Hey,
first I love the gameplay, story and ambience of the witcher 2! So that thread is not about: ohh it's too hard... but there is one thing that disturbs me.

I love to place trabs! Three fire-traps in triangle with a splitter-trab in the middle are just fun for me. But why does a mob killed by my trap give no experience? I wan'ted to become a alchemist and this suck.

So my question is: bug or feature?



Greetings,
Melinae

I don't believe it's a bug, but a choice by the developers. Setting traps would result in acquiring experience without actually working for it. Set a bunch of traps, and then sit back at the inn waiting for monsters to blunder into them, or at most, running around the forest luring the monsters into your trapped area or using bait. I think it was considered too easy. A bit of a game breaker. If you still want to set traps, don't put down really powerful ones that will kill the monsters. Just weaken them. It won't be as impressive as a massive chain explosion, but if you finish them off with sword, or a couple of well placed bombs, you'll get the XP.

Good luck.

You may also have run into the XP "diminishing returns" feature.

As you gain levels, the XP you get for killing monsters and outlaws drops, fast. You don't have to get very high up before you stop getting any XP at all for Act I mobs.

Snare traps are not as spectacular, but they are devastatingly effective, and reusable.

I don't think it's a "diminishing returns" feature, because I once got no XP at all from killing Drowners with traps when I was still getting some for hacking and slashing them. Since Geralt cannot set off a trap he set himself, I think it would have been too easy to rack up the XP by littering, for example, the swampy region on the other side of the river with dozens of high damage traps and then just standing on the shore to make the Drowners spawn at sundown and killing the lot of them without raising a virtual sweat.

But when I do use traps, it's snares all the way. I believe you can gather over sixty just lying around the landscape for free. As you stated, they're reusable and when using the more spectacular traps, there's a danger Geralt will be caught in the area of effect if he's too close when a monster sets it off. Speaking from experience here. Once set a Talgar Winter and couldn't get away fast enough. One Rotfiend set it off, froze itself and Geralt, and my Witcher could only move in slo-mo while a further half dozen unfrozen and really quick Rotfiends closed in and started pounding the White Wolf into a late lunch. Snares don't have an area of effect so there's no risk of that happening.

***Spoiler maybe ***
Like in the Queen Harpy contract/Hunting Magic. When you pick up the crystal from the player, you get swamped by Caelano Harpies, including the Queen. To try to survive that, I first tried planting Conflagrations (since Harpies are sensitive to fire) over the area where the Harpies would land and Geralt took a crapload of damage from the area of effect explosions. He almost died, actually. Last time, I planted snares instead. No damage to Geralt when the monsters landed on them and the traps didn't kill the Harpies and rob me of XP, they just weakened them a lot, making them really easy to kill, especially since I'd invested a couple of talent points in Whirl, maxing it out, Whirl being this game's version of group style.

Anyway, sorry about the length of this post.