Power Gamers Look Here: How do you grind to 8 million XP?
sarevok57
Member Posts: 6,002
So as the title says, for those of you who like hitting the 8 million XP cap, how do you do it? If you do ALL the quests in the game and rewrite your spells when you find them and do no pointless monster slaying, at best you are going to hit around 6.8 million XP, so what do you do for the little extra? for me I go to one of two places,
First I will go to the forest of Mir if I don't need potion of superior healing because in general I feel those could be one of the easier alternatives:
Of if I'm a little low on potions of superior healing and feeling a little ambitious I will go to the fire giant enclave area and whip up some fire giants:
Or, if you have some extra cash laying around do you just buy ( or steal) a whole bunch of spells and go on a spell learning tangent?:
So, with that being said, how do you do it?
First I will go to the forest of Mir if I don't need potion of superior healing because in general I feel those could be one of the easier alternatives:
Of if I'm a little low on potions of superior healing and feeling a little ambitious I will go to the fire giant enclave area and whip up some fire giants:
Or, if you have some extra cash laying around do you just buy ( or steal) a whole bunch of spells and go on a spell learning tangent?:
So, with that being said, how do you do it?
3
Comments
If you REALLY need to, you can just rest in a dungeon somewhere you'll know you'll get high-value ambushes. Fire Giant Temple would seem like a likely candidate, but I've never really looked into that. Maybe WK?
XP at very high levels doesn't do all that much anyway. Spells don't scale, HP bonuses are fairly small overall gains, THAC0s are maxed. You gain extra HLAs and that's mostly it. Not a bad thing, of course, but certainly the flat end of the curve. There really is not all THAT much of a difference between a lvl30 and a lvl40 (player) character.
But if you click him too slow, he'll escape, and if you click him too fast, you'll miss the XP reward sometimes. It's actually possible to hit the XP cap within a few minutes using this trick. There's a much slower infinite XP trick in Brynnlaw involving talking to the chef in Galvena's fest hall multiple times, but it comes later and is much less efficient. I assume neither is possible in the Enhanced Edition.
Having more than 6 million XP doesn't do much, as @Lord_Tansheron says. The biggest jumps in power occur at 3 million XP for most characters, and 6 million XP for multi-class (if not triple-class) spellcasters. Getting the full 8 million XP will feel little different from the 6.8 million you find is normal at the end of the saga.
There is only one way to reach the XP cap much faster, and that is to play with fewer party members. Cut the party in half, and they'll reach the XP cap in mid-ToB. A solo will hit the cap in SoA. But I find small parties to be much less versatile and interesting, and far, far less powerful than a full 6-member party.
Most NPC quests aren't worth much exp, but it's worth noting that the EE NPC quests have a decent chunk of exp associated with them; I wouldn't recommend crossing to opposing alignments in order to do them, however.
Also, why do people call them (Minsc/Jaheira etc) NPCs when they're just PCs (playable characters)? Is this just something that ended up sticking?
But yea rest spawns are going to be your best bet once you've done Watcher's Keep.
1. I finish SoA with the party having 31 million xp's total, playing with a 5-6 member party at all times (except Chateau Irenicus – 4 – and the first few moments of Chapter 2 while recruiting) getting Imoen in a timely manner:
- do all quests and side quests possible, including the NPC’s whom have a quest (but not Dorn’s)
- no erasing/re-writing spells!
- no Watcher's Keep at all until ToB!
- collect and buy spells as you go along and learn them with the NPC's who can scribe (but never erase and re-scribe)
- only unlock and de-trap the essentials – save the rest until Imoen returns in Chapter 6 as the xp values go up a lot
- Chapter 4: take advantage of a Rebel Cleric's continuous summoning in Sahuagin City to grind 1 million bonus xp's (while at the gym)
- Chapter 5: take advantage of the continuously re-appearing Mind Flayer's in the Illithid Lair to grind 400k bonus xp's (while enjoying some tea)
- Chapter 5: Imoen cast Limited Wish to carefully fight Golems 55k xp
- Chapter 5: get rest interrupted in the Underdark Caverns a few times for a bonus 100k xp
- Chapter 6: do a few extra Stronghold quests as relevant for the party composition: Cleric/Ranger, Fighter/Druid, Paladin, and Mage strongholds. Nets a few extra xp's, maybe an extra 300k.
2. All chars of the 6-member party can then can reach the xp cap late in ToB by doing all quests and:
- collect and buy new spells but only the mages of the constant-six party member scribe spells
- Chapter 8: get rest interrupted on Level 3 of Watcher's Keep several times for a bonus 500k xp
- Chapter 8: carefully fight several waves of the continuously re-appearing Glabrezu's in the Lower Crypt of Watcher's Keep for 1.2 million bonus xp's
- this is without doing the new quests for the new NPC's Neera, Rasaad and that evil guy, whom I haven't used yet in ToB. I don't know how many xp's those quests would add.
- this is without getting xp bonuses from the Machine of Lum or Deck of Many Things.
My walkthough is here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/211406264/Baldur-s-Gate-2-Enhanced-Edition-Walkthrough-for-SoA-ToB-Cleric-Ranger
I often use the Fire Giants outside their Temple to grind a little more XP, and also often use a rest-respawn at the Siege Camp to generate a few more Fire Giants. However, EE seems to have set a finite cap on how many times the Giants will respawn at both of these locations ... after about 10 pairs have respawned at each location, it seems to stop offering more.
However, I don't usually find myself grinding away very much to build more XP, I tend to hit the cap (with a full party throughout) just before the Final Battle without needing to work too hard at it.
I avoid more blatant cheesiness (such as re-scribing, and abusing the MoLtM) except that if I have a character who is substantially behind the rest in XP (most likely Imoen or Sarevok), then I sometimes (although not always) abuse the Machine to catch them up somewhat.
At least you're somewhat playing parts of the game instead of abusing a singular aspect over and over. You can redo whatever quests you want. BG2 and ToB are very sort of open-world games, you can go wherever you want and whenever you want just about. Seems more fun to me to be honest.
I don't see a reason to hold on to the 1 instance play-through, 6 party member mindset really. It's great for the first run through of the game and maybe a few more even but when you're powergaming, it's more about seeing what you're capable of, not story line. Besides, it's not like you can't continue the story if you import/export into another game. Your NPCs still do their thing (maybe not romances though - not sure) if you're keeping them for the interactions.
Stealing lots of scrolls, dumping everyone from the party (kick the members out while the game is paused if you have a romance, write the scrolls, and take your lover back when unpaused, so romance does not get broken.) and deleting/writing spells with your mage or bard. Galoomp the bookkeeper is excellent in Athkathla for this purpose, he has 4-5 of those juicy 5th level spells. Jan can steal all of them with some potion aid and you can rewrite them over and over for huge amounts of xp.
It helps to get to the coveted mage level 12 early in the game. 6th level spells is a huge power leap from the 5th ones.
It seems to trivialise all the hard work I've done so far just to get there, and you don't even have to finish WK to gain access to it, so it just becomes a 'pick what level you want to play ToB at' machine.
I know that nothing in the game forces me to re-use it but why doesn't it just stop working after you've used it once? If you need all that extra XP in order to beat ToB then I would suggest that the game itself is unbalanced. Equally, if you don't need the extra XP then the MoLtM is redundant and shouldn't really be in the game.
Having just re-read what I've written I've now come up with a counter argument with which to shoot myself in the foot:
It's entirely possible that you could rush through SoA and find yourself out-gunned in ToB. In that scenario it would be reasonable to have access to the machine, but only after you've reached Saradush (presumably the original intention was that it wouldn't be possible to complete WK while still in SoA).