How do XP caps for BGEE, SOD, and BG2EE going to work now?
johntyl
Member Posts: 400
How do XP caps for BGEE, SOD, and BG2EE going to work now? Since SOD is in between BGEE and BG2EE, and we can continue from SOD to BG2EE, does that then mean that our CHAR is going to start BG2EE with a higher XP than pre-SOD BG2EE?
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XP Cap in BG:EE unchanged.
Import your party to SoD (not explained how this works yet, ie is it like TotSC or is it a "New Campaign" style import).
Level cap of 12 in SoD
Import character only to BG2:EE, starting that game at whatever level you are
No changes to BG2:EE (in regards to difficulty of encounters), so you be slightly more powerful than you were without the SoD expansion.
However, many of the additions (items, spells etc) will be ported into the existing games, so that may adjust things. (EG, the Legacy of Bhaal difficulty, similar to Heart of Winter in IWD).
EDIT: Apparently BG2 already scales most of the encounters to your party level, per: http://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/655249/#Comment_655249
In this post (http://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/655284/#Comment_655284) they said they're making sure BG2 EE is balanced for people bringing characters over from SoD.
Also, keep in mind that only your CHARNAME imports to BG2, so it would at most be one character at level 12/SoD XP cap I think?
At this moment it see two main challenges:
1. Balance in SoA
Starting around level 12 is huge. This means around 1 million XP points - this is 1/8 of the total ToB cap, which you usually don't reach with a full party. Since at this point the required XP per level stop growing geometrically, the effects of starting with that amount of experience will be felt to the very end of ToB - unlike the 80k XP from TotSC.
There is some level scaling in SoA, but this is mostly minor encounters not boss battles or fights against enemy parties - the most fun type of encounters. Some early examples where this will be a problem:
* the early enemy party fights (the one in the sewers and the one in the inn) will be much more easy
* your clerics will almost certainly have sunray before the end of Chapter 2, trivializing Bodhi's lair
* you start with spells that can penetrate the level 5 or lower spell immunity of liches
* the death spell alone can instantly win some of the early SoA fights
I still have problems how this can be fixed. Make every enemy more powerful? Making vampires less susceptible to sunray? Putting more difficult enemies in Bodhi's lair? I don't this would preserve the feel of SoA. In general, the levels around 10 are unique in many ways - you can still rely that some enemies will fail their saves, you do not have the most powerful magic, there are enemies that can do things you cannot. It seems a shame to lose a sizable chunk of this in SoA.
Also note that the limited level scaling will also give you more XP in SoA. This means you will have an even higher level for the unique and interesting encounters. And as I said, I don`t see a way to (for example) buff vampires or many other enemy types to make them a challenge again and still make them feel right. They *should* be vulnerable to sunray.
2. Perceived player growth
SoA begins with taking all your gear and leaving you with an incomplete party. So at the beginning of the game you start less powerful than at the end of TotSC. But you will quickly gain some levels, find at least some gear that is as powerful as or more powerful than the best you had before. After some time you will being to feel more powerful.
How will this be after SoD? It seems reasonable to expect that you will find a considerable amount of upgraded gear (+3 or even +4?). So it will take longer for you to find better stuff in BG 2. You will gain levels more slowly in BG 2 since you start with more XP. For example, it seems unlikely that you will level up in Chateau Irenicus, making it even more tedious for those of who went through many times.
All this makes me a concerned that it will take quite a bit of fun away from the early SoA game. Less perceived power growth and being either more powerful relative to your enemies or just missing some of the fun mid-level challenges.
Regardless, I am still looking forward to the expansion and hope that the designers will be able to figure this out. I think it would be important to make certain that if you import a normal TotSC party, the difficulty of SoA remains exactly as it is. Then we at least have the fallback option of importing from the old ending instead of SoD.
Then again, it might not. 1m is definitely a lot... While simply not using that option is always a choice you can make, it would probably be preferable to have a more elegant solution. Wonder what, though!
For all of us completionists however, I am also curious how they will balance the difficulty after importing a level 12 PC into BG2EE. I'm assuming they will scale the joinable NPCs to your level like they already do, but that just aggravates the problem.
Hopefully the new difficulty setting makes up for the boost in XP we start with.
More importantly, I don't think any of the interesting encounters scale to your level. Look at the Planar Sphere, for example. I am pretty certain that the golems you encounter in the engine core are scaled to your level, so that we might meet Adamantium Golems instead of lesser ones. But the feral halflings, Lavok and Tolgerias will all be unscaled, and those are the interesting encounters. And the additional XP from the encounters that are scaled, might even intensify the effect.
Also for all the spellcasters the additional levels are huge, even without any items. This especially concerns mages and sorcerers. For example, you will avoid (in SoA) the three level gap between 5th and 6th level spells.
@Lord_Tansheron The new difficulty setting is more like a game+ things. Personally, I prefer an even playing field with the same rules (HD, damage rolls) for both the player and the enemies with the challenge coming from AI (SCS) or P&P monster abilities (again SCS also aTweaks). Anyway, there are lots of strategies that help you avoid any damage, so the difficulty might matter less than we think anyway.
@FinneousPJ Without the planned patch for SoA this would be totally true. So we will have to see what that patch will do! Also want to point out that I am not yet feeling strongly about, because I see it as a challenge and am more interested to see if and how the devs overcome it.
All that being said, starting SoA at 1m XP will essentially result in it sort of being a semi-game+. It will certainly be a lot easier to get into the game even on NMM, and I have actually found a lot of the encounters in the early game to be more difficult than mid- or even end-game, simply because you have less XP and thus less tools to work with. Starting with 1m XP is likely to change this quite considerably, and while we're not sure yet of all the various changes that are likely to come with SoD, it is highly probable that there will be a need for both AI and numbers tweaks to retain adequate difficulty for those interested in such a thing.
I'm sure though that the devs are aware of this issue, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with to address it.
So on the one side, SoD should be AWESOME as it is a whole expansion given over to characters playing in the sweet spot of levels. The down side is that it risks taking that wonderful gameplay out of SoA, making it a mixed blessing.
One other thing to bear in mind is that TotSC reworked the final fight with Sarevok, knowing that the party would be a higher level reaching there. ToB did no such thing for the Irenicus fight, and it shows if you hit Watcher's Keep in SoA, reaching Jon with HLAs and 9th level spells. Now that will be almost guaranteed if the xp cap on import is raised to 1Mxp, I suspect a reworked fight will become important, and possibly an update to similarly epic encounters (Firkraag, Kangax, etc.) I'm not sure whether ToB would need much tweaking itself though, and Watcher's Keep was essentially designed to support parties from early SoA through to end-of-game ToB, depending on player choices, so is hopefully ready for the xp boost as well. OTOH, it does mean that parties are more likely to be more level appropriate for the lower reaches of the keep in SoA, so will more routinely clear that out before Jon - further complicating the level balancing of the end game.
300,000 druid
440,000 thief/bard
750,000 mage/sorceror
900,000 cleric/monk
1,000,000 fighter/barbarian
1,200,000 paladin/ranger
So what happens if we lower the xp cap a little, after all, level 12 is our approximate level given that different characters will be different levels at the cap anyway:
800k xp cap
13 druid
13 thief/bard
12 mage/sorceror
11 cleric/monk
11 fighter/barbarian
10 paladin/ranger
750k xp cap (same as 800, I had thought that at least on class would switch here)
13 druid
13 thief/bard
12 mage/sorceror
11 cleric/monk
11 fighter/barbarian
10 paladin/ranger
700k xp cap
12 druid
13 thief/bard
11 mage/sorceror
11 cleric/monk
10 fighter/barbarian
10 paladin/ranger
600k xp cap
12 druid
12 thief/bard
11 mage/sorceror
10 cleric/monk
10 fighter/barbarian
10 paladin/ranger
500k xp cap
12 druid
12 thief/bard
11 mage/sorceror
10 cleric/monk
10 fighter/barbarian
9 paladin/ranger
So my reading is that an xp cap closer to 600,000 xp than 1mega-xp could be more likely, and probably a funny number that is not exactly on any limit but close, as previous caps were 89k and 161k.
At that level, the effect on BG2 would be trivial.
@AlexT has confirmed (in the SoD forum) that it'll be a traditional BG-style XP-cap, not a BP-style level-cap, and that some (unspecified) classes will be able to reach level 12 while others can't.
@PhillipDaigle has said in these forums that he doesn't plan to change the start of BG2ee:SoA, and he remarked in the announcement video that he reckons the new XP from SoD won't prove to be a problem in SoA.
Therefore I reckon the new XP-cap will be just enough for Druids (only) to hit level 12, i.e. just over 300,000. That'd mean level 9 for all Warrior classes, also level 9 for Clerics and Monks, level 10 for Mages and Sorcerers, level 11 for Thieves and Bards, and level 12 for Druids alone.
The most they might do, IMO, is allow just enough for the Rogue classes to reach level 12 as well, i.e. just over 440,000. Doing that would also move Mages and Sorcerers up to level 11, and leave Clerics and Monks just-about-to-level to level 10. I reckon that'd be getting into territory where early-SoA would be noticeably easier, so I don't think they'll do this.
Thus my best guess is an XP cap for BG1:SoD of 301,000. At that level, I reckon they can probably get away with doing nothing about the start of BG2ee:SoA, which wouldn't be true if they let XP go much higher.
Looking at the charts above, I am hoping for an xp cap around 0.5Mxp rather than 1Mxp, as that still leaves plenty of scope for BG2EE early game, and is still in the 'sweet spot' for most classes. No matter why they do, fighter -> druid duals are going to be a beast! The xp curve for druids means you should comfortably get back fighter levels without impacting max druid level at cap, unless they pick something very close to 750k. That said, I am partial to druid->fighter duals as well, with druids at 200k or 300k, which would mean starting BG2EE much closer to regaining the druid levels, rather than dualing out of Jonnie's playpen.
It might be significant that the level cap for Black Pits is level 10 (irrespective of xp), and 600,000 is exactly the right amount for all single classed characters to reach at least level 10.
If we compare that to the multiclassed NPCs that we know are in SoD, Jalheira would be 8/12 and Glint would be 9/11.