I just finished the Automatron DLC, and overall I enjoyed it, the short ride that it was.

Not surprisingly, the best part is the robot companion crafting, where you have near limitless possibilities to upgrade your robot into a rampaging death machine...who only gets better at stealing your XP.

This seems entirely counter productive, because the more effort you put into your robots, the more it actively hurts your character progression. The same argument can be said about the standard companions(having to keep them supplied with ammo, only to have it negatively impact your experience gain).

Unfortunately with the robots, it's no longer a matter of giving them the ammo you don't use, it requires a significant investment in the form of perks (Robotics Expert, Armorer, Gun nut) and a huge amount of materials, and all for what? You don't lose experience for jumping into the suit of power armor you have meticulously spend hours grinding the parts for, so why are the robots treated so differently?

I absolutely love the idea of building these machines into the perfect compliment to your character, but when they're stealing most of my kills before getting a shot off, especially considering the high Int build that he is to even use the bots in the first place, it sort of discourages using them at all. As I said before, this makes no sense and is totally counter productive.

Solution: Easy, and obvious, give us experience for their kills, regardless of the damage we've done, or lack there of.

Probably dragged this out a bit more than needed, but this has been an issue with the game I've had since the beginning, which has only been worsened and made more apparent with the introduction of companion heavy DLC, including the next one where we will be taming the wildlife.

Thanks for the read, would enjoy hearing some opinions on this. Would like to think I'm not the only one out there who wishes this was changed.

Haven't had the time to play automatron yet but aren't they treated as companions? You mention they are like regular companion: stealing xp.. Regular companions don't steal xp? I get experience gain whenever my companions kills something.

They are, and regular companions do steal xp if you do not do ~25% of the damage to the enemy before they die. That may not seem like much when fighting a deathclaw or something large, but the "grunt" level things, raiders, super mutants, ghouls, etc etc die entirely too fast to even hit them before a well equiped minion has killed them.

I had that problem throughout the Automatron DLC with my slightly upgraded robot companion, as they are scaled for a level 15 character. Some of the enemies you face give upwards of 100xp+, not an insignificant amount to be stolen because you were focusing on 3 other 11xp enemies on the other side of the room.

This is part shameless bump, part update.

I am having a real hard time understanding how this game determines when you gain shared xp with you companion. Wiki says you must do damage, that's not true against all targets, particularly Super Mutants and mid raiders (tested many, many times, not a shot fired, 100% xp), but low level enemies such as ghouls and low raiders or really high level enemies like Deathclaws do not. Most of the time, anyway, because in the case of ghouls it's like a 10% chance of randomly getting the xp. Even bloatflies, there has been a certain group of 3 near the Ranger Camp where I get the credit for just one.

I'm pretty sure even the game has no idea what's going on, but if anyone has any ideas, let me know. I'm lost here.