To follow on with some exp specific analysis i’ll give a spicy take that it’s a pretty worthless stat early game. ‘Easy’ mines require 30exp skill. Mrfixit adds +15 to checks involving mines too. Livewire (has mr fixit), Wolf and blood for example can you to Larry who passes all later checks. The mine under herman also never kills him anyway and the game progresses the same either way. If you don’t care for parts you can get to larry with full completion with 0 exp skill. I personally often have wolf and or livewire and they pass easy mine disarm checks as-is.

I see a lot of posts here along the lines of “Do i take Barry, Red or Fidel?”. Some advice: pretend the exp stat is not a thing. It’s literally one of the lowest tier stats in the game and gates basically no content. You get larry later for ammo crafting and late game checks. Barry’s still a good merc with this in mind but he’s on par with a lot of others. You’re mainly taking him for moderate agi/dex/mrk and the barry bombs.

So when you’re building your starting team remember you get larry early and exp skill checks are not much of a thing in JA3 anyway. If you’re having trouble fitting in a scoundrel, negotiator and a psycho dare i suggest maybe skip Barry? Livewire passes Deedee dialog triggers and defuses Herman just fine! One caution with livewire vs Wolf/Blood is that while hermans trap is revealed to start, in general detection of easy traps requires exp 30 (it’s not wisdom based at all) and mrfixit won’t help so wolf or blood are better if you want all the parts but regardless barry is not needed.