If you actually legitimately bought the game, how you enjoy your playthrough in a single player is up to you (hell, you can even just watch the story on youtube if you don't want to bother playing it at all, even saving you the money from buying the game at all). On PC, you can even just use cheats to add grade or experience multipliers. What I mean by that is that it's ok to just grab a completed save if the grinding is not something you enjoy (you will basically be overpowering everything just with the masteries until fairly late in the story).
It depends on your difficulty on a massive scale too, normal mobs of the last dungeon are level 88 on chaos (which means that you will have a hard time if you are bellow 83 because you will not stun them easily to regain souls), but just dropping it to intense and they are already down to 70 something (and it continues to go down drastically as you lower the difficulty too).Īlso, remember that this is a single player game, where you can't influence at all how others are going to enjoy themselves (not even multi-player to show off how broken your unnamed +10 gear and level 200 team is). What I am saying is that without multipliers (NG+ or dlc), hard and above seem to have been designed with people like me in mind, that stay for way too long in an area just to fight those mobs, without actually wanting to completely breeze through the next 2-3 areas because of it. If you don't plan on fighting a lot, dangerous encounters (if you can manage them) are the best way as they can reward you about 5-10 times the experience of a normal fight (it takes longer as well, but not 5-10 times as long in areas where you are supposed to be for your level).Įxperience is also supposed to be not too plentiful for the exp boost, but I am talking about the Grade shop one in NG+, where you can "buy" both 2x (for 700 grade) and 3x (3000 grade) multipliers that stack (the dlc is just a way to get some of those boosts without needing NG+ or grade to pay for it). Normal and simple give enough exp with just bosses and a few enemies here and there to clear the game without having to grind (at the cost of having nearly no gear mastered), while hard and above are designed for the people that enjoy the fighting itself, letting you stay longer in the areas without vastly out-levelling even bosses.
There is no ploy with the exp, it depends on your difficulty for the most part, with higher difficulties having lower base exp but a higher bonus for the one that finishes the last enemy (2x highest combo in intense, 4x in chaos, as the percentage of the base exp that is given as the bonus). (dire foes don't actually give exp, or so little that it doesn't show much, they give a ton of grade and gald though)