I came here to say something similar. I feel like the game has some difficulty balancing issues with combat as it is. As a player trying to persuade/deceive their way through encounters, without exp gains those unavoidable combat instances just become incredibly difficult and not very fun anymore. Another related issue is I've noticed that even when I do resolve an encounter peacefully, I'll get comments from other npcs about how I killed so-and-so. Hopefully Larian will add more player choice based commentary from npcs as well as exp for peaceful resolutions.
