Flix

There's 5 or 6 side quests in Od Nua, including Kana Rua's quest and the main "Master Below" objective. I did about 5 dungeon levels at a time with my group, starting with a level 6 party and defeating the master at level 13. I enjoyed this dungeon a lot.

An alternate way to think about it is reverse the association. Like imagining the gods as an adventuring party - what class would they be, what roles would they play? So instead of saying "all priests are followers of Eothas, all Druids follow Ondra" you can say "Eothas would totally be the priest of the group, Ondra would probably be the Druid, etc."

I agree. Also, I've yet to play with a god-like character, so maybe this is answered somewhere, but I would have liked to see a stronger link between the god-like and the gods that they resemble. About their origins and the significance of their resemblance to the gods, etc. Just generally more lore about them would have been great. With all the plot revelations about the gods I thought something about the god-like would have been explained as well.

Then you didn't do all vanilla content. You get XP for discovering areas, solving quests, picking locks, disarming traps, and Od Nua is full of all those things. Doing all vanilla content before Court of the Penitents will get you up to level 13 and some change. Completing a bit of expansion content will then bump you up to level 14 quite quickly. In my full playthrough in 2.01, this meant I did most of the expansion content with max level, as well as the final campaign battle. In my opinion the last 5 levels or so were gained too quickly, so I'd appreciate a ~15-20% increase to experience needed to gain those last 5 levels.

My suggestion would be to just make the XP leveling requirement a little steeper at the higher levels. With no level cap the end game content would need to be massively scaled up in difficulty, because Burial Isle/Court of the Penitents/Sun in Shadow and final fights are already painfully easy with a level 14 party. Concelhaut and Master Below were the only worthy foes of such a powered up team. I agree about trying IE Mod, which has an XP nerf feature (I downloaded it solely for that). It's not really quite what I wanted though, as it just applies a 25% (or more) increase in XP requirement for all levels, which makes early game more painful.