I think this is one of the few innovations in this game that they got absolutely right. There's no reason killing stuff should give you more XP than doing things peacefully; that's a holdover from D&D that resulted in the "optimal" behavior being to slaughter everything that has a red circle under it and then some. The way PoE implements it, you still get some XP from combat, but not in a way that makes stealth and diplomacy suboptimal. I hope that this idea catches on and we see it in other games.

It's awesome that you don't get XP for killing. It allows you to role play, to freely decide wether to kill someone without having to care about the XP.

I would've been fine with no mob killing xp at all but this suits me as well. It feels great not to have to kill everything and be able to sneak by if you prefer. Raedric's Hold is a good example.

 

I first encountered "no combat exp" in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and loved it because it felt so liberating. You were rewarded for simply doing the quest and finding a solution rather than for doing it in a certain optimal way that discourages doing it in any other way.

Edited April 2, 201510 yr by Jean-Luc