The great experience challenge

Remove all ads!

Now that I've found out the exact cut-off points for extra spawns (see the other thread), the data strongly supports a duo approach.

All of Horde Fortress, both inside, under and outside, is exceedingly generous in the amount of extra spawns available for the sufficiently high leveled adventurer. Hence, getting to APL 8 and sneaking your way into the courtyard should be a top priority. Conveniently enough, you only need to sacrifice the kills in the Shaengarne bridge battle at somewhat higher than average APL (think mostly six) to get there, as you'll get almost 10k quest exp by just sneaking into Warrens map two, skipping most of APL 7 with almost zero spoiled kill exp. Also, a peek at MONCRATE.2DA reveals that the kill exp difference between APL 6 and APL 7 is negligible for all monster at or below CR 5 (ie. everything in Shaengarne), it's no big deal to clear all of it to pile all the way up to 72k exp (APL 9 for Deep Gnome) on your first character with very little drawbacks.

While you'd need to get back to APL 8 to get maximum spawns inside the actual fortress, there's a sizeable reason not to: You only get very few extra spawns there, and killing the high CR bosses is much better done at lowest possible APL, think right after obtaining the ward stones. Your medium-term goal is to reach APL 10 before entering the outside of the Ice Temple a while later. This doubles the kill exp for Sherincal.. which is also the first time the addition of a new party member becomes lucrative again.

However, both levels of Ice Temple are ALSO a great place for extra spawns as both Frost Touches and especially Winter Wolves literally multiply in their numbers at both APL 10 and APL 12. Now, reaching APL 12 prior to it is a tough cookie indeed, unless you want to get creative in how to justify "forgetting" about the worgen drum spawns to squeeze in extra kills. (But if that's your cup of tea, you should do exactly that.) So, instead of getting a few extra thousand exp for Sherincal herself now, zip right past her into the temple and make sure to pay a visit to both levels. Considering you get almost 15k exp by just saying hello to Nathaniel and the prisoners, you might make it to APL 12 for the second level, at least.

I totally missed the teleporter painting on level one to get back to Oswald with all the ingredients, so there's no need whatsoever to aggro mobs nearby Zack in the outside map. This makes it also plausible to massacre Andora and the Boring Beetles if that helps you to get within a shouting range of APL 12 in the process. Or failing that, right after you've added new members.

Once you're done cashing in the path-critical quests in Chapter Two, you should have Sherincal still alive, right? Hence, NOW would be the perfect time to bring in a third, maybe even a fourth, character. While the extra spawns in Chapter Three and Four are numerous indeed, almost none of it is of high CR. Besides, you'll need an exceedingly high APL to see ANY extra spawns there, heavily penalizing the few kills you actually need to do in order to get to the Monastery. That's quite a few actually - Thvara's pack, Limha, Death Candles, Dark Treants and Harshom, not to mention their respective packs unless you want to go masochist style and skip them using invisibility.

So many options to test, so little time..

 

I saw the thread - lots of research!

I got round to playing Battle Square properly, for the first time (would you believe it?).

It is awful. It's horrible. It isn't all that difficult, it is just so tedious. 250 battles, not counting reloads due to Greater Feyr's appearing and requiring a reload. I beat the first 5 ranks legitimately, and then gave up, and used the Skip Battle Squares option. I dropped the extra copies of goodies I already had.

It does make me think that a good mod could be made here. If I get a bit of time, I might look into it.

I think the way that Battle Square should work is that, instead of it being one on one, it should be party on pack. One battle per rank, and each battle should be a fairly difficult tactical encounter involving being outnumbered and facing enemy spellcasters as well as warriors. Ideally, it should teleport you to another map for the actual battle to take place.

If I had to win 10 difficult large scale battles, that would be so much better. It would actually be a true test of your party's abilities. Sure, story wise it would make no sense because Oria battled alone. But it would be so much cooler. At the very least, if I mod it, I'll remove those Greater Feyrs.

 

interesting mod ideas for battle squares! Though I'd prefer to keep the 1 person challenge as an interesting deviation of normal game play.

btw, I always found that after acquiring a disruption weapon the highest levels of battle square where easiest. (even easier then the first levels since most monsters are disruptable and go down in very few hits).

 

Yes, I found the same. After acquiring the club, I tried one or two battles of rank 7, and it was easy. The only problem was that one of the demons could teleport to my party, like the Greater Feyr can. I don't know why that makes you instantly fail, it completely breaks the script.

 

you can kill him then with your party. just make sure to wait until the golem is near to recognize the kill.

 

First run-through with a duo has just passed the Eight Chambers, having collected a hair over 300k exp in the process. Worthy of note is that my duo (DG+Drow) was only 3k exp behind my previous trio/quartet party exp totals at the end of Chapter One, ie. 157k instead of ca 160k.

I noticed that you can get to APL12 for BOTH levels of Ice Temple fairly easily, even if both characters are of high ECL races. All you need to do is to slaughter everything in the Andora map and complete all quests there. This also makes it possible to reach both APL 13 and APL 14 breakpoints (ie. maximum spawns) all the way to the Umber Hulk cave. Contrary to normal playthroughs, you'll actually want to cash in quest rewards fairly soon in the storyline, rather than delaying them as the whole point of this exercise is to get more spawns for later, hoping it will compensate for the few kills you must sacrifice along the way.

 

Sir Rechet I am constantly amazed at how much work you put into this game! How many times have you finished it? What was your first party like?

I vote that a nearby university award you an honorary doctorate in powergaming!

 

One more of those d'oh moments: There's no point in trying to skip the Restless Dead on your first time through Fell Wood. They will just disappear in all Fell Wood areas as soon as you've killed the Death Candles. Edit: For those that keep count, there's a maximum of 3 + 9 + 2 + 7 + 7 = 28 of those, several of which you could kill multiple times in order to get to the heart of the forest.

The "kill or forfeit" list of mobs in Chapter Three is becoming a major issue. Combined with the fact that navigating the Ice Temple with any number of parked mobs is a major PITA, a somewhat unorthodox idea of introducing newbie(s) during the latter parts of Chapter Two is an alternate path that needs to be investigated later on.

However, my now six-man party is sitting at 617k exp halfway through Chapter Four, with Duergars still alive, Umber Hulk cave and Monastery outside maps waiting to be cleared and Underdark still completely untouched. Looking good so far.. even if losing the Restless Dead kills was a bummer. For the record, the JUPP example party only managed 589k right before heading for Kuldahar.

Edit: I found out that you CAN actually get a sizeable quest reward (3000 exp) out of the spectre in the Duergar fortress. You just need to turn it successfully (turn as in Turn Undead) and it'll leave in peace after a while. While the quest itself isn't news per se, I've never bothered checking out what, exactly, you need to be able to turn it. A Deep Gnome Banite has never been able to do it in my previous playthroughs, but that's likely caused by her charisma score of 1. However, a Drow has at least 5 CHA and while it took a few reloads, my Cleric of Helm(6)/Paladin(1)/Monk(1) finally rolled the dice successfully. While this doesn't rule out the possibility that you need a cleric of good alignment, at least you don't need to be of any significant level or have even any charisma to speak of to be able to pull it off.

---------- Added 15 hours, 18 minutes and 18 seconds later... ----------

Success!

My party is at the very end of Chapter Four, ready to take the air ship to Kuldahar. I managed to squeeze in a whopping 745k exp, almost 130k MORE than a straight six Deep Gnome party at the exact same spot.

My party consists of:
DG Illusionist tank, lvl 21
Drow sorcerer diplomat, lvl 18
DG Monk, lvl 10
DG Druid, lvl 10
Drow Cleric, lvl 10
Drow Cleric, lvl 10

The two DGs were added first so that I could dispose of the relevant mobs to be able to cash in quests that require extensive killing. Most notably, Duergar fortress including Monastery slaughter and freeing Zack outside Ice Temple. I could've squeezed in the complete clearing of Ice Temple interior areas (minus Battlesquares) to be able to pick up the quest bonus for freeing the Abishai as well, but I was at APL10 already by then and decided to get maximum benefit out of Battlesquares instead with two newbies.

An added bonus of spawning areas with extra mobs with invisibility is that you also get to choose in which order you wish to dispose of them. As both the relative and the absolute exp difference for high CR targets is much greater at varying APL as compared to low CR grunts, you'll always want to kill the big ones first. In cleartext: Battlesquares top ranks must be your first stop after you've added in all six members. Also, don't forget that you can access the four Iron Golems in Black Raven tomb as soon as you get to the Monastery - it's only when trying to leave for Underdark that you get ambushed by duergars and risk forfeiting their quests and kills. Those are the equivalent of four extra Rank 8 levels. For my party, that was 4,500 exp a pop at the time.

I did suffer yet one d'oh moment, though. The Umber Hulk cave is a bit funky in that you actually need to spawn the Umber Hulks on your first go, lest the four spawn points for them recalculate and spawn much less once your liberation party finally gets there. This has the side effect of making the Harshom battle quite erratic at first, since you will now be sandwiched between his pack and the lumbering Hulks from all over the place when you try to dispose of Harshom. Better make it quick and get the hell outta there, that's all I can say!

 

From a game design standpoint, do you think the dynamic spawns and XP are better than static?

If you could be on the dev team for a new DnD crpg game, an "IWD3" or something, would you implement a dynamic system that scales both spawns and XP to party level?

Would you do anything to prevent squatting? Like maybe make it so levels must be taken immediately. What about adding characters at will throughout the game? I personally don't like the second, but squatting allows you the challenge of being a lot lower level than intended - with the side effect of getting absurd amounts of XP.

 

The only loophole that needs fixing is that exp should be awarded based on the levels you already have earned the exp for, instead of by the levels you have decided to take. Dynamic spawns are much harder system to game around, just look at this very thread how much it takes just for the basic stuff.

---------- Added 4 hours, 46 minutes and 27 seconds later... ----------

Due to the numerous factors I overlooked and/or guesstimated wrong during my first go around, I decided to restart from the start of Chapter Two with a slightly different strategy. Now, instead of taking most quest exp as soon as possible, I try to stick to the usual plan of killing mobs while the average level is still low.

While it does sound odd that a party at an average level ten and well past it would want to kill ANYTHING during the early chapters, you also have to remember that any six-man party will reach APL 10 just by doing the complete Battle Squares so any kills have to be compared to that. Should you have several maps worth of monsters saved, the average reaches APL 12 fairly quickly as well. So in a way, any kills done by the duo at APL 10-12 are just as good exp as you'd get later on, and hence piling the exp on just two characters should take priority.

The next idea I will be testing: Quite a few of the quests require a fair amount of killing to complete. So, to combine the best of two worlds, I'll kill the mobs that are blocking a quest later and leave the rest in peace. Once I cash in the saved quests later, my duo will easily make it to APL 16+, ie. exactly the kind of levels that are perfect to push into with quest exp.

The Duergar Fortress is a huge blockade in that you need to clear the caves completely to satisfy their first quest, slaughter the entire Monastery to complete the second AND kill them all or forfeit massive amounts of kills to advance to the Underdark. But the low CR monster kill exp rule helps out here in that you shouldn't really be of low average level to score big exp here anyway, there are better spots for that. Besides, while there is only two more areas readily accessible after the Black Raven Tomb, both of them are extremely generous in the amount of extra spawns available, and they are of fairly high CR as well. The only catch being that you need to make it to APL 15 to see the maximum spawns, pretty much impossible for anything past a duo.

So.. as unorthodox as it initially sounds, clearing the ENTIRE Hook Horror cave map at APL 14 might not be all that bad idea, after all. It's still good for almost 10k kill exp with maximum spawns. (NOTE: Using the Perfectly balanced exp table by 1eyedking ONLY - you'd get exactly squat using the game's standard MONCRATE.2DA file.) What you gain instead is nearly 20 more Driders and a fair amount of other mobs to kill, plus you can pile yet two more quest exp rewards for you initial duo. (Saving Ginafae and returning the mind flayer's stone, both 3,900 exp.)

 

The battlesquares is one of the most unfun parts of any game I have ever played. Did any of the designers actually thought it would be fun to play? After getting through them, I ended up losing interest in IWD2. I've completed the game only once and am going through it again. It seems I had a lot more fun before battlesquares than after battlesquares. I'm getting close to the monastery part. Just finished the Fell Wood and then my interests went to other hobbies. Not sure when I'll continue with this game.

 

HA! It's entirely possible to sneak through the Black Raven Tomb without alerting the Duergar ambush team hiding behind the last door. Most of these kind of encounters are scripted to ignore invisibility, but this one is NOT one of those. As long as the ambush doesn't trigger (invisibility does the trick), the duergar horde back at the fortress stays put as well.

This makes it possible to max spawn maps all the way to the Drider Cavern without all too much unnecessary kills along the way.

For the record, a duo that DID kill everything in the Hook Horror cave map (before I realized it was possible to skip it) made it to almost APL 17 (ca 370k exp) after cashing in the saved quests, so there's plenty of slack to get to APL 15 by the time you hit Underdark.

Cheers!

---------- Added 11 hours, 4 minutes and 31 seconds later... ----------

Minor adjustment to above: seems like freeing Ginafae from the drider cavern is tied to destroying the Viciscamera. Hence, the only quest that can be done in the Underdark without extensive killing is fetching the Ioun stone for the mind flayer. No big deal, as the extra spawns is the main reason to sneak all the way there.

 

So, my gut reaction was right. I did improve on the exp tally at the very end of Chapter Four by a fair margin by redoing everything with "kill first, gather quests later" strategy.

New record: 759,180 exp. 14 k better than above.
Character levels 21 (DG), 19 (Drow), 9 (DG), 9 (DG), 10 (Drow), 10 (Drow) and I got to average party level 13 right at the end of Zhinda Citadel.

Only about 5k of the exp improvement is due to kills I missed the first go around (Fell Wood areas and Umber Hulk spawns), but the real boon was to be able to start the Battlesquares at APL 6 after adding four newbies, rather than "spoiling" it by having to unlock quests with a few newbies elsewhere first. A grand total of 210,300 exp was milked out of the Battlesquares (plus 7425 quest exp for completion), going from APL 6 to APL 11 in the process. Note that this also disproves my previous theory about the optimal addition strategy for newbies - it's better to add all of them straight away rather than a few at a time. While it IS true that you will zoom past the very lowest levels lightning fast when you get 21,600 exp for a single Rank 10 Battlesquare level, the fact remains that you spend a whole lot of more time at lower levels compared to a piecemeal addition strategy all through the remaining ranks as well. The minor exp delta (ie. "free exp zone") you'd get between middle and last characters added is negligible in comparison.

The main point of using this maximum spawn utilization method is that you need to follow the maximum spawn curve as close as possible to minimize the exp lost to the kills you need to sacrifice along the way. A duo is optimally suited for the task, as there's just enough quest exp along the way so that you don't need kills to keep up. The only map you'll miss max spawns in along the way is the Monastery Outside map (APL 15 required, the same as for Underdark), which amounts to one White Wyrm and a couple Yetis lost. No big deal.

While I haven't actually tested a trio approach, by killing most of Chapter Two once the path-critical quests have been done as a duo first, adding a newbie and then proceeding with the slaughter, there are several pointers to discourage me from trying it.
- Getting to APL 13 to get max spawns through most of Chapter Three is tough enough as it is with a duo, and would require either MASSIVE amounts of kills sacrificed at APL 12, or even worse, having to cash in quests early and/or missing max spawns during the early parts in Chp3.
- It's much better to start the Battlesquares with two characters with a combined level total of 33-35 rather than with three with a level total of at least 45 (minimum APL 15 to max spawn Underdark). That's two whole levels of difference in APL right from the start after bringing in the newbies.. not good at all.
- The amount of kills required to push a duo to the maximum spawn track all the way to the Underdark beautifully coincides with the kills required to be able to delay cashing in quests all through Chp 2-3. I literally reached the required APL levels right at the very end of the previous maps, minimizing kill exp sacrificed along the way. Having had a third character sharing the experience would've been a recipe for disaster.
- The total amount of kills from halfway into Chapter Two and into the Underdark is really low, now that the entire Hook Horror map can be safely skipped. Hence, no reason whatsoever to split quest exp three ways when you only need two sharing it.

 

Would you consider a 3/1/1/1/1/1 DG character to be an exploit?

 

What do you mean? A character with five different mix-in class? Mine has three already, I added Ranger for dualwield early on. Two more class wont change much.

 

Assuming no favored classes, it will be stuck as a level 8 XP mule, without cheating.

The best BAB you can get from that level mix would be +5, but you'll have great saves, probably great AC, and over 100 maxHP.

 

I have not tested such an abomination but I've read elsewhere that MC penalties are capped at 60%. But even if it goes all the way to 100%, you would effectively be tossing one sixth of your exp away just to use a mule character. Edit: That is actually not even one full APL less in a party of six since my late addition characters end up at lvl 12-13 range usually. No way it would pay itself off before HOF mode.

---------- Added 5 hours, 8 minutes and 49 seconds later... ----------

Just for the sake of completeness, I'm also jotting down quests that can be postponed in Chapters five and six. So far, it's almost ALL of them, except for the stuff you need to do in order to get to new areas such as killing Hiepherus or stuff that will get disabled unless you do it before kills, like most anything in the Yuan-Ti Temple in Chult.

Also, while the fight for Holy Avenger could technically wait since you get 5850 quest exp for it, the kill exp of the Lost Followers is definitely NOT something you want to delay at all.

Also, just checked - you can backtrack all the way back to Kuldahar from Severed Hand, so the same quest delay rules apply as between Chapters Two to Four.

 

Updated the exp guide with my new experience point record (1127k) and the relevant quests that can be skipped. Which just happens to be EVERYTHING in the entirety of chapters five and six, except for a single dialogue with Hatemaster Drothan.