[NobleNick]

Originally posted by seefree22: ...Also, am not overawed by playing with a small party as much as I thought. I'm thinking of restarting. Just wanted to follow up on the claim that with HOW and TotL the total exp is around 13 million on normal without resting all the time just to spawn extra encounters. On another forum I read 15 million. I know it is nit-picky, but anyone care to contribute their final exp amounts?...

seefree22,

I don't think this is what you asked for, but this is what I got. The below are hard numbers for a party doing only light camping (i.e., to regain spells and health). Add in the quest XP for previous areas that can only be fulfilled with items from DD/WT/LDD and you are up to about 4.1M TOTAL plus other LDD-through-the-end-of-the-game expo. This makes the 7M that Aerich quoted, for IWD only, look quite reasonable.

Sorry, I don't have anything exact for the expansions. I can tell you that 13M total looks very reasonable; and it is extremely easy to grow that number by a few million with only light camping at critical areas in the expansions: I have a party near the end of TotLM with **AT LEAST** 15M; so expect at least 20M by end of game (including IWD and expansions). I have camped maybe 3M worth with that party.

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Normal difficulty, Full party, HoW installed, but no HoF mode, VERY light camping, quest XP included.

125K TOTAL XP (about 21K per character) at the end of VoS
155K TOTAL XP (about 26K per character) at end of ToFG
360K TOTAL XP (about 60K per character) at end of DE2
650K TOTAL XP (about 110K per character) at end of DE
1.3M TOTAL XP (about 220K per character) at end of SH
1.9M TOTAL XP (about 325K per character) at end of DD (plus 120K for Ba_of_PuWa to SH)
3.5M TOTAL XP (about 580K per character) at end of WT (plus 120K for Ba_of_PuWa & 55K for Eva_Jour to SH)
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The only thing that I saw lacking from your 4-character party was a Cleric.

Another thing I noticed was that your party choice of 3 MC/DC characters uses the same amount of XP to advance as a party of 6 SC characters. The 6 character party will have slightly more total HP and about twice the cargo carrying capacity of the 3 member party. Not to mention that a 6 member party can take 6 simultaneous actions per round in a fight, versus 3.

Personally, I like to take a full party with 4 or 5 of the characters being MC or DC. This is power play, which you have said you don't necessarily care for. My point is that you can do anything you want and not worry about XP limitations, because the expansions give you all the XP you need to build a full set of very powerful characters. I think 15M is a good planning number: You might come in under that if you don't do quests and/or are TRYING to minimize camping to come in with a low XP number (why would one do that? Maybe Midget Gems knows the answer.... ).

Hope that helped.

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What's a party,
without a song?
Bards ROCK!
Party On!!


[ 01-30-2006, 11:02 AM: Message edited by: NobleNick ]