All those ";)" and overuse of "..." - please stop.
No...;) They are called "emoticons" and "expressive punctuation" ( "ep" is commonly used in novels) and I use them at times to inject a bit of levity into conversations which have lost their sense of humor because people are taking the topics involved far too seriously.
First of all - check how much experience points you ACTUALLY need to get from 1 to 10.
As I said, you need far less going 1 to 2 than going from 10 to 11. It's a fact, no kidding. Check it out.
Do you have some kind of fetish for "difficulty", which is just being "bad design" and not actual obstacles?
The design is fine...Lol...;) You want a lvl 10 Merc? Buy one. You want a lvl 1 Merc you level up to Lvl10 "your way," buy one and level him up
through game play. What's the problem?
In other words, when there existed possibility to design your own team by yourself - option desired by many players, expressed over various internet boards and in form of mods, like "4 player creation" or "Fourplay" - and devs for some reason disabled it, calling it "bug" for no reason, you eat it up for no reason as well and right away call it good decision? Perfect.
The opportunity to "design your own team" has always been there, right from the start--you design the first two party members. All members you either pick up in your travels after that, or that you buy as Mercs after that, are optional. You *can* do what you want like this: start a new game, then get to the Hall of Heroes as fast as you can, buy a couple of Lvl1 or Lvl2 Mercs that appeal to you, and then take them with you and level them up.
But again, hitting a high-level with your *created characters*--just say lvl 10--then going to HoH and buying a Lvl 1 Merc who them automatically levels to up to 10, no extra money or XP earned in game play, is a pretty stupid darn way of doing that. If that was Larian's intent, then they'd simply have made the game to *start* by creating four characters instead of two, and there you go. Since Larian has fixed what it calls an XP bug relative to purchased Mercs in the HoH, then I think we pretty much have to accept that's the way Larian intends the game to be played.
This is getting tedious: there are ways (as I pointed out...three times?) to do exactly what you want to do in the HoH--but you want the game to continue broken as it was. But they've fixed the bug and said so. Accept it and move on. You'll have to grind a little more to take a lvl1 HoH Merc and turn him into the lvl 10 character of your choice--but if Larian had intended the game to start with *four* 100% player-created characters then that's the way Larian would have made the game, seems to me. You aren't arguing with me--you are arguing with Larian. Good luck there...;)
I'll tell you though...I'm not emotionally invested in this issue--it's simply a part of the rules of the game AFAIAC. If Larian wants to reintroduce the auto-level of the low-level Mercs we can buy in the HoH, well, I'll play it that way, too. I'm just pointing out that I can see why they did what they did with the HoH Merc XP, and that it makes a lot of sense to me.
