Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Early game XP and leveling is terrible

Something that's bothered me in both D:OS 1 and 2 is that the early game feels starved of XP and leveling opportunity. When combined with the rather demanding and high leveled combat encounters, makes for a frustrating and slow early game experience.

I understand that the game is supposed to be challenging, but when you're gated at multiple encounters because your characters are under leveled and there is no easily available XP around, frustration ensues. I have spent hours wandering around the opening area in search of leveling opportunities in order to gain entry into the fort to no avail.

Not only is this a roadblock to inexperienced players just starting out, it's also detrimental to the feel of a large world bristling with opportunity. In order to scrounge enough XP to make it into the fort without being massacred, you basically have to do all the quests available regardless of whether it fits your playstyle or desire, and your characters still come up short! It makes the world feel claustrophobic and "designed" and really sells all the effort put into the world short.

What are your thoughts on this? Am I missing something drastic?

It definitely feels like you need to do basically everything that exists in order to level up enough. That converts "side quests" into "mandatory quests", which is not great. And yeah, D:OS 1 had this same problem as well.

I finished the alpha Patch 0 in September, but in the December patch, I felt a little lost as well. I was pretending I was a new player and I didn't know everything. Because I made a couple different decisions, and missed out on saving Elohdi, and playing with the kid in the grotto, which left me short of ways to go to get into the fort, and short of XP.

I eventually had no choice at all except to turn Stingtail into Griff because fighting him at level 1 would be a death sentence. I did save him by killing Silence, but I was pretty railroaded into taking only that course of action. That got me Amryo free, which told me of the trap door into the prison. Being level 2 I did at least beat the crocodiles and the arena, but reaching level 3 took a lot of exploring and finally killing some silent monks for the last little bits of XP needed to reach level 3.

I am still stuck in the prison area trying to figure out if it is possible for me to reach level 4 before leaving the prison and facing level 4 enemies, and which fights are possible for me to reasonably do.

No the xp is just right as it is. If it get changed, we will get a horrible experience (gameplay-wise ) like in TW3.

In the end you are imprisoned, so everything being scarce is quite fitting to the theme. Perhaps there are even to many traders for a 'prison'.

I agree. It is hard at the beginning but I don't want a gold star for not giving up like some pre-school kid.

I'd like one more civil point at start though. Sneak AND Thief for example.

I'd bring in an apple for the teacher that did that.

I really hate that Stingtail mission.

Ignoring how incredibly glitched and inconvenient it is if you are actually trying to save Stingtail.

The fact that it amounts to "Either help us, or we will murder you" really hurts it.

Heck Griff, you aren't even well protected... I easily could just kill you before you manage to take out my party.

Which of course once you do his lackys surrender right? ohh wait they don't. :P

Certainly you have to be careful to not hit him.

Best to stand in the water (to save fire) and heal him now and again.

Mind you last time he didn't notice I did anything and I missed my XP 600. Miserable git just kept moaning about not telling Griff.

F8

While you might be correct to say that increasing the XP would break the current balance, it is still incorrect to say that it doesn't need to be changed. That is because the current balance needs to be changed anyway. This is alpha, everything, including balance, is a work in progress. XP given by combat encounters and quests can be changed

For instance, the level 2 Void Turtles give a pathetically low amount of XP given the difficulty of the encounter, AND when compared to the difficulty of other level 2 encounters. Any solution you do to the (missable) Elohdi "Shakedown" quest gives you more than the much more difficult fight against the Turtles.

Some (many?) people are saying that once you reach level 4, the game gets MUCH easier. Part of that is apparently because that level unlocks all the spellbooks available from vendors, but I'm sure that another part is because that's when you get a second Talent and Civil point. But the biggest part would be that there are a TON of enemies at level 4, both inside and outside the fort, so that's a lot of XP available. There's drastically less XP from combat for the first three levels, and you're forced to complete nearly all quests to gain the levels needed to allow you to survive in combat.

It's also somewhat missing the point to say that adding more XP would break the balance. The complaint is also about feeling like you need to do ALL optional quests to get strong enough to progress. That suggests that there are far too few quests, which means that on repeated playthroughs you have to do the same content over and over again. Even adding in mutually exclusive quests so you can do quest X, but then cannot do quest Y would help in that regard - you couldn't get any extra XP because of the exclusivity, but there would be some variety in quests so you wouldn't necessarily wind up doing the exact same quests every game.

Exp are still odd and not fitting to diffulty, the waves of Voidwoken still earn you tons of exp, far more than they deserve, they aren't that hard. They have no kind of armor and are easy to cc.

The game gets easy when you have gotten enough money via stealing to buy Snipe and Tactical Retreat for your ranger. Then you can start wrecking guards left, right, center if you have just a bit of care. And voila, in 1 hour you'll be Level 4 and killed all guards inside the fortress. The easy way of doing it? Just teleport from outside (a small ledge) to the walls, behind the boxes, and start killing. Only remotely difficult part is keeping the Paladin guy alive.

The cheesy way is always the easy one.

I couldn't disagree with you more.

The only fun part of D:OS1 was the first act where it was slow, tactical, and as a new player especially you had to be on your toes and actually think of how to approach a combat encounter.

After act 1 it all became nonesense filler and not even near as fun.


It is my heartfelt wish that they keep the game difficult, more 'sanely' paced, and basically if it could all be like DOS1's first act, it'd be rpg heaven

I agree with you but you're missing the point of what I'm saying. It's not the challenge that I dislike, but rather the necessity to do ALL of the quests in the starting area in order to JUST scrape enough XP to JUST make it past the encounters in the fort. It feels incredibly unnatural to have to comb the entire world and every character in order to progress, especially when many of the quests sound like they are designed to be mutually exclusive.

For me the most fun part was somewhere in Act 2 (end of Cyseal, first part of Luculla), as you were quite a bit powerful, but still could be mashed and bashed by that orc with knockdown, and every tactical opportunity and wise use of skills were required. So duh.
First act was limited in possibilities, and that understandable, as the characters are newbie-adventurers.

I'm still stuck. I'm at level 3 with two level 2 party members. I'm not high enough level to defeat any of the mobs in the fort or in the prison and I cannot find any quests or sources of XP at all.

I must be missing something right? Surely they wouldn't design the game this way.

Depends on what you did so far.

I'm about there too, and I think I can help a bit.



Since you're level 3, you can now probably kill the isolated pair of magisters at the gate and the beach near the start to finish gaining a level.

So it probably is possible, but you need to do basically all the content in a specific way. (That's a BAD thing for an RPG which you are supposed to replay several times over.)

Personally I didn't have THAT much trouble going from 2-4, but I did do several fights underleveled (which was honestly more fun, but would be frustrating for newer players for sure). But I stopped at level 6.25ish unsure of how to get to level 7, nevermind 8, after doing pretty much all of the combat and dungeons outside the fort. No pet pal, mind you. I didn't kill the frogs, and I probably could have killed a lot more magisters, but I did get a decent number of them. So I kind of feel like I just need to go back to Fort Joy and slaughter the magisters and do a couple quests. I could probably defeat the final boss even at 6, but it'd be tough, and in the actual game, I wouldn't want to advance if I felt underleveled, since presumably you can't go back to Fort Joy.

It does feel like doing 90% of the stuff is necessary to get even to 7. I do feel like their could be like two more level 6-7 fights around. Maybe a magister ambush somewhere on the west or north side (like, they spot you on some little scouting party boat and come to shore). Maybe another voidwoken fight somewhere, too, maybe that attacks the fort joy prisoners (perhaps later on, and you receive some kind of message that a large voidwoken has been sighted, and there could be a cool 3-way fight between you, magisters, and voidwoken.

In discussions like this, I'm always reminded that some minor level scaling (preferrably upscaling, where enemies only go up to your level, no more than 2-3 levels though) would given Larian so much more freedom to give extra experience for more player choice without overleveling the players too much. This could actually make decent thematic sense for the voidwoken, too, like the source is "fermenting" in them the longer you wait.

To admit it is technically possible to defeat the Warden at level 2 without exploits... I did it before, it did require a few loads.

Though the dogs were outright impossible (yeah the dogs were harder than the warden)

I agree with Baard. Fort Joy island desperately needs more fights. A voidwoken assault sounds good, and it would also serve as a sort of prelude to the Voidwyrm attack - it could be a way to prepare you to the hell that is Voidwyrm environmental effects.

Another (prompted) Magister fight would also be great. How about the Magisters find the Seeker camp and assault it, which then prompts Gareth to up his own timetable and assault the Magisters at the beach?

Voidwoken attacking the fortress itself... well, I'd say, if it's possible to make that happen only if you kill all of the Magisters in the fortress... then I'd be on board. Haha, but that is a whole lot of qualifiers.