SOME TIPS

[Michael]

Start on Silver difficulty.

The game is enormous, so only do the sidequests you feel like doing. Two exceptions to this: do the "Tutorial Blacksmith" and "Tutorial Runemaster" quests in Sloeford, the first town, so that you can actually access them. Also, you probably want to look up how to find and complete the quest for your class's unique mount.

Don't just activate every rune you see. Every time you level up a combat art with its rune, the cooldown time increases sharply. Be careful leveling up buffs, in particular.

Each class has three schools of Combat Arts; each school has its own independent cooldown timer, which applies to all arts in that school. Once you've got more than one Combat Art slot, you can equip Arts from two different schools and not have to worry as much about waiting for cooldowns.

Your personal skills can reduce cooldowns, improve damage, and unlock special bonuses on equipment. The "Focus" skills are incredibly good, especially since putting points into them grants you augmentations for your Combat Arts.

Do not take the Dual Wield skill along with Sword Weapons or Hafted Weapons skill; the bonuses do not stack. Just pick one.

ADD MORE TIPS PEOPLE

[Krosis Priest]

Side quests are actually worth doing, even the simple ones - the XP and gold rewards are usually unimpressive, but there's a decent chance you can get very good, even set (green) items from them over time.

If you want to do side quests, best "collect" all the quests from a town/area before you start doing them - it's fairly often that several of them will be in a similar area, or even in the same dungeon (and unlike Sacred 1, the quest item/target will not appear before you take the quest). Also, quests like "kill 20 kobolds" can then easily be done while doing others.

It is worth exploring areas way out of any quest target, and some of the most interesting side quests or hidden bosses are *far* from where the main quest tells you to go. These are worth looking for both for the reward, as well as IMO some of the most interesting and well-written quests.

Damage types are important (especially against stronger enemies), and it is good to have weapons/combat arts dealing different damage types ready at your disposal (imo at least 2 is good to have). Often it's fairly logical what damage type and resistance enemies have (e.g. everything deals and resists fire in the dragon tunnels, everything deals and resists poison in the swamps, undead are resistant to cold, mages deal and resist magic, dragons deal and resist fire).

[Michael]

[Roderick]

The third and the last tip aren't quite correct.

When creating your character, you can choose something that might be translated to "masters hand" or so... tooltip should go as following: If you activate it, regeneration of skills is reduced, but regeneration of ALL three trees is taken.
It is usefull if you want to use/specialize in only one apect.

Dual Wield allowes you to equip higher level weapons, increases attack speed and hit chance with one handed weapons, as long as you quip one in each hand. But every weapon may have special bonus relating to the weapon category. Hafted weapons like hammers might ignore armor, edged weapons like swords and axes might inflict special wounds (Deep Wounds, Open Wounds, Serious Open Wounds, Deadly Wounds).
1. Chances to actually trigger those specialities only rise with the appropriate weapon lore, dual wield doesn't do anythign to it.
2. Starting around item level 70 you'll need the mastery (75 hard points, no bonus counts for masteries) in that weapon lore to even use these specialities.
Note: They are nice to have, but no must, so you can go with Dual Wield for sure. Just don't be suprised when some weapons at higher levels have attributes in red that you can't use because Dual Wield doesn't unlock those.

Two huge tips from me:
1. Even if you play ranged and don't intend to get hit, consider Armor Lore. You are able to equip higher level armorand the regeneration malus of armor is "reduced". That doesn't mean it gos to zero, it can also go into negative. With light armor and a high Armor Lore, you actually boost your regeneration time.
2. Sacred 2 looks easy, but if you hoover over your character name in the inventory, you will find a "Survival Bonus". It rises (albeit slowly) when you ... well... don't die. Standing around doesn't do anything to it, you have to fight and not die. The higher the Survival Bonus, the higher you get a bonus to your attributs and the higher the ENEMY level will go. You won't notice that at early levels, but if you get to level 30 without dying, enemies should start to be one or two levels above you. Higher level enemies provide more xp and better loot! Later on f.e. level 130 (if you dare to play that far), enemies are 20 level above you and hell of a test whether you did build your char good or not...

Short tips for skills:
1. "Ancient Magic" sounds like only for magic, but non weapon based Combat Arts including physical damage (Meteor) also benefit from this skill, since it works on all damage channels.
2. Combat Disciplin raises the damage of all Combat Arts, and you can use the regeneration bonus with a single skill in a Combo.
3. Damage lore only works on none physical secondary effects. Like if your weapon has a chance to set things in fire, it will work for the burn dot triggerd by the fire. It WON'T do anything to weapon effects like bleeding (physical damage) or if your Combat Art has f.e. burning as own effect.

[Donitsi]

-If you want to use a bow or staff out side of maximum range hold CTRL down, click and hold down on a terrain first and then lead mouse on a target you want to hit. Holding CTRL down and clicking straight on an enemy may cause nothing to happen.

[Michael]

[Ch0Fak]

Blacksmith arts start kinda low at say for Anneal L58, Armor + 8.8 % and Defense Value of + 9.6 %.... now here is the kicker, You can take armor and weapons from that L58 and forge the Blacksmith arts in them from a L144 and use those items without penalty... even at level 128 the stats are at Armor + 32.5 % and Defense Value at + 36.2 %, Thats a huge jump. Those last values seem to be MaxValue as it has not changed from L128 to L144...
So at some point it will stop being of value but for now it is worthwhile.

[Michael]