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When you create a new character using a mercenary token, they start at the same level as the highest-level character in your party. So if you want to tinker with, say, an INT build practitioner, use a mercenary token to create a new one and they will start at the same level as the highest level character in your party.
And yes, you can also leverage this when you pick up Bryan of Dorn who is usually about +2 to +4 levels higher than your party when you encounter him. My party was 11, he was 15. Spent some merc tokens and updated my party to lv 15 ;)
Mercenary tokens are limited, so you can only do this so many times, unfortunately.
If I have the choice of using a level 15 or a level 11 character depending on how I spend my limited in-game currency, I'm going to take the level 15 character. This is a pretty obvious game mechanic that's in there by design. Otherwise, there would be a blanket XP applied to both new and stabled characters, based on combat completions, and the number of shrines/luck stones consumed.
I find that the chars I do not have in my party level as well, are a bit behind the others, but nothing crucial. I also saw during the playthrough that Fiona, 5th char I hired, was the last char to get access to the third skill tier after a visit to the Reference Board. The difference in levels is less than one level, so all have achieved eg L12, before the first party char gets L13. Is this common experience, or did I inadvertently do something special to get this result?
From my impression, the game is pretty linear, and I read elsewhere that there is no respawn in this game, so my conclusion would be that any party is at +/- the same level in a certain area. There is some limited freedom, so you can take on "red" fights, and when experienced enough, you will probably win most of them. Personally I try to avoid red fights, but go back to previous areas to see if closed areas blocked by superior enemies were now accessible. But aside from that, are there huge variations in character development in the same area? I did not meet Bryan yet as a companion, unless I overlooked something completely, and my party is at L15. Above it was mentioned he was met at L11, so much earlier. So where is the variation in this game?
One other question related to mercenary tokens. I saw they were offered by some vendors, never used them, because no need yet. My party setup works, I hired one fighter mercenary, which is my main tank and provides support to my main dds Wringneck and Green Lady, the others are all NPCs I met on my way. But my question is, is item supply really limited or do the vendors refill stock?
Thanks for your kind answers which help me to better understand this game.
The game is essentially a completely linear story unfolding through a sequence of zones, but with a major "side quest" or 2 in each zone which consist of harder puzzles, tougher fights and a special reward.
One example from quite early in the game:
When you meet Duke Kingston to acquire the key for Sinister Street (to exit the undercity), there is a door in his hideout leading to Mangar's Tower. This is a side-quest zone, and is completely optional, though it has 3 notably difficult fights and a unique weapon reward. It also has some difficult puzzles and a number of secret areas. You can elect to do this zone before heading to Sinister Street, at any point later in the game, or not at all.
No restock, I'm afraid. The mercenary tokens and all other vendor stocks and pickups are static/persistent, as is the number of encounters, so there is a pre-planned balance of resources vs. combat encounters.
Mercenary tokens are generally plentiful, and appear in the random loot tables of Hidey Bides, so the more of those you uncover, the more tokens you'll generally encounter. My last full playthrough I had spent 6 on Mercs, a few on respecs, and still had 18 in my inventory before end-game.
I got the Paladin too late, he was lower level, I wanted try anyway, and keep it, the lower level changed nothing.
What you suggest is just a pointless exploit, I get it that you disagree.
It's like refuse experiment with party composition because of few XP lost, the few XP is no reason to not do it,
That right there just killed this game for me. I was hoping there would be some kind of random encounters coming after the first couple of quests like you got right from the start in Bard's Tales 1-3.
I'm sure it did. I'm no longer surprised since I've already seen others say they shelved the game because they couldn't play with a full party right away. It seems a sign of the times that some people these days always want immediate gratification or throw it down, instead of giving a game (or book, or movie, or whatever) a fair chance, and to explore it some time, to gauge its strength and weaknesses.
But no, these days it's: "I can't grind? I'll throw it in the bin then!".
I quote that many JRPG remake of classic have been tuned to remove the forced grinding or most of it. So I suspect I'm in the winner camp.
It's not instant gratification, it's that grinding is boredom repetition, artificial game extend duration, life time lost. I can't understand why some players like such repetitive gameplay. Why some other players would want grinding, no idea, to me it looks absurd.
I'm not a fan of grinding myself. As so many things (I've discussed some before, like in the thread about not reading the info an NPC gives for a quest) I blame it on the fact that ARPG'ers don't realise they're not RPG'ers. (Which doesn't mean one can't play both, but I'm talking about the mentality and disposition, here.) There are so many differences between the two, at least from a pragmatic/practical stance, that I highly deplore the two are conflated with eachother.
On paper/theorethical it's the same genre/group, in practise they differ in a lot of de facto aspects. Some people have difficulties switching from the one to the other.
But that means that no project can target fully and well all aspects of a RPG, they all have weak points on this or that.
And this leads to many sub genres, but also many uncommon genres not even tagged.
I saw not that long ago a RPG without any combats (recently released on Mac hurrah). And even if I haven't play it yet, and I'm quite suspicious about it because of two reasons, I don't like challenges through dialog this never work well in my opinion, and for me no matter the RPG combats is very important and a major aspect. Still, I looked at it a little bit closer, and yeah it seems be a RPG without combats, really a RPG, not an Adventure game in an open world.
I'll pick another example Wizardry series, many kids (ok less old) players don't tag it RPG but will tag them randomly like Hack&Slash or Dungeon Crawler. But the point is any RPG history not highlighting this series would just be a brainless ignorant bullcrap writing. This series is RPG no matter what are saying a massive amount of younger players, and I doubt they'll ever succeed rewrite the real history.
This leads to, RPG is a ton of sub genre, most of them never tagged.
When you write ARPG it evokes another tag evolution battle, what means Action RPG. Currently the wikipedia has the old definition, but believe me, it's changing constantly:
<<The games emphasize real-time combat where the player has direct control over the characters as opposed to turn or menu-based combat while still having a focus on character's Stats in order to determine relative strength and abilities. >>
So a clear opposition between Real time and turn based but only for combats.
It's never been in past a clear tag, nor even much used. But along end of 90"s and during 00"s it started collide with a focus on combats oriented Rpg versus RPG where combats is a less wide part of the gameplay. For example Diablo 2 "is" ARPG when Gothic and Morrowind "are" RPG. Check tag definition and obviously all are ARPG and many younger players will never ever been able to accept it.
Frankly, I'd ask you, but what means ARPG for you?
The RPG tags story doesn't end here, certainly a lot because of Steam as an over-dominant video game platform on the influential perspective, since few years CRPG tag started popup. It's no way a new tag but in past it's never been a much used tag. So in old time CRPG was an opposition to exclude console RPG that is JRPG to western RPG without exclude JRPG up to deny them the RPG tag.
But through Steam and some specialized forums, a new CRPG tag started appear, it has no real definition that is really coherent and could include RPG as different than Ultima series, Wizardry series, Baldur's Gate series, Migh & Magic series, Fallout first series, Gothic series. The real meaning of the tag is "true" Rpg opposed to RPG that aren't "true". The problem is nobody will agree on those that match and don't match, it's more a tag meaning RPG I like opposed to RPG I don't like, I already had boredom arguing on this illusory tag, I never ever get any definition of the tag working really and fully.
Technically, you had random encounters when you first stepped out into the city in BT1 and you needed to use them to level your characters enough to even enter the first dungeon. (There was a special encounter in the city that some people farmed from the start, if they had enough time and patience to do so. To me, that destroys a lot of the fun from starting off fresh in BT1.)
Unfortunately, inXile ditched most recognizable features of the original series. No starting party. No random encounters. Different spell mechanics. Different combat mechanics. Barrows Deep lets you see enemies before you encounter them and "ambush" them in real time, so a different exploration mechanic too.