Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Massive Exp Nerf in Definitive Edition

I played two times the classic version. Now i play the DE version and im at arx now. The first act was the exp normal but all what cames after (specially Namless Isel and Arx) the exp was way less compared to classic version. Is this intended or a Bug?

From player feedback, apparently a number of players had trouble leveling up during Arx in order to tackle encounters without being underleveled. There is sort of a lack of "stuff to do" in Arx for you to comfortably level up. For players who already know where to go and what to do, they might be able to mitigate this problem. However, based on my Definitive playthrough, I suspect it would require a fair amount of searching and wandering about, as well as avoiding doing this or that. It would be a fairly tight progression.

I can't say for certain what exactly the problem was, but I ended up finishing Nameless Isle with a lot less XP than in my Classic Ed playthrough - about 2.6-2.8 million difference. IIRC, compared to my Classic playthrough, I skipped two big fights on Nameless Isle (against the two Black Ring camps), but at the same time, I'm pretty sure I got more XP from other places throughout the playthrough. So I really doubt I missed enough stuff to explain the 2.6+ million difference in XP. All the XP from all the brand new encounters in Arx wasn't enough to cover that difference. It would *seem* to me that there was an overall XP nerf which might be a tad too much.

I don't remember if there was a level difference at end of game (I finished definitive on tactical); I will say that fights prior to arx were easier than previous version; but arx was much harder than previous versions. The last fight was thankfully toned down.

There was a nerf. Some players were managing levels above 20 before the endgame. I even heard heretic rumors of players reaching level 23 on CE. Now it's so that you get to the final battle pretty tightly at 20, with some leeway of completion, but not enough to level up any further.

I always reach Arx at lvl 18, and enter the crypt at lvl 21, in both DE and CE. If you do most quests and murder most magisters/paladins you'll get that. If you avoid the peace keeping forces you'll be one level below that.

Here's the thing, there's a few more fights in Arx in DE (mostly outside the city proper in obvious places as long as you look at the map), so the nerf wasn't actually a nerf, more a redistribution of exp.

Another thing about the "avoid this and that", for those having trouble, you can easily destroy mobs while underleveld by abusing the shotgun mechanics of these spells: pyroclastic eruption (dust blast for lvl 9~15), mass corpse explosion (if you can't find corpses, your party memebers will do lmao), thunderstorm and blood storm. The way it happens is that one shot is fired for each target, all of them with an area of effect, so if you teleport your enemies so they clump up, it'll hit every one with multiple times the damage it would against lone targets. As an example of how OP that is, I oneshotted the lvl 15 voidwoken harbinger east of driftwood at lvl 10, and the 2.5k hp kraken at lvl 18, with 5 corpses each.

I just got to level 20 in arx and I would say that is a darn good way of balancing the game. But that has never stopped me from trying to reach level 21.