I'll still take the traits, but only on certain builds, such as a Brilliant Altar General Mage with Air 2, or a Trainer Commander. I tend to play very long, epic paced, dense everything games, so will be able to get the most out of them.

Perhaps I've never gotten a hero high enough to be amazingly uber or something.  But I've found that trained units rapidly outstrip heroes due to access to the same equipment but in groups.  A unit of cavalry is able to take a considerable amount of punishment and deal excellent damage.  Add in a unit of Skirmishers (horse riders with light armor and bows).  Now that you can upgrade them, they don't need to be replaced when you get new weapons.

By mid-game, my heroes are doing a fraction of the damage that my trained units do.  Guys who have been around a while who are level 5-6 have a whole lot of hit points. 

I suppose that if you find one of the rare weapons (+25 attack or whatnot) you can have a hero that's damn strong.  But I've found that a unit of Paladins (chainmail, longsword, kite shield, horse, chain belt, two magic amulets, charge trait, accuracy trait) end up doing most of my damage.  Typically they move six square per turn, so they can hit and often kill an enemy unit before they get to move.

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Based on the XP split, I now run my heroes with an army.  If I don't have enough units (can't afford the upkeep, etc) I sit them in a border town.  This time around (this is the first game I've tried this), my heroes are of course leveling twice as fast (I used to run two heroes per army). 

Normally what this means is that my armies have lost some flexability (can't cast as many or as many kinds of spells).

So behavior wise, the XP split has encouraged the following:

1.  One hero per army

2.  If I don't have enough units the hero sits in a town, not leveling and generally being boring.

3.  The use of fewer heroes

So I guess my questions are this:

1.  What are we trying to accomplish with the XP split?  Keep you from using two (or more) heroes?  A 50% hit is enough to make me scrap the idea.

2.  Are heroes really too powerful?  They have access to the same equipment trained units do plus some decent items (hell, most of the time when I get longswords, I equip my heroes with them because they are better than whatever they have).

3.  What level of XP hit is acceptable?  I was actually thinking about what level of XP hit I would take, and I was thinking the progression should be 20% per additoinal hero, so 80% at two, 60% at three, 40% at 4+.  Perhaps I'm too generous? 

I gave my opinion. If yours is different, then that's fine. I personally don't feel that Potential is worthwhile on its own, and think that generally speaking you get more from having a real trait than from having the +1 accuracy/spell resistance/spell mastery and +2 health a fraction of a level early. I consider this to be true for Warriors, Defenders, Commanders, and probably Assassins, but on Mages I tend to take both Knowledge and Potential since I generally prefer direct-combat mages, and they tend to have a lot of level-dependent spells.

I also only gave my opinion at the end of the post, rather than mixing it in with the data. You can draw whatever conclusions you want to from the data I gave, and it should be relatively easy to take what I gave and separate it from my opinion (which, I might add, is intended 'as a general rule', but not as an absolute). There are situations where taking the experience-boosting traits might be more reasonable than others, and there are situations where they are not useful. I tend to feel that Warrior/Defender/Assassin champions get more out of their class traits than from levels, so unless I'm planning for a long game I probably won't take Potential on that type of champion. The data is there if you want to supplement your gameplay experience with something less anecdotal, and if you want to take it and theorize without reference to the game, go ahead. The opinion I gave is based off of my gameplay experience (I've done things both ways at various times - taking all the experience-boosters as soon as possible, and taking none of them, and sometimes taking one somewhat later in the game), and the data I have seems to support my experiences. If your experiences differ, that could be an effect of your playstyle, or your preferred game settings, or any number of other things.

Now, my rationale:

The faster leveling is only marginally faster. You can approximate how many fractions of a level ahead you are essentially by a linear interpolation between the points I gave. Compared with a champion of level x who has no experience boosts, a champion with Potential would be about 0.05*x levels ahead, and a champion with Knowledge would be about 0.08*x levels ahead.

Moreover, most of what champions get out of gaining a level is the trait that they pick. Thus, picking Potential instead of, for example, Lethal is sacrificing power now for the promise of power later, and some of the traits you are putting off for later could be a rather significant amount of immediate power (for example, if your champion has an attack rating of 10, and you have the option of picking a trait for +3 attack, that represents a roughly 40% increase in the damage that champion can do; Potential will not match this until you get to be at least one full level ahead, because until then you don't have any more traits with direct benefits than you'd normally have, and the basic level bonuses are generally insignificant compared to the trait bonuses on champions).

Beyond that, most of the higher-end bonuses aren't really as much of an advantage as you might think - in the early game, when your attack rating is 10, +3 attack is great, as it then represents a bonus of about 40% to the damage you deal per hit; later on, when your attack rating is up around 20 or 30, this only represents a damage bonus of 10-15%. Evoker IV isn't as good as you might think it is - +20% spell damage sounds great, but this is applied to the base damage of the spell, so when you compare a mage with Evoker III and a mage with Evoker IV who have equal numbers of shards, the Evoker IV mage is only doing about 12.5% more damage than the Evoker III mage, if the spell damage is independent of level. If you have the need for spell mastery, then each Prodigy trait is equal to five levels (or more, if the bonus is more than +5 spell mastery - I don't remember if that's the correct bonus for Prodigy), and at 1 spell resistance per level the extra level you might have doesn't counteract it, though I will say that spell resistance and spell mastery have rarely been a significant problem for me. The same argument applies for the spell resistance traits available to defenders; +1 accuracy being a level ahead let you go from (for example) an 80% chance to hit something to an 81% chance to hit something, so since level generally doesn't have anything to do with your attack rating the damage your non-spellcasting champions deal is essentially independent of their level, and +2 health is mostly useful for low-level champions, particularly before large units of trained troops or monsters start to become common opponents. About the only time levels, independent of traits, grant power for champions is when you primarily use something that does level-dependent damage (certain spells, a handful of rare weapons) or when you have something that grants a decent per-level bonus (e.g. a shield that grants +1 defense per level).

The Commander-line trait that lets all of your units move immediately is just about the only high-level trait I can think of that is really impressive compared to what a champion just one level off from having it can do, and you could have that by level 10 if you wanted to, or level 11 if you took Potential - but you get your basic champion up to level 10 on less unmodified experience than it takes to get the Potential champion to level 11. Only if you're taking it at some point past level 20 will your Potential champion have earned less unmodified experience than your basic champion in order to get to it, and since in my experience most of my champions more or less stop leveling somewhere between levels 10 and 15, if there's a trait deep in the tree that I want, this means that Potential on its own is never useful to me, since to have the same number of power-granting traits I have to have at least one extra level compared to non-Potential champions, and this is never cheaper for the Potential champion in terms of base experience than the preceding level until you're up to level 20. For Knowledge, this break comes in around level 12, and for Knowledge and Potential, this comes in around level 9 (but unfortunately, with Knowledge and Potential you've sacrificed two power-granting traits, which shifts the less-base-experience-for-same-number-of-power-granting-traits point up to level 18 on the non-Potential champion).

This is my rationale for why I think Potential, on its own, is only particularly useful for long games where you want champions to reach high levels. If you have additional experience boosters to tack on to Potential (e.g., a +10% bonus that lets you consider Potential on a non-mage to be equivalent to Knowledge on a mage who lacks that extra +10%), then it could be a different story, depending on what exactly you need out of your champions.

I totally agree with the potential traits (and the trait in mage or w/e that gives +25% exp) I found myself in my 3rd game turning on cheats just to bump my heroes up past that level the moment I got them just so I could go to the fun bits, which obviously bumped my heroes ahead game wise and made me much stronger than normal.

I've only read the OP and a few other posts on the first page and I agree with taking these traits out.

I don't like the xp sharing at all, I've only played with 6 DM's, 1 of them did a split similar to this game where we each got a portion of the exp based on how many of us there are, another did it based on our damage output, and later switched it because our healer wasn't getting shit for exp. Every other has just given us the exp and everyone gets the same.  Point being it just shouldn't be there, they're all fighting in the fight, they all get the same experience from it.

One thought is to do what I did with my exp, give bonuses for things in combat, such as cool combo's between pc's and other small things, this could be your potential replacement.  Have dynamic specials on each character in the fight which increase they're exp gain at the end of the fight and are deleted, probably wouldn't be hard to implement considering it's basically just a slow or growth like spell.  The hard part would be storing amounts of damage dealt  and other things for transferring them or determining when they're placed and who on.  I actually thought of this WHILE writing this, may try and implement this in a mod at some point (if I manage to get time to take up modding )

Anyway. Theres that wall of text.

yeah i think killing potential 2 & 3 was not the best solution. potential 1 on its own is very weak. imo a sensible solution would have been to scrap potential 1 & 2 and leave the 25% version of the trait (the former potential 3). a 25% boost is a real choice - the return of investment is around level 12, which is a level you will most likely reach (at least with some of the heroes) before the game is over. so you'd have the choice of getting a real trait that helps now -  or sacrifice one trait now to get faster level ups within a somewhat reasonable time frame. i'd probably still skip it with most champs, but i can see how it would be a soild choice for a game where you focus on only 1-2 champs and ignore the rest. the 15% boost is never a good choice, unless you want to keep playing long after the game is decided and get your sov to level 30 or whatever.

That's the problem though, they add up, so if you don't pick potential you get the other XP benefits anyway. The 15% one costs a level that you can't make worthwhile until it puts +2 levels ahead (1 actual trait) of whatever the baseline is.

Extra bonuses don't get you to the breakeven point or the +1 trait any faster. In fact, iif you have more bonuses, the breakeven point and the +1 trait get pushed back, though I don't know how far. 

For instance if you have 30% modifiers anyway, the +15% modifier gives you a total 45%. The extra 15% is only (0.15/1.3) an 11.5% increase in XP. So it is even worse if you have extra % modifiers. Whatever modifiers you were going to have anyway will reduce the actual total % increase you get from taking potential and knowledge, making them an even worse deal. 

That is a lot of bonuses, but paradoxically each one of those you take makes Potential and Knowledge a worse deal. If you took all of them, I don't think you would ever break even on spending a level for potential or knowledge. That is a 130% increase maximum, so potential is worth a (.15/2.3) 6.5% increase and knowlede is a (.25/2.3) 10.8% increase. Whatever bonuses you get that don't cost levels become the new baseline, and the benefit of the XP trait is the proportion it would increase that baseline if you took it. So all the breakeven and +1 trait calculations would have to be redone.

The only way potential and knowledge could possibly be worthwhile at some point is if you didn't take any other bonuses, or at least very few.