Divinity: Original Sin II: Difference between revisions

== 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.

* 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 ==

* 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==

* 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 ==

* 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 ==

* 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 ==

* '''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 ==

* '''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 ==

** Elemental Skillbook (Fire, Earth, Air, Water) + Non-Elemental Skillbook (everything else) = Crafted skill [http://divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com/Crafted+Skills] 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 ==