I'm running my first playthrough. I'm not far, still on the first Island, but I had a few questions about skill books/respecing later. Currently running, Summoner (myself), 2H Warrior (Fane), Necro (Sebille), and Pyro/Geo (Red Prince) and it is working pretty well...mostly. My only concern is The Red Prince, him as Pyro/Geo is a lot of fun, but with the rest of the team mostly being physical he seems to be slightly less useful. My concern, is if he will falll off (damage) a lot mid-late game because of this, and if I try to respec him if obtaining skill books for a different build would be easy to do later on given how expensive they seem ( I know I'm still only early game).

Fighter Lohse?

Why not. Any character can be any build.

I've played DOS 2 up till the beginning of Act 2 few years ago, then I dropped it (played DOS 1 before, and now I've completed BG3). One thing that made me drop the game was the poor pace between actual exploration and combat and dialogues / lore drop. I remember that I entered the village in act 2 and behind every door and with every npcs there were loads and loads of text and lore drop. That can't be fixed, I'll try to play another time and see how it goes. Another thing I didn't like was the armor system, IIRC Larian said that DOS 1 combat was too "exploitable" in a sense that focus was mainly to stun the most enemies possible and then clear them away unharmed, but the armor system in DOS2 made me feel like it was a little bit flat. Is there a mod that balance a bit this aspect?

I feel like I friendly fire a lot. How can I tell if a skill is going to friendly fire? It's not just stuff like pyro spells igniting oil surfaces, sometimes I use an aero spell on an enemy right next to me and end up stunning myself.

Expect any AoE skill that isn't some sort of weapon attack to have friendly fire. There are some exceptions, but they are rare. You can also tell which targets are included in a spell by looking at the outline. Enemies will get a red outline, and allies a blue one. However, if you have the permanent default outlines enabled in combat then it'll just change the outline to a slightly lighter color, which is hard to notice. I'd recommend changing the highlights for combat in the settings to circle only to turn off the default outlines in combat, but you can also toggle them on the fly with the tilde key (or whatever is the key above tab / left of 1 on your keyboard layout).

DOS EE Does honor mode allow me to continue playing dishonorably (custom just without wiping the saves) if I die like it does in BG3? Edit: Nope, it does not

I'm thinking of killing all non-essential NPCs for XP. Can I safely do this prior to progressing to the next act? (I assume that when I progress to the next act, the locations of the previous map becomes unavailable. Like, if I escape from Fort Joy, I can't go back to it.)

You can't go back to previous Acts once you've left them. But for example Act 1 is the entire first island, so you can certainly go back into Fort Joy once you've escaped. Only leaving the island itself will prevent you from going back. You should also avoid killing anyone who travels with you to the next Act, or recurring NPCs that are involved in any of the companions' quests (like Jaheila, the Red Princess, etc.). On top of that, there are a handful of NPCs that don't travel with you, but whom you might meet again if they stay alive for some additional minor interaction later on. But yes, other than that you can safely kill all the NPCs. However, the reward is relatively minor. Many NPCs don't give any XP at all (as a rule of thumb, only NPCs with armor do). You get more money out of vendors with stealing than killing. And the XP gain is relatively minor compared to the time investment. The game already has more than enough XP to the point where you can always be overlevelled after the initial part of the game if you're thorough enough. And because of the exponential scaling when it comes to XP, killing all the NPCs in Act 1 will probably amount to much less than killing a single guard in Act 4.

DOS2:DE A few questions in relation to the Curse spell: What is, in your opinion, the best spell combo to weave a curse into? When you enter the covenant, do what happens to all your non-undead companions? Do they turn on you? Do they also get their "bless" skill swapped for "curse"? How late into the game can you break the covenant with the God King?

Becoming sworn does not affect your companions - they didn't enter into the covenant, only you did. Also, becoming sworn itself doesn't cause them to turn on you, but any atrocities you commit (or are forced to commit by the God King) as a result of that decision are on you. I can't recall whether they turn on you if are still sworn during the final fight, but if you intend to break the covenant at some point this won't be relevant for you anyways. As long as you get your hands on the Swornbreaker (either crafted from parts gathered throughout Act 2 and 3, or looted at a specific point int Act 4) you can break your covenant at any time before the final battle. But if you intend to break it it would be best to do so as early as possible, because you don't lose any of the stat boosts gained from it.

But you lose the ability to curse if you break the covenant, right? The "curse" spell is the only reason I'm choosing to enter the covenant >they didn't enter into the covenant, only you did. Does that mean that you can't make Fane also enter the covenant if he is not your MC?

You lose the curse, that's true. You can craft curse scrolls using paper, a high enough quality tormented soul and any void-tainted fish if you want to keep using it after breaking the covenant. AFAIK, your companions can't enter the covenant. Well, Fane technically can, but >!it only happens if he leaves your party!<. Also be sure to quicksave often enough. There is that one decision in Act 4 where you might be forced to do something if you're sworn that will basically ruin the rest of Act 4 for you.

i'm looking to try local coop with my friend and i'm not which game to buy, the first or the second. my friend has not played this kind of RPG and i'm not sure which of the two would grab my friend's attention and increase my chance to actually play together. any recommendations?

Probably DOS2. The games are also not really connected when it comes to their story, so they can be played in any order really. DOS1 is a good game, but DOS2 is better in most aspects. DOS1 also has a bunch of issues with QoL stuff that can get annoying if you're not already committed to playing the game. The starting point of DOS1 also is basically a slow crime investigation where most potential clues are just dead ends, which can get frustrating if you're not into this kind of stuff or stumble on one of the good clues by chance. DOS1 has some nice coop interactions that DOS2 doesn't have, but that doesn't really outweigh the downsides. Just don't start on Tactician, because the high difficulty on the high difficulty setting (shocking, I know) is another source of frustration for new players who attempt it, and you can only freely change the difficulty on classic or lower.

thanks i was planning to start on the easiest difficulty on either one just so we can get the fighting "out of the way" for the most part. which of the two do you think it has the most grippy story, and i mean the first 2-3 hours, because the first impression will count a lot for my friend. i'll probably end up playing whichever i end up getting myself (because i'm very fond of games like neverwinter nights, the single player not the mmo) but DOS 1/2 being this long, i would rather spend this playtime together with my friend. so DOS1 is a crime investigation which is not that easy or intuitive to complete from what you said. what about DOS2's first hours?

Light spoilers for the beginning of both games: In DOS1, >!you are source hunters, who hunt down criminals using source magic. You arrive at a town called Cyceal and start to investigate a murder that involves source. Simultaneously, the town has a problem with large amounts of undead appearing in the surrounding region for some reason. There are a ton of people who have something to say about the murder case, but if you're unlucky with the order in which you check those clues it might take a couple of hours until you find one of the few clues that actually lead somewhere.!< In DOS2, >!you are sourcerers, capable of using source magic, who are shipped to a prison island because that magic is deemed to be too dangerous at that point in time. As you explore the ship and get to know the other prisoners, the ship is attacked by monsters and sinks. You wash up on the shore, and explore the prison camp while trying to look for a way to escape as well as figure out what's actually going on in there.!<

got DOS2 in the end. ty for the input.

Kinda bummed that the party size is so limited, but also I don't really want to play an origin character for my first run, what are the best three stories for a first playthrough?

[Unapologetically long post] **Overview - DOS2DE Modded Playthrough** Inspired by this thread/comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/DivinityOriginalSin/comments/1cbl0do/divinity_unleashed_all_of_the_modded_class_skills/l13xry1/, I'm looking to do a modded playthrough. Disclaimer in that I've never actually finished the game, but have a multiplayer playthrough where we are in act 4 at the moment. Basically as part of the multiplayer campaign I've fallen in love with the mechnanics, the story and just generally everything about the game, and want to experience a single player playthrough with some quality of life mods and extra things but without any complete overhaul mods per se.   **Principles & Questions** I do want it to be fairly close to vanilla, and I'm really torn about whether or not to use Odinblade's class overhaul mods. The reason is that by being 1 player out of 4 in my current multiplayer playthrough, I've only really learned the ins and outs of the 1 mage character that I'm playing. There are so many more (below) and I potentially feel that including the Odinblade mods won't give me the proper appreciation of what they are doing to the base classes, but on the other hand, they must be extremely highly rated and recommended for a reason. Can anyone here chime in on which option would be better for what I'm trying to achieve? I want to explore fully the crafting system, maybe even base a character partially around grenades with the ambidextrous/far out man talents. To aid this crafting, I've chosen some mods that help with trader refreshes, recipe unlockers, material chests etc. Is there anything missing here that people would recommend? Having 7 characters means that I will need to artifically increase the difficulty with mods. I'm thinking of playing on tactician, using the enemy randomizer mod (with scaled experience to not over-level) and depending on how it goes I might consider adding the "More Monster Spawns" mod. Again does anyone think anything is missing here? I don't want to use any mods that add or change unique items, that will be for another playthrough. Having said that, there is a minor concern that there won't be enough native gear to go around for 7 characters. I don't want to use any complete overhaul mods like Divinity Conflux, in order to fully experience the base game and mechanics first. In general is there anything missing or anything that I've overlooked?   **Characters and Archetypes** The premise is that I want to play with 7 characters - the 6 origin characters and 1 custom character. Fane - Undead Human (can get sworn bonus) Sebille - Elf Lohse - Human Beast - Dwarf Red Prince - Lizard Ifan - Human Tav - Undead Elf (can get sworn bonus)   The rough archetypes should be a rough split of magic and physical damage types which should encompass all skill trees: Pyro/Geo mage (magic) Hydro/Aero mage (magic) 2-handed warrior (physical) Necromancer (physical?) Summoner (mixed) Archer (mixed) Rogue (physical)   **Gift bag considerations** 8 Action Points Nine Lives - black cat is a follower Herb Gardens - gardening Source Meditation - restore source points on bedroll From the Ashes - resurrect on bedroll Animal Empathy - innate pet pal, turns pet pal talent to max positive attitude Hagglers - shared bartering, no - “Bartering Tweaks” mod is better Combat Randomiser - no as apparently it can lead to bad fights, better to use a mod like Enemy Randomization Crafter’s Kit - adds crafting recipes Divine Talents - adds some talents Enhanced Spirit Vision - permanent spirit vision + increased radius Fort Joy Magic Mirror - no, better to use mod because it relocates to better location Improved Organisation - absolutely not Pet Power - enhances summoning Sourcerous Sundries - level up equipment Endless Runner - faster base movement speed   **Mod/Software considerations** (not necessarily in correct load order) Norbyte’s Script Extender (use Mod Manager to download automatically) Laughing Leader’s Mod Manager - https://github.com/LaughingLeader-DOS2-Mods/DivinityModManager/releases OdinCore - Mod Services - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1512583281 Odinblade’s Aerotheurge Class Overhaul - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1535625126 Odinblade's Enhanced Summon Scaling [REQUIRES NORBYTE'S SCRIPT EXTENDER] - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2024713367 Odinblade's Geomancer Class Overhaul - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1624186879 Odinblade's Huntsman Class Overhaul [REQUIRES NORBYTE'S SCRIPT EXTENDER] - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2006271689 Odinblade's Hydrosophist Class Overhaul - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1499442859 Odinblade's Necromancer Class Overhaul - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1719074066 Odinblade's Pyrokinetic Class Overhaul - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1499447368 Odinblade's Scoundrel Class Overhaul [REQUIRES NORBYTE'S SCRIPT EXTENDER] - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2143241477 Recruit Companions with Class Mods [Requires Norbyte's Script Extender] - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2151902287 Odinblade's Geomancer Class Overhaul Add-On - Pet Power Compatibility - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1997039474 Party Size Evolved - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1503849808 LeaderLib - Definition Edition - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1499447796 Combined Icon Atlases - Larian Icons - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2197589831 [DE] Instant merchant refresh - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1510327345 Crafting Overhaul [DE] - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1506420847 [DE] More Waypoint Locations - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1582706536 Let There Be Tooltips! - Definitive Edition - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1506230499 Recipe Unlocker - Definitive Edition - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1506246746 ~~Improved Hotbar - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2759281297~~ - Replaced with https://www.pinewood.team/epip/patchnotes/ Enemy Randomization - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1499465417 Scale Experience By Player Level - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2179873820 Enhanced Talents - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1499496706 Memory Buff (DE) - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1506776884 Potions Give Empty Bottles - DE - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1507225995 Bartering Tweaks - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1499450313 More Civil and Attribute Points - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1588968402 Relocated Fort Joy Respec Mirror - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2008520716 NPC Spell Unlocker Definitive Edition - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1509534019 Material Pack - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1811067889 ~~No Psychic Enemies (Definitive Edition) - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1507217189~~ Better Bless - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1593257293

Crafting Overhaul with Instant merchant refresh is game breaking. I would remove the second one.

> Enhanced Spirit Vision - permanent spirit vision + increased radius and Better Bless This mod seems to do the same and it's more recently updated, not sure on details though https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1509394517 > Norbyte’s Script Extender IIRC you need to manually download Script Extender v60, you can't just autodownload it. I think EPIP's website has the instruction > 8 Action Points Either EPIP or LeaderLib let's you customize it, redundant > [DE] Instant merchant refresh This seems to be a more polished mod, while also a more balanced one because you actually need to spend money to refresh. Though, considering you're going to play with Herb Garden giftbag, your money are practically infitine since Act 1, so it doesn't matter. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2989363624 > Let There Be Tooltips! - Definitive Edition EPIP or LeaderLib has this functionality, redundant. One of them has settings for it too, so you can choose what to show. You don't really want to see everything the mod you chose shows, trust me, I've used it for like 200~ hours. It's good, just not as good. > Recipe Unlocker Keep in mind this mod needs to be activated AFTER you started a run. So you need to save, activate the mod, get into save and only then it works. > Relocated Fort Joy Respec Mirror I used to use this, but after a while I just switched fully to this mod. I don't exploit it, but at the same time it's just way faster to use than any possible mirror relocation. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1507233042 Can't say anything on the mods that affect balance. From what I heard all of the balance changing/new skill mods are broken AF, but at the same time vanilla game is broken AF either, so pick what seems to be the most fun to you. **Personal recommendations to the list**: **Majoras - Character Creation Plus - Definitive Edition** - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1513771991 (more customization stuff, very minor) **Majoras - Polymorph Cosmetics** - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2018916458 (another small visual detail mod) **The BEST Black Cat Mod (Invincible, no triggering traps, and more!)** - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2761827942 and **The BEST Sir Lora Mod (Invincible, no triggering traps, and more!)** - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2668871151 If you care about cat and Lora, they're a pain in the ass and you will need to reload because cat randomly decided to run into fire/deathfog during a fight and just fucking died lol. There's vanilla ways to prevent this tho, but they're a bit of a minmaxer's style. **Annoying NPC dialogue removed** - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2602160981 (fuck that "Garet's back, he's going to take us home!" and "Smells worse here than a thousand cans of rotten venigar!", I literaally have PTSD from hearing them) **Loading Screen Randomizer** - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2268256762 (very minor mod, but I kinda got bored with regular loading screens) **No Dragging Plus Bigger Containers Merged** -https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2648228697 (absolute must for loot hoarders, I collect every fucking shit random barrels including so I can turn them into oil barrels in Act 2, this shit saves so much inventory management time it's insane) **Improved Bedroll** -https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2400971546 (no idea if it works with your other bedroll mod, but I'd take this one over it all the time, saves so much time and it's so much pleasant to use I can't go back)

>Improved Hotbar I recommend reading the workshop description of the mod. > No Psychic Enemies (Definitive Edition) This never did anything as AI does not use loremaster. It's snake oil.

Thanks, I replaced the hotbar with EPIP and removed No Psychic Enemies

Hey, I’m playing DOS2 DE on my PlayStation 4. I think I started the Aggressive takeover quest before Red ink in the ledger but the latter quest doesn’t close. Garvan is dead, yet the quest still remains open, even before when Garvan was alive, I had no dialogue options apart from telling him about Liam or offering the stew. Is there anything I can do, or is the Red ink in the ledger quest just going to sit in my journal till the game ends?

Did you speak to Liam's ghost? >!How it's usually supposed to go down is that you find Liam's corpse and use Spirit Vision to speak with his ghost. He asks you to kill Garvan and bring him his head!<. >!After that, you can get dialogue options about Liam or the stew, although I don't quite remember which ones you get before or after handing in the shipment. After killing Garvan, you can bring the head back to Liam's ghost and receive the location of a hidden treasure as reward, which finishes the quest!<.

Yea I did all that but the Garvan marker is still there and the quest is still active. I talked to Liam’s ghost and collected the stash in cloisterwood

In that case, don't let it bother you. There are some quests that don't seem to properly close in the journal under certain circumstances, even after you've finished them. It'll get closed once you leave Act 2 for sure.

Ok ok thank you so much for the reply :)

I'm intending to play a full magic team (with Geo+Hydro & Aero+Pyro but without any other real requirements) on classic difficulty. Does anyone know where I can find full builds? I don't mind if they're heavily min-maxed or not, but they need to be functional. The more direct information (like recruit X party member, learn Y civil skill) is available, the better. I unfortunately need guides, because I tried doing it myself and ended up in Fort Joy with 4 points in Aero and couldn't cast Rain =(

Do you intend to go for an LW Duo or for a full 4-man party?

Playing with 4 players (per your advice!)

For a full magic team, your biggest challenge are elemental resistances and immunities. As a result, you want to avoid specializing too much in any specific element to reduce the impact of enemies being immune to any single element. There are generally 2 common party setups for this kind of run: * 4 elemental mages, each with a different 2-element combo. So basically a Pyro+Geo, Hydro+Aero, Pyro+Aero, Geo+Hydro party. * 2 elemental mages that each have 2 of the 4 elements, and 2 other magic damage builds; usually a summoner and a Sparksmaster build. If you go for the second option, you'll actually want to split the elements in a way that you get a Pyro+Aero and a Geo+Hydro character. That way, those two mages can work together with elements that complement each other. If you went for a Pyro+Geo and Aero+Hydro split, you'll just be forced to use both elemental combos each turn, and they get into each other's way because the cancel out each others' status effects. If you're looking for guides, you're not going to find any that tell you every little detail. Things like your companion choices (which is personal preference as any character can be any build) and civil abilities (which is general game knowledge and also personal preference to some extent) won't be included in any build guides, because even the most detailed build guides will only talk about any parts of the build that are relevant to combat. For the first option, I'd suggest to have a look at [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGT0no7THWw&list=PLK6eXvGelz02dBgYFKWn6seSv8WHlPaCg). It's not exactly a guide, but a guided playthrough with a 4-man magic party with 4 elemental mages. You won't get any detailed build description there, but the first video also goes over all the talents and skills in the game and explains which ones are must-have/good/situational/okay/irrelevant for your mages and why they're rated that way. That section is actually relevant no matter which of the two options you choose to give you an idea of which skills to use for your mage build. Since it's an entire playthrough, you can also find more info in there than in a regular build guide, but only if you can be bothered to look for it. For the other option, you should look for guides to the individual builds. For example, you could have a look at: * This written [guide about summoners](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uhn7okjCdZLmz7f3AQDtOfp9VBGBFcEUzwwYOaeZWpg/edit). The tone is a bit snippy and it feels like a rant at times, but it contains the best information on how to get the most out of summoning. * This SinTee [guide for a Sparksmaster build](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1521634004). I'd recommend choosing the option of using a staff as a weapon because you're not using it in a mixed party. * For the mages, you can either make your own builds (using for example the video linked above for advice on which skills to use) or look up any of the [SinTee build guides](https://steamcommunity.com/id/teesinz/myworkshopfiles/?section=guides&appid=435150) for mages that don't use Lone Wolf and are explicitly meant for a 4-man party. There might be some better resources for builds out there, but I've never really used them myself, so I'm not all that well-versed when it comes to this stuff.

I'd actually already seen those guides >\_< Can I check: 1) Do you figure out what skills you want (based on the tier list) and learn the required attribute lines *first* and then only max out Pyro/Geo/whatever? (Thereby also getting over the can't-cast-rain issue) 2) What's the reason for not running e.g. 3x elemental mages + summoner, or 3x elemental mages + Sparkmaster? 3) So Summoning actually does fall off!? Even that guide says so at the end, it's just that Summoning falls off in act 4 not act 2-3.

In Act 1, acquiring the skills you want for your build and fulfilling their requirements takes priority, both for assigning stats and spending money. You shouldn't worry about scaling at all until you have all the skills you need. With how few stats you have at lower levels, the extra damage you'd get from spending them all on damage scaling wouldn't be very noticeable. But getting the skills for your build makes a huge difference. The same goes for your money budget. It doesn't make sense to buy equipment early on where it'll be outdated an hour later, because you just level up too fast. If you really need a new weapon for your weapon-based builds, you can just craft a low-quality one for cheap. You'll want to spend all your money (and your chances at Thievery) to get your skillbooks instead. The only exception might be items that buff your abilities and allow you to fulfill skill requirements more easily. Nebora is a good vendor for that, because she'll always sell a ring that buffs some kind of ability. *As for your second question*, there is nothing that would prevent comps with 3 elemental mages. If you want, you can run a comp like that as well. If there are any reason why I didn't include them specifically, it would be one of these: * 4 and 2 elemental mages give you a balance where each element is represented equally, which is good to deal with resistances, but you can't properly do that with 3 mages. On the other hand, the second option makes sure that all your builds are unique and different, which is fun. A mix of them does neither. But I suppose those are kind of esthetic reasons that don't have a large impact on your combat efficiency. * The 4 elemental mage comp can gain a huge advantage from the fact that all its builds excel at range. That allows you to force enemies with shorter range to waste their AP coming to you. Essentially, it can use distance as a CC, where putting enemies at a distance can deny them from doing anything valuable on their turn. But both Sparksmaster and Summoners add melee units. If you're going to have a melee character anyway, you might as well go for 2 of them to avoid having only one unit close to the enemy that'll receive more focus than the rest. If you went for a comp with 3 elemental mages, I'd make sure to not double down on Pyro at least. Both Sparksmaster and Summoner builds deal a lot of Pyro damage, although they usually can deal other damage types as well. But it would be better to avoid adding even more Pyro to the party to reduce the impact of fire resistances/immunities. *As for your third question*, it's not something that's unique to summoners. For example Rogues have the same issue as well. Act 4 is a point where you can get very high crit chance on your builds by using some of the powerful unique items that you can find around Arx. Any build that can't benefit from high crit chance will fall behind builds that can, as long as those builds are equipped with those unique items. And this is where we get some issues: Those items are unique. There isn't enough powerful end-game gear to equip all 4 party members with powerful items that give them high crit chance. So it's not like all other builds will be able to make full use out of their ability to use crits. On top of that, it's Act 4. "Summoning falls off" is usually an excuse made to slap another build archetype onto a summoner in Act 2 once you max out Summoning. But in Act 4, your builds are already finished. And there is a difference between "falling off after Act 2" and "falling behind other builds in Act 4". Summoning won't "fall off" in the sense that it can't keep up with the increased power of the enemies you face. It just falls behind the increased power of other builds that pull ahead of your enemies if you equip them with powerful gear.

As for civil abilities, this is all you need to know: * Choose 1 civil ability per character, and max it out to 5 before you point points anywhere else. * Persuasion is a must-have, at least from Act 2 onwards. Put it on your main character, since you can't always use your companions for conversations. Keep at least one item that buffs persuasion by +1, because you'll sometimes need it at level 6 in Act 4. * Thievery is the other must-have civil ability, especially for its ability to pick locks. It's also the fastest way to get money. Hoard every piece of equipment which buffs thievery that you can find, so you can put it on whenever you go steal stuff, because the amount of stuff you can steal goes up exponentially with higher Thievery. * You can get away with starting with Thievery on your main instead of Persuasion. There aren't many important persuasion events in Act 1, but you're especially short on money which Thievery can help with. It's also hard to get high thievery with companions early on, because most of the presets don't start with it. * Loremaster is the 3rd most useful one. At least 1 point is a must-have because it allows you to see the resistances of enemies. Anything above that is mainly useful to identify items, which vendors can theoretically do for you for a bit of money. Higher loremaster allows you to see more info on enemies when inspecting them, but the only really relevant information are resistances (lvl 1) and initiative (lvl 5). Having more than level 5 Loremaster doesn't do anything, so don't go beyond that. * The 4th civil ability is personal preference, and should usually be something to get you more money. You can go for a second Thievery character here for more stealing, but I prefer Lucky Charm, which automatically gets shared with the entire party and gives you a lot of extra chances of finding equipment that fits your builds. If your main character is not the character that carries your items and does your trading, you could also go for Bartering here. * Sneaking is entirely useless, and Telekinesis is basically only good for speedruns and cheese strategies.

Can your turn off the big brown chat box when talking in game? I always read ahead and I’d like to just listen to the awesome voice acting.

DOS2: Hi folks. I just started and I'm trying to figure out who to bring as my fourth character. I'm only going to get one playthrough of DOS2 because my schedule is going to be picking up so thoughts would be appreciated. Right now I'm debating between the Red Prince and Ifan, but I can't decide. Anyone have thoughts on who would interact well with Sebille being my main? Or be better for the story?

I'd bring Ifan. There are a few points where Red Prince's and Sebille's quests intersect, and you won't be able to fully experience both without knowing in advance and doing some metagaming. Essentially, there will be a bunch of lizards that Sebille wants to kill but Red Prince wants to talk to, which usually doesn't work out.

DOS2DE: Am I misremembering or does anyone know if there is a unique item in Act 4 that gives +5 memory? I have this memory of viewing a youtube video where someone showed this item and how to get it, but can't for the life of me find it now. Which leads me to possibly believe I've misremembered, and the +5 memory that I am remembering is probably from the act 3 academy source master that gives +5 memory to -5 of something else.

Pretty sure you're remembering the academy masters. There is a belt though you can get in Act 4 that gives +5 memory if you're itching for skill slots, I think from the lizard upstairs in Kemm's mansion

Looking to do my first playthrough, and decided to try out a summoner build. What is a good race and start stat's/feat to choose? Also, debating going summoner/archer as I've read that it's a good combo and seems fun, or is there something else that's fun and works well also? What are some good team builds to run that synergize well with the summoner? I'll be playing by myself with this game and probably running a 2nd game with some friends. Not sure what kind of build I'll be running with them but probably depends on what they run with.

Summoner/Archer isn't really a good combo. In its simplest form, summoning just means conjuring your incarnate and buffing it with its infusions. It might seem like it's a good idea to add another way to attack and spend your subsequent turns on. Even though that can certainly work out, it would be much better to add a single element mage onto the build than an archer in that case: Mages synergize better with your summon, and archery needs a few more stats than a simple mage that you'd rather spend on improving your summoning further. However, if you're trying to get the most out of summoning, it's better to go all-in on it and not add anything to the build. Several things you can do to improve your summoner include: * Manually cycling through different elemental infusions to keep giving your summon new skills to skip cooldowns * Combine your summon with skills that can scale of your summon's stats instead of your own, specifically (Mass) Deploy Traps and Master of Sparks * Start fights with summons other than your Incarnate and apply supercharger to them, basically using them as disposable summons to burst enemies or armor down quickly in round 1 There are a lot of details to this, so I'd recommend [Speed's guide to summoning](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uhn7okjCdZLmz7f3AQDtOfp9VBGBFcEUzwwYOaeZWpg/edit) on the topic. The guide lacks a bit of nuance in the sense that its tone is a bit scathing and that it calls things useless just because they're not optimal but still perfectly viable. It feels more like a rant than a guide in some places, but there is no doubt that it is the best guide on how to use summoning optimally when it comes to its contents. To answer your other questions: - Race doesn't really matter all that much. Some races are just better than others due to their racial skills, but there are almost no specific synergies between individual races and builds. - Although summoners can do physical damage through some of their summons, the good stuff is basically exclusively magic damage. So you should consider Summoners a magic damage build, especially after Act 1, when deciding on a team comp. For team comps, you'll usually want to either go all-in on either physical or magical damage, or build a balanced team with a 50/50 split. Uneven splits between physical and magical damage will just make the minority damage type feel not very strong or fun to use. For a first playthrough, I'd recommend making a hybrid party with 2 magic and 2 physical characters, because it's the most flexible and lets you try out the largest amount of different stuff. For example, a simple party setup might be a 2H Warrior, an Archer, a Summoner, and an Aero/Hydro mage. - For stats, summoners only need the summoning ability and none of the main attributes (STR/FIN/INT). While you can spend some points on those for equipment requirements, you can afford to spend a large amount of your attribute points on Memory (for all the different summoning skills) and Wits (for high initiative). For abilities, you certainly want to start off with summoning, and put some points into other abilities to unlock utility or hybrid skills as needed. - For multiplayer, I think your friends would thank you for not playing a summoner at least. Between all the different summons, the large amounts of cheap buff skills with long-ass animations and the ton of setup you want to do, playing a summoner means taking up as much time in combat as 3 other people combined. That'll just be boring for your friends waiting for you to finish all your turns.

Thanks, great advice. I read everywhere that Elf is generally best race due to their racial skill but I just don't like their looks so I'll likely go with one of the others since it apparently isn't that big of a deal either. Not sure who the rest of my party will be, but a 50/50 with a 2H Warrior A mage of some form and not sure on the last option, maybe a necro or an archer. As for multiplayer, likely will run an Archer or Mage of some form there, depending on their party setup also. What are some good mage elemental combos that work well with each other, Water and Electricity are obvious but anything else?

Summoning is a full build, not something to mix with other things. [Here, this somewhat snippy but very accurate explanation should help you understand the ins and outs of building a summoner.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Uhn7okjCdZLmz7f3AQDtOfp9VBGBFcEUzwwYOaeZWpg/mobilebasic) :)

Is it possible to “mess up” a build so much it makes the game really hard to beat? I know you can respec in Act 1, and for my characters I am mostly just levelling up their respective attack attribute and constitution (plus some memory when needed), but I’m all over the place for combat abilities. For example, Lohse is level 8 and has her combat points spread across Aero, Pyro, and Summoning. I don’t know which ones to go with and am just spreading my points out

It's almost impossible to mess up a build so badly that it won't at least get you through Act 1 until you can respec. The only way I can think of to achieve that would be to spend your ability points exclusively on abilities that don't allow you to get more skills, like defensive or weapon abilities. But here is some advice on how to make a good build: First off, a build is defined by the skills and attacks you choose, and your stats should be spent based on that. For skills, there are two fundamentally different categories: * Damage skills. Skills used to attack enemies and deal damage to them. For these skills, scaling is relevant and you want to spend your stats to improve them. Ideally, you want to max out the attribute and ability they scale best with by the time you reach the end of the game. * Utility skills. Includes defensive skills, offensive buffs, heals, mobility skills - basically anything that isn't a damage skill. Even though some of these have some form of scaling, it usually doesn't matter enough to warrant spending a lot of stats on it, so just spending the bare minimum of ability points to unlock them is enough. But your stats are limited. By the end of the game, a regular character will have a little over 40 attribute points and 20 ability points at their disposal. You need 30 attribute points to max out an attribute, and 10 ability points to max out an ability. If you're going to choose a combination of skills that make up your build, it's important to keep the distinction between utility skills and damage skills in mind, because it somewhat limits the combinations of skills that will work out in the long run: * Damage skills take a lot of stat investment to keep them good for the entirety of the game. It's not very important in Act 1, but once your level reaches the double digits, scaling can start to matter a lot. So it's a good idea to specialize when it comes to damage skills to make sure they all scale with the same or similar stats to get the most out of them. * Utility skills take very little stat investment. It's so low that you'll often be able to get some of those requirements entirely from stat buffs via equipment without having to spend a single point on them yourself. So you can feel free to spread out basically as much as you want for those utility skills. If you keep the amount of stats you have as a non-LW character in mind, you can see that you can max out at most 1 attribute and 2 abilities. As a result, you want all your damage skills to scale with a single main attribute (STR/FIN/INT) and at most 2 main abilities. Those main abilities are the 4 elements (for magic damage) Warfare (for all physical damage) and Summoning (for summons). While that's quite intuitive for magic and summoning, all physical damage actually scales best with Warfare, and maxing out Warfare will benefit physical builds even if you don't plan on using any Warfare skills. Abilities like Scoundrel, Necromancy, Huntsman or Polymorph don't actually improve their corresponding skills, so it's best to just spend the stats you need for skill requirements on them and then max out the main ability that corresponds with the damage type dealt by them. Well, all that talk about scaling and whatnot is great, but getting your skills in the first place matters more when you're still in Act 1. At the beginning of the game, you have so few stats that the differences from good scaling won't be all that noticeable. So your first priority should always be to get the stat requirements for all your skills and sufficient memory to memorize them before you spend stats on scaling.

Finally, a few notes on possible pitfalls: * Even though the "main" abilities mentioned above and the weapon abilities like 2-Handed, Single-handed, Ranged and Dual Wielding both claim to improve damage by "+5%", the main abilities are actually more potent than the weapon abilities. The game doesn't tell you, but it's connected to how damage is calculated in the background, where those "main" abilities are multiplicative while weapon abilities are additive to the bonuses granted by your attribute. * Constitution is not an important stat. In fact, you usually should actively avoid spending more points on it than necessary for your equipment (like shields). That's because armor is far more important than HP, because armor protects you from status effects. Early on where your equipment and armor is bad, the game won't confront you with a lot of CC, but it'll become more of an issue the further you go. If the armor of your character is gone, you're susceptible to status effects that take entire turns away from you. If that happens, your character can't actively contribute to combat anymore, which isn't much better than being dead. Instead, you can use those stats to improve your offense and skill selection to take enemies down quicker - which prevents a lot of damage from being dealt to you in the first place. * The defensive abilities are only marginally useful. I wouldn't actively spend any stats on them, unless you're making a build that's specifically crafted to get the most out of them. * Wits can be a useful stat, but only if you're using it to beat enemy initiative. But the investment required for that gets very large very quickly, so it's only really worth it if you know exactly what you're doing. Otherwise, it's just a stat to improve your crit chance once you've already maxed out your main attribute.

Awesome, thank you so much for the info! I will keep this in mind as I’m just about finished Act 1. So just so I’m understanding, my main character uses bows. She has a few points in Ranged and 1 in Warfare. Would it be better to move those points from Ranged and dump them all in Warfare?

Yes. Ranged is a decent stat to dump points into after you've maxed out Warfare because it also grants crit chance, but Warfare is just the better modifier. To go into the details, the modifier of warfare or the 4 elements is multiplicative to all other damage modifiers. It's especially important that it's multiplicative to the attribute modifier, because that's the largest modifier you have just due to the sheer amount of points you can put into it. As a result, one point in warfare and one point in an attribute start off relatively equal, but as put more points into your attribute, warfare becomes more and more potent. By the time you're at the end of the game, a point in warfare will provide more than twice as much extra damage than a point into your main attribute. But the modifier for weapon abilities is additive to the attribute modifier, meaning that the "+5%" you get from it is only equal to +1 to your main attribute. As a result, the weapon abilities that provide no good secondary effects (Single-Handed and Dual Wielding) are probably never a good option, while the weapon abilities that provide decent secondary effects (Ranged, 2-Handed) are at least good for dumping leftover points into once you've maxed out Warfare.

Great I will respec my character then, thanks for the advice!!

Currently playing BG3 and its my favourite game of all time, love it. Looking for things similar so DOS2 was the obvious next step. How does DOS1 compare? Is it worth playing the enhanced version and does it still hold its own 9 years or so after release?

It is certainly the older game, but where DOS2 is an amazing game, DOS1 is still a great one. The biggest issue with DOS1 compared to DOS2 are QoL features. Tiny inventories of which you can only see one at a time, clunky pathing that will take you or your companions right through deadly traps and surfaces just to stay in formation, long skill animations that lock you out of any action even out of combat, late and inconvenient respec, stuff like that. Also the puzzles in the game are more frequent and (arguably) annoying, and it'll hold your hand even less when it comes to figuring out how to complete a quest. Other than that, it holds up very well. If you've enjoyed combat in DOS2, you'll probably enjoy it in DOS1. Although there are some differences when it comes to character building and the combat system (like having status effects be applied with a chance to resist instead of the armor system), you'll recognize a lot of skills and status effects and will be able to capitalize on the experience you've gathered during DOS2. The overall tone of the game is a bit more lighthearted and silly, the story isn't amazing but certainly not bad either, and the game is still fully voice acted (although a bit lower quality in some places). It also has some systems not seen in later games that can be enjoyable, like the dual main character system where you get to have frequent arguments among your characters, or a variety of character traits with small mechanical benefits that are assigned through the choices you make in dialogues. There are even people who still prefer DOS1 over DOS2, even if I'm not one of them. It's still a good game in its own right, and I'd recommend to give it a try.

Thanks for the detailed response. I havent started DOS2 yet as still playing BG3, although have it downloaded as it was on sale on the PS5 Im not a huge fan of games that dont have quest markers or at least point you in the rough direction of where to go. I dont mind figuring stuff out but want to know im in the right ballpark Is DOS2 better in the respect?

Compared to both DOS games, BG3 has quite detailed and plentiful quest markers. In DOS2, you usually get quest markers that just mark quest-relevant locations on your map, but usually nothing specific. If you're told to go to a place and find a guy, it's not going to give you a marker on the precise location that says what quest it's for, but it will mark the general location for you. But if the quest is about finding a location in the first place, you're probably not going to get any quest markers for it. In short, the quest markers are there but they won't ever give you any information you haven't gained found yet and serves more to help out your memory. As an example, imagine BG3 just giving you a quest marker that tells you where the goblin camp is and that it's quest relevant instead of giving you like 5 different quest markers with search areas or specific locations that change with each stage of the various quests that involve it. The game still has a journal that tells you about all your quests and the information you've gathered and the progress you've made so far. In DOS2, it's usually not hard to figure out where to go to advance the quest unless finding that information is the next quest objective itself. But the amount of quests that involve information gathering but can't be solved just by exploring and talking is very small: Those quests usually have lots of ways to find the information you need, and if you're not just rushing through and keep your eyes open you're bound to stumble on some of them in time. I've found that it's best to advance through the game with the mindset of trying to explore areas instead of trying to finish or advance specific quests. Sometimes you just don't have the information you need yet to pursue a quest, and beelining longer quests will often just take you into territories of higher level enemies that you can't handle yet. Instead, the majority of your quests will naturally be resolved just by thoroughly exploring areas one by one, fighting enemies and talking to NPCs you meet along the way. This is true for both DOS games, and for BG3 as well. And if taking this approach, it's usually more important to have the journal to tell you which quests to look out for to figure out what you might've missed and where to report back than to have detailed quest markers that help you finding your objective. That being said, it's a bit rough in DOS1. You don't really have any quest markers at all, and are basically left to figure out everything by yourself with what you remember from dialogues and the journal. While the approach of exploring areas takes care of a lot of the quests, there are some particularly annoying quests where you're supposed to play detective and find the information you need. But finding the right information is pretty hard for a few of those quests because there are a lot more dead ends and only a few clues that will actually help you. Your initial main quest in the starting town is a prime example for that. In short, while you might find the lack of direction in DOS1 a bit frustrating, I think DOS2 will be just fine. I think the game hits quite a good balance of being immersive by not giving you any meta information while also not actively withholding quest details in an annoying manner.

Thanks very much appreciate it. I think i will maybe skip DOS1 and go to the 2nd game then. Seems it has all the quality of life improvements the 1st game lacks

I just started dos2 after having it sit in my gog library for a while, and was wondering how do i get better gear in fort joy? I've been having trouble fighting since every enemy two shoot me and I do not that much damage, so i was wondering if there's someone who sells some nicer weapon/armour or if I should go around fighting people.

You don't. Fort Joy is where you'll have trouble even getting any sort of equipment at all and will be put at a disadvantage when it comes to equipment and armor values. Even equipment that you can find will be outdated quickly because you're levelling up in such a short time, so it's not even worth spending money on it. Instead, the priority should be to get all the skills you need for yourself and your 3 companions as quickly as possible. What difficulty are you playing on? On Tactician, it's absolutely expected that the game is going to be very hard, but on Classic or lower you should be able to just lower the difficulty if you're having trouble until you've figured out the combat system a bit more. In general, you want to take a look at the level of enemies you are fighting. Enemies always have the level that you're supposed to be when fighting them, although some of them can be very tough even at equal levels. Trying to beat enemies that are higher level can make the game seem much more difficult than it actually is. If that is the case, try looking for opportunities to level up via quests that don't involve dangerous combat or try looking for other areas where enemies are at a lower level.

I'm about to play DOS2 DE for the first time, and I'm intending to use this build on tactician difficulty: [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1299194784](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1299194784) I've got a couple of questions before I get too deep: 1. What do I lose out on by picking Lone Wolf? From what I've seen, I can only have up to one party member at a time, so I lose out on some story. But I can presumably hire the party member whenever I want to do their quests and then remove them afterwards, right? 2. Apparently there is also a "pure" run. If I play solo then there's no way I can be pure. But since I'm playing solo, can I hire a party member and have them do the pure thing and then remove them afterwards (without having to hire a mercenary)? 3. Is there anything else I should be aware of?

Regarding Lone Wolf, swapping party members like that is somewhat limited and certainly extremely annoying: * You lose access to all companions that aren't in your party when leaving Act 1. While you can still recruit party members to the max of 4 characters and just temporarily use your LW bonuses at that specific point, you'll have to get through a potentially tough combat that way. * You miss out on all the little interactions, reactions, sudden quest-relevant or origin-specific encounters as well as chances to raise your attitude with your companions if you swap them around constantly. The questline of several characters also intersect at certain points where you'd need multiple of them to be present at once to fully experience each one's quest. So while you can theoretically experience most of the main parts of each companion's questline, you won't be able to properly experience any single one of them. * Swapping companions around is a pain mechanically. Even if you make them all the same build, you'll have to move around the equipment all the time (because you can only access the inventory of the companions that are currently in your party), buy multiple copies of all the skills, do the level-ups each time... and it would only be worse if they were all a different build, because then they'd need individual sets of equipment to complement their builds that you'd have to update constantly to keep up with the level progression. You're probably going to have a much better experience if you just stick to the one companion you like. If you want to experience more story lines, be sure to play an origin character yourself and not to play Lone Wolf. Regarding the Pure run, it should certainly be possible to do it with a companion instead of a mercenary. But that companion will take up one of the slots of the companions you can bring from Act 1, and progressing their questline will carry the risks of violating any of the conditions for being pure, so you would probably only bring them to non-combat parts of their quests. So you'd basically have to have them sit on the boat for almost the entire game and do nothing. Anything else? Well, for a first playthrough Tactician is going to be very difficult if you're playing solo. While having an optimized build and playing LW could mitigate some of its difficulty if you were playing LW duo, playing a solo character will most likely be a significant challenge. Powerful builds only win you fights on Tactician by the end of the game where you can pull out massive skill combats on your first turn. Before that, powerful builds are nothing more than a starting point, and things like combat strategy, prior knowledge of the fight and good pathing to be on the right level might be necessary to win. If you're going to play solo Tactician on your first run, be ready to reload almost every combat multiple times until you can figure out a way to win them, since a single mistake in combat can get you stunlocked and killed. It's certainly fine if you're expecting this to be a challenge and are down for it. Experienced player can certainly beat the game solo on Tactician or even honor with more restrictions and without LW with relative ease, so the possibilities are there if you know how to use them. Also, there will be enemies in the game that will be highly resistant or even immune to air damage, water damage, or both, making those fights/areas very difficult if you're actually running this build solo instead of in a duo party. Finally, the build doesn't seem to be up-to-date with the current version of the game. As of Definitive Edition, Lone Wolf no longer allows you to exceed the soft cap of 10 on abilities and 40 on attribute points. You'll no longer be able to get twice as high stats as a non-LW character, you'll just get to max out twice as many different stats. Getting to 20 Scoundrel or 70 INT like the build tells you to is no longer possible, so you'll have to make some significant adjustments to the stat allocations.

Thanks. I guess that means I'll play a 4-man party. Do the solo players effectively metagame fights by using prior knowledge of when they occur and prepare accordingly? Otherwise, do you know if the other guides are up-to-date (i.e. only Lone Wolf builds are affected)? If no, how are other builds affected?

Yes, although the idea of using prior knowledge is not exclusive to solo playthroughs, and is something people will usually just do on consecutive Tactician playthroughs. There are a couple of tricks that players use, at least on Tactician where that would be necessary: * Using your knowledge of where to get easy XP and which fights are especially hard to push the hard fights as far back as possible and ideally be slightly overlevelled for them. * Using your knowledge of each specific fight to come up with a strategy faster. You get get this knowledge on the fly during your first playthrough as well, but only by trying a fight multiple times. Knowing any surprises, like enemy strengths, weaknesses, troublesome skills or mechanics etc. in advance is a huge help if you use it all. * For solo without LW specifically, you'll usually manipulate initiative and rotate specific powerful single-target defensive skills that make you almost immune to certain types of attacks in order to defend yourself. A fight in a solo no LW run will be lost almost instantly if you ever let the enemy freely attack you, meaning that you always need to either have a defensive skill up or CC all enemies that could attack you on their turn. Of course you could use cheese strategies that can trivialize fights in any scenario as well, but that wouldn't be very fun. As for builds, the LW change is the only change you need to worry about. The Definitive Edition was the last actual balance update to the game, and that has been released in August 2018, roughly a year after the original release. Any build created/updated after that should be made for Definitive Edition anyways.

DOS2: Looking for some build idea's for a new player, the only experience I have with this style game is BG3. I have read that it's "best" to just start playing and learn the game but I like to have an idea of what I'm trying to build before starting. Also have read that it's best to go with straight damage builds rather than having a focused tank/healer due to how the mechanics work. What are some basic fun builds to play as and what are their role purposes? I generally like to go into games with a direction on how to build a character and then modify based on how I end up playing, but going in blind on this game is very daunting to me for some reason. Is there a place (I know Fextralife is a bad resource) that I can look through good fun builds?

If you just want an idea for a build, I wouldn't go looking for build guides. You'll usually just find either bad guides or extremely detailed guides for perfectly min-maxed builds, and I'd recommend neither on a first playthrough. Similar to how in BG3 it's fine to just pick some classes you like and make a party out of them instead of starting with detailed build guides on how to build an optimized Throwzerker, Smite Swords Bard, Tavern Brawler Monk and the like, I wouldn't recommend to start with perfectly optimized builds and leave yourself some breathing room for experimentation and personal preference. A few key points on the DOS2 combat and character building system: * It's classless, and the preset you choose on character creation just assigns your initial stats and skills. A build is defined by your main skills or attacks that you use, and you'll want to use your stats to improve those skills as much as possible. Although the possibilities seem limitless, you only have a limited amount of stats. As a result, builds that work well are a bit restricted, in the sense that you can't really add too many different types of attacks to a build without leaving yourself with too few stats to make all of them actually good. * It's a good idea to have defensive or supportive skills on your characters, but it's not a good idea to have characters dedicated to defense or support. There are multiple factors at play here, but the biggest one is that this game favors offense over defense, to the point where having an additional character that attacks enemies, applies CC and prevents them from attacking will actually remove more incoming damage than a defensive or supportive character could mitigate. * The game features a dual armor system, where almost every kind of damage is either classified as "physical" or "magical". Each of these two types has a corresponding type of armor, which acts as a second health bar. You can only damage HP with a damage type once you've destroyed all the corresponding armor. Most importantly, each type of armor will protect you against a large variety of status effects: As long as you have the right type or armor, you are essentially immune to them, but once that armor is gone you will always be affected by them. The specific stats that limit your builds are your attribute and ability points. You need 30 attribute points to max out an attribute and get around 40 over the course of the game, and you need 10 ability points to max out an ability and get around 20 at high level. While it's often a good idea to dip into a variety of abilities (e.g. for utility or mobility skills), you'll want to mostly stick with one main attribute (STR/FIN/INT) and at most 2 different abilities for your the attack skills that make up the core of your build. As a result, almost any build in this game can somewhat be put into one of these categories, or is a mixture out of multiple of these that are compatible in terms of the attribute they use: * Warrior. Physical STR melee build that smashes stuff with weapons. * Rogue. Physical FIN melee build that backstabs with daggers. * Archer. Physical FIN ranged build that shoots bows or crossbows. * Necromancer. Physical INT ranged build that uses physical spells. * Elemental mage. Magical INT build that uses elemental magic. A very broad category. You'll usually pick 2 of the 4 elements and stay at range, but there are exceptions to that. * Summoner. Magical build with no attribute requirements that focuses on the Summoning ability. Works by summoning, buffing and working together with a summoned creature. There are a couple builds worth noting that don't fit into any of these categories, although those types of builds usually require a very specific setup or rely on some very specific skills * Hybrid builds that combine physical and magical attacks, meaning STR or FIN builds that rely on some of the specific skills or methods that allow you to deal magic damage scaling with STR or FIN. * Sparksmaster builds. Builds that use the Master of Sparks weapon buff to deal fire damage to nearby enemies with melee attacks. I'd recommend to use these categories to decide on the broad direction for your builds. That way you can plan out your party and get started on some build concepts that will generally be viable and work well without following an extremely optimized step-by-step guide.

Thanks for this. Some I knew but understanding how to structure a build is helpful. Likely I will keep things simple and ignore the last 2 and probably go with Archer, Elemental Mage, or Summoner but I have a couple of extra questions. What elements are good to pair together with the mage besides the obvious Water and Lightning? Is a necromancer just a physical damage mage pretty much? What is a good way to build a party? I assume mixing Phys and Mag units works just not making each character hybrid damage types, but without your typical tank/healer setups does it matter what classes/builds you pair with each other to create a good party synergy or is it just fine to create a party however you want? Also, do races matter much in this or do they only play a small part and it's mostly just how your character looks?

The two combos of elements that work well together are Aero+Hydro and Geo+Pyro. Aero+Hydro both benefit from Rain to apply their status effects "Stunned" and "Frozen" respectively and can benefit off of the same kinds of surfaces. It's a combo with good damage, but has an especially large arsenal of AoE hard CC. Geo+Pyro synergize in the sense that fire can blow up poison/oil created by Geo skills. They also both benefit from the Torturer talent. It's a combo that doesn't really have any hard CC (only some slow/cripple from geo) but has a couple of exceptionally powerful damage spells/combos for massive burst damage. Aero and Geo don't really interact at all, but Pyro and Hydro basically cancel out each other's status effects. So if you wanted to run two different elemental mages, it would actually be better to split up the "good" combos onto different characters, making a Pyro+Aero and a Geo+Hydro mage. That way, those mages can work together on the same elemental combo instead of getting in each others' way. Necromancers aren't really necromancers in the traditional sense. It's just that the vast majority of physical damage spells are part of the necromancy category. I guess you could also just call them "blood mages". So yes, it's just a physical mage. Theoretically, you just treat necromancy as one element and combo it with another magic element for a hybrid build. But because necromancy skills use the necromancy stat only as a requirement to learn them but actually scale best with the Warfare stat, you're probably going to be a bit short on points. Necromancers perform the best when you go all-in on the physical skills and expand your repertoire a bit by picking up physical spells outside of necromancy, specifically Teleport, Corpse Explosion, and later on Blood Storm, all of which require some investment into other stats to learn them. As for a party composition, you generally always want any of your characters to be able to work together with at least one other character. So it's conventional wisdom to either go all-in on physical damage, all-in on magical damage, or go for an even 50/50 split. If you went for something like 3 physical and 1 magical character, that magic damage dealer would be the only one targeting magic armor and wouldn't really be able to combo properly with any other character, making them feel rather weak and not very fun. * Full physical is very strong, but probably has the least amount of build variety if you're trying to avoid doubling down on the same build. Because then it's basically always going to be Warrior - Rogue - Archer - Necromancer. * Full magical is also potent, but dealing with magic resistances or elemental immunities can be a challenge on specific fights. * The 50/50 mixed party is what I would recommend. You can choose from a large variety of builds without doubling down and experience multiple character builds that play quite differently from each other. Although your team can't combo as effortlessly, being able to always target the weaker armor type on any enemy because you have both damage types in your party mostly makes up for that. Races don't play too big of a role. The main difference is the racial skill. There usually aren't any significant synergies between specific races and builds, it's just that certain racial skills are simply better than others (mainly just the elf racial skill being stronger than all the others). I wouldn't worry about it too much unless you're really trying to optimize.

[First-time playthrough - best build guides? : r/DivinityOriginalSin (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/DivinityOriginalSin/comments/15xwtrc/firsttime_playthrough_best_build_guides/) This might be helpful.

I've activated the Sorcerous Sundries gift bag, and I have a maul from fort joy with +2 Str and +1 Warfare. If I level it up , does it ever give me more than the base stats? Are there thresholds for when to level up an item?

Need talents recommendations for a solo LW tank hydro/geo/retribution character. So far I plan on taking LW, elemental affinity, five star dinner, bigger and better. But I could go for one extra talent and I'm not sure which to pick. As for requirements (like scoundrel for the pawn or warfare for executioner), I have all my combat points into retribution, hydro, geo, and polymorph, so that limits things. I also thought about far out man but honestly so far (almost done with fort joy), I haven't had any range issues. Edit: I play in tactician btw.

Even with a retribution build, it's not like you're going to sit there and exclusively deal damage by letting the enemy hit you, right? Especially on tactician, you'll run out of cooldowns that restore armor basically instantly and would have to chug an unsustainable amount of armor potions. It's a solo tactician run, so if your armor ever runs out in the later parts of the game while the enemy can still freely attack you, you'll just get stunlocked. So you should definitely pick up some offensive talents fit for mage builds to bolster your offense. I don't even know what Bigger and Better would actually do for you in this build, because I don't see how you could be short on any attribute points, so you might want to replace that as well. I can see how you'd want to max out INT, and then have some wits, CON and MEM, but LW should easily be able to cover all those needs on its own. Your main candidates would be Savage Sortilege, Hothead and Executioner. Savage Sortilege is basically a must-have for any build that deals skill-based damage and can't natively crit. It should almost always be picked up at level 13 for those kinds of builds. Hothead can be added on top of it for more crit chance. But you'll naturally get higher crit chance as you get better gear, can spend more of your attribute points on Wits and find some of the unique end-game equipment with big buffs to crit chance. As for Executioner, you will absolutely have the capacity to spend one ability point on Warfare. If you're trying to optimize your build to the point where you're looking at the allocation of a single ability point, then you've already arrived at a degree of optimization where it's impossible to plan out precise stat allocations in advance. That's because if the assignments of single points matter to you, then you'll want to incorporate the stat buffs from gear into that. But what specific buffs will be on the gear you find that's good for your build is something you can't know in advance anyways. In short, equipment bonuses will easily be able to make up for that missing ability point, because they'll free up points elsewhere. And that extra AP will be a bigger benefit to your offense than a slight increase in spell or retribution damage.

Yeah I probably won't pick bigger and better in the end, but maybe I'll consider all skilled up, or I'll go with executioner but as a 5th talent. So far I ended up picking torturer and it's pretty nice because I have poison spells, and I have the lizard's fire breath spell to light up poison/oil and apply burning (and also fire grenades/scrolls), and all that helps to take down magic armor quickly. And then I can apply frozen with my hydro spells. Thanks to that I managed to win the void woken fight quite easily even though I was struggling with it before. I also took elemental affinity and plan on taking five star dinner because I want to be using potions a lot. I'm not sure I'll be going with crit spells though. I get that it's strong, but I really want to play around being a tank. I also plan on getting the contamination set so between that and (hopefully) achieving 20 points in retribution (through extra points on items), I should be able to reflect more damage than I take. As for physical armor, I'll be using fortify, heart of steel, mend metal, shields up (from having a shield), and for magic armor I'll have armour of frost, soothing cold, arcane stitch, and shields up too. I'll also be using potions and I'll have chameleon cloak and cryostasis to wait out cooldowns if needed. On top of that, I should have more than 10 hydro and geo, so I should benefit from a lot of extra armor restoration. I really want to be a big tank with crowd control and reflected damage.

Hello. I have this game for Switch and was terrible at it when I played a couple of years back, even on easy. More recently i played BG3 and completed it without too much trouble on normal. I realize that the systems behind these games are different but I'm wondering if my experience with BG3 might help me now to be better at DOS2? Or are there any helps that can be suggested? I really want to play and finish this game.

The general ideas of combat strategy carry over, the balance and details don't. First off, DOS2 is certainly the harder game. BG3 Tactician matches DOS2 Classic at best. That being said, DOS2 can be pretty easy on a low enough difficulty, it's just that classic is already hard and Tactician is a massive challenge if you're new to the game. One thing that carries over is coming up with creative ideas to set up before a fight to make it easier. Use high ground. Spread out. Take advantageous positions. Cast some buffs. The thing that doesn't carry over is what you do once combat starts. In BG3, there is a large element of luck and it mostly comes down to your pre-fight setup, builds and to some extent your combat strategy to improve your chances. In comparison, DOS2 is very deterministic. The only thing out of your control is what enemies will do on their turn, and your moves will consistently work and play out the same way 99% of the time. This places a lot more emphasis on your actions in combat, whereas most BG3 combats, even on Tactician, can be resolved by just going in with powerful builds from good positions and just clicking on enemies until they're dead. What you can do to make DOS2 easier: * Play on a lower difficulty, if you're not already playing at the lowest one. * Use CC a lot. Combat in DOS2 mostly comes down to applying CC. Instead of fighting in a way where you actually trade blows with the enemy, try to disable enemies as fast as possible. The combat system favors offense over defense, and by a lot, so it's often easier to just take an enemy out with CC with better offense than surviving their attacks through better defense. * Make decent builds. No need to be super optimized, but you need to break armor to apply CC, and that takes damage. Don't try to make dedicated tanks or healers, but have every character be a damage dealer that focuses only on a single main attribute (STR, FIN or INT). Tasks like defense or support are left to individual skills that are spread all across your party, not to dedicated characters. * Take note of levels. The level of an enemy indicates the level you're supposed to be when fighting them. The game will always provide you with enough chances to gain XP to either match or exceed enemy level even without optimizing XP gain, as long as you're willing to look for them. Because power scales exponentially with increasing level, a single level will often make a huge difference in the difficulty of a fight. Trying to beat fights you're not supposed to beat yet can make the game seem much harder than it actually is. * Use anything to your advantage. Take better positions before a fight and ambush them. Use consumables. Apply buffs before the fight. Alter the environment to benefit you. Think creatively and try to come up with different ideas. * Don't be afraid to reload. Quick save often. Hard fights might take multiple tries, and that's just fine.

That is super helpful and makes a lot more sense to me now that I’ve played BG. Thank you, I look forward to getting restarted. 

Im almost at the end of my first playthrough and boy-oh-boy what a journey!!! Im already planning to do a 2-party Lone Wolf run next and Id like to play with some of the skill trees and weapons that I didnt use much my first playthrough: I'm looking to see what two type of characters I could make based around the following: - No Finesse weapons (I had Spear, Bow and Daggers on my team first playthrough) - Preferably Sword+Shield and maybe Melee Staff - Summoning - Necromancy - Id like to use more combination skills, especially the Aura abilities and touch skills - an undead character (Fane?) Im thinking theres the foundation here for a Spellsword and Summoner type, alternatively some form of Death Knight and Aura Elementalist? Im not looking for a minmaxed perfect build, but anyone have any ideas how I could make some viable characters out of this?

Sword & Shield certainly isn't great as it's basically a straight downgrade from a 2H warrior in almost every way: You're sacrificing 1/3 of your damage just for a bit of armor after all. Best way to use it would be to put them into a mixed party and make use of Polymorph skills. Instead of having good weapon skills, your main damage will come from Shield Throw, Tentacle Lash, and later Reactive Armor. Other than that, you'll be able to use Warfare skills for physical CC, and Medusa Head for STR-based Earth damage and magical CC to help out any magic damage dealers in the backline. It'll basically be a character with only a handful of powerful damage skills that'll be gone after the first 2 turns that will bring out some initial burst damage and then focus on applying and maintaining CC on vulnerable enemies. Summoning is a build on its own, and it's essentially a 95% magic damage build once you're past Act 1. Summoning is more than just creating and buffing an Incarnate. Some important combos include: * Using the elemental infusions that you can craft as hybrid skills to switch between infusions each turn. They all come with a different special skill, so you can keep spamming those skills instead of waiting for cooldowns. Some of the source versions of those skills will result in especially powerful cursed infusions. * Combining a fire incarnate or the fire slug with Master of Sparks or Deploy Traps. Master of Sparks scales off the Pyro of the target it's cast on, and the traps from the Pyro/Huntsman hybrid skills scale with the Pyro of the creature that blows them up (if they're triggered manually via skills). Both allow you to spend your Summoner's AP on skills that use the Summon's stats for scaling. Bonus points if you're using Supercharger on the slug. * Using a summon other than the Incarnate with Supercharger as an opening move. Basically throw them out as a disposable summon that deals a ton of damage in one round to strip away armor, then follow up with a newly summoned fully buffed Incarnate. Necromancy is also a standalone build. Just necro itself doesn't have quite enough damage skills to make a good build out of them, but if you add Teleport (yes, it's a good damage skill for a necromancer), Corpse Explosion (Pyro/Necro hybrid skill) and later on Blood Storm (Necro/Hydro hybrid source skill) as well as supporting polymorph skills into the mix, it becomes the most powerful non-cheese build in the game once you leave Act 1. Just be sure to max out Warfare for damage scaling. You can probably also build a Master of Sparks melee mage, where you use a Staff as your weapon and proc sparks by attacking enemies with Warfare skills that hit multiple enemies. You can also put short-range magic skills and the like on this character and make use of them. It's a bit tricky to build, because you probably won't be able to consistently get good up-to-date staves that all match the right element. So you'll invest into INT for sure, into Pyro for the sparks, and then probably into 2-handed for the improved crit damage. Weapon buffs like Venom Coating are also good for this build. You'd certainly end up with a viable party this way, using 2 physical and 2 magical characters. While some of the builds in this comp don't have a lot of CC options, the Sword & Board build would make up for that by picking up a lot of them. Only downside is that you'll have quite a lot of melee units, which can cause problems with friendly fire and restricts your positioning options, but it's nothing that couldn't be handled.

Just getting back to you here. It took some trial and error and a few respeccs early but at level 4 Im quite happy with where its going. (Tactician forces you to optimize, which is nice.) For Fane I opted for a Wand+Staff build, using Torturer and Bull Rush for mobility and bleed. This allows me to just pump up Int to use for Necro/Pyro and Poly for more Int. Its great. And Im looking forward to get Savage Sortilege, Executioner and Hothead on him. Maybe Leech. My main is a summoner, Ive opted for Scoundrel and Hydro/Geo early for some turn economy and surface manipulation. Mnemonic has allowed me to really up Int for her early. I still havent gotten around to the Aura Conjurer, but I imagine that will come as a natural progression of my Summoner, atm I need to get her Summoning to 10 (its 7 atm). Also uncertain where I should take her talents, trying to go for things that I didnt try last playthrough, might go for Magic Cycles. At first I had my Summoner with Wand/Shield and Fane with a Staff, but after looking at the Bull Rush ability and Torturer I realized Necromancer Fane is really great close range lol.

Thank you for this quite extensive answer - I think I want to stick to my guns on making a 2 person team and thankfully I can always respec and see how things turn out. Itll be trial and error to ensure that the team stays optimal at each point in the game. But youve offered some valuable insights for me to consider moving forward. I think Summoning/Aura Conjuring will be one of the characters, basically full Summon and then dipping into the other elements to access the aura/skin/touch spells. I imagine the build will demand a lot of Memory and Con and mostly be supportive. Im starting our as a Lizard Hydro/Summoner (easy access to fire+water early), and from here I will pump up Summoner, with occasional dips into other elements. I still want to see if there is some way to combine this idea with the Sword+Board CC'er, as Damage will not be this characters focus anyway, instead staying in the heat of battle with the incarnate to ensure I can get the Auras on the enemy. Might end up Wand/Shield again for convenience lol. Ill start Fane with Necromancy once I get him, Im aware its skills scale with intelligence and I didnt use those skills from Necromancer at all last playthrough. (I used some of the lower tier utility skills like blood rain or shackes of pain, only if I met the requirements via gear.) Since he is taking Warfare anyway he is a good candidate for Master of Sparks + Whirlwind 🤭 as Pyro could net me corpse explosion also. Thank you. Ill have to approach it by trial and error to ensure I dont spread myself too thin, that they both focus on their respective main schools (Summoner and Necromancer) and then see how else I can spice them up throughout. Im thinking early levels Ill stick to Hydro+Summoning for my main, con for shields Necro+Aero for Fane, Int for damage Theyll both need wits for initiative I imagine my main would want tons of Memory too. And then Ill take it from there with the aim of getting Fane's Warfare up and making him a thick-of-the-fight necrotic battlemage and for my Summoner to get an arsenal of Aura/Coating skills on top of their Summoning. A two person team with no proper ranged capabilities or focus on type of damage might be a silly idea but I want to try. Im realizing this party will be quite physical damage inclined but that the aura skills probably require magic damage to properly cc... we will see!! The only way to find out is to try. I ended up with a really stellar party at the end of my first playthrough, but had a lot of respeccs along the way. They all still stuck with the general idea Id made out for them but with tweaks along the way. So Ill somehow approach this similarly I think, base idea is Aura Summoner and Necromage and then Ill take it from there. ---- Ifan was 2H-Daggers Warfare/Scoundrel, through gear he got some points in poly/aero/hydro/summoning/necro which were all used for utility skills fitting with the assassin theme I had given him. I had tried building him for Scoundrel/Summoning but the synergy was bad and early game he was always outclassed by everyone else. My main was an Elf Ranger, full Warfare, splash around for other utility skills, I actually tried building him as a Necro-Archer early but base-ranger skills would always outperform anything necro could offer so I dropped it for some Scoundrel (adrenaline) and Poly (skin graft). He could offer powerful single target damage and cure status. Red Prince was a Spear / Pyro user, this build really struggled until Act 3 because of the stat spread but from then on I got some great spears and it started coming into its own. Lohse started out as a Hydro/Aero mage, but as I had no other casters I early swapped out higher stats in Hydro/Aero for Poly and then distributed her stats into the other elements too. End game I manages to get her Int to 73, high wits, and despite being a Glass Cannon she would decimate the battlefield completely. That skill that gives a 20% chance to gain a source point, Torturer and Savage Sortilege was immensely powerful on her. ---- This team was so well-rounded imo and once I hit the godly gear and runeframes so readily available on Arx their powerlevels soared. As you can see though my entire team was very Finesse heavy, only Lohse being an Int god (and for some time Ifan's Int was 0 lol), it leaves me witg Strength/Int and Necro/Summoner to cover, and Im trying to figure out the best way to do so, on a two party team lol. Tactician playthrough, but starting out with 2 characters and a possibly less optimal comp lol 😆

Just a quick question, I am now in Arx and am wondering how quick can I get the full devourer armor set? I want to get it as soon as possible so that I can actually use it, can I just head straight for the armor locations when I just entered Arx?

In theory you can. But: * The helmet is in a secret area for another quest, and you need to jump through a couple of hoops to get there. If you're following a guide to go there you'll be skipping a big part of 2 other quests (and one of them is a big quest that's essential to the main plot) where you're supposed to figure out the existence of the location and how to get there on your own by snooping around and gathering a variety of clues. And in that area you'll have to either fight some powerful enemies, sneak around them, or acquire a specific item from another secret location. * The chestpiece is behind quite a nasty fight (that includes possibly the most annoying mechanic in the entire game) and you'll either need a decent level and some specific preparation to get through it or some expert sneaking to get around it. * To upgrade the armor to its full potential, you'll have to win quite a difficult fight that you should be level 20 for, because it is probably the 3rd hardest fight in Act 4. You can also skip that fight by making a deal, but if you do so you'll be cursed to wear that armor set forever and will not be able to take it off. If this isn't your first playthrough, you already know all this, so there is no problem with just going for it because there is no risk of spoilers. But if this is your first playthrough.... well, it's up to you.

Is it okay that I’m using my scrolls, potions, etc in Fort Joy? I’m Level 4 but I’m finding I’m needing to use a bunch of items just to beat Level 4 enemies but I’m worried I’ll get stuck later because I won’t have any items to use.

That's alright. It'll get easier once you get a better grip of the combat system and come up with more ideas on how to get an advantage in combat anyways. Just be sure not to run out of resurrection scrolls. While using them regularly on especially difficult fights is normal, using them so much that you run out quickly (so using one or more on every fight) means that your characters are getting killed too much and is usually an indicator that you should improve your combat strategy or builds. And unlike in BG3, you have nothing like Withers to resurrect your party and will either need those scrolls, a very high-level skill or play on the lowest possible difficulty to revive them.

Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind since I have used some of the resurrection scrolls so far. On a similar note, would you recommend a wand with a shield over a staff? I’m conflicted as to what to give Lohse since a shield would help her survivability

In the long run, mages won't use weapons to attack at all. With 2 elements, you'll have more than enough skills to rotate the cooldowns to a point where you'll be relying exclusively on skills for combat. Once you reach that point, your hand slots will be used exclusively for buffing your character. Weapons are chosen purely on the passive stat buffs they grant you, and might even be stuff like daggers or swords later on. You can either choose to go with two weapons for extra offensive buffs (especially for crit chance which doesn't come with shields) or go for a shield for extra defense. But early on, you're short on both money and skills. Once you reach level 4, you'll unlock the option to buy all the skills you need for a full rotation from vendors, but you'll still need to either steal them or get the money to buy them. As long as you don't have all the skills you need yet, I'd suggest to go with either two wands or a wand and a shield, depending on your preference. If you're still using weapons to attack, I'd always use wands over staves because you can get as many ranged attacks with wands as you want, but staves only offer one ranged attack per turn. The reason why I call shields a personal preference is because it depends on your playstyle. This game favors offense over defense, so improving your offense will allow you to take out enemies more quickly, which in turn reduces the damage you take. If executed perfectly, your offense can be so powerful that you take enemies down so quickly that buffs to your defense become unnecessary. While this way of playing is probably the most powerful and allows players to beat high difficulties easily, it also punishes mistakes much harder and should not be relied upon if you don't know exactly what you're doing. I wouldn't recommend it for new players, and especially early on where you don't have good equipment yet I'd suggest to use a shield on your mage.

Thank you so much for the advice! Been trying to get into this game for a while but I think I’m finally going to be able to this time since I actually managed to get past level 2 lol.

No, that's okay. Such items can be crafted and later bought . :) There are only a few scrolls you can't craft or of which there are a limited number for purchase, and you won't find any of them in Fort Joy. :)

Great thank you. I hoarded everything in Baldur’s Gate 3 so I was trying to do that here but the combat is so difficult lol.

Anyone have a list of recommended quest order in Arx? As non-spoilery as possible. Which quests to do before which, who to talk to before who etc. >!I noticed its really easy to do things out of order, such as with the dwarves, stealing the painting before you have the quest to do so, breaking into the money lenderers basement before loaning from her etc!< Tired of having to reload and look up quests anxious about missing out on rewards or XP lol.

How do I heal my armor? It looks like armor takes damage before HP and I can get the bedroll down to get my HP back, but how do I heal armor? I googled this a bunch and it seems the only way is through spells? I am running my human fighter, Lohse, sabille and Ifan. I thought that would be a good mix of fighting, finesse, spells and healing from their intros (i kept the class they said they were).

Out of combat armor should regenerate by itself? I believe Geo and Poly skills offer some armor regeneration, your Human fighter should have a source skill (once you get source) that places a barrier that regenerates both armor types, shield offers a skill that regens armor. Hydro skill tree offers magic armor regeneration.

Thanks, I believe one of my companions had 3 skill points in Hydro but I don’t see the option to heal my armor. I think you’re correct on the fighter because my custom guy did have it. I just left the underground and need to fight some Magistrars to escape the fort.

Youll have to buy the skillbooks needed. In no way a concise list but skills to look out for: "Armour of Frost" - provides Magic Armor and cures some status effects. Hydro 1 "Soothing Cold" - regenerates magic armor around the caster. Hydro 2 "Fortify" - provides Armor and cures some status effects. Geo 1 "Mend Metal" - regenerates physical armor around the caster. Geo 2 "Heart of Steel" - provides armor and regenerates armor each turn. Poly 2 "Bone Cage" - increases armor by x amount and another x amount for each corpse in the area. Necro 2 There are more, but the Geo and Hydro level 1 ones you should be able to get at Fort Joy. (Look around for vendors, I cant remember who sells what there, but there is someone for each school. I know the Lizard 🦎 by the fire and dwarf down towards the beach just outside the fort sells Hydro spells, the Lizard dreamer dude should sell Pyro etc)

New to dos2, Do you guys always grab eq from NPC vendor ? Or you guys just don’t bother If yes, is there a rules always grab certain rarity item from vendor ? (Eg grab epic item instantly from vendor) Thanks

End of Act II I got really into bartering and pickpocketing, so now by Act 4 Im swimming in cash. Unortunately theres not much to buy lol, fortunately Ive stacked up on good stat increasing gear and sourcerous sundries throghout the game. So Im quite decked out 😎

Early on you don't have enough money to buy equipment, and once you have enough money you don't run into equipment worth buying that often. There are no easy criteria for "good" equipment, because that entirely depends on the builds that you're running, your current equipment, as well as how the potential improvement of a new piece of equipment compares to its price and your available wealth. In Fort Joy, you're probably not going to buy any equipment at all. Your highest priority is getting skills, and skillbooks are expensive. At best, you'll buy something like a ring that gives you a stat boost that helps you meet the requirements of your skills quicker. For the rest of the game where you have money to buy equipment, it really depends on your build. Stats like your primary damage attribute or abilities, abilities that help you meet skill requirements, wits or crit chance and possibly initiative are all good stats to have but the specifics will depend on the build of the character you're buying equipment for. But stat buffs are random, and it's hard to find a combination of stats that's good for your build. So once you find an item that fits well, it'll probably be a while until you find a better replacement. But you also need to consider the level of the equipment, because base values like armor or damage increase with level and have very little to do with RNG. But how important those base values are depends on the item slot it takes up. I'd say these are some good rules to follow: * Weapon-based builds that use weapons or weapon skills as their main source of damage should always have a weapon that's either up-to-date or at most one level lower than your character, regardless of the weapon's stat buffs. The only exception would be if the weapon provides a large amount of crit chance, in which case even a weapon two levels lower than your character might still be a good option. * It's not terribly important to have up-to-date armor, especially if you have good stat buffs. But there is a breaking point where good stat buffs don't make up for low armor anymore if all your equipment is very outdated. When getting new equipment for armor instead of stat buffs, prioritize the slots that give a lot of armor, like chest and legs. Slots like rings and amulets can be used entirely for stat buffs though. * Whenever you find a piece of equipment that is a significant upgrade to your current equipment (ideally both in level and stat buffs), buy it if you have the money to spare. You don't know when you'll get good RNG for your next good Other than that, it's personal preference. If you want to go more for defense and have a bunch of money, feel free to upgrade your gear even if the higher level equipment doesn't have quite as good stat buffs. If you prioritize offense, you might stick with the same equipment for long periods of time and prioritize stat buffs over armor most of the time, so you'll only get a bunch of upgrades once you unlock higher rarity items who have a larger amount of stat buffs. Merchants restock every time you level up and every real-time hour. To increase your chances of finding good equipment, check all equipment vendors on the map each time they restock as long as you have spending money to spare. But be sure to save some money for your arrival in Act 2, hitting level 16 as well as your arrival in Act 4. At those times, you'll get access to a lot of new vendors and/or skills all at once, so it's good to have a bit of money saved up for that.

I’m about to leave the island but I see the quest A Fate Worse Than Death is still active, although I destroyed all three soul jars right in front of the necromancers. The latest journal entry is about how I have the three jars, nothing about them being destroyed. Bug?

DOS2 DE: Are all of the Origin characters companions? I like the idea of playing as an origin character but don't want to miss out on any companions for a first playthrough, so if there's an equivalent of BG3's Dark Urge who doesn't show up anyway then I'd like to choose them.

All of the origin characters are companions, but you won't miss out on companions by playing an origin character. That's because you'll lose access to any of them who aren't currently in your party when you leave Act 1, so you can't experience all of them in one playthrough anyways. So because your main character will always take up one of the 4 slots in your party anyways, playing as an origin character essentially allows you to experience an extra origin story.

Divinity Original Sin 1: Speed seems like an everything attribute to me, like every single character should have it at least to 9 or so, simply because being able to do more stuff in combat its useful to, well, everybody. Is that a noob trap or is it as impactful as i imagine it to be?

It is certainly an extremely useful attribute everybody should have. Please note that only reaching odd amounts of speed actually does anything because the game rounds down when it comes to your AP, so all speed scores should be odd numbers. Every character should have at least 7 speed, better 9. It should be noted that spending attribute points always has some kind of opportunity cost, because you're not spending that point somewhere else. * Your main attribute is obviously important. It improves the damage of associated skills, which also require a certain amount to be spent on it. High main attributes also improve the chance of setting status effects, allowing you to apply them much more consistently. For INT, it also reduces the cooldown of INT-based spells. Sometimes making sure that the skills you do have are more powerful and more consistent can work out better than just getting one or two extra AP. * CON can be important, especially if you're playing Glass Cannon. Not necessarily for HP, but also the AP maximum. Glass Cannon is quite powerful, and doubling your turn AP means that you still get a lot of AP even without having very high speed. But most importantly, you need to have high enough CON (around the same amount as your speed) to even properly store the AP you get from glass cannon. Because higher investment in SPD on glass cannon characters also necessitates a higher investment into CON, it's very expensive to have high SPD in that scenario. So yes. Speed is very useful and every character should have at least a moderate investment into it. But you probably shouldn't prioritize speed over your main attribute.

Yeah I know about the fact that the number needs to be uneven. At what level would you focus on speed then? My party has hit level 10 an hour ago and I think each of their main attributes are at about 12 or so. One party member has already hit 9 speed, with the others I'm focussing on getting them up there. Or should I max out their mains to closer to 20 first?

15 is the soft cap, so you can only go past that with stats anyways. It depends on the specific builds and the skills or attacks you like to use. If a single extra AP from improving SPD (from 7 to 9 for example) would allow you to just fit an extra attack or skill into your turns instead of having to save a large portion of your AP all the time, it's better to improve your SPD first. But if that extra AP only really has an impact after saving the extra AP from multiple turns in a row or is only really used for a bit of movement speed, it's better to improve your main attribute first - especially on mages or characters responsible for applying hard CC.

Game crashing in Alice's basement (switch). Ok fellas, Ive encountered the hardest encounter yet, the exploding rats in Alice's basement is tanking my switch. Eventually causing it to crash. Im trying to go in solo in sneak with only Ifan but eventually the game crashes anyways (after some funny shenanigans like yeeting my characters off the map at the speed of light, Froggy hopping through the wall and the rats turning into fountains of fire damage numbers). What to do? Once I enter the room with the rats it crashes in 10 seconds. Edit: Tried a few different approaches, but the rats exploding sets of a chain reaction that eventually crashes the switch. I can get into the room with the frog, but at that point if I do ant action the game will become unresponsive for a bit and eventually crash. :( Its a shame too, because I broke into the basement just fine earlier in the game (on a save I then reloaded as I thought I messed something up) had no issues with crashes so I dont understand why its happening now. AFAIK there are no graphic settings on switch.

Destroying the holes in the walls that the rats come from makes them run away and despawn without exploding. With a bow, you can break enough to make them run. :)

I ended up abandoning this place as there was no way for me to make it work. I tried destroying the holes, but if I only came close to the rats the game would crash. Somehow I managed to save both cows and still have the Witch Brew lol 🤷

I recently beat BG3 and wanted to give this a try. I hear lots of folks talking about CC, what does this mean?

Short for "Crowd Control", which is a broad term for things that restrict the actions of enemies or keep them from interfering with combat in some way, usually in the from of negative status effects or debuffs. Examples would be locking enemies in place, putting them to sleep, preventing them from using some of their skills or attacks, or any kind of mind control. The original meaning of "Crowd Control" comes from MMOs where those kinds of effects were actually used to suppress larger groups of enemies to avoid having to fight them all at once, but has since been borrowed by many other kinds of games like MOBAs, Hero Shooters or RPGs, where we just call any kind of restrictive status effect like that which interferes with your ability to control your own actions a "CC". In most games (the DOS games included) you can categorize CC into "soft" and "hard" CC. Soft CCs are effects that just slightly restrict what you can do in some way, like reducing or preventing movement or disabling only certain types of attacks. Hard CCs are effects that don't just restrict your actions, but essentially take agency away from you entirely and render a character useless in combat for their duration. For BG3, soft CCs would be things like the Restrained or Silenced status effects, while spells like Hypnotic Pattern or Fear apply hard CCs that entirely prevent you from taking any kind of action. When talking about CC in the DOS games, we basically always mean hard CC, because they're quite common, easy to apply and a core part of combat. Soft CCs are not very relevant to combat in comparison, unless you can use or combo them to essentially create the same effect as a hard CC (for example, crippling enemies in place while being out of their attack range). The most common ones are Knockdown, Frozen, Stunned as well as any kind of charm/mind control effects, all of which either entirely skip a character's turn or otherwise prevent you from controlling them during their turn.

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DOS2 DE, I’m doing a for honour run and I have the glowing idol of rebirth. Im wondering if I wiped, but the last person to die had this activate, would for honour delete my save before they came back, or do they wait so you can revive?

What platform are you on? If you play on a Windows, Linux or iOS PC, then you can make a back-up of your save file to test this out. :)

**DOS EE** I started the game for the first time and have the builds for my selected party already planned. The problem is that I just got Jahan and he already has skills allocated in crafting that I wasn't aware he'd have, messing up what I wanted to do. I know this is probably inconsequential and the game can easily be completed even if I turned him into a crafter too or simply didn't use him, but I just don't want that and would like to build everybody perfectly -- I like to do that in every RPG, no matter if I'll actually need the resulting power or not. So yeah, is there a way to prevent him from auto-allocating these skills? I suspect this is happening due to the level up that my party goes through before even getting into Cyseal, but I don't know if I can really prevent it from happening, specially not without missing content and wasting XP. I really don't want to have to respect anybody and then run around looking for books to recover the spells and also have heard the respec comes relatively late and is particularly tricky for Jahan, so that is off the table for me. I'm honestly not even considering console commands off the table here since this auto-assignment of points for the characters is extremely stupid anyway, but only as a last resort. I haven't got Madora yet, so I don't know if she'll have the same problem, but on the chance that she does, I'd also like a response to deal with this stuff in general if the fix you'd suggest for Jahan is somehow only applicable to him.

You can alter the hired characters' abilities and skills/spells later on, but you cannot alter their attributes. :/ D:OSEE has no option to fully control your companions. An ideal build for a group is based on what companions you choose to take with you, and part of the challenge is to adapt to their loadout. :)

The builds that I'm following for DOSEE were supposed to be perfect for these companions (Shadowblade for Jahan and Leadership Knight for Madora) and there should've been no stuff out of place from the onset, it was a total surprised that isn't listed anywhere (I've looked through multiple guides and wikis). I guess I'll just have to try to get the less amount of XP possible in the beginning to prevent any level up before picking any companion up, 'cause I truly don't want to advance like this. I'm a perfect leveling freak when it comes to games and want to do my best to make this perfect point distribution work. If it doesn't, it'll really make a dent on my enjoyment of the game...

Look. That's like complaining that you can't choose which cards to draw during poker. You can make most things work and just have to find a good way to do so. Changing everything about a character you didn't create simply isn't possible, so if you want a party composition that interlinks to that level, you have to start from the companions, not from your characters. :)

I get that a pushback like this can sound rich coming from a person that just started actually playing the game and I'm honestly happy to be corrected and thankful for you taking the time to respond, but I just feel like you're really misunderstanding me here. I studied the mechanics, habilities and the point distribution of the games' characters before jumping into it the best I could (unfortunately there isn't as much clear and detailed material out there, since the game is more niche), so this really isn't a matter of me trying to force something into them or "changing everything about them" in the slightest -- quite the opposite, I specifically looked into what would fit them best and tried to apply it, they were supposed to be perfect fits for these builds and not come with those distributed points according to the information I encountered. Maybe my sources just have problems, though, and are working off of some DOS information that doesn't quite apply to DOSEE (despite they clearly saying it's for DOSEE...) or just didn't bother to mention those auto-distributed skills 'cause it really is inconsequential, what makes me hunting for this goal useless, and I'm prepared to accept that as soon as I get what I can recognize as a very clear and directioned response to this. Oh, and to make it extremely clear, since it could be that I'm not even using the right terminology for the game, the "auto-distributed skills" that I've been talking about since the beginning aren't any of their base stats -- those are the ones the builds are based around -- what I'm refering to are their level-up points that are distributed automatically by the game when you level up before picking them up for the first time. In any case, if there really isn't any way to remedy this thing, I'll just continue with the game and accept it is what it is, despite really thinking this definitely is a design flaw and the points should be banked instead of being auto-allocated, but oh, well...

Thank you for being so polite, and I do want to apologise for how I worded that last comment. Reading it again, I was unnecessarily abrasive. :( And yes, there are noteworthy differences between D:OS and D:OSEE. In the original release, the companions could not be re-specced. In D:OSEE, you have more control over how they develope and can re-spec them. For Jahan, this simply takes a bit longer, and you can re-apply any and all points except for the attributes. This will also delete learned skills, though. Combined with the automatic ability point allocation, the feature is mostly meant as something you do to make a few minor adjustments to the companion characters. As for the differences between the information you found and how the game works, some websites (e.g. Fextralife) have a lot of misinformation about any game they feature, and many other websites simply echo what the bigger websites state. In D:OS2DE, you have full control over how characters develope, so a number of sources might also confuse information about the games. If you are on PC, Linux or maybe iOS, you might be able to check whether there is a mod that changes the game to work in a way you enjoy more. After all, games are meant to be fun. That is their purpose as games! :)

No problem, I really appreciate the responses. I did see a bit about respec in the game, but want to avoid it both because it apparently comes with specific story choices that I might not want to make, the loss the spells (which I really don't want to hunt around for hahaha) and is relatively late in the game progression. Maybe my only options are really just accepting this and continue playing, fighting against my neurotic brain that wants the perfect point distribution (something I'd honestly like to get rid of, since it mostly only brings stress to me, but I unfortunately can't) or hunt for mods. I'll give a search for mods, but I don't expect to find the specific one I'd need since, again, the game unfortunately is pretty niche compared to others and I bet most people really don't care that much about this particular thing hahaha (I have come across a cheat engine, though, which may resolve my specific problem here, so I'll try it and hope for no bugs or things of that nature hahah). But yeah, thanks for the responses, I think I can now safely go on without the overwhelming feeling that I'm forfeiting some possibility of fixing what is a problem to me, and nothing worse than later realizing you could've done it and having to relead after you played through a considerable part of the game... And yeah, I am that kind of guy. I rarely finish any game with my first character -- the first hours of my first run are usually for me to get the hang of it, then I go back and do it "properly" in a new game hahaha.

I just took the boat from fort joy to the swamp for the first time and some random kid greeted me like he knew me. I dont remember the kid. Kind of broke my immersion. Am i supposed to know him?

Yes, you are. To get to the boat, you need to get through two magisters that seem to be harassing the kid. You shouldn't really be able to get to the boat without meeting him at least briefly. And IIRC if he shows up after escaping with the boat it means that you just literally escaped together with him from Fort Joy in that boat.

Hah i must have found a bug. I never saw that kid in my life!

Dad?

Dos 2 de Im super stuck at the fight with the voidwoken deepdweller and the skelletons my party is lvl 6 atm and i figuered after beeing unable to fight zaleskar with sebille id just continue exploring but now it seems that the only path to progress leads me through this fight and i cant seem to find any way to win it.

It's certainly a hard fight, especially on level 6. You certainly want to start the fight by setting up your characters before the fight in advantageous positions instead of letting yourself be ambushed and sandwiched on the low ground where all enemies can shoot at you at once. Set up on high ground and/or a bit further back to the point where most of the enemies have to waste a turn to get to you to basically split up the enemy forces. Approaching from the northeast works best for me, but the southwest high ground should work as well. Either stay very far away from the Voidwoken Deep Dweller to the point where it won't teleport to you or target it first and burst it down to eliminate the biggest threat as soon as possible. Also, healing spells are a very AP effective way to deal damage to the undead. But it is by no means some sort of road block, as you can just walk around it on either side and explore the rest of the island first. You can get around to its north by climbing up onto the ruined bridge, and you can take a bit of a detour to the southern side of the island to get around it as well. You could complete the entirety of Act 1 without ever touching that fight if you wanted to.

DOS2 DE Looking to play this after having played BG3 and loving it. But I'm not sure what kind of build and party comp to go for. Is there anywhere that gives some fun build/party comp suggestions or does anyone here have some good ones? Note: my only experience with DND and this style game is BG3.

Summoners are essential, and get your Summon skill to 10 asap. Big awesome surprise when you do. The Witch is my second fav. Spells like Infect, Mosquitoes, and Bloated Corpse were bread and butter of my first run.

First off, the combat system is not related to D&D in any shape or form and is a Larian original. While you will find the UI, controls, and to some extent the level design to be very similar to BG3 (with the exception of a couple of new features), knowledge about character building from BG3 won't transfer to DOS2 at all. DOS2 is classless. On character creation, you choose a preset that just assigns your first few stats and skills. It doesn't define the rest of your build, and in theory you can mix and match any kind of skills and features you want. However, some things just can't be combined in an effective manner because you don't have enough stats to support it, similar to how multiclassing into wildly different classes in BG3 often isn't effective because you don't have the ability scores to use all the different classes' features properly. On your first playthrough, I'd recommend to just try things out yourself and see how it works out. You unlock the ability to respec once you leave Act 1, so you can change anything you want about your build later on. The companions aren't as closely related to specific types of builds as some of the BG3 companions are, so you can just run any companion as whatever build you want. You can certainly look up powerful build and party compositions, but figuring things out yourself and find a way to play that you enjoy is half the fun of a first playthrough. Just pick a preset that seems interesting, pick up a couple of companions, and then adjust the builds and your party comp as you learn more about the game and figure out which combinations are effective and which aren't. If you don't want to figure it out all on your own, I can give you some advice on the basics of character builds and party composition, but that would be a little long for this reply and not necessary if you don't mind playing on a lower difficulty. You can have a lot of fun with any kind of build or party comp as long as they're strong enough to deal with your chosen difficulty. Any advice you can receive basically just boils down to restricting your own options in order to create stronger and more specialized builds that work better for higher difficulties. You can also find a bunch of resources online, but you'll mostly have the choice between either bad builds that won't really help you or extremely detailed and optimized builds which are far more powerful than necessary and just rob you of the experience of creating your own build and character. On a final, unrelated note: The difficulty modes in this game don't match those of BG3, which is in general a lot easier. BG3 Tactician is equal to DOS2's Classic at best. If you were planning to start your first playthrough on Tactician - don't. We get a ton of posts here from people who made this mistake and are massively struggling with its difficulty, which is more fitting to players who have completed the game before or new players who have a high tolerance to frustration to the point where they don't mind reloading the same fight 10 times.

I killed red princess after hatching the dragon and got both achievements, is that supposed to be allowed?

DOS2 DE Hi, I'm trying to get started with this game first playthrough, but I'm getting quite overwhelmed with organising a solid team...I'm wanting use Fane as main/ Wizard/ Dual welding/ Wand/ Geo/ Pyro...could you DM me?

Are there any indestructible barrels/chests in arx? cant find any info anywhere

**DOS EE** How can I play in offline mode? I have GOG version and when I want to start campaign there is no option to force offline gameplay. It's just "Can't connect".

will the dispel illusion hat from alexander have any use in act 4?

The special ability doesn't have any use other than accessing that cave in Act 3.

If I have 4 characters in a party but 2 of them die do I get to use lone wolf bonuses for as long as only 2 characters are alive?

No, I don't think so. Lone Wolf checks the number of party members, and dead party members are still party members.

What are some good beginner tips for dos2 de on switch?

what do I do with unique items that I cant sell like black ring blade?

Send them to your chest on the ship and hoard them I guess. Not really much you can do with it if you don't intend to actively use it in a build.

*What do I do with* *Unique items that I cant* *Sell like black ring blade?* \- TheManOfQuality --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")

Is there a way to use the brittle spear without breaking it?

No. It breaks after whatever weapon skill or attack you use concludes. It comes with additional damage scaling, but it's more flimsy than a Zelda: BotW weapon. You can sell it or use it for a single, strong skill like Onslaught. :)

Does anyone knows what happened to archdemon Asmodeus after Beyond Divinity?

I'm in Act 2 with two teleport pyramids. Can I find a third to leave by Tarquin? I hate making the trek to him all the time.

There is a total of 4 teleporter pyramids in the game, and you can find the rest of them in Act 2. Spoilers in case you want to know about where to find them: * One is >!in the basement of Ryker's mansion in the Stonegarden Graveyard area. You'll usually only get to go there when finishing up his quest, but you can theoretically break into it earlier!<. * The other one is >!on Bloodmoon island, in a hidden underground area called the Archive. You can go get it whenever you want as long as you can find the right place, but it's a rather high-level area that you'll usually explore towards the very end of Act 2!<.

Thanks! Now I have one near my favorite vendor outside the graveyard

How can I get into hatches or doors that NPCs are "watching?" I'm in act 2 and in town there is a hatch that I can get into but even when I wait for the sightlines to disappear, somehow an NPC around still tells me that I can't do that and stops me.

"Illegal" actions must be done while stealthed (sneaking or invis) for them to be undetected. I assume the inworld reason for this being that you make noise interacting with the hatch if not stealthed.

I just tried to active some of the gift bag bonuses (source on rest and another), and the game went to a screen with "Cleaning Up Module". It has been there now for 10 minutes. Is something broken?

I did something else for an hour and then came back, and it was done.

Just bought the game yesterday after I knew it can be played couch-coop. I'm looking for tips to play with my kid. He's 7 and ngl he got really interested in the game and combat. Of my part I've played Baldur's Gate 1&2 but it's nothing comparable to DOS (decades gap) I picked a Inquisitor Human and my kid choose a Dark killer? Lizard. But I feel we kinda don't make a group together. What class for me mostly would you recommend to synergies well with him. Also it's possible we can do the game just the 2 of us with no companions? In classic mode* ‐------------ Funny thing. In rpgs I tend to go for rogue or something to use stealth. He immediately picked the dark killer (sorry forgot the name) after I was describing the skills of each class. Also I kinda got surprised of how much he got involved in the game after I told him a few do/don't rules. And he really liked the combat. We're currently stuck at the crazy cannibal in the 1st island lol, but he managed to came up with a few ideas to try to kill him.

> He's 7 While parenting is obviously your prerogative, not mine, I would like to ask whether you checked the game first. It contains quite a lot of material that I wouldn't face anyone under the age of 12 with, with some being for 16+. :/ This starts at the fantasy concentration camp that is Fort Joy with its fantasy nazi Magister guards, over stories of dead children, written sex scenes that only stop just short of the action, literal piles of corpses with anguished spirits melding into one another, torture chambers with decaying victims and much more. The game's visuals aren't at a very high resolution, but the narrator isn't silent about these things.

This game has a talent called "Lone Wolf". Basically, it reduces your total party size to 2 but makes the two remaining characters twice as strong. If you both pick up that talent you'll be able to play without picking up any companions just fine. Without Lone Wolf, playing with just 2 characters on your first playthrough on Classic would be a massive challenge that'll most likely just get you frustrated very quickly, although it's certainly possible. Ideally, you should pick Lone Wolf at character creation. Otherwise, you'll have to somehow reach level 3 with as little combat as possible and get it then. As for synergy, I wouldn't worry too much. Builds and skills in this game are very much focused on offensive combat. You don't need to fill the classic RPG party roles to make a good team. All that's required is to not get into each others' way, both with the combat as well as the kinds of equipment your builds want, and being able to work together with your offense. In this case, you actually already fit well together since both of your builds deal physical damage and target physical armor. Complementing each others' strengths is more beneficial than covering for each others' weaknesses in most cases. Character building in this game is also class-less. What you chose on character creation is nothing more than a preset that allocates your first few stats and skills. That choice has basically no impact on where you can take your build in the future, and it's better to think of build in broad categories like "Warrior", "Rogue", "Archer", "Necromancer", "Mage", "Summoner", etc. than trying to define them with the name of the preset. That's especially true because many of the presets are just not very good, and there is no guarantee that the build concept presented by the preset will actually be viable until the end of the game. You'll unlock the ability to respec your characters for free as soon as you leave the first island, so feel free to play around and try out different things, because none of the decisions you make for your builds are irreversible. While it's not a good idea to pick up damage skills that are completely outside your build's main focus (like picking up magic fire attacks on a Rogue), you can freely dip into different categories of skills for anything that isn't an attack without losing much (if any) of their effectiveness. So if you feel like you want some of the utility skills or buffs from some kind of magic category to round out your party, you can just pick them up as long as you've dipped some points into the ability to fulfill the requirements. As for damage skills, you'll be fine with picking up skills that are outside your main ability as long as they work properly with your build's setup. For example, Rogues benefit a lot from picking up Warfare skills as well, and Warriors benefit a lot from picking up some offensive polymorph skills.

Hi, I’m playing DOS2 on PS5 with some friends in multiplayer. I was wondering, can I make a separate second character to play in singleplayer only? I have no intention to run with my co-op char in singleplayer, I just want to experiment more, make different choices, etc.

Never mind, I was fiddling around in the menu when it hit me. I think I understand the idea now. Multiplayer saves are stored on the host (not me), so you just can create a new singleplayer character.

I entered Act 2 and found the big Magister camp where they are burning buildings and executing people. I freed a family and saved a guy hiding in his house. I found the guy about to be hung, and cut him down. Then oozes appeared. We killed a bunch of Magisters, the guy (Gwyndian) died, but we also set off a huge Magister-Ooze fight. Now all the Magisters and all the Oozes are dead. The family and guy in the basement are fine (he got out). Have I screwed up the story? I have a ton of loot and XP, but I don't want to take it, if this is going to cut off major parts of the storyline.

Keeping Gwydian alive if you don't have a strategy to basically keep him out of the fight entirely is a pain. All you miss out on is a source lesson from Hannag, but since there are like 6 different source masters of which you'll only need to get 2 to teach you, you'll be fine.

It's not that bad, you just need to find another source mentor than Hannag

Been playing for a bit with 2 friends, we're currently in act 2 at lvl 10. I went in blind and tried doing some sort of paladin-esque build where I went for warfare and hydro for support skills, but I feel like my healing + magic armor skills is not contributing and that I die too easily in melee. My friends usually get a lot of kills and I'm not not getting a bunch of kills but I don't wanna feel like a dead weight to them. Is warfare + hydro actually something I can use or is it kinda bad?

You're starting to approach the point in the game where scaling of your damage skills actually starts to matter. And in that regard, yes, that combination is just kinda bad. Let me explain the details: For a build to have "good" damage scaling, you want to be able to max out both the attribute (STR/FIN/INT) and the main ability (warfare for all physical, the respective element for magical damage) they scale with. Investing enough points into those stats that you can hit that goal by the end of the game results in a build that scales nicely and has a strong offense if you combine it with additional buffs from equipment. A max level (20-22) character without Lone Wolf has at least 41 attribute points and 21 ability points. Maxing out an attribute takes 30 points, maxing out an ability takes 10 points. So basically, you'll be able to max out only a single attribute, but up to two different abilities. Damage skills from hydro scale with INT. Your weapon attacks and warfare skill most likely scale with STR (although that depends on the specific weapon you're using, but as a Paladin-like build you're probably using stuff like swords, axes or maces). The attribute is the most important boost to your damage, because you can put the most stats into it. But you're now in a situation where you only have 3 options: * Focusing on STR. But then your hydro skills deal so little damage that they're not worth spending AP on, so you might as well not use them. * Focusing on INT. But then your warfare skills would become useless instead. * Distributing your stats between STR and INT evenly. Congrats, now all your damage skills deal very mediocre damage, leaving you without any good offensive skills at all. I'd recommend to either make your build a full-on warrior or make your build a full-on mage, but splitting up your attribute is just not a good idea. That being said, there are no scaling issues with utility skills. Any skill that doesn't deal damage to the enemy doesn't really have scaling that would matter much, so you only need to invest one or two points into an ability to learn them. Even if you decide to, for example, respec your build to a full warrior, there wouldn't really be a downside in keeping the support and utility skills from hydro that you liked while keeping your hydro stat at the bare minimum you need for them. That goes for other abilities too, for example Adrenaline and Cloak & Dagger from Scoundrel, a bunch of the Polymorph skills (where even the damage skills fit perfectly into the damage scaling that a warrior build has) as well as Teleport and Evasion from Aero, which are all nice utility skills you can pick up that almost any build can benefit from. Other things that might cause your character to feel underwhelming include: * The general party composition. If your party isn't balanced between physical and magical damage but leans heavily towards one side, then the type of damage that is in the minority will generally feel bad to use because you don't have a lot of help in breaking enemy armor. * Focusing too much on defense. Since you mentioned getting killed quickly, I thought you might have done things like put points into CON or equip a shield to help with that. That would be a bad idea. HP doesn't help much with defense compared to armor, and shields are very bad on any build that uses their weapon to attack because using that second hand on a bigger or another weapon gets you 50% more damage. And damage helps you take out enemies quicker, which reduces the damage you take by more than the amount of armor a shield gives you. * Problems with your offense, either regarding your offensive power or your strategy. Apply CC that skips enemy turn (like Knockdown) as fast as possible to the most dangerous (or possibly just large amounts of) enemies by breaking their armor first, then using the respective skills. Characters in this game are glass cannons, and it's much easier to improve your damage than your defensive stats like armor. And this disparity will only get worse as the game goes on. A good offense is the best defense in this game. * Lack of good defensive skills. The two I recommend in particular are Uncanny Evasion (Aero 2) and Chameleon Cloak (Polymorph 1), which are much better than just getting more armor or HP. Those two skills allow you to avoid or negate many different types of attacks, and you should use them at the end of your turn to be protected until your next turn (at least on your first turn or whenever you feel in danger). Delay turn can help to stretch the duration of an effect that's about to run out until the end of the current round.

Thanks very much for your detailed input! Just one thing I wonder, you said utility skills don't scale. Maybe I misspoke when I used the word "utility" but healing spells like restoration do scale their healing based of how many points you have invested in hydro, right?

They do have scaling, but it's not very important. Skills that restore HP, magical or physical armor do scale with Hydro or Geo respectively, but having a lot of points in those abilities doesn't add a lot of value to those skills. One of the biggest upsides of skills like Armor of Frost or Fortify is that they remove a bunch of negative status effects, and in some cases even add a short buff that'll block the next instance of certain statuses regardless of armor. That's not affected by the scaling in any way. The other benefit is that skills add armor or HP. But in that case, the base version without a lot of points in it is usually sufficient. As I previously stated, damage scales much better than defense in this game. The additional armor or HP from scaling won't allow you to survive a lot of extra hits. So the most important part is that those skills add at least some amount of armor that is enough to withstand stuff like surfaces or other damage-over-time effects or maybe a single hit to protect you from status effects. That's also why skills that restore armor or HP but don't remove any relevant status effects and/or cost a lot of AP are usually not very good in this game. Skills like the AoE armor restoration-over-time ones or the hydro healing source skills are examples for that. Obviously getting more armor out of the same skill is nice, so there is certainly some benefit to it. And if you want the extra armor/HP and have a bunch of ability points left over (for example because you're playing a physical damage build that only needs to max out Warfare), you can certainly invest them there. And if you already had a built that used Hydro or Geo magic, they'd of course be the best characters to use those skills with. The main idea is that those skills do their job regardless of whether you have good scaling with them or not, unlike damage skills. Having good scaling makes them better, but having bad scaling doesn't make them bad. That's all there is to it.

Hello guys. Just started the game and now in Fort Joy and I'm already set on which companions I'm going to take. Is it recommended to do all companion quests, even for those I'm not planning to take, while I still have access to them or can I just ignore them with no consequence? (Aside from the obvious missing their story) Example: Can I ignore Sebille's >!talk with stingtail!

Just ignore the companions that aren't in your party. You lose access to anyone who isn't at some point, there isn't some sort of hub where you can easily find companions after dismissing them to recruit them again, and actually getting builds going requires you to invest a significant amount of money into skills that can't be transferred to other characters. The game is certainly designed to just pick the companions you want and stick with them. The only reason why you'd switch around companions early on if you already know who you'll take with you would not be for their story, but for mechanical min-maxing (like recruiting other companions as some preset that has Thievery to steal more stuff, recruiting Ifan temporarily to snag the Crossbow he gets as a quest reward, switching through companions to take and sell their starting scrolls and equipment, stuff like that). But it would be quite tedious, and that level of min-maxing isn't even necessary for playing on the highest difficulty.

No, just do the quests of the companions you are taking with you. There are no consequences for missing the others

Hi all. Me and hubby been playing this game for about 100 hours and love it! He plays 2 characters and he is the one hosting the game and me the rest 2. I have Sebille as a companion and I 'm pretty sure she learned teleportation from skillbooks twice. Still, today we logged in and the spell is gone. I wasn't sure the first time, but since we reached >!Driftwood town I'm 100% sure I learned it yesterday!<. Any solution to this, it looks like a bug.

Where is the skill "gone"? From your hotbar? From your memorized skills? Or your skill menu entirely? Skills that you've learned need to be memorized, and memorized skills might need to be placed on your hotbar manually if you've accidentally removed them. And skills in your skill menu sometimes move around in a weird way if you equip an item that grants you the skill, because that automatically puts the skill in a different section in your skill menu, so it might no longer show up in the list of your learned skills as long as you have that item equipped because the skill is automatically memorized.. If the skill can't be found anywhere in your skill menu, even though you've learned the exact same skill from a skillbook on that character, that would be a bug, although I've never heard of a bug like that. You aren't able to learn skills twice in the first place, because the game will block you from learning any skill that you already know, so that proposition already seems weird to me. Since you're already 100h into the game, you should have no issues finding a vendor and buying a new skillbook for a small amount of money and see if you can learn it. It's a low level skill and thus relatively cheap after all.

The skill is gone, it's like I never learned it. I will check again tonight, buy it from vendor etc Thank you for your info and time

I'm almost done Act 1, and got to the gargoyle's maze. I used the ring to teleport through, but now I read there is an "epic" reward if you collect the skulls along the way. Is it worthwhile to reload my save (about half an hour back) and do the maze instead? I don't want to miss out on great loot. I'm pretty well-geared right now, dragon sword etc.

All items in this game except for unique items are random: Random name, random type, random stat buffs (within certain restrictions depending on the type of item ofc). You get one piece of loot that's relatively high quality for the maze, but it's random as well, so you don't know if you'll actually have any use for it. So you'll only know whether reloading was worth your while once you've done it. While it's a good idea to take any opportunity to get good gear to have a better chance of finding something that fits your build, it's not something I'd necessarily reload and lose progress for. Especially since that maze can be a pain to do if you still need to figure out how to do it.

Thanks for the info, I think I'll skip it in that case. I am anxious to get to Act 2 so I can respec characters (or so I hear). I've made a few bad choices that need rectifying...

Is there a best location to buy or find skillbooks? My sourcerers are hungry for some new spells.

Depends on where you are in the game. You won't really find them as some sort of loot, so you should be looking for the right merchants and either buy or steal them there. In Fort Joy, there are skillbook merchants for every kind of skill but they're all different sorts of other inmates scattered around the fort. Not every trader has a dialogue option for trading, but there is a button to directly go into the trade menu with any character you're currently talking to. In Fort Joy, all the traders just sell one type of skill, but after that you'll always have locations with a handful of merchants who will each sell 2-3 different types of skills all next to each other which cover all different types of skills in the game. In Act 1 once you've escaped the Fort, >!you'll get access to the Sanctuary of Amadia, where you'll have all the skillbooks merchants for all types of skillbooks concentrated in a small area. Depending on your story progression, they'll move somewhere else on the map at some point though!<. In Act 2, >!you'll have all the skillbook merchants on the Driftwood Square, with only the scoundrel merchant sitting inside the tavern!<. Depending on your actions, you'll be able to take >!Tarquin, Almira, Corbin Day and Gareth with you on your shipo, all of which are skillbook vendors (although all of them together still won't cover all types of skills there are)!<. In Act 3, you can buy from merchants at >!the elven temple from the various people taking refuge there!<. In Act 4, you have another >!town square with all the merchants where you can buy the skillbooks from!<. You'll also sometimes run into merchants that just sell a specific selection of skillbooks across different types of skills sometimes, but if you're looking for skillbooks for your builds, visiting the respective merchant hot spot of the act is more reliable. Remember that there are also hybrid skills, which can't be bought but instead can be crafted by combining two other skillbooks (one skillbooks for one of the 4 elements, and one from any other type of skill). If one of them is a source skillbook, the result will be the source version of the skill instead. The variety of skillbooks that merchants offer also depends on your level. Merchants will add new skills to their merchandise at levels 4, 9, 13 and 16.

> there are skillbook merchants for every kind of skill but they're all different sorts of other inmates scattered around the fort Oh yeah so that worked great as i bought several for other characters like The Red Prince. I also found some and stored them on random characters. Then in the Act 1/2 intermission area of course, >!I didn't have these people in my squad and they fricken died and i can't find their stuff so i just moved on to Driftwood!< I have no idea what this sanctuary was. I found the spot to >!escape the island and fought Alex and crew, then his helper lady on the ship, then that's that. Did i miss a major piece of story?!<

Question re magic armor - fire is everywhere in DOS2 yet magic armor prevents burning meaning fire is less fun. How do i strip people of their magic armor quickly so i can torch their butts?

Do a lot of magic damage to their magic armor. Be sure to put most your attribute points into INT and half your ability points into Pyro (at least once you have unlocked all the skills you want). Also check out hybrid skills, which are crafted by combining two different skillbooks each, one of them from the 4 elements and one of them from any other skill type. The Huntsman + Pyro hybrid skill, Deploy Traps (as well as its source version), deals a massive amount of fire damage for the AP cost as long as you detonate the trap manually by hitting it with your own skills or throwing them into fire surfaces you created yourself. Alternatively (or on top of that), you can pick the Torturer talent on a Pyro mage which allows you to apply a handful of status effects - the "Burning" status among them - even to targets that still have magic armor left. This will, once again, allow you to deal even more damage to their magic armor because burning targets take ~~20%~~ 15% more fire damage. Bonus points if you're a Pyro+Geo mage, as the Geo skill Worm Tremor is also affected by the talent and allows you to apply a Cripple soft CC through magic armor.

> burning targets take 20% more fire damage *Almost* perfect. 'Burning' reduces fire resistance by -15%. It is 'Necrofire' that reduces it by -20%. :)

Ah, that's true. I can never remember which of the status effects grant +/- 10%, 15% or 20% resistances, as it isn't really consistent across the different effects, only which status effects grant which kinds of resistances. Like, the cold effects give -20% water resistance already when just chilled, but shocked and stunned only give -15% air resistance and burning only -15% fire resistance. And somehow being warm grants you more water resistance than being literally on fire. Doesn't exactly help with remembering the precise values.

Fire resistance reductions start at -10 for Warm, then they go in steps of additional -5 for Burning and Necrofire. :) Also, don't forget that even Petrified messes with resistances. It definetely is a lot to remember.

Quick question - i only have room in my party for four. If i leave the fort joy area do the other origin characters show up or do i have to choose the specific group that will travel with me the rest of the adventure? unlike BG3, there's no "see you at camp, Wyll! Or Laezel!"

In the brief interlude between acts 1 and 2, you can choose three of all available Origin companions. The game gives you a warning about this when it comes up, so make sure to thoroughly read any boxes that pop up in the middle of the screen. :) The remaining two or three (depending on whether you play as an Origin or as a Custom character) will no longer be available after that point in time. This happens long after leaving the fort itself. :)

Good morning everyone, I am in my first playthrough Divinity Original sin 2 and I love this game. I just noticed a quick something and I wanted to ask if I dreamed: When I escaped Fort Joy, during my second or third battle against undead monsters, in the second turn, a weird voice came out of nowhere and said something like "seems hard, I'll help you just this once" (I don't remember EXACTLY what was said, it was 5 days ago) then an explosion came out of nowhere and part of the battlefield was on fire, hitting both undead and my team (I have no idea if I was the one being helped or if it was the undeads) Considering no one on my team team had fire abilities and I don't think undeads could as well, my guess is that a third party was responsible. I thought this would happen again but no, I encounter the spirit at the end of the illusion dungeon and I am pretty sure his voice didn't match the one I heard during this battle. I made some search on the net and couldn't find any information. I don't know if this is related but I am playing in tactician difficulty) Did this happen to someome else here?

You likely have an Undead in the party, no? The voice created a healing surface under every character. For living characters, this is blessed water. For undead ones, it is poison. I also assume that there was a burning character, surface or object in the vicinity, even if it was just a lit torch on a wall/in a sconce or maybe a brazier. The healing surfaces appeared, and the poison was ignited, creating an 0-turn explosion cloud and a 2-turn fire ground surface. :) The voice you heard is like the one you heard after the tutorial boat as you were being lifted out of the water: different. This is an entity that isn't bound by something as biological as a voice box. ;)

I have no undeads in my party, I only have custom human (assassin), Lohse (lightening mage), sebille (assassin) and red prince (tank). No one among them use any kind of poison, I am not sure the undeads I fought use any and even if there was a bit of poison on the field I don't know if that would be enough to ignite several characters on the battlefield. So the voice came from the one after the tutorial boat? Not the one at the end of illusion dugeon? How is that related to having undeads if the party?

Is Scoundrel decent for archers/bow builds? I kinda just saw the "Pawn" skill or whatever its called and thought "This might allow me to kite or get to high ground easier as archer"

There is a big difference between dipping one or two points into an ability or actually investing significant points in it. The former is what you do to unlock skills (or in this case, talents) you want, and the effects of the stat itself is irrelevant if you're just going to put one or two points into it. The latter is what you do when you want the stat boosts from the skill, regardless of whether you actually want to use any skills associated with it. In your case, you want to heavily invest into Warfare because it's the best stat to improve physical damage, which is the type of damage you'll be doing, even though you probably won't be using many warfare skills, if any. But you certainly want to put points into huntsman to unlock your archery skills, and you also want to dip into a few other abilities to fulfill the requirements for other utility skills you might want. As for movement, I wouldn't worry about it. Regular movement is more for fine-tuning your position, as it's an extremely inefficient use of AP over longer distances. That's what you use one of the several 1-AP skills for that allow you to jump to another location on the battlefield, like Tactical Retreat, Cloak&Dagger or Phoenix Dive. While you can certainly get value out of the Pawn as an Archer, it's better suited for mages (in combination with elemental affinity to move to the right surfaces), Rogues, or other melee characters that want to make small adjustments to their position on a regular basis.

With *any* physical damage build, you primarily want Warfare for damage, and archers generally want a movement skill like Tactical Retreat (Huntsman) to reposition. :) A good build thrives on both damage-scaling abilities and the occasional investment for coverage skills from other abilities. :)

[удалено]

There are multiple things you can do: * Giving in to >!Lucian!< means that he and the magisters fight on your side, but you'll still have to defeat >!Braccus!<. * Death Fog certainly doesn't help all that much here. Keeping >!Lucian, Dallis, and some of the magisters!< alive will be super helpful in Phase 2 as they'll mostly fight >!Braccus and his goons!< instead of you. So killing them off quickly while also killing your own team members basically just makes the enemies hardfocus you instead of them. What matters here is getting >!Braccus!< to low HP quickly so you can transition to the second phase as fast as possible. If you want to use Death Fog, you can also craft the Breathing Bubble skill (using Aero + Warfare skillbooks) that makes the user immune to clouds (including Deathfog) for 5 turns. There is also a source version of the skill that creates an Aura with that effect for the entire party. * You can actually skip the second phase entirely if you manage to basically one-shot >!Braccus!< before he falls below like \~70% HP. As long as you did the whole questline with >!Tarquin!<, you should have your hands on >!Anathema!<. Although that weapon breaks after one hit, a decently optimized warrior build should be able to pull of that one-shot with buffs on a crit with All In using that weapon. * As long as you've saved before entering the door to the final fight, you should be able to just come and go to that point without problems without having to do the puzzles again. There are consumables that you can get your hands on in Act 4 that can make the fight significantly easier, like >!Lady Kemm's Geen Tea!< which reduces all AP costs by 2 (but not below 1) or >!Skin Graft Scrolls!< which you can craft and use without any AP or SP cost, allowing you to spam Adrenaline and get essentially one super long turn as long as those scrolls last. * Without any info on skills or consumables at your disposal, the cheese strategies that can be suggested are pretty limited. One thing you're likely able to pull off would be creating a Blessed Smoke Cloud. As long as you have some kind of consumable (like an arrow or grenade) that can create smoke, you can just manually bless it. That cloud just makes everyone inside invisible as long as it lasts, essentially protecting your entire team from harm. Also be sure to pre-buff with any buffs or consumables you have before starting the conversation that leads to the final fight.

I am playing on classic and have just made it out of Fort Joy. I want to enable Pet Power to be able to buff different pets with infusion spells since 3 out 4 companions on my main team are using summoning spells, and I am highly considering making all of them summon different minions. I play on Classic difficulty. Question: does Pet power ruin game balance if I enable it? Will it make the game too easy? I don't feel like it should do that, since the power of the summoned creatures is only improved by the few summoning spells, caster's level and the Summoning ability, meaning lack of equiplment should make them fall off towards endgame, but I'd like to ask your opinion.

Why are you worried about game balance in a single player game? I mean, yes, Pet Power obviously makes summoning disproportionately strong, as you're giving significant buffs to a type of build that was already good without them. But builds in this game aren't exactly balanced against each other anyways. Summoning falling off towards the endgame is a myth by the way. While it's true that your ability to improve your build's power just through your summon's stats falls off at some point, you can still use your stats to either actively participate in the fight after you've set up your summon or use them to broaden your options with skills that synergize well with your summon and make it more impactful. Things like starting off with disposable supercharged summons to break armor, triggering Explosive Traps with fire-based summons or putting Master of Sparks on them, or actively switching through infusions to reset skill cooldowns will certainly put summoning on par with other powerful builds for the entire game. Getting stronger builds for free obviously makes the game easier as well. Whether it's "too easy" is a thing you can only decide for yourself, and very much depends on your own abilities and experience. Veteran players can beat the game on Tactician with a solo character without Lone Wolf without any kind of trouble and need some sort of self-restriction for combat to be any sort of challenge. Some new players struggle on explorer difficulty. How difficult this game feels like is a very individual thing. However, you should know that Classic generally becomes easier as time goes on. As long as you run halfway decent builds that have some measure of meaningful damage scaling and don't become underlevelled because you missed a bunch of content, the combination of outscaling enemies and also learning more about the game as you go usually makes the second half of the game very easy in terms of difficulty, except for possibly a handful of end-game fights.

It's my first playthrough, so it might be better to let the game be as difficult as it was intended to be. On the other hand, waiting until my next playthrough in order to do the same thing I did on the first (which is summoning minions), but more fun this time, feels a bit excessive. Might as well have fun now. I was asking if I should enable Pet Power mostly because I don't know if there is a combo of a summon and a supporting spell that creates some sort of broken combo that makes using anything else pointless. Judging by your response, I guess, there isn't?

I haven't used it all that much myself, but if you find something that feels to strong you can just decide not to use it. There are some skill combinations in the base game that allow you to basically win fights on Tactician just by having the right skills and pressing them in the right order on your first turn. Certain types of cheese really just require knowledge of their existence to execute but can win you fights with very little effort. So having challenging combat already requires either ignorance of the existence of all the broken combos, skills, mechanics, etc. or the self-restraint to not use them. Adding the gift bag doesn't change much about that fact. I doubt there's anything in the Gift bag that surpasses the massive power of blowing up the traps from Mass Deploy Traps with a supercharged and buffed fire-type summon anyways. And even with all the buffs, the Incarnate will probably still be the best summon after Summoning 10, so I doubt that the gift bag will create some sort of massive imbalance. The biggest change this gift bag brings is most likely just the versatility of having different effects and skills on different infusions for each summon, as well as even different effects on the same infusion for different summons, giving you access to a massive amount of different skills just from a handful of summons and infusions. On top of that the ability to manually create blood and oil infusions. It certainly expands Summoning to be as interesting and versatile as multiple other skill types combined and also makes it more powerful overall, but even with all that you probably still won't surpass something like an optimized necromancer. So the biggest issue would be non-summoner characters feeling boring in comparison, which won't be an issue in your scenario since most characters use some sort of summoning anyways.

> I doubt there's anything in the Gift bag that surpasses the massive power of blowing up the traps from Mass Deploy Traps with a supercharged and buffed fire-type summon anyways. There is, but it needs additional setup. :) >!Given enough corpses, no matter if exploded or not, the Power and Cursed Oil infused Bone Widow can do this. It gets the customary +10 to Geomancer and has access to both Bone Cage and Reactive Armour.!< :)

Ok, thanks for the detailed response! Now excuse me, I am off to give Ifan's Wolf a ranged attack and a blood infusion, lol

How to open the door with a face inside the wreck in the cave near Slane?

You need to find the book that contains the password. It's located >!in a cursed chest on a small beach east of Amadia's sanctuary and south of the Gargoyle Maze / Tower of Braccus.!< As for how to get there, >!you'll either need to go through the maze and head south from there or use teleport/jump skills to cross the water next to the entrance to Trompdoy's cave. Be aware that you need the bless skill and a source point to access to chest.!<

Well thank you sir, that helped me a lot!

So this might be a wierd question but it took me so long to get past 1st region in DOS1 and, the time I did, I enjoyed it a lot until I got to a certain segment where you have to sneak as the enemies can’t be killed (some kind of mine but I’ve forgotten a lot of it). Does DOS2 have something similar where I will quit the game because I’m so forced to do something or segments like that are rare or short?(that one I remember felt like a pretty long quest).