Throne of Bhaal "Free Experience" ... well, sort of.

FredN

.....I have a pretty standard seuqence of events for campaining in Saradush. Wipe the guards in Gromnir's barracks, clear out the sewers ... but do NOT attack Gromnir yet. Sell the looted gear for a ton of cash to buy better gear for us. Then do the Countess's son sidequest, then work my way down through the prisons. Lastly, exterminate the Vampire's nest.
.....Every time I play I seem to find new stuff. This one I found totally by accident, I was up on the walls, for no good reason except exploring, and suddenly my group was able to actually see attacking fire giants. Not only that, but able to go to the edge of the wall and actually target them with missile weapons. So, I had 4 NPCs ... cleric, thief and 2 fighters ... firing away at them. Every Fire Giant killed netted 8000 experiece. Now, with a standard crew of 6, this comes out to a mere 1333 experience per person. Not a huge amount, considering that most early game parties will range in level from upper teens to low 20s, but quite helpful if any of your guys are close to levelling up. But you can only do this from one very limited stretch of wall. It doesn't seem that mages can cast spells at them, either. Still, free experience is not to be sneered at.
.....Why the quotation marks around "free"? Well there actually is a price to be paid, but how high depends on your boredom quotient. You have to hit the unpause button many, many times per target fired upon. Tedious. Mine is pretty high, though, so I actually levelled up 4 of my crew that way, and the other 2 are pretty close. Gromnir is no wuss, and his buds are pretty nasty also, so I want my guys to be at peak performance when we finally confront him. As always, YMMV.

jmerry

A much faster route to unlimited experience in BG2EE:
- Reach chapter 6, with a rogue (thief or bard) and arcanist (mage or bard) in the party.
- Get a rogue with very high Pick Pockets skill. 200 is more than enough. Temporary skill from potions works.
- Find a fence (merchant willing to buy stolen goods) that can be stolen from. Sell stuff to them, steal it back, and repeat for an arbitrarily large amount of gold.
- Visit Ribald's special shop. He sells unlimited Freedom scrolls for a very reasonable price. Buy a whole lot of them; you can stack 50 in an inventory slot.
- Have your arcanist learn Freedom. Then erase it. Then repeat. 9000 XP per scroll. You can max out the entire party if you feel like it, well before ToB.

Even without the infinite gold exploit at the fence, it's a very efficient conversion of gold to XP. At 20 rep/20 CHA, that's 370 gold for 9000 XP. And you can easily earn a million or so gold in SoA if you save up expensive stuff like full plate and enchanted armor to sell to high-price merchants (like Ribald's special store) in a batch. 2000 scrolls, 3 million XP for each party member? Sure, sounds great.

So no, there's not really any point to grinding those off-screen (actually, no animation) giants unless you started at ToB. In a campaign continued from SoA, you already had a better XP source.

skorch

FredN wrote: »

You have to hit the unpause button many, many times per target fired upon.

Or you could just disable auto-pause.

FredN

The auto pause can be useful in many combats, but I get the suggestion. Disable it for something like this. Got it, thanks. As for the pickpocket thing ... that's diabolocal! OMG, never even thought of that one. Gotta try it. Vielen dank!

jmerry

It's one of the few exploits that I ban in my own runs. Sure, I'll use the shoplifting mechanics to loot all sorts of merchants, but I won't loop it. Too game-breaking. I'll only ever allow myself to sell a stolen item once.

FredN

If the truth be known, I have never even tried stealing at all; it never seemed a skill worth wasting ability points on. My most skilled thief right now has pickpocket skill of 40; won't be grabbing too much loot with that level of skill. Still, something to think about for much later on.