What is it and how it works.
“Use progressive level bonuses” is an option in Ghost Mode that allows to make mid to end game NPCs a bit (or a lot) tougher. It is controlled by two parameters: Level Delta (LD) and Abilities per level Delta (AD).
Leveling up for NPCs in The Witcher 3 works like this: for every level above level 1 an NPC gets a levelup ability that increases its health and damage. So, a level 20 NPC ends up with its base class ability and 19 levelup abilities that increase the base stats.
While the early game is more or less equal for all the players, mid to end game experience might differ significantly if, for example, a player decides to really-really minmax their build. Progressive levelups should help in a situation like this – if you feel like enemies can’t really keep up with your character progress.
With progressive level bonuses enabled NPCs will get extra levelup abilities depending on their current level and the parameters in the menu. LD defines how often the increase will happen while AD defines how big the increase will be.
Let’s look at the defaults for the Hardcore preset: LD=10 and AD=5. These numbers mean that up to level 10 NPCs will get no additional abilities, but when they get past level 10 they will be getting 5 more levelup abilities for each 10 levels. So at level 1 an NPC will be level 1, at level 10 it will still be level 10, at level 20 it will be level 25, at level 30 it will be level 40, etc. And in between it’s just a linear dependency (see the picture below):
Note that those extra abilities do not affect the NPC’s displayed level: a level 40 NPC will have 40 as its displayed level, but its actual level will be 55 (i.e. it will have 54 levelup abilities and not 39).
In other words, the smaller LD is, the faster NPCs will get their extra bonuses, and the bigger AD is, the larger amount of bonuses the NPCs will be getting.
You can use progressive level bonuses with any game difficulty and with any Ghost Mode scaling option.
Old Ghost Stories 