Yep, I’m all for not overly incentivising violent as opposed to peaceful ways to achieve goals. There definitely have been conversations about this before, and there are multiple ways it could be attempted. One interesting suggestion I think was to tie XP to achieving objectives as opposed to what you do along the way, but I don’t think any solution is perfect.
It’s hard to comment on the balance in the game as it stands as I have done playthroughs minimising death (though not at the expense of forgoing quests) and still not had any problem hitting the XP cap or felt that my character is under-levelled for the content. I’ve not completed a patch 9 playthrough though, and of course the divergence between an XP-maximising approach and one that avoids unnecessary fights will only grow further in the full game if the XP-granting approach doesn’t change. Which is why I think this has come up in the past alongside discussion of level caps.
It´s good to know that even trying to do things peacefully you got to the level cap more or less fine. But as you point out, i´m a bit worried about the "snowball" of getting less XP than doing more combat will affect difficult batlles in the future.
This can also be balanced if you get extra help for certain battles if you have tried to avoid combat with certain characters that later joins you for that temporarily for example. I hope it´s balanced for the different acts because I´ll try to solve each situation with dialogue at least with those i think deserves it
