Divinity II
- The gameplay is similar to WoW, minus auto attack, Third person mode, click to swing your weapon and use 1-8 for your special abilities.
- The game is insanely hard for the first 10-13 levels. This gets easier when you get Arben's sword, which is a quest reward on the main path. Just play it safe, kite monsters away from the group and don't charge in head first.
- The bow sucks - 2h swords are awesome
- There's no falling damage
- Weapons do two forms of damage, normal damage and magic damage. Sell or upgrade weapons that cannot do magic damage. Strength improves the normal damage you do by a half a percent, while INT is two to one for magic damage, making INT the super stat. Intelligence and Stamina are really all you need if you keep your inventory lean.
- The expansion is less monsters and more puzzles if that's your type of thing
- Try to gather all the plants/minerals. They come in handy later.
- Find a guide on item enchantment online. I didn't realize how to do this until I was nearly done with the game.
- After completing Broken Valley you can respec skill points (but not stat points).
- Ignore Wisdom and Mindread and put your points into useful things instead, you'll hit the level cap easily even with no points in either. I played a sword & shield character and put most of my points into Whirlwind, Charge Attack, Bleed, Life Leech, Mana Leech, Heal, Jump Attack, and Thousand Strikes, and it worked great, but since you can respec the game rewards experimentation, so try stuff out.
- Mindread everyone as soon as the option appears. If it comes back on someone you've mindread earlier, mindread them again.
- Do everything in Broken Valley before you leave, because it'll be a long time before you come back.
- After leaving Broken Valley you get infinite sources for every enchanting and alchemy ingredient except malachite gems, so don't worry overmuch about hanging on to them. Conversely, malachite gems are needed for the best enchantments in the game - get them whenever you can and hang on to them.
- Talking to an enchanter NPC will remove from your inventory the blueprints for all enchantments you don't already know and add them to your enchanting list. Ditto alchemist NPCs and recipes. Use this to save inventory space (and determine which blueprints/recipes you already know and can thus safely sell).
- Hang on to items with good enchantments on them. Even if you don't plan to use them, you can strip the enchantments from them at an enchanter and apply them to something you are using.
- The only enchantment on jewelery that stays useful past the first hour of the game is Healing Aura, and it is amazing. However, it also requires a malachite gem regardless of how powerful the enchantment is.
- the Flying Fortresses are optional; they have some nice, but not vital, loot, so if you hate doing them don't worry about it
- If you go mindread-heavy in the expansion you'll end up with an XP debt in the hundreds of thousands. This is normal and you'll pay it off very quickly once you get into the combat-heavy areas.
- When you start the escort mission at the very end of the expansion, check your skill bar - you have some new abilities there that will help a lot.