@windscion2: My second question was with regards to hero traits like Merchant, Evoker, Precision, Potential, and Summon, which all have at least three tiers (Merchant I, Merchant II, Merchant III). The question for these in my mind is why the trait display doesn't work more like the way the spellbook mastery traits work.
For example, if I have a champion with the Fire I trait, when s/he levels up and I take the Fire II trait, Fire I disappears from the list and you see only Fire II. However, if I have a champion with Potential I and take Potential II at level up, Potential I and Potential II are both present in the list of traits, and moreover require me to make some assumptions about how the bonus from Potential I stacks with Potential II.
Currently, watching the experience increase from one of the experience-granting books that I can find as loot, I can see that the bonuses from both Potential I (+15% exp) and Potential II (+20% exp) are affecting the experience gained. My question for this is why do I need to have both of these traits displayed in the trait list, which currently becomes very difficult to read very quickly, rather than having Potential II replace Potential I in the trait list and having the tooltip for Potential II display the total experience bonus from the two traits (i.e., +35% exp if the boni are additive, or +43.75% if the boni are multiplicative). Also, since as far as I can tell you can only get traits like this if you have the prior trait in the sequence, the tooltip text could be defined in the file rather than calculated on the spot.
This does bring up another question, though: does anyone know whether the experience bonus from Potential I is added to the bonus from Potential II, or multiplied by the bonus from Potential II?
I.e., does the experience gain formula look like this:
exp_gained = exp*(1 + exp_bonus_1 + exp_bonus_2 + ...)
Or like this:
exp_gained = exp*(1 + exp_bonus_1)*(1 + exp_bonus_2)* ...
where exp_bonus_1, etc, are the decimal equivalents of the listed experience bonus from the tooltip.