I'm going to bet once PoE is out you'll wonder why no other devs do this and prefer it to the current situation in future games.
And yes, PoE is more combat-centric than D:OS even. D:OS enemies are on their way to quests, or bosses of quests. There's a complete foundation for no combat XP at all, and you wouldn't notice a thing since you would still fight equal as much as now.
Just without stupid stuff like "charisma XP, then kill them all for some more XP" or "murder the entire village for XP" and all that stuff that developers now had/have to put time in to fix. It's not that easy to make all NPC's of a quest not give XP after quest resolution. Many games who've tried have many broken instances of it and other mayhem... and sometimes; who's related to a quest anyway?
And in the time it takes developers to code XP nullifiers for all quests, couldn't they better add more quests? I say yes.
Also no Combat XP will allow PoE to have ACTUAL difficulty levels, unlike what all other RPG's have nowadays (including D:OS) just affecting Hitpoints and Damage.
They can tweak encounters... easy will give less enemies or less powerful (with combat XP this would also mean less XP, eventually making Easy less easy)... Hard could feature more and stronger enemies without risking that those enemies higher XP makes Hard easy.
Sure, some people come to the forum and suggest Hard should give more XP and better items as incentive for them to play Hard... but I really think those people miss the entire point of difficulty levels, not to mention adding such boosts nullifies "Hard" in the first place.
Easy, Normal, Hard and any other levels are there so people can play their own level. It would be unfair to punish new players just because they aren't good at RPG's... nor do we want people go HARD for the boni and then come whining to the forums for massive nerfs to make game easier since they don't want to go down (something similar I've seen here simply since Easy is called Easy... facepalming material)...
