Just install IE Mod and use F11 to teleport, and use the console to level yourself up? If you hate the base game might as well just skip to WM content.
I'm enjoying my playthrough and about to start WM content, but there is definitely something weird about the Defiance Bay / Chapter 2 content. It's like all the trappings of a good old big city CRPG is there, and some of the story moments should be very cool, but it ends up being very disjointed and underperforming.
Heritage Hill for example has several cool conceits - the first discovery of the soul crunchy factory at work, the scientist turned man-eating zombie, the option to trick some prisoners to getting eaten by said zombie, the long-bitter woman that you have to gently cajole for the crucial info, the parent zombies clawing at their own child's door. And I don't even think it's about writing that is so terrible that it sinks each of those moments into a crater; sometimes the writing is poor, but it's more often between mediocre and decent. It seems to be more about the lack of little touches that put it all together. The scientist-zombie guy feels entirely disconnected from the scene as you deal with the soul factory, the bitter woman is found in some random house that looks like a villager's domicile in Icewind Dale. The little kid with PTSD is a great moment, but the rest of the whole map doesn't support this theme of psychological horror, and so on.
From a murderhobo standpoint, I'm running with a barbarian, rogue and cipher on POTD with -33% XP, and it's a good challenge. My party's more geared towards evasive action - debuffing enemy ACC, riposte, etc. - than carpet-bombing, and it makes me appreciate the strongest aspect of POE combat - how different damage/defence types interact in meaningful ways. Without a Frostseeker ranger or a Slickenspamming wizard or such, you do start to appreciate how your high-deflection rogue can be instakilled by a necrotic lance, how oozes are particularly effective at killing each other when charmed, how you might switch to different weapon types, or pump up different defences for a fight, things like that. (Obviously, the monotonous of enemy mobs within those species varieties remains a problem.)
The obvious problem is that in most cases, playing with a full party and normal XP gain, you're so far ahead of the relative defences curve that you can seemingly attack with anything and everything. Difficulty - both in terms of number pumping and qualitative differences - really is the bane of RPG systems; the problems with the mechanics themselves aside, the mechanics can't even reach their full potential when the power pacing is bad.
And whole ship/pirate stuff is underutilized IMO, tho whole game is littered with underutilized themes.
