Tips for beginners

[Madmonkey68]

Never played a Divinity Original Sin game so I'm a newbie. What tips can you guys recommend for new players like myself?
(I've not had much experience with turnbased combat either)

[Winter]

1. XP doesn't get split between party members- everyone gets XP equally. No reason to be afraid of the 4-char party.
2. Pay attention to the 2 armor types on mobs. There's physical armor which protects against physical attacks and some (mostly necromancy) spells. The other is magic armor which protects against most elemental spells. Many mobs will have a mix of both, though some only have one or the other. Losing all of an armor type leaves characters (your chars as well as npcs) vulnerable to all sorts of status effects that can impact range and accuracy (like blinded), lose turns (like knocked down or frozen), or damage over time (like poisoned or burning). Taking advantage of these can impact combat quite a bit.
3. A good balanced party will have 2 mainly physical damage dealers, and 2 mainly magical damage dealers. That and a mix of multiple elemental skills and physical attacks will allow for flexibility and dealing with most npcs. That having been said, there's nothing wrong with a part of 4 physical damage chars either- I've played through most of the content with a party just like that- finesse rogue, strength fighter, necromancer, archer.
4. Diversify, but specialize. Don't try to make each char do too many different things- pick their strong points and build on them; at the same time, if you make someone a one-trick pony (like rushing to 10 pyro books), they are going to be useless when you fight something immune (or even healing ) to fire. The exception to this may be summoning. If you are going to make a summoner, shoot for lvl 10; the power jump between lvl 9 summon and the lvl 10 incarnate is huge.
4. Hydro generally has your heals as well as freezing magic. Making things wet with rain makes it easier to freeze targets and shock/stun them :)
5. Earth fixes physical armor, and can do earth, poison, or physical damage. Oil spells slow movement, and except for flying mobs, everyone gets slowed by oil. Oil also boosts/spreads fire damage.
6. Turn-based allows you to take your time to decide what to do. Right click on NPCs and see what resists and immunites they might have. Some will even have vulnerabilities to some types of attacks.
7. Avoid Tactician/Honour on your first play through. Tactician is fun, but it there is a definite jump in combat difficulty between Explorer/Classic and Tactician.
8. It's by no means exhaustive, but there's a good set of example builds at https://divinityoriginalsin2.wiki.fextralife.com/Builds. Some are more straightforward than others, but many of them are good starting points for chars.

[dantès]

and

1) talk to everyone, and read(in-game letters, books) everything you can get your hands on

2) in the beginning, don't go fighting enemies above your level. try to stay within your level..

3) In fort joy(act 1).. take the time to explore the map... scavenge, steal, buy, trade your way to some armor and a decent weapon before you start picking fights.

[Chaoslink]

Weapon skills suck, just stack Warfare instead (even on archers or rogues).

Don't split between main damage scaling attributes in one build, Finesse, Strength or Intelligence. Just one.

Constitution sucks.

Probably other things. Those are the big bits for building your characters. As for the whole team, consider the damage type you deal and try to balance between magic and physical. A lone mage with three physical will find themselves struggling.

[Rave Pathfinder.]

Summoning skill and teleporting people are cracked.