Party members on ship lagging behind in XP

[PangaeaACDC]

Currently my active party members have around 56000 XP, which means they just levelled up to 11. I've stuck with them all the time so far, but would like to use Pallegina instead, since I liked her a lot in the first game (hopefully equally excellent voice acting this time too). But it seems like party members stuck on the ship will lag fairly far behind the main crew in XP. This means it's a bit awkward to swap them out, and incentivices sticking with the same 5 all the time. When I swapped out Xoti for Tekehu, he had 48000 XP, and when I swapped him out for Pallegina, she had only 43000 XP.

 

In the first game they could at least partially keep up via adventures, but there is no such thing in this game. Are 'inactive' party members therefore meant to lag so far behind in XP? Think I'd prefer them to keep track with the main party, so we could mix and match a bit more without feeling punished by the game.

 

(Not sure how much XP the crew had when I recruited these characters, but I would think a deal less, so that they have got some XP by playing cards on the boat in port).

Edited May 15, 2018 by PangaeaACDC

[PangaeaACDC]

Found a save from when I had just recruited Pallegina, and at the time the crew had ~21000 XP. Therefore looks like 'resting' party members get maybe 2/3rd of the XP the active party does. I'd prefer them to keep up so we can switch around without being "punished"

 

56000 - 21000 = 35000 (active crew)

43000 - 21000 = 22000 (Pallegina)

 

I now regret not switching to Pallegina right away, but the thing is I like both Serafen and Xoti so it's been hard to dump any, and Aloth as a mage is always nice (though less nice in this game compared to many others).

[Glurak]

Is work as intended was in Pillars 1 the same. 

[Wintermist]

It's a pretty bad idea to have it this way if that's how it is. All party members should keep up even if not in the group, I know it's not realistic but from a gameplay perspective it's pretty needed because what if someone actually dies, or something else. Now you're stuck with a replacement that can't keep up in the areas you're now adventuring in.

[PangaeaACDC]

Not a big fan of how it currently works, because it means members not in the active party will very quickly lag behind in XP, and by quite a lot. However, thankfully there is a feature to help them close the gap, albeit very slowly. They get an extra 20% XP for each level they lag behind, up to a maximum of double XP. I finished some quests with Pallegina at level 1 (hadn't levelled her up) while we were 11 or so, and she got double the XP of other party members. When 1 level behind, she gets +20%. So if for instance the normal crew get 200XP for a bounty or whatever, she will get 240XP.

 

Probably something that won't be changed, but what was nice with 'resting' crew in POE1 vs POE2, is that in the first game there were the adventures you could send them on, which helped them to stay in touch in terms of XP, especially if you sent the same 1-2 people every time.

 

The way it works now can quickly lead to people (especially on 2nd+ playthroughs) to think: "Okay, I want this crew, so I'll get them asap so none fall behind too much", and then basically ignore the rest of the party members for the entire game.

[Osgiliath]

Is work as intended, for me at least even after change some party memeber the max lvl difference I get was 1 1/2, and most of the time I see the gap getting lower

[Amentep]

since this doesn't seem to be a bug I'm moving this to strategies forum.  If later determined to be a bug, I can move this thread back.

[adragojlovic]

Greetings,

 

And thank you all for taking the time to post your questions and answers on our forums Should you have any additional questions or concerns let us know.

 

Cheers.

[Vitalis]

Having recently done numerous PoE1 playthroughs to try to perfect the games I wanted to import, it seems rather similar to how it was in 1.

 

Most of my inactive party members ended up being one level lower than the regulars, which isn't too much of a detriment, and they quickly caught up in levels after a quest or two. If it's worse in Deadfire then it should be looked at.

[Incendax]

It is exactly the same as POE1, minus the adventures.

But there is the catch up mechanic. So just play with them and they will catch up. And eventually DLC will make is to that you can max out everyone even with the penalty.

[Archaven]

Currently my active party members have around 56000 XP, which means they just levelled up to 11. I've stuck with them all the time so far, but would like to use Pallegina instead, since I liked her a lot in the first game (hopefully equally excellent voice acting this time too). But it seems like party members stuck on the ship will lag fairly far behind the main crew in XP. This means it's a bit awkward to swap them out, and incentivices sticking with the same 5 all the time. When I swapped out Xoti for Tekehu, he had 48000 XP, and when I swapped him out for Pallegina, she had only 43000 XP.

 

In the first game they could at least partially keep up via adventures, but there is no such thing in this game. Are 'inactive' party members therefore meant to lag so far behind in XP? Think I'd prefer them to keep track with the main party, so we could mix and match a bit more without feeling punished by the game.

 

(Not sure how much XP the crew had when I recruited these characters, but I would think a deal less, so that they have got some XP by playing cards on the boat in port).

 

i really like so that every character should be on par with level with the main character. this is important especially if you want to complete the sidequests of all the companions. also having the option to swap in/out party characters anytime will be really important.

 

now everytime i need to run to an in to swap party characters is really PITA

[MrMoe]

Is it really that important?

 

Pretty much everyone on this forum thinks that the game gets too easy reaching level10+

So having a character lagging behind a bit is not gamebreaking or anything, he just needs some time to catch up a bit.

 

The only thing that would bother me about it, if it's not possible to reach the level cap for that character in question.

 

 

I think I like the current way its handled. It was like this in Baldurs Gate, very seldom would you level up your complete party at once. In PoE it can become a chore - ughh 5 level ups to distribute....  vs Cool! 1 level up. Lets see what we have...

[Zaerisk]

Hi,

I was recently looking into this same behavior while playing the game for the first time, and I thought I would share what I discovered here in the most relevant existing thread. There are also some other online discussions that mentioned how experience gain would be greatly diminished for characters further down in the list of inactive party members. I was looking at the Assembly-CSharp.dll file, according to another post I had found, and I noticed what I believe is a minor error in the code. It seems the game is intended to give inactive party members 90% experience if they are equal to or below the player's level, and 50% if they are above (based on global.gamedatabundle file). However, these adjustments are made to all of the characters in a loop without resetting the initial experience value on each iteration. Therefore, the first inactive member would get 90% xp as intended, the second would only get 90% of 90%, or about 81%, the third would get about 73%, and so on. Depending on the number of inactive members, this can result in severely reduced experience gains for the most recent members not in the active party. The post that shows this code and how to edit it is below. The poster just bypasses the loop and assigns 100% xp every time, but it would be easy to just add a new variable for reassigning a new adjusted xp value on each loop to make the code work as intended. It seems Obsidian is finished making minor patches like this one to the game, but it seems to be a simple fix in case anyone is interested.
 

 

[Boeroer]

@Zaerisk: great first post, thank you! 

[AeonsLegend]

I hate it when games have inactive party members lose out on experience. I always make sure they are even through unity console. Problem solved.

[ancalimohtar]

@Zaerisk thank you!

 

I just hit max level with my main party, but then noticed that the sidekicks I never used are stuck at like level 12! Completely useless. Silly that this bug has remained.