Divinity: Original Sin II

General Tips

• Save often, manually. The game is intended to be difficult, and certain things can instantly kill you and your entire party at once instantly. Do NOT rely on auto-saves, as those are infrequent, usually happening either just before entering a point which will have a fight, or at the start of a fight.
• If you play both co-op and single-player, create different profiles from the main menu to keep them separate, as quicksaves and auto-saves made in the same profile will will overwrite themselves regardless of whether you are playing single-player or co-op.
• Be sure to save before trying something you suspect might be dangerous.
• After finishing the first act, you unlock the ability to respec your character and change their appearance infinite times for free at the mirror.
• After finishing the first act, you get an opportunity to change up your companions once, and if you don't like them, you can switch to hired mercenaries without stories, but they also don't have tags. There are also only a limited number of mercenaries, but you can resurrect them just like PC's.
• Combat is in a round-robin order, players and enemies go one after the other, so Initiative is of highly questionable use. It's only particularly useful to have one character with high initiative, and that's only so they get the first turn in combat. Initiative for other characters does not matter very much. This also makes the Wits attribute mostly only good for spotting things (but this can be boosted by the spell Peace of Mind.
• If a conversation is going to result in combat, you can stall it indefinitely by not clicking on (end) and freely re-position your 3 characters not in the conversation to places of tactical advantage. This is kinda cheesy though.
• Status effects on characters in conversation are paused, so this can be used to pre-buff a character about to engage in conversation you know or suspect will end in combat, then you can buff someone else right before switching to the first to end the conversation.
• You should always engage enemies at your level or lower whenever possible. Enemies one level higher can be beaten, but are much more dangerous. Avoid fighting enemies two levels or more than you are.
• If you keep running into enemies too high a level for you, explore in a different direction until you find level-appropriate enemies.
• The game is tough, but you probably shouldn't be dying 2-3 times a fight for every fight. If you find yourself dying so often that you keep running out of resurrection scrolls and money to buy more, consider reloading your saves (which you are making often, right) and re-trying fights until you can do them without dying. This not only saves you grief in the long run, but it helps you learn faster.
• Keeping your gear up to date level to level makes a HUGE difference. If you're a physical attacker, you always want an up-to-date weapon.
• The only difference between Tactician and Honor difficulties is that Honor has permadeath and deletes your single save file. It also auto-saves when someone in your party dies. It is not recommended to play Honor mode as your first (blind) playthrough, there are lots of ways to get screwed by things you might not have expected, and then there goes your entire playthrough. You have been warned.
• You can talk to NPC's to distract them, or turn their view cone for thievery.

Character Creation

• You have the choice between creating an Origin character or a custom character. The Origin characters have their own history with their own personal Tag allowing for custom interactions between the Origin character an NPC's, and their own individual quest, and they have a fixed name and gender (and a partly customizable appearance), but they can otherwise be customized as you choose. Origin characters don't have a personal tag or an individual quest, but can have their appearance fully customized.

• Character Presets are only suggestions. You can change pretty much everything from a preset. The only thing fixed by a preset, in fact, are the starting weapons found in the "Confiscated Weapons" chest.
  • Battlemage: One-Handed Axe + One-Handed Axe
  • Cleric: Mace + Shield
  • Conjurer: Wand + Shield
  • Enchanter: Staff
  • Fighter: Sword + Shield
  • Inquisitor: Two-Handed Hammer
  • Knight: Two-Handed Sword
  • Metamorph: Two-Handed Spear
  • Ranger: Bow
  • Rogue: Dagger + Dagger
  • Shadowblade: Dagger
  • Wayfarer: Crossbow
  • Witch: Dagger
  • Wizard: Wand + Wand

• Certain quests are unable to be completed without the Scholar tag. That is the only tag which has such a restriction. Red Prince, Sebille, and Fane all start with the tag, and having at least one of them in your group will help.
• Physical-damage parties are considered easier than magic-damage parties, because nearly nothing in the game resists physical damage. Magic is perfectly viable, though.
• Because of the physical and magical armor system, party configuration should be either 4 of the same type of damage, or 2 each of physical and magical damage. A party where 3 people do damage of one type and 1 person does damage of the other type is less effective because a single person won't chew through armor fast enough to be effective.
• Damage to armor is affected by resistances. For example, an enemy with 50 Fire Resistance and 0 Air Resistance will lose more armor when hit by an air-damage spell than a fire-damage spell of the same power.

Attributes

• Do not split your attribute points between two different damage-boosting abilities (Strength, Intelligence, Finesse), you can only deal damage in one way at a time (either physical or magical), and it cuts your damage output making you less effective at both than a specialist. Pick only one to focus on.
• There is a hard cap of 40 on attributes. Since they start out at 10, that means you can only put a maximum of 30 points into any one attribute (or 15 level-ups worth). There is only about enough XP in the game to reach level 21 or 22, so it would take the majority of your points to cap an attribute.
• Characters start out with 3 Memory slots and gain one free slot every two levels, meaning with no investment into Memory, at level 21, you would have a total of 13 Memory slots. Only one Unique item in the game has a boost to Memory, it does not appear on any other item.
• Because of skill cooldowns, casters will naturally want more Memory than physical attackers. Regardless, a Memory of more than 20-25 probably means you're not investing enough points into attributes which boost your damage.
• All regular skills require only one Memory slot. Source skills which require 2 SP to cast require two Memory slots, Source skills which require 3 SP to cast require three Memory slots, but those are the most powerful ones.
• Unless you're going for a very specific "maximum criticals" build (where you're trying to boost your critical hit chance as close to 100% as you can), don't invest in Wits for the purpose of boosting critical chance (and therefore damage), that point is better spent on one of the primary Attributes (STR, INT, FIN) instead, as it always gives +5% damage on every attack).

Combat Abilities

• The most powerful skills only require a minimum of 5 points into any Skill school, so unless you specifically want the 3-Source Point skill for that school, you may want to consider leaving the school at 3 points, which allows you to learn all but one of the skills in that school (not counting crafted skills). That said, the 3 SP skills are some of the most powerful in the game.
• Warfare is the go-to choice for boosting physical damage of any type, even daggers, bows/crossbows, and Necromancy spells. It's also the superior choice because it's a percentage-based boost, whereas the other damage abilities are additive. Max it before moving on to your other skills (other than what is needed for skill requirements).
• For primary casters using more than one element, Pyrokinetic and Aerothurge are not the ideal places to put ability points, because they give +5% to only fire damage or only air damage. Instead, that point would be better spent on Polymorph, and the resulting free Attribute point should go into Intelligence, which gives the same 5% boost, but to all magical damage types. If you're going for a single damage type though, you will want to maximize your damage by maxing out both, though (unless you hit the Attribute cap).
• Healing from Necromancy's passive bonus and Mosquito Swarm is "neutral" and does not damage Undead or living under the Decaying Touch status effect. Bloodsucker DOES still cause damage like regular healing, though.
• Avoid Retribution and Perseverance. They need to be maxed out to be of any use, which takes half your total Combat Ability points, crippling you everywhere else. Retribution is particularly crappy because enemies have much higher HP and armor than players, and even dealing 50% of their attack damage back to them isn't very effective. Perseverance is only triggered by a handful of status effects, and doesn't restore enough armor to matter without a crippling amount of points invested.
• Leadership grants decent bonuses to nearby allies, but it does nothing for the character who takes Leadership, and the 5-meter range requires other characters to be crammed very closely together. That limits the usefulness, and like the other defense abilities, heavy investment in Leadership sucks up a bunch of points which will lower your effectiveness at maximizing damage.

Civil Abilities

• Civil Abilities cap at 5 base points, but can be increased over the cap with bonuses from items. You only get a total of 6 Civil ability points throughout an average playthrough, so you can only max out one of them, and its advised to stick with a different one for each party member, and max out the chosen ability first.
• If you plan on having your chosen main character talk to most of the people, it's advised that they take Persuasion as their chosen civil ability.
• With the Pet Pal Talent you can talk to animals, and sometimes they have persuasion checks, so Pet Pal is often suggested as a Talent for your Persuasion character, although perhaps not enough to make it mandatory.
• Lucky Charm (free items in containers), Bartering (4% decreased purchasing price and increased selling price per point), and Thievery (pickpocketing and lockpicking) are essentially three different ways to increase your wealth.
• Avoid taking Sneaking and Telekinesis as Civil Ability points. Sneaking is of no use in combat, and not that difficult outside of combat, anyone can sneak without it. Telekinesis is only useful to invest in for a very specific gimmick build based around using TK to throw containers packed with as many things as possible at enemies to deal massive damage. If that's not your thing, skip it.

Some Good Talents

• Duck Duck Goose prevents enemies from performing Attacks of Opportunity on you. Since most enemies can do that, this is very helpful for certain builds - particularly Rogues and Shadowblades.
• Elemental Affinity lowers the AP cost of skills by 1 when standing in the appropriate element (to a minimum of 1 AP). You only get a fixed 4 AP per turn, so this is immensely helpful, such as to let you cast two 3 AP spells in one turn. Additionally, Magic Armor protects you from the damaging effects and statuses of surfaces.
• Executioner can only go off once per turn, and it requires your character to land the killing blow, but 2 extra AP, even intermittently. The only downside is that it is mutually exclusive with The Pawn, which is possibly even better than Executioner.
• Far Out Man gives 2 meters extra range for INT-based spells (touch-range spells excluded). This only works with magic Skills, not physical Skills.
• Living Armor replenishes your magic armor when you receive any healing.
• Lone Wolf doubles the value of each point invested into a primary attribute or combat ability. This allows you to be much more flexible and spread your points around to more areas, or to increase your points beyond the normal cap. Most people think that this is so powerful as to be broken. It does require a party size of only 1 or 2 characters, though.
• Opportunist lets you attack enemies who are in melee range and try to walk away.
• Pet Pal allows you to talk to animals and certain creatures. This can lead to discovering hidden items and certain Pet Pal exclusive quests. However, many of the animals stories or quests can be depressing.
• The Pawn gives you 1 AP's worth of free movement per turn. You don't have to spend it all at once, you can move a little, attack, then move a little more and attack again. You can use this every turn, so it will save you a lot more AP than Executioner will.
• What A Rush gives +1 AP when below 50% health, and once again, free AP is very helpful.

Talents to Avoid

• All Skilled Up and Bigger and Better trade a Talent point you get once every 4 or so levels in exchange for - in the case of "All Skilled Up - an Combat Ability point you get once every level and a Civil Ability point you also get about once every four levels. In the case of Bigger and Better, it's trading a Talent point for one level's worth of Attribute points, which is a very poor trade. These are only much use in Act 1 before you can respec.
• Ambidextrous is not that great since the scrolls you'd be using most often cost 1 AP already.
• Demon and Ice King effectively are their own counters - the resistance you get from one element is cancelled out by the other, so you're only really left with the +10% to Maximum resistance, which you will NEVER come close to hitting without a lot of luck with the randomly generated gear.
• Comeback Kid is a death resistance talent which heals you back up to 20% HP instead of dying. It doesn't trigger other "on death" Talents such as Morning Person or Unstable, and 20% health leaves you in range to be one-shot killed by most things anyway.
• Glass Cannon is a dangerously attractive Talent, but it's more a liability than anything else. The AI knows you will have Glass Cannon, and it is very aggressive at targeting you with hard crowd-control (CC) skills which can render you unable to act. However, this can be exploited to your benefit if you build the Glass Cannon with high HP and armor (and maybe the Walk It Off Talent as well) to create a tank to attract most of the enemy hits.
• Guerrilla is aggressively bad. Sneaking inside combat costs a staggering 4 AP - one entire turn's worth, and a regular attack costs 2 AP, so you're paying a total of 6 AP to do the damage of less than 3 AP's worth of normal attacks. It only adds damage for one Huntsman skill (Assassinate) and one Scoundrel Skill (Mortal Blow), and otherwise is only useful for sneaking up from outside of combat and unleashing your first blow.
• Leech heals you a little - about 5% of your maximum health - when you contact blood, consuming the puddle. The size of the puddle doesn't matter, it heals the same amount regardless. If you need to spend 1 AP to reach a blood puddle, you would be better off spending that amount of AP to use a potion to get healed for a lot more. If you have Warfare 2 or higher, Picture of Health is better for survival than this.
• Slingshot extends the range of your grenade throws by 5 meters, but the range is pretty much fine as it is, and grenades aren't that useful anyway.
• Torturer only applies to damage-over-time status effects, nothing else. So only Bleeding, Poisoned, Burning, Necrofire, and Ruptured Tendons. This is especially questionable since if you are able to get one of these to land, it's a sign that you can probably finish the enemy off before the extra turns come into play anyway. Ruptured Tendons does ignore armor and can't be dispelled, though, so it does synergize well with other damage skills which ignore armor. Torturer does combine well with Burning and the Spontaneous Combustion Skill, but a Talent which only works with one or two skills is of poor utility.

Crafting

• If an item, when right-clicked, does not have "Combine" as one of the options in the pop-up menu, it is not usable in crafting. Feel free to sell it.

Handy Recipes:

• • Empty Potion Bottle + Penny Bun Mushroom = Small Healing Potion
  • Small Healing Potion + Small Healing Potion = Medium Healing Potion (Repeat for better versions. This also works for armor potions)
  • Mortar & Pestle + Bone = Bone Dust
  • Mortar & Pestle + Stardust Herb = Stardust
  • Bonedust + Stardust = Pixie Dust
  • Small Rune + Small Rune (same type) + Pixie Dust = Medium Rune (Same Type. Repeat for better versions. the highest level rune will require Superior Pixie Dust )
  • Knife/Sword + Long Branch = Short Branch
  • Knife/Sword + Short Branch = Arrow Shafts (8)
  • Hammer + Nails = Lockpicks (4)
  • Cooking Pot + Campfire = Cooking Station
  • Elemental Skillbook (Fire, Earth, Air, Water) + Non-Elemental Skillbook (everything else) = Crafted skill [1] requiring one point in each skill school.
  • If one or both of the skillbooks is a Source skillbook, it makes a more powerful Source version of the skill, requiring 2 Memory slots and 2 points in each skill school.

Vendors

• If there's a vendor you plan to use a lot, it's worthwhile to boost their attitude towards you up to 100. You do this by giving them things without asking for anything. The amount you have to pay is not a lot, and it's fixed based on the vendor's level. It starts at about 100 gold for vendors in Fort Joy, and goes up to about 4750 gold at level 20, which is really cheap. The discount for maxed attitude is a substantial 20%.
• Vendors stock new skillbooks starting at Player Level 4, 9, and 16. It's not based on the vendor level.