Experience gain on Joinup bug?

[czacki]

There's something seriously wrong with this. At least a couple times, my returning NPC leveled up substantially (so much that I had to edit the savegame with shadowkeeper to remove the excess XP). Last example: after finishing Jansen's quest and having him rejoin, he immediately leveled up to almost two million XP total whereas my team was at around 1,500,000 XP at this point.

The XP cap for joining/returning NPCs is supposed to be 32,000 for BG1, 125,000 for Siege of Dragonspear (IIRC, not sure on this one), 1,250,000 for Shadows of Amn, 2,500,000 for ToB. This is respected in BG1 and SoD, but NOT in SoA. Joiners often outscale my "regular party members" instantly, above the 1,250,000 XP threshold.

I do have the more customization for NPCs component installed (the one that lets you choose their class on joinup, so you can modify their base proficiencies for instance).

[Jarno Mikkola]

Is your main char a thief/bard ? Cause it might be the character level, not the XP that they have that produces this.

[czacki]

He's a dual class actually. Good ol' Berserker to Mage, dualed at 9th, currently at 13th.

The problem seems to be most frequently happening with Multiclassed team members. Jan Jansen in particular.

[Jarno Mikkola]

Dualed char that has 22 levels. That's about 3 000 000 xp. Which is about Thief/Mage whose level is 17/14.

No wonder you got a little more than 1 250 000 xp you think you should have gotten. And nope, there's not really much that can be done with that. Except to NOT dual.

[czacki]

I see. But shouldn't it stop at the cap? It for some reason worked in siege of dragonspear part of the game: the team mates would be scaled to 250,000, not more. Glint is a Cleric/Thief, so he should face the same bugs as Jansen does; he did not. (my PC reached 500,000 exp fairly quickly in SoD - unlocked Berserker).

 

Wikipedia suggests that those are the caps:

The highest XP they can have at the time of joining is 32,000

250,000

1,250,000

and 2,500,000

 

my next playthrough will include my character as Dwarven Defender, we'll see if this is caused by Dual Classing.

Edited October 17, 2019 by czacki

[Jarno Mikkola]

Did you install the EET_Tweak mod that comes with the mod ?

If you refer to the BG wikipedia, then that only tells you about the vanilla non EET-ed game... meaning that if you use EET, you get the BG2EE ToB rules ... aka the 2 500 000 "cap" at BG1 part. And if you installed the LEvel 1 NPCs NPC leveling, then you could get nearly as much as 40 000 000 given or take a few.

[czacki]

Upon further testing, I noticed it's not completely bugged.

For instance, Valygar joins and gets properly scaled to 1,125,000 exp, which is the final level he can get before the 1,250,000 exp cap.

 

So it does work sometimes... and sometimes it doesn't. The most common culprit is Jan Jansen which, if removed and invited to the party again, will immediately get scaled up to improper amounts of exp (my main character's exp plus about 250,000). Perhaps it's tied to multiclassed party members. Unfortunately I don't have anyone multiclassed available for testing (Jaheira is during her quest, and will permanently leave if kicked out at this point) and I changed Aerie's class/stats to "replace" a party member I dislike.

[Blash2]

Is experience gain on rejoin a vanilla feature? How can I disable it? If I remove an NPC from party, I'd like to find it exactly as I left it.. I think it's also in the spirit of EET NPC continuity..

[K4thos]

14 hours ago, Blash2 said:

Is experience gain on rejoin a vanilla feature? How can I disable it? If I remove an NPC from party, I'd like to find it exactly as I left it.. I think it's also in the spirit of EET NPC continuity..

Automatic XP gain on joinup via character script, based on CHARNAME XP, is a vanilla EE feature. Unless it is confirmed that it only happens in EET, fixing it is outside scope of this project.

Generally EET is not fixing vanilla bugs because any such fix needs to be carefully tested after each released official patch to be sure that Beamdog didn't fix it on their own and to ensure that it doesn't break anything in the possibly altered vanilla content.

Edited November 11, 2019 by K4thos

[czacki]

Further playthrough reveals the following:

- returning (or recruited) NPCs will have uncapped growth, past even the ToB 2,500,000 experience. This happens in SoA. BG1 and SoD seem to have proper cap implementation. I got Mazzy to HLAs upon recruitment, so I had to reload and EE-keep her back to the intended 1,250,000...

- Imoen is bugged until she hits 2 mil exp; I got her with just 220 000 exp in mage class and whenever I leveled her up, she'd go back to 220 000 exp in mage class instantly, forcing me to EE-keep her experience back. Once she hit 2,000,000, this ceased to happen.

Edited November 11, 2019 by czacki

[K4thos]

 

Quote

I got Mazzy to HLAs upon recruitment, so I had to reload and EE-keep her back to the intended 1,250,000...

can't see how it's possible when her MAZZY.BCS script XP scale ends up with this max:

IF
  Global("BD_JOINXP","LOCALS",0)
  InParty(Myself)
  XPGT(Player1,1249999)
  XPLT(Myself,1250000)
THEN
  RESPONSE #100
    SetInterrupt(FALSE)
    SetGlobal("BD_JOINXP","LOCALS",1)
    ChangeStat(Myself,XP,1250000,SET)
    SetInterrupt(TRUE)
END

there is nothing there that could give her more XP on joinup unless she uses her ToB script (MAZZ25.BCS), which is not the case until ToB.

If you have a save game made right before recruiting her and before any edits with EE-keeper I can test if the same problem will happen in my game.

edit:

Quote

I do have the more customization for NPCs component installed (the one that lets you choose their class on joinup, so you can modify their base proficiencies for instance).

missed this part. Most likely a conflict (not with EET but with vanilla BG2:EE content). But please upload the save just in case.

edit2: also please upload MAZZY.BCS from your override directory.

Edited November 11, 2019 by K4thos

[czacki]

I will, do you need a list of all mods installed, just in case?

[Fouinto]

It's not an EET bug, people have reported the same behavior with BGT. It's probably a popular mod...

[Jarno Mikkola]

50 minutes ago, Fouinto said:

It's not an EET bug, people have reported the same behavior with BGT. It's probably a popular mod...

Or a EE game feature added after Level 1 NPCs mod was released to BG2 in 2007 .. 12 years ago.

[Blash2]

In very interested in knowing what causes this behavior, and remove it.