I know this sounds power gamey, but I'm curious to know when the best time, from an experience standpoint, is to take major enemies, like the Slavers. For a party of five, for instance, at what level would it be best to take them out and not waste experience by hitting the next level threshold? Advice?
I believe thst due to the original level cap, the CR's of encounters above 10th level all give the same XP. So if all your characters are 10th level, or 16th level, they will get the exact same amount of XP. Obviously that amount could give you a new level at 10th, while it could be a drop in the bucket at 16th, but with very few high level fights, you will take what you can get or you have to grind on random encounters in the temple or nodes.
You'll get different amounts due to the threshold. You can't ever gain more than one level with a single XP gain--you max at (next level XP prerequisite)-1 XP. So a level 10 character would gain significantly less XP than a level 16 character (the maximum is the difference between lvl. 10 and lvl. 11 XP thresholds vs. the difference between 16 and 17), thanks to the cap. That's the wastage I'm trying to avoid. I guess what's most useful is the amount of raw XP that would be awarded for high level encounters, so that I could plan to reduce wastage.
The first time that I fought the slave traders, my party of 6 characters wasted a LOT of the XP value of the slave traders that my characters received for killing them. The second time that I fought them, my party of 8 characters were all around level 14 and they did NOT waste any of the XP that they received for killing them. My party received more than 1,194,480 XP in total for killing the slave traders. You'd be pretty bloody amazing to be able to defeat the slave traders without any of your characters dying when your characters are lower than level 14. Divide 1.2 million XP by the number of characters in your party, and then figure out the minimum character level that your characters need to be in order to not waste any of the XP that your party is rewarded for killing the slave traders. But all of this is mostly irrelevant any way because the slave traders is BY FAR the most difficult combat in the game, so you don't really need characters that are any higher level in order to defeat the remaining opponents in the game. The size of your adventuring party affects how much XP each character in your party receives after winning a combat. If you don't want to waste any XP when fighting the slave traders, then fight the slave traders with a party of 8 characters just to be on the safe side. Speaking of efficiency, in my next play through of the game, I am not going to do any item crafting or buy any items from NPC vendors (I am only going to use items that I find, loot, or am rewarded), so the 1 million or so gold that one accumulates throughout the game will go to complete waste in my game (I guess I'll be making a rather large donation to Terjon's church of beggar-making).
