This game has a very weird exp. system. The best example is the 1st battle with young orcs, where you have 3 friendly legionaires. The 1st thing that is strange is that you get exp for killing the legionaires. The reason why I tried to kill those guys in the first place is that if they finish off the orcs, you don't get experience, even if you did all the damage, if they get 1 lasthit on the orcs, you don't get the exp. You also don't get exp if you cast a spell and the orc dies from burning dmg after, or dies from explosive barrels etc. etc. Usually i keep on reloading those fights until I got maximum exp from it, which feels very weird. It would be nice if you didn't get experience from killing monsters, but just get (a load of) experience from won battles.
You recieve experience from killing things. Killing legionnaires grants experience just as much as any other creature of the same level. Supposedly, though, you should get reputation penalties from killing them, which is already in game but doesn't seem to apply correctly. You should eventually be able to get a lot of experience from killing town guards and sentinels but at the expense of your reputation.
Also, you do not get experience if the monsters are killed by soldiers or creatures that are not part of the group, which is not that weird actually. Besides, when you fight the first group of orcs, the legionnaires are doing more work to push them back than we are. Not recieving exp. from kills performed by summoned creature will probably fixed later on.
Not getting experience from DoT caused deaths should be fixed at some point or another. Bear in mind, this is still a work in progress and as stated many times, it is still subject to change. What that means is there is little chance we will see major core mechanics changes, but a lot of adjustments, tweaks, balancing, feature implementation, and bug fixes.
Reloading every fight to get the maximum experience from them is a choice you make. It is an understandable approach of the game but it is yours. My co-op partner and I never reloaded a fight we didn't get full experience for, and never felt cheated on our character progression. It is a bit strange to blame the game for our own choices.
Some years back, when Half Life came out, I watched a friend play it through. He would save before every fight, and reload if he thought he had spent too much bullets on the fight. That was his way of playing Half Life. He ended up fighting the last boss with every weapon loaded to the max. He didn't need to use half of it though. I'm not sure it made Half Life's combat system wierd. Getting the most of everything was just his way of enjoying the game.
