Must-haves or bewares?

[e11]

I'm thinking of grabbing this during the summer sale. Are there any skills that are hugely useful, or ones that aren't worth the points? Are there weapon classes that are objectively better than others?

[Wovan]

1. Good choice. 2. Yes 3.No 4.Yes

Classic mode, anything is dandy and fine so you can enjoy the variety of choices as you're given.

Tactician mode, this is where the enemies are tough and your patience is tested.

I don't find the game impossible to win if you build wrong. There are plenty of "special arrows" and "grenade" that you can find to use on battles. Some gameplay styles like 2-man mages are definitely easier than others, some will take more persistance and time but still possible. As long as you don't stray off path and build obvious counter hybrid like ranger-fighter or give skills that don't work (weapon requirements) you can try anything you want. If you made too much an error, the game allows you to reset your abilities from a NPC near the quarter-end point.

And now for some actual useful tips: healing items are expensive and hard to find, so get a healer/way to sustain. You can only summon one unit per character, so don't be giving a single character several summons, unless you plan on dragging fights. Only the source hunters can equip "charisma" abilities which helps with relationship/price discount. Rangers have three skills that boost accuracy. Shield blocking value only becomes strong near the max level

[e11]

Thanks.

Does anyone else want to chime in?

[Dragon]

Yes it's worth buying, especially on sale, which makes it an amazingly good deal.

I recommend to put 1 point into Hydrosophist on every single character, and always put the Novice Hydrosophist healing skill on each one of of your characters. Having 4 separate heal skills is always a great idea.

Likewise, if you have a (or more than one) Man-At-Arms character, you will always want the Cure Wounds heal skill on that character (in addition to the Hydrosophist healing skill).

And you should also put a Summon Creature skill on every single one of your characters, as that will give your party 4 more meatshields to take damage on the battlefield instead of having your characters take that damage themselves. Again, this is always a good idea on all parties, regardless of what type of character builds you are using.

For the most part, no, one weapon type is not objectively better than the other, but it could be argued that a bow and/or crossbow equipped with Charming Arrows is objectively better than most other stuff in the game, as Charming Arrows are vastly OP and can easily win victories for you in any battle which you are able to use them successfully (i.e. as long as the enemies you shoot them at don't resist the charm effects).

You have to spec your guys sensibly based on what weapon and skills they have though. I.e. for mages you want high intelligence, for rangers you want high dexterity, for Man-At-Arms warrior you want high strength, etc.

You will learn how to do that stuff as you play the game. Just think about what you are doing, and don't recklessly dump points into random stats; find out what a stat means before you dump any points into it.

[Reality]

This game isn't so hard that you can't try what you want and make it work on a blind playthrough, even on Tactican difficulty. I think that the best things in the game are a little too Good and prevent if from being one of my favorite CRPGs for tactical combat

Saving Throw Reduction
Divine Light, Drain Willpower, Mass Disease, Infect

First 20 hours
Hard CCs
Stun, Knockdown, Freeze, Blind, Petrify, Charm*

Soft CC
Slow, Oil, Fire/Ice/Electric Ground effects

Line of Sight Blockers
Smokescreen, Ice Wall

Super Aggros
Charm, Summons, Smokescreen, Icewall

Weapons - Everything works well enough, generally. I think the technical order of preference is

Crossbow - Crit stacking at higher levels, CC through special arrows at low levels
Bow - CC for less AP, but damage generally slightly more on skill cooldown / bully
2 Hand - Crit Stacking at higher levels, subtle benefit of extended range is saving AP
Wand - Pretty much only for stat boosting not direct use.
Dagger - Ease of equipping for "Mage" charathers, dependent on full AP reductions / skill
1 Hand - Shield (esp Con bonus) is nice, but you do miss the raw damage.
Staff - Also for stat boosting, but allows access to "stances"

You don't really need to fully develop all charthers - if really serious.. any "Mage" charather can realisically reach STR ranks for 2-hands. Bow/crossbow have the highest equipment requirement and cause shortages if going INT/DEX (I intend to have the game done before reaching levels where +3 equipment instead of +2 is craftable).

Bewares-
Using spells for damage other than the Mastery Level spells - In First 20 hours it feels okay, but later on you'll notice that if you get your "mage" charather to just barely reach equip requirments of an on-level dagger (or 2 hand) they can easily outdamage what they do with spells - spells are for status effects and crowd control first and foremost.

The Bodybuilding Saving Throw
- The WIllpower saving throw status effects (especially hard status effects charm and stun) are generally the most powerful, because Drain Willpower is the best Saving Throw Reduction in the game, and easy to obtain on multiple charathers. Body Building has its own hard status effects (knockdown, blind, petrify, freeze). The problem is the Saving Throw Reduction is not as powerful - Divine Light is ONLY available at charather creation - So you can only have it on 2 charathers as opposed to 4. It has shortish range, but can hit multiple targets, unlike Drain Willpower. The reduction isn't quite as ridiculous either (but it's generally good enough). Additionally, you have to beat a bodybuilding saving throw to land Divine Light in the first place. Infect is the worst of the 4. since it has the shortest range and you only get 1 chance to get it for 1 charather. Mass Disease - can hit multiple targets and has extreme range, and is also easy to obtain multiple charathers but the game after level 12 is kinda easy anyway. The benefit of them - many "boss" enemies have hard-coded immunity to most hard CC - but Knockdown works on many thought not all ""CC proof" bosses, such as the final boss, and Blind works on EVERYTHING.

Armor -
Original Sin uses a "threshold" based armor system for physical damage- on a first playthrough it makes absolutely no sense, and (in my opinion) actually further encourages the CC everything glass cannon approach. But if you manage to learn it, you CAN play the game more traditionally - the +20 armor buff of the earth spell looks useless but it doesn't mean you take 20 less damage - if it puts you over a threshold you get a huge percent based damage reduction - it retains value midgame and lategame due to this. Armor itself almost always has terrible values if you vendor it instead of crafting it yourself as well. If you don't learn it... you will see the "1 shot" thing people always complain about all the time and probbably end up playing this with a CC them so they just don't attack mindset...

AP for movement
Until you get high AG on your charathers, your AP per turn is terrible, and this is inhibited by the fact that you also get AP increases for distance per point of AG - 1 AP could mean 3 feet, or 15 feet depending on AP. This kind of also applies to enemies, but they eventually get AP above your maximum of 15. This means lots of different things - in the first 20 hours, when enemy AP is similiar to yours - the "Slow" and "Oil" status effects are almost as good as Hard CC, because the enemy suffer from AP to move as much as you do. Later on - "Slow" effect on AP per turn barely matters to enemies with one exception - If they are MOVING, it raises their AP per Foot , so melee enemies are still quite affected by it. However Lategame Ranged enemies and melee enemies already in range will barely be phased and still get their full amount of swings.

Archers
A melee charather will want to get most of the Man at Arms skills, but an archer/crossbow doesn't REALLY need the actual marksman skills. Special arrows are not skill based and IGNORE accuracy checks. The special arrows inflict chance is also always (100% - enemy resist), while with spells/man at arms you can often get your inflict chance over 100% (so an enemy with 40% resist fighting a 160% inflict chance will always be affected by Battering Ram, but Knockdown Arrows will only work 1/3 of the time! - Unfortnately for balance.... in the first 20 hours many enemies have only 1 or 2 willpower/bodybuilding and you can use the accuracy skipping CC at will, and at the time enemies finally get the ability to resist status in later areas.... The arrows just transform into damage dealing mode - Both through the ludicrous power of the expert skills, and because you'll have massive flat multipliers by raising the bow/cross skill weapon skill itself to at least 4 (if not 5) at this time.

I would say that

Witchcraft - you can't use the good stuff until level 6 (about 2/3 through first town's associated areas) but once you have it is comically over the top.
Scoundrel - massively simplifies the annoying non-combat parts of the game such as trap traversal and gearing up in town. Recomend on one charather only.
Man at Arms - Good all stages - worth on non melee charathers
Earth - Good all stages - in my opinion having it on both startign charathers causes the easiest earlygame
Fire - Piggybacks off of Earth - throw fire at Oil and profit - Falls off quickly after you reach second town, but does have the top-tier Smokescreen spell.
Water - exists for convenience, for the love of god when you get Water of Life, use it instead of Regeneration to avoid voice lines.
Air - Very good first 20 hours / earlygame, but falls off once you can CC multiple enemies at a time instead of 1 by.
Marksman - not neccesary for the power of Archers, but yes, at level 12, you can get it to 1 turn kill basically anything and the long cooldown of Arrow Spray doesn't really matter since you can just have the archer charather do other stuff (status arrows) while waiting to use it again... assumming the fight even lasts that long.

Broken Skills
Drain Willpower > Rapture > Water of Life > IceWall > Smokescreen > All Summons > Oil