Gothic 2 Tips and Tricks

A large, detailed guide filled with various bits of information to help with your gameplay experience including special secrets, tips, tricks, a glitch or 2, and almost anything worth noting I can continously add to the Guide.

A good start

Alright so you begin at good old Xardas' Tower. The room he reads in will have a stone tablet, bookstands, and a item or two there. Read all the book stands, punch Xardas just once to get him off said bookstands to read, and loot.

Upstairs he has a key, more bookstands, and an Alter of Beliar. The Beliar Alter asks you to permanantly sacrifice HP/Mana for gold, I honestly wouldn't recommend it.

At the bottom level you got herbs, a STR Belt (put it on, duh) and some other supplies. Okay well right behind the tower, you can find a skeleton with some goodies.

Abit up forward a small lake and goblin guarding a tunnel, walk around the lake first around the tree's to find a bow and some arrows, very useful! If you go down the tunnel you'll have a goblin or 2 to fight, and some young field raiders. Save before taking those raiders though as they can be lethal to newbies. Loot every mushroom you find too, their tasty.

Eventually the tunnels will take you to a valley filled with young monsters and a friend from Gothic 1, talk to him and unlock a dialogue option for getting into town. After you do what you want down there make your way up again and continue the path way.

You got some young wolves, goblins, and bloodflies along the way but they're weak. The Bandits however want you specifically and you best save before approaching any guy in the wilderness because most bandits wear normal leather clothing. There is a man in exotic armor from Gothic 1 who'll help you and give you a nice weapon.


Anyway after all that you'll meet a farmer and some sheep, tell the first guy you killed the bandits, tell Lothar you want clothes and do all his jobs till the clothes cost 30 gold pieces. Buy them. There's also a merchant on a bench who can offer you a document to let you into town, but don't take it. He's bad news.

Next up we got a pirate named Gregg, offer him the Farmer clothes, you'll get EXP and 50 gold coins. As for how to get into town? Well Lester (the first friend you found) told you finding 10 of the same plant and showing it to the guards will do the trick, but there's another secret way that will earn you extra EXP. I'll mention it in another bit I add later called Nostalgia Bonus

Get a Job!

Alright so you probably figured out how to get into the upper quaters of Khorinis, Mercenaries, Magician, or Militia. But wait, you got to do something special to join Militia, you gotta get a job.

Even if Militia/Paladin isn't your ideal route, it'd still be good to get a job. It gives you access to special skills and a way to make some money, get some EXP too, so let's take a look below.

Carpenter: Can't get this job but easy to get his approval. Go get blessed by the Water and Fire mages in town and don't have a bounty on your head.

Merchant: Another job you can't have but easy to earn approval. Just get the man his money. You can shake down the tramp for the money with threats of selling her clothes, or pay for her (You get wine and happy points with the Carpenter), if you do extort the money, don't let the guy know or he'll claim she stole it from him and take it for himself.

Alchemist: Automatic approval, if you wanna be his apprentice you gotta give him like 1 of each herb, thankfully the begining of the game made that pretty damn easy (Xardas tower has most of it) This guy will pay you gold ONLY for Dark Mushrooms and Digger Meat, goodies that can permanantly increase your stats. He even explains he basically scammed you after about 250 mushrooms or so later, what a prick. Honestly a horrible job option, as you'll make the least money with this job, and don't even need to be his Apprentice to learn Alchemy from him. If you learn just 1 recipe from any other trainer, which have 2 options for (3 if you pick the Mage path)

Blacksmith: Okay this one is actually tough but thankfully optional. He wants you to either fetch him an Orcs weapon, or solo an entire gang of bandits. Orcs are extremely powerful and shouldn't be messed with...but thankfully there's a cave to the Left of the exit that has the merchants there's a cave with an orc weapon in the ground and some bandits ahead. You can snatch that OR buy one from Cipher (SMOKE WEED EVERYDAY!) Hopefully he wouldn't have glitched and auto equiped the axe. The horde of bandits are a nightmare to find though so just do the axe thing.

In truth, Blacksmithing actually nets you with more Gold, more quickly and it'll only cost you about 2 LP. I heard folks finding a way to constantly replenish their Raw Steel supply without chapter advancing but I never figured that out. Even then though, it still nets you the most, and the most quickly.

And finally Hunter: My favorite of the group to be honest. Learn how to skin and you can use it throughout the entire game to earn money to sell at full price to Bosper. If This isn't you're style though, you could still earn the approval by finding his stolen bow (In the sewers, which I'll mention in another chapter), but also if you learn Skinning, you can do a quest involving a black troll.

So there's your options, Alchemist, Smith, or Hunter. In truth it's not really important which job you pick, it doesn't dictate your path or anything so you can be a Mage Blacksmith if you wanted.

Weapon Training

Alright so here's a a strange subject to talk about. Gothic 2 is abit weird with it. But I'll try my best to explain how this all works. There are 3 levels. Untrained, Skilled, and Master, each level increases your attack speed and improves attacks. The exception is magic.

Melee Combat: Melee damage is a combination of both Weapon Damage, and Strength Damage. What complicates this is you will only do a fraction of your expected damage. In order to do full damage you need to score a critical hit. This is where the trainning comes in, your skill % is an indicator for how often you land that critical hit. You can knock out most NPC's with your melee weapon and decide if you want to kill them.

1-29 is unskilled, 30-59 is Skilled, and 60-100 is Master. A special thing to note is you cannot master say 1handed without becoming skilled in 2handed, ditto for the Archery skills. There's always a 30 point gap between them at most. So for example if you have trained to get 70 1handed, you'll have also trainned for 40 2handed. This makes it quite expensive in Learning Points. The exception to this rule however is special things increasing that skill. For exampe, a combat book for each melee skill pops up later on in the game that gives you 3% increase for free.

Training beyond 60% is for the most part not needed but if you do have it at 100%, that means you will always do full damage. Going beyond 100% however does nothing.

But which is better? 1h or 2h? I always saw 1h to be better but there's no wrong choice between them.

Note: There's about 3 or so different Swords that require Dexterity to use. These however still use your Strength for additional damage, not Dexterity

Archery Combat: This has it differently. Arrow/Bolt damage always does full damage and is treated as critical hits. The training to improve the skill lets you has you hit more frequently, but even at 100% you could miss due to special problems, like if there's someone infront of the target. Archery is always fatal so you cannot knock them down with this, only kill. Dexterity increases the damage you do with Archery weapons as well.

Which is better? Depends on your build, if you want a STR build only, Crossbows at least offer a ranged attack option. Arrows however are much more common and I think Bows in the long run will do more damage.

Note: Crossbows Require Strength to equip, but require Dexterity for bonus damage

Magic Combat: Magic is in my opinion one of the worst combat styles. Unlike the other 2 you essentially must be a Fire Mage to specialize in magic. But because of the amount of combat you must plow through, you'll have spent a good deal of Learning Points into Strength and a Weapon Skill. There are 6 Circles of magic you can learn.

Mages use Learning Points to increase Mana, unlock Circles of Magic, and learn how to create Runes. Besides a very, very rare rune spell found, you must learn to create the Runes to cast the spells in the circle you unlocked. As you can imagine, this gets very hungry for Learning Points.

To create the Rune, you need a blank rune slot, a copy of the spells scroll, and it's ingredients. The Blank Runes themselves are pretty uncommin and finite, so you need to have a general idea on what you want and need. The easiest way to do this is to dedicate your runes for powerful spells as if you see weaklings, you can most likely kill them in melee combat anyways. Personally, I always found Summon Skeleton to be a very useful spell to abuse.

Spells are always lethal, and unlike the others, you cannot increase the damage they do. Spell Scrolls, however are different, no matter how powerful it is, they always cost 5 mana to cast. Using only scrolls though isn't a perfect plan though as it can not only get expensive, but the good ones are limited/finite.

Alternatively, I believe Paladins actually get Runes they can use without learning Circles of Magic. But they are very specific and for the most part nothing worthwhile.

How does Damage work?

Alright so we covered how your stats effect your weapon in the previous page, so this is about damage.

Let's use a Stick weapon as an example for this, one of the first items you can pick up. The Stick does 10 Damage + Your STR (Which is 10 in the very beginning, or 15 with the belt.)

10 + 15 = 25

Now the complication is you only do 10% of that damage if the attack is NOT a critical hit, or 5 damage minimum (Whichever is higher.) Crits do 100% or again, the 5 damage (Whichever is higher.) Now what happens next is your damage will be subtracted by the enemies Defense rating related to the type of damage. The Civilinas in Khorinis' clothing gives them 10 defense.

1/10th of 25 is 2-3 vs 10 armor. Now because of that minimum rule, you will always do 5 damage.
All 25 vs 10 armor will be 15

As mentioned earlier Arrow/Bolt/Magic damage is always critical hits. It'll be their max damage minus the defense rating of the target.

Note: Plot related characters are typically unkillable so you will never be able to hurt them, regardless of how high your damage output is.


"So why do the Civilians do so much damage?"
Well, originally they didn't. The most common complaint back then was that the game was too easy, so NotR tried to fix that by giving alot of enemies massive power ups, as well as hindering your stat enhancing progress. The reason Civilians do so much damage is because they have 100-200 STR and around 30% weapon skill.

Just to make things worse, Almost all NPC's also have 1000 Mana and access to all levels of runes. So they won't run out of mana anytime soon. Including the Seekers.

While I can't confirm this, I believe the Monsterss are powered up, although not as much as NPC's.

Monsters and Ground levels

Gothic has been around for many years and back in the day obvious tricks and glitches were difficult to take care of. This trick will teach you how to kill monsters while they can't fight back.

The majority of monsters can only attack you if your on the same ground level as them. So if say you hopped ontop of a few tree branches large enough to support you without making you fall when making your attack animations, you can attack monsters with say a bow or spells without fear of retaliation.

You will also notice if your out in deep water you cannot attack, the same is true for monsters. They will follow you into the water so lure them to the deep end and then nudge to the water level where you can unsheath your weapon. They will sit there and take your abuse till death.

WARNING: If you use the deep water trick on NPC's, it'll instantly kill them.

Incase you do notice, I copied and pasted this from my Gothic 1 tips and tricks guide. They never fixed this mostly.

How to kill The Black Troll

In chapter 2, this guy in the Mercenary faction thinks you're still a loser, even if you got a proper class now. Well he'll give you a challenge, kill a Black Troll and bring back the fur to prove it!

While you're at it there's an "Herb Witch" who wants a rare item that only spawns near him. It's useless to you but at least you can earn extra EXP here.

Well to simply put it, you have no chance in hell. Not unless you decided to play dirty and/or happen to find a Shrink Monster spell which will severely weaken said troll. Summon spells can probably work too.

After that the Mercenary will make you an offer for the fur, if you reject it he'll just say F you and keep it anyways (THen you can beat him senseless to take it back), personally I just take the offer, beat him up and take it back anyways.

Nostalgia Bonus and some special dialogue bits

Okay so there's at least 2 events I know that trigger a Nostalgia Bonus. Triggering these give bonus exp and special dialogue lines.

The first bit involved sneaking your way into the town. I think the reason this is a Nostalgia bonus is because in the first game there was a bug you could exploit to sneak/force your way into town involving drawing your sword to make them unable to talk, or shapeshifting.

To earn this Bonus however, you need to walk around the town and along some path way until you reach a cliff and jump into the water. Obviously you should save before doing this cause not all monsters will be as gentle as the ones you fought earlier. Anyway hop into the water and swim onto the docks, there Lares (from Gothic 1 again) will address you. This seems nearly impossible without cheating as you're incredibly fragile and easy to kill for many enemies that'll be along the way.

Alternatively, and much more easily: You can actually find a portion of the wall short enough to jump onto. The dialogue implies you took the dangerous, watery route. So while not an actual cheat/exploit, I'd say it's more of an oversight.

The second involves escorting Diego out of the Valley of Mines, you do this in Chapter Two. After you find Diego he'll ask you to escort him to the route you had taken to enter the valley. Well if you lead him there, walk past it towards some orcs you'll find a giant wooden machine built to haul goods up and down. This was where you and Diego first met, when you first came to the Colony/Valley in Gothic 1, also while you're there, there is a bag Diego stashed around there with 1,000 gold. He's gonna need you to help him get that later so grab it now.


Okay now here's where I'll mention how to get some funny bits of Dialogue.

If you join the Fire Mages and go to the New Camp, Lee will burst into laughter.

If you become a Fire Mage (not just a novice) you can go to the big ass ship the docks have and hassle the Paladins to let you on it. Trolling at it's finest as they have to kill anyone who tresspasses on the ship, but they can't even think about touching a fire mage.

If you do the Nostalgia bonus for Lares, his line is pretty funny.

I think the VA for Bloodwyne was fired or something mid recording because if you clear a certain area of minecrawlers for him and keep the conversation going he keeps crying the same line again and again.

Raven seems pretty offended if you tell him you're not the champion of Innos

If you go to the New Camp, talk to Cipher (SMOKE WEED EVERYDAY!) and find out Cipher's weed was stolen and ask around to find out Dar stole it. If you tell Cipher you wont so much as get funny lines, just a pissed off pot head beating the hell out of another pot head.

Gotta find the missing people? Try asking Lord Andre

There's plenty more for our Snarky hero to say but these are just a few worth hearing.

Food Bonuses

There's a small number of foods that can give you permanent bonuses to stats, you need to go through ALOT of these however so exactly which ones are hard to tell but these are the ones I know of. I also added 2 special foods that grant the bonus right off the bat.

Thekla's Soup heals you for 20 HP but gives 1 STR, you can get up to 3 servings
Coragon's Special Brew gives you +3 HP and +1 Mana. You can only get 2 as far as I know.
Apples, 25 of them should do the trick for some STR
Dark Mushrooms, 50 of these and you can keep eating them by 50 for extra mana
Diggers Meat, It's suggested that this can give you extra HP but I never managed to confirm this one

Finding out exactly how many of anything can give you stats is of course incredibly tedius as you need to power through the stock animation for eating 25-50 times before results are revealed and NOT every food does this. You don't have to eat 25-50 in a row, (though it helps with keeping track)

Apples are pretty common to find, you can find plenty on people you beat on.

Dark Mushrooms are also an item one of the masters on Khorinis wants but the reward is only gold. I'll go into more details on that in the next part. You can find these scattered throughout the entire game so it should be easy to find. Some people might drop 1 or 2 too.

Thekla is a Farmer Girl at Onars Farm, in the same building as Jarvis and Bulco. You can get 2 servings by defeating Bulco once, and the second by doing a quest for her. The third serving requires you do a quest as a Mercenary.

For Coragon you need to give him Lomars Ledger and his stolen silver. You get the Ledger by mugging the guy, which won't provoke the law, and find his silver in the sewers.

How to join the Thieves Guild Good/Bad

That's right folks, a Thieves Guild exists in this game. Let's dive into the details.

Lord Andre offers to let you cut out the middle man involving getting a job to join the Militia if you destroy the thieves guild. By accepting this though you need to continously update with him to avoid failing this quest and suffering the results. By having this quest pop up, if you don't make a DAILY report, he'll eventually find and kill them all himself. So avoid Andre about skipping the Jobs thing.

Brazen Thief, one of the merchants has his purse stolen by a idiot thief who took it broad daylight! He's called Renguru or something like that. Find him and confront him by pressing your unsheath weapon button while talking. Instead of running away like he's scripted he'll pull his out demanding you put yours away. Do so and talk to him before he can run. Now 2 options pop up. Let him off but take his gold, OR turn him in.

If you turn him in you get 100 gold reward, and a Hitman will come for you, you pissed off the thieves guild. Let him go and you 'fail' the quest but earn a brownie point.

Next up is Joe, poor Joe. This guy thought it was a good idea to look into those locked towers when he saw a door open and somebody locked up behind him, leaving him stuck in the tower by the nicer Tavern. One of the named Militia men has the key.

Nagur, a guy in the corner of the crappy tavern at the docks has a special job for those sent by the barkeep (Whom you can negotiate the info prices down to 6 gold), just do his job and you're good.

This is a really hard one to find but there's a group of bandits in one of the caves who have weird types of fish. I know this really doesn't help unless I give details on WHICH cave and WHERE but that's why it's so hard! SOMEWHERE there's a cave that has a group of bandits with weird fish containing items, specifically a message from the fish merchant, confront him but let him off.

The Innkeeper of the Sleepy Moneybag (Subtle...), she's a very special case. She owes a certain money lender alot of gold and if somebody were to give her the book,They'd get brownie points AND a special key which I will talk about in the Thieves Guild Island spot.

I believe you need to please 4 out of 5 people to get the Barkeep at the docks to tell you someone wants to see you. Atilla to appear FRIENDLY and give you the key. Turning in any one person will make the guild try to assassinate you. After dealing with Atilla, regardless of how, you can find the guild in the sewers and join them. SO to do it the quickest way? Turn in Renguru or whatever his name is and just deal with Atilla. He's fairly tough though so be ready. As a warning though, doing it this way makes them charge alot of money (early game expensive I mean) to train you.

Gamebreaking Scrolls

If I remember correctly the game before adding the expansion would have you need a large amount of mana to cast spell scrolls but this is no longer a factor.

To basically make this simple, while you can swing a sword/axe around or use a bow, spell scrolls are obscenely powerful now, having the advantage of only costing 5 mana to cast even the most powerful spell, at the expense of only being usable once.

Because of this and you DO start the game with 5 or 10 mana, and the fact you can immediately buy some of the most powerful scrolls in the game in the very begining, you can have a serious game breaker insantly.

Well exactly what scrolls are game breakers you may ask? I barely even have to tell you as the name of some scrolls clue you in well enough. But one exceptionally useful one I personally favor are the summon scrolls, all of them. You can only safely use them in the wilds as they WILL attack all living targets except you but they will tear apart your enemies with relative ease. The only exception is the skeleton goblin and the wolf one as they are the weakest of the bunch. But Summon Skeleton? That can rival a group of Bandits. Summon Golem/Demon? That's just overkilll, I save these for the vital fights later on in the game. Warning, casting these summon scrolls leaves you open to abuse so cast them ahead of time and be aware the monsters don't stay for very long. They also instantly die if you interact with them, effectively desummoned.

Okay okay, but how does one get these scrolls? Well my friend, you can purchase these from a merchant in Khorinis as early as Chapter One. Better have some gold though as these suckers aren't cheap and you'd be wise to swing by the shop again in every chapter as new ones will pop up.

The mighty alien dwarf message!

Gothic 2 when you go back to the penal colony you will see this large wall blocking something. The NPC's say orc hordes must be behind it. Well it turns out you can actually climb it! But behind it there's nothing but a message board made by a being called "The mighty alien dwarf".

You can cheat and use the K command (with Marvin activated) to just pass though the wall but it is possible to get over it.

A Strange Game Over Cutscene

Ok you probably never tried this but if you swim out into the ocean, with the obvious intention of just swimming away from the islands you will get a series of texts taunting you, you might even hear a monster sound. If you keep going you get a Cutscene where a sea monster snatches you while your swimming, down into the depths.

I originally never found this in my game, never thought of trying it and thought the text taunts were purely flavor. One day I heard about this and tested it. Test Confirmed.

The Thieves Guild's SECRET TREASURE!

The Thieves Guild looks pretty crappy eh? Well guess what? There's actually a secret treasury you can find and pillage. Downside? It's safely hidden and needs a specific key.

Okay so what do you learn? Well looting the chests in the Sewers has one call you out and mention this was just a mere taste of their true wealth.

Well if you pleased that Innkeeper she gave you a bag "It is the key to the gates of wealth.", she basically gave you the key to all of her friends wealth worth SO MUCH MORE then what she owed because you cleared her debt. Okay so to do that, you need to get the Money Lenders book and give it to her. Save before doing that because I think you can hand it to the Carpenter and one barkeep to earn EXP, free lockpicking lessons, and a mana boosting beer, get those and buy it back, it's a tad expensive though. This doesn't always work though so just save before handing the book over to anyone.

Alright let's talk about WHERE the loot is, save in advance by the way. Well it's on an island, swim directly ahead from the docks. You'll get a scary message suggesting you best turn back but you're usually fine. There's an island full of lizards and a cace. This is it, BUT watch out, the tunnel is booby trapped. You need to find a secret switch to turn it off, which I believe is one of the lamps in the cave.

And there ya have it, the entirety of the thieves guild's treasure. The guild will never find out you robbed them blind either so don't be scared.

Quarhodron's Answers and Puzzles + Claw of Beliar

Okay so in the NotR zone when you reach towards the end and persue Raven, you need to answer questions for a ghost to get the password to progress. The answers are as follows...

The Guardians of the Dead
The Warriors Caste
The Priests
THe Warriors Caste
The Scholars
The Healers
I can't possibly know that

Next there's a very obnoxious death trap puzzle Hit the right combo of buttons to proceed. Save your game NOW! Just Do it okay. I think the combo was the first one, the last one, and then the middle, in that order. Be careful not to hit the same button twice or that's wrong and you die. Hit the wrong combo and you die. SO save now before you mess with these puzzles.

There's a second puzzle where the floor is pitch dark, light a torch and carefully navigate through, exit through the entrance to the right, not left or middle, those are death traps.

The room with 3 doors is actually safe, the dead ends lead to chests and statue golems.

Final puzzle, Stand in the middle spot, talk to the ghost and just have him hit a lever, any lever.

Okay so let's talk about the Claw of Beliar, it can be a 1hander or 2hander, it depends on which skill you have is the highest around the time you aquire it I believe. Right off the bat, Mages cannot actually use the Blade, instead to "Improve the Blade" you tribute it for 1 Rune of your choice, the runes are very powerful and there's like 1 for each level. The first being a ensnare spell to make enemies stuck, second draining 100 HP to heal you for 100 I believe, and so on.

For those of us who keep the blade, to maximize the power of the sword, you will need a large level, and you will need to sacrifice 100 HP. A heavy price to pay but a fully upgraded Claw as a 2hander has these stats. I believe the level cap for the sword is 50.

120 Damage
50% chance for a bolt of lightning to strike a random enemy (Not always the one your attacking) This does 100 Magic Damage

I'm not sure if the stats would be different as a 1hander, but beyond these bits of info, there is no listed STR Requirement, if it exists, it's low, and it applies your STR to damage as if it's a normal weapon.

Let's say you want your mage to use the sword, well you'll need to do abit of cheat coding. Hit the "B" Keyboard button, type Marvin, Hit "B" again, and hit F2, enter the phrase, which will auto fill your command "Edit Abilities" Now, what you need to do is type Guild. The Mages number is 4, change that to a 2 "Milittia" Pray to a Beliar Shrine and upgrade the sword, it gets powered up and you get the weapon. Be sure to repeat the process to set yourself back to Mage by turning your new 2 into a 4.

You can also Edit your level and stats to fully upgrade the sword for free, if you wanted to. No judgements in this Guide folks.

[Tomha]

I haven't messed with Gothic 2 in a really long time but yeah, I'm gonna have to oppose the Beliar Shrines. Sure the gold is nice in the beginning, but there's a lot of ways to make money in the game. Any permanent increase to stats is priceless.

[Local Jerk]

You can only pray at Innos statues for health a limited number of times. So there's only so much health to be gained from them. And trust me, you need all of it.

[Ghostica]

Praying at beliar status is definitely worth it, just numbers really.

You get 500 gold for 10 HP (number on the dialog is different, you actually lose 10 not 3). Then you can pray at Innos status for 50 gold and get 2 HP back every day. That means after 5 days of praying you basically got back all your HP and are up 250 gold. Just good business really.

[Local Jerk]

Lol, the author of this guide needs a guide himself. non-critical damage isn't 10% of critical damage, it's just the weapon's damage without any strength.

[Alphadron]

The bandits with the strange fish for that Thieves' Guild invitation quest are located behind Akil's farm - once you go up the stairs, turn left instead of right and hug the mountainside, there will be a cave there with a bunch of bandits, the fish and the letter required to snitch on the fish merchant.
It's also the same farm Nagur sends you to, conveniently.

[Bloodwyn]

For Brazen Thief, if you turn Renegaru in Atila won't show up to kill you, you have to turn Nagur in.

[•●Gh0$7●•™]

Yeah like that VINO guy from the farm first farm you meet after getting out of Xarda's tower

[Tomha]

Sorry Gh0$7 but I can't remember where you find said book. I know which one you're talking about but all I do remember is that basically anyone who's name is in all caps is possessed.

[•●Gh0$7●•™]

Dude i wanted to ask you in one of my games i cannot remember who dropped it a seeker or another npc but anyway it was a book that had writen names of NPC's who are in legion with the seekers but in my recent games i cannot find it can you help me

[Bloodwyn]

Thekla's Soup - You can get up to 5 servings instead of 3