It's something I've been noticing for a while: whenever I fight a group of monsters that are wandering the map, versus a group of monsters that are part of a quest spawn, the XP reward is massively different. I haven't taken many screenshots previously because I wasn't totally sure. Last night I picked up the "Hero's Tomb" quest, where you return a Helm to a gravesite, only when you get there it's a fight with a Clambercoil dragon. My Sov is a death archmage with Savant and massively high spell mastery, so dragon dies in one turn (could have done it with manablast, but haven't finished that quest in this playthrough). My army is my Sov, an Umberdroth, and five hirelings with the Bard skill, plus one of the hirelings is a commander with Trainer 1-4. Should equal, what, 90% XP bonus. Oh, and of course I'm Altarian blood 10%, and I have Potential 15%, Knowledge 25%, Brilliant 10%, and Tutelage 25%. So total XP bonus is in the neighborhood of +175% of normal for my Sov. Imagine my disappointment when I ended up with a measly 63 XP gain for my Sov.

I tried doing it without my hirelings (in case it was somehow still splitting the XP for them even though it isn't supposed to), just my sov to cast Kill and the Umberdroth to soak some damage up. Ended with 42 XP.

Just for comparison, I found the nearest group of randomly wandering enemies I could find. Was a group led by a lvl 12 Cindercorpse, and 3 groups of lvl 2 skellies. Same group of Sov, umberdroth and 5 hirelings. Sov gained 118 XP for the fight.

So a random group of weak skeletons is worth twice the experience as one of the biggest, meanest dragons in the land?

Is this a Bug, or did they nerf the quests that much on purpose? BTW, this wasn't from a quest map, not that it should make any difference.