a grand total of zero out of fifty possible exp rewards for the individual levels.

I'd say using the console is perfectly valid option to skip a whole lot of IRL time, albeit a bit maths intensive if you want to do it with precision. I'd recommend Excel at the very least.
1) Calculate your average level.
2) Cross reference the corresponding exp rewards for remaining levels (out of fifty) from MONCRATE.2DA file. Don't forget to halve the values in the table to get the actual exp awards.
3) The tricky part: Calculate how much exp you can get without gaining a full average level and add suitably many level rewards.
4) Restart from step one, until all fifty rewards are awarded.
5) Use the "skip battlesquares" option and toss away all loot, except for the rank awards (Club of Disruption et al) as you chose to forfeit all that.

 

Thinking about it, it isn't even worth the effort to calculate how much experience I would lose out. I think I'll just suffer the loss and take the cool items.

What I will do next time, is to not skip the battle square too early. I'll do the first rank to get Oria's key, but not speak with the golem. Hopefully doing the first rank will not invalidate the skip option. My reasoning is that, when you are level 8 or 9, getting those powerful items is a little unbalancing. I may be a powergamer, but even I realize there are limits!

So I'll probably wait until I am at least in the underdark before I get those cool items.