A rough guide to Drakensang

A sketchy, mostly spoiler-free guide to make your life a little easier if you want to play this game without reading a full tabletop rulebook, but assumes you have read the manual and/or descriptions provided ingame. It is not a complete walkthrough, nor a comprehensive character optimization guide.

Introduction

'ello. I'm Remainaery, and when not painting pictures, I nerd around playing video games or game-master tabletop games, and this game I had a soft-spot for ever since it came out – to this day, Das Schwarze Auge / The Dark Eye tabletop game remains my guilty pleasure even if there's “better” P&P RPGs out there, and seeing how this game is currently available on Steam for a decent price and apparently still somewhat in demand, I thought: what the heck, write an introductory guide, maybe it will help out all those interested gamers who run into the accessibility hurdle that, back in the day, has made me somewhat frustrated over AD&D-based games like Baldur's Gate and so on. I can relate to how it is coming into one of these tabletop-based games and wondering why my characters keep dying over trivial encounters, or why things just do not work like I thought they would.

This guide does not cover all the basic terms; check the “Manual” link provided by Steam or right-click in-game on attributes, talents and so on in the character screen to receive basic descriptions.

The intention here is not to provide a full break-down of the Dark Eye P&P rules, but to make your life a little easier if you want to play this game without reading a full tabletop rulebook. Its is to teach you enough to decide for yourself how much want to power-game and min-max; whenever I say that something is “better” or “worse”, take it with a grain of salt – ultimately, this is my opinion and experience with the game, and I bet someone out there can fling their RP-crunch-fu in my face and prove that something else is more powerful.

Furthermore, this guide tries to remain spoiler-free wherever possible; it is NOT intended to be a complete walkthrough, and remains intentionally sketchy in several areas.

Quick Tips On How To Play

Interface Conveniences

• SPACEBAR pauses the game, and allows you to chain up several commands via the CTRL-thing mentioned below to make very predictable/easy fights go over quickly.
  
  
• Holding CTRL while clicking on something in your hot-bar and then on a target will cue up that action to be resolved until whatever action is currently undertaken is finished. This way, you don't end up ABORTING whatever action is in progress, which can make a huge difference in combat. Watch the “action cue” next to the character portrait in the upper right.
  
  
• You can also hold CTRL and press the associated number key of the quick-bar skill/item to chain the skill up to be used on the current target, which is convenient for clobbering petty enemies into a pulp quickly via Mighty Blow or Feint.
  
  
• Press “K” or click on the “?” Symbol in the lower left to bring up the game's console/message box, where you receive detailed feedback on rolls and numbers being crunched in the background. If you constantly fail at a talent roll or combat, check the console to see what it may be that's making you fail – it may just be a series of unlucky rolls, but you may also discover that a certain high modifier makes success just incredibly unlikely until you raise an attribute or talent.

Combat Tips

• Use your Special Abilities for combat. They are usually your key to winning a fight, and make the difference between a cakewalk and waiting 6 rounds for your party to whack a pack of rats to death. Many companions and main character choices come with “Mighty Blow” or “Feint”, both of which are very good abilities; generally, Feint is better against human types, while Mighty Blow does the trick against beasts, and is also well suited for attacking humanoids in the back.
  
  
• Attacks from behind are generally unavoidable – this goes for enemies, as well as your party. Use this to your advantage: While one combatant distracts the enemy frontally using Feint, have a hard and sure hitter approach from behind and use Mighty Blow. When surrounded yourself, better hope the companion caught in a pincer attack has high Armor Value, or watch them get beaten to a pulp quickly.

Character Improvement

• Save up some EXP over time and don't always put it all into talents right away: Raising attributes and learning Special Abilities is important and key to character development – mathematically, for how the rolls in this game work, attribute-increases are overall more critical than 1-3 talent points in terms of average success rates.
  
  
• Balanced attributes beat hyper-specialization: With talent rolls demanding three attributes being checked and also base attack/parry values being derived from 3 attributes, this game generally favors “balanced” characters over those with “dump stats”, especially for any character that is not just your dedicated melee combat brute. A character with, say, 12/12/12 in rolled-on-attributes and a talent prowess of 10 has significantly higher success chances than one with 14/9/9 and talent prowess 10. This is because all three-out-of-three rolls MUST succeed for the check to be overall successful (see below in “How Success-Rolls Are Made”).
  
  
• Attributes Over Talent Prowess: let talent prowess numbers not fool you: A character with good according attributes (average 14) and a prowess of 5-7 will generally be better in this talent than a character with low attributes (average 11) but a prowess of 8-10.
  
  
• Know your role to roll well: While this game's talents, overall, are not “class-locked” and most characters can pick up any talent or ability (magic being one of the exceptions) it does not mean that's always a good idea. For example, your amazon-warrior companion that joins your party early starts with certain nature skills already learned and a couple of points in them, but if you look at her attributes, you will realize that she will not shine in any of them unless you also raise the necessary attributes, which will cost you a fortune in EXP, and thus severely hamper her growth as a fighter-type. While this may be open to interpretation at some points, just look at what characters joining you are already good at, and how high associated attributes are – if their average is 12 or above, they make good candidates for improving on that area of expertize. If it is lower, the required investment may outweigh the usefulness of teaching that character this particular talent.
  
  
• Special abilities, however, are often interesting even for “dabblers” - even the 1st Tier of Special Abilities is often a vast improvement in terms of combat abilities in a specific area compared to having none, like Feint and Master Parry. As enemies will often go after archers and mages, it might pay off to teach them some defensive or even offensive fighting tricks through special abilities.
  
  
• Certain spells are great even at their most basic low starting values (even at 0), like the poison removal spell Klarum Purum, or any kind of “Attributio [attribute]” buff spell that, if successfully cast, always raises the according attribute by at least +1, which is never a bad thing considering that it lasts for a bit and can make a noticeable difference for many talent rolls, especially if a buffed attribute is rolled on twice.

How The Game Rolls: Success Rolls & Talent Rolls

This section covers the central success roll and talent roll mechanics the game uses, emulating the tabletop game.

How Success-Rolls Are Made

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Since this is based on tabletop roleplaying game rules, whenever you try to do things, the game will make a “success role” to see if you can pull it off. Those will EITHER be a SINGLE d20 (twenty-sided die) roll for most combat rolls, or THREE d20 rolls +/- a “talent prowess” modifier for basically all skill uses aka “talent rolls”.

You may want to press “K” on your keyboard to bring up the console which will show you the details of when a roll is made. You want the game to roll LOW on these rolls, not high. When the game roll 1s and 2s, rejoice, and be sad if 18s, 19s, and 20s come up. This is because the attributes of your characters represent “thresholds”, basically: If your Cleverness is 13, and the game makes a cleverness-check, you succeed on a roll of 1-13, and fail on 14-20. This is true for all checks made in the game.

The only time you want the game to roll high numbers is when dealing damage!

Talent Rolls

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Talent Rolls are usually where it is at in non-combat situations. They are made by rolling 3 d20s against 3 linked attributes. If you hover with the mouse over a talent's name on the character screen, it will highlight the attributes rolled on to the left (if only 2 are highlighted, that means one of them gets rolled on twice!).

You will need to suceed on ALL THREE ROLLS for a talent roll to be successful. As soon as one of them fails, the talent roll fails.

The number of the talent you raise is called your “talent prowess”, and is used to A) compensate for low rolls, B) determine how well you succeed on your check.
Every point of talent prowess can compensate one “fail” point on one of your d20 rolls; for example, if you have attributes of 10/10/10 and your die rolls end up 4, 8 and 15, it means the last roll failed by 5. Now, if your talent prowess is 7, 5 of these 7 points will be used to compensate for the failed roll – resulting in a success, with 2 TP* (“remaining talent points”) to spare.

The more talent prowess points remain, the better the quality of your roll – this will often enough determine what your talent roll can achieve (like how many wounds are treated with a single “Treat Wounds” roll, how many plants are harvested, etc.)

Penalties & Difficulty Modifiers

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Often enough, a “difficulty modifier” is applied to a talent roll (you will very often see them when trying to pick locks or harvesting plants, for example), which can range from 1 to 10 or even more. This difficulty is subtracted from your talent prowess in advance, making the task harder to succeed on by reducing your effective talent prowess for the job.

The worst part is: Once an effective talent prowess goes negative (-1 or lower), this penalty gets subtracted FROM EACH (!!!) of your three die rolls. So, if you have 10/10/10 on your attributes and a penalty drops your effective prowess to -3, every one of the three rolls must be 7 or lower!
So, keep in mind that once you hit the negative-number-zone, your chances of success go down immensely. This is most critical for talents like Willpower, which can literally make a life-or-death difference depending on whether a roll succeeds or not.

Developing Talents And Attributes

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Attributes can be considered “good” in the 14-16 range, and you might not really need to go much higher for your general non-combat talent uses of attributes. If your average of stats is close to that when rolling on talents with decent prowess (7+), you will overall see more successes than fails. Attributes ranging from 9-11 can be considered “low end”, because you will need to invest heavily in talents (12+) to compensate and see successes more often than failures. Characters with 14+ in attributes will also have good chances to still roll successes when a penalty reduces your effective talent prowess to -1 or even lower.

Consider certain spells that buff attributes or talents, since raising them to the point where they will provide you with a temporary benefit for certain very specific tasks can be a lot cheaper an EXP investment than raising that stat or talent, even if that is very little – this buff becomes even better the higher your “natural” score gets, because talents and attributes become significantly more expensive the higher you raise them; that means that in the late game, that measly spell where you just have enough prowess in to get a +1 in this or that actually becomes comparatively more 'valuable' than it used to be in the beginning of the game.

Exploration & Talent Uses

This section covers the use of talents that mostly factor into the game outside of combat.

Lockpicking:

To pick a lock, you have essentially two choices - the HARD way, or using a tool (Hairpin, Lock-pick, etc). If you use NO tool at all, you will receive a -10 PENALTY on your roll - which, if combined with any difficult lock, can make it nearly impossible to open a lock. To make use of a tool, put it in your quick-bar, click on it, and then click on the lock you want to pick. The quality of your tool will not only offset the no-tool-penalty, but also provide a bonus (+1 for Hairpin, +5 for Lock-pick).
So in the end, you only don't want to use a tool if you're out of resources, or once your "natural" lockpick talent and according attributes are so high that you can still easily succeed on the roll even with the -10.
Once you fail opening a lock, you are afflicted by the “Shaky hands” condition for a little while, applying another -10 penalty to lockpick rolls while it lasts. You will need to wait it out. Or, even better – quicksave with F5 before opening a lock, and reload with F8/F9 if it fails. Not only will this save you a lockpick or hair pin, on most modern computers reloading will also be faster than waiting for the shaky hands to reset...

Disarming Traps:

To disarm a trap, right-click and select the according icon. Note that unlike with lock-picking, no tools are required to disarm a trap without a penalty to the roll.
Note though that SPOTTING traps is handled by the “Perception” talent and modified by the “Traps” talent that also governs laying traps of your own – so it's overall better to have your “forest scout”/hunter type of the group be the “trap spotter”, not necessarily the “thief”.

Dialogue-Talents: Seduce, Human-Nature, Fast-Talk & Etiquette

You only need one dedicated “social guy” in your party, as the game will always select the character with the best values to step forth and do a check on one of these skills when talking to NPCs – however, you will not always get identical results, as in some very rare cases, a character's gender will play a role: For example, only Dranor or another male “Seducer” can woo the farm-lady in Avestrue to spill the beans on how to get past her watchdog via the “Seduce” dialogue option.

Streetwise:

Aside from affecting mini-map display in towns and cities, the Streetwise talent also affects whether or not certain shady characters like “thief shop” NPCs will even talk to you and show you their stock. Much like its wilderness equivalent “survival”, you will really only need one character in your party at a time that has any or high ranks in this.

Survival:

This talent can be either convenient or entirely useless to you, and I suggest you only truly invest in it if you are out hunting for plants as alchemy ingredients (or as money-makers). A character with high Survival will display animals and plants on the mini-map; especially the latter will only show according to the plant's “rarity” compared to your Survival talent prowess. But, the plants themselves will be there either way, so whether you find them via this talent or just by checking every corner visually is up to you. If you don't want to pick flowers, you might opt to not even bother – most animals aren't that dangerous that being taken by surprise after not seeing them on the map would be a big deal.

Treat Wounds, Treat Poison & Healing in general:

Generally, you want at least one character with “Treat Wounds” on acceptable levels to compliment magical healing - magic healing is rather expensive, slow, and only at high levels will the Balm of Healing spell have a high enough modifier to remove a lot of wounds in a pinch - the Treat Wounds talent outshines it in that regard. Ideally, have a ranged fighter on Passive be your "combat medic", so if a character is hurt, they can disengage, run to the healer (who hopefully is not being attacked themselves due to being set on "Passive" and not drawing attention), and have their wounds treated.
While it is fairly inexpensive it might at first seem like a good idea to teach front-line characters like Rhulana or Forgrimm some basic "first aid" too, but their stats are not really up to the task.
Overall, try not to rely on healing duringcombat too much, as it takes valuable time and, in the case of magic, points possibly better invested in an offensive spell, buff or debuff.
If there is a character capable of casting the Clarum Purum spell, you may find that there's hardly any more use for the “Treat poisons” talent.

Arcane Lore / Identifying Magic Items

Another “binary” talent, this is your “Identify magic item” ability. Once it is high enough, you can uncover the pecularities of a “blue” item by right-clicking on it. Only raise this whenever you find a new item that you cannot already identify with your current talent value, and raise it gradually. You will also only just need one character among you with any capacity in this. It is available earlier than the “Analytica Arcana” spell, so might as well keep running with Arcane Lore.

Sneaking:

While the game mentions this, I shall repeat it – a group is only as good as sneaking as their worst sneaker. Meaning that if you undertake a certain sneaking mission with a any kind of non-sneaky party member wearing a plate armor, don't wonder what went wrong if it continuously fails... which makes “Sneak” a very bad investment in this game, honestly. You barely ever need it, and if you want to use it, you need most characters of your group to invest in it. I think during the only part where sneaking is somewhat required, the game provides you with an excuse for it succeeding pretty much automatically as long as you remain in sneak-mode (which is, btw, accessed by clicking the sneaky-walk icon in the lower right). Your choice, though, as I cannot say I have spend a lot of time in this game sneaking around, so it may have some uses unknown to me (but I doubt it).

Haggling:

You may want to hang onto certain more pricey treasures and sell them once a character with a high haggling score is in your party, as it is a straight-up percentage to prices – of the two “rogue” types you can get as companions, you can assign one as your crafting- and shopping-servant, and only swap them in whenever making a shopping/crafting trip around Ferdok. This can save you quite some coin on the more expensive materials, weapons or when selling off valuable loot. Note that only your highest haggle talent among all party members is used, so there's no point to invest in haggling on more than one hero.

Crafting & Materials

Which item is junk and which is a material is generally given away by its description: if it says something along the lines of “can be used to make X” or “used in [this or that]”, it's usually a crafting material. If the description indicates no such thing, it is most likely junk you can safely sell off.
Crafting is a “binary” thing: Once you have the necessary talent prowess to produce a certain item, no check is necessary as long as you have the materials. This is why crafting can be easily delegated to “stay at home” characters whom you rarely take on adventures and who probably have not that much use for all that EXP, and you don't need to worry about attributes being a certain number.
–- Plant lore: Provides you with plant ingredients used in alchemy, or for finding Whirlweed as a bandage-substitute
–- Animal lore: provides you with materials mostly used in Bow-making, but the leather straps gathered from animals also find use in Blacksmith crafting.
There is no “mining” (or similar) talent, and a lot of materials for Blacksmith must either be found or bought.

Combat Advice I: How Combat Works

This section aims to lend some aid in how combat works, and how to make an efficient fighter in Drakensang; after all, combat in this game is mandatory, and fights can get rough towards the late game if you are unprepared.

How Combat Plays Out

• Basically, combat works like this: Each “Combat Round”, your heroes get 1 attack, then your enemies get 1 attack each. Rinse, repeat. Once an attack succeeds, the target of the attack gets to make a parry or a dodge (whichever is applicable/better) 1x per round.
  
  
• If the parry/dodge succeeds, nothing happens. If the attack succeeded and the parry/dodge failed, damage is rolled.
  
  
• From the rolled number, the “Armor Value” of the (randomly determined) hit zone is subtracted. The number that is left is the amount of points that are subtracted from the target's “Vitality” (HP). If the damage value is higher than your “wound threshold” (equal to your Constitution score), then the character will potentially receive a “wound”.
  
  Also note:
  --- Some enemies 'cheat' and will potentially cause wounds on lesser conditions.
  --- if a character receives damage that exceeds their Constitution score multiple times, they can receive multiple wounds through a single attack!
  
  
• Before that happens though, the game will roll “Willpower” to resist the wound – it's a talent roll (see earlier in this guide) with a penalty of -10. If the roll is successful, the wound is ignored, if not, ouch:
  
  
• A wound will result in a -2 penalty to Agility, Attack, Parry, Ranged Attack, Dodge, and a -5 penalty to Endurance. That's bad, as even one wound will start a downward spiral of making you less efficient during combat - luckily, it applies to enemies as well. Treat wounds immediately after combat if you can, and try not to engage new enemies while wounded. If possible, treating wounds during battle can turn the tide, should you manage to pull it off.
  
  Also note:
  --- Wounds can stack up to 4 times, with the penalties being cummulative!
  --- Once you reach 5 wounds, you go down and stay down until the fight ends, no matter how much Vitality was left. If your entire party is down, it's Game Over.
  --- A character that went KO and gets up after a fight suffers a "Critical Wound"; that one gives -4 to all attributes, ON TOP of other wound penalties, and is harder to treat than 'regular' wounds.

So much for the basic rundown. What follows are just a few tips what you can do to succeed at combat, otherwise I could fill an entire rulebook with minute detail.

Combat Advice II: Developing A Fighter

Here's some advice on which stats you should focus on when improving the fighter(s) of your group, and what actually makes a "fighter".

DEVELOPING YOUR FIGHTERS

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When developing a character for melee fighting, these are things to consider; building ranged fighters is a lot more straight-forward: Just raise the according talent, and learn pretty much all available Special Abilities (and use them!).

Which Attributes To Raise

High attributes in “Courage”, “Agility”, “Constitution” (for Vitality and Wound Threshold) and “Strength” (for the potential damage bonus). High “Intuition” does not hurt, but is less important, unless for 'dedicated tanks'. Raising your attributes is the only way to raise your base attack/defense values that are calculated according to a certain formula you can check when going to the Combat Talent screen and right-clicking on the “Base Attack/Parry” entries in the upper right corner.

Hit Points (aka "Vitality) Aren't Everything

While high Vitality is nice, high armor values and a high Willpower talent as well as high parries and abilities like Shield Parrying go a much longer way than just bumping up your Vitality. See more on the individual entries below, but as a rule of thumb, don't just raise your vitality score, especially once each point becomes very costly! (The first 10 or so added points may still be economically viable, but after buying those 10 extra HP, you may want to start considering other options to extend your melee fighters' lease on life.)

The "Willpower" Talent

Willpower is used to resist wounds, which can cripple you during combat – one wound received is not too bad, but once a character receives a 2nd or even 3rd wound, they are on a downward spiral to dying. Thus, next to your weapon-talent of choice, this will be a fighter's second most important talent to raise.
Once you hit a talent prowess of 12, if the associated attributes Courage, Constitution and Strength are around 15ish on average, you might not need to invest much more in this, as that means you get rid of the penalty of -10 and start having a small buffer. You may want to stop raising this talent at 15 or so unless you got experience to spare, and going over 18 is probably excessive for if you have attributes with an average over 16.

Chosing Weapon Styles

Concentrate on one main weapon style for each character. Combat talents are expensive to raise, and you're better advised to handle one weapon category really well than handling all of them just a bit. However, you can teach each melee fighter a ranged combat talent on the side if you want, since they have no associated “parry” value – meaning that each point invested is sort of 'worth more for less'.

Chose your weapon wisely. The more of a “true warrior” the character is, the more you want to invest in “true martial weaponry”; not all weapons in this game are created equal – no matter how you look at it, “Swords” are usually better than “Daggers”, but it may not be worth it to teach every character the Sword combat talent. Teach the expensive talents only to those who can really make use of them, and then commit to them by picking up the Special Abilities that compliment them (more on that below)

Special Combat Abilities

When chosing which weapon to commit to, consider the special ability trees. Thankfully, the game highlights which weapon class can make use of which special ability, and vice versa, so I recommend you check up on that in the Special ability subscreen of your character sheet. Click on an ability to see which talents are highlighted in the list below, or click on one of the talents in the list and see which abilities are highlighted in return.

The “3rd Tier” abilities like “Strike of Wrath” and “Mortal Blow” are SIGNIFCANTLY powerful and offer usually great returns for investing in them, so once you can learn them, you should.
Furthermore, this is a bit of an equalizer on some weapons that seem overall less than optimal over others; for example, daggers, fencing weapons and spears enable you to use “Mortal Blow”, which is an amazing ability that makes the at first lackluster-looking spears gain a late-game advantage over the otherwise somewhat superior sword-type weapons.

Attack VS Parry: Which To Improve?

Whenever you raise a combat talent, you need to allocate the added point(s) between the combat style's Attack or Parry values – this choice is final, once points have been assigned, you cannot undo this!

If you ask me: high attack is more important than high parry, unless you build a dedicated tank. Not only that your heroes go first in the combat round, but also consider this – a parry roll is only required once your enemy succeeds on their attack roll; whenever they fail, your parry value is irrelevant, and you also just get 1 parry per round. So unless you have a character who is fighting with a shield or otherwise capable of having more parries per round, you might wanna favor the strategy of “the best defense is a good offense”, cause if it's wounded and dead before you are, then you also don't need to bet on parries.

Furthermore, heroes with high “Dodge Values” will ALWAYS favor Dodge over Parry when it is higher – which is good. Some attacks cannot be parried, only dodged, and dodging may actually be more economic investment for heroes that do use more than one type of weapon (since Parry is dependant on a certain combat talent, while Dodging is “universal”).

This also means, do not dismiss weapons that have a somewhat annoying weapon modifier of -1, -2 or -3 to parry. That's not so bad, as long as the weapon is otherwise good. Weapons however that have a negative modifier to BOTH parry AND attack... those stink.

Combat Advice III: Damage & Support

Generally, when it comes to melee-combatants, you may probably want to focus on making a character a "damage dealer", a "tank", or both, so here are two 'advanced' aspects to consider to achieve either.

Weapon Bonus Damage:

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A more arcane aspect of the game rules is the damage bonus received from weapons, called “Strength bonus”, written in an X/Y format. Here, the first number is the Strength required to use the weapon WITHOUT a penalty/bonus. The second number than is the interval at which damage goes further up or down by +/-1. Meaning that, if you have a weapon that says it has 12/4, it means that if you are around 12 Strength, it does its normal damage. If your Strength is 8 or below, you receive a -1 damage, if your Strength is 16 or more, you receive +1 damage. If your Strength is 20+, it's +2, and so on.

So: what you WANT is weapons with a damage bonus interval that is as small as possible, while also having a low value on the first number! For example: 14/1 would be great, 16/4 would not be. So you got to check what the average damage of a weapon is, how high the strength of the wielder is, and then weigh it against how high you can bump your strength temporarily by using potions and spells!
Unsurprisingly, expect two-handed weapons not only having better damage-die values, but also generally more favorable Strength bonus ratings that give you more bang for the wielder's buck.

Whenever you bring a magic-user, teach them the "Attributo Strength" spell, level it, and use it: For every three remaining Spell-talent Points, the effect of the spell improves; so, at a prowess of 12, assuming you roll well enough, you are very likely to have enough points left to overall achieve a +4 Strength bonus, which is usually enough to at least get a single bonus-bump in damage, if not more depending on your base strength.

The other thing to remember is: Special combat abilities that reduce or even ignore enemy armor values are critical to success, because the more damage you can lay on an enemy in a single hit, the higher the chance to inflict a wound on them is – and the more wounds an enemy suffers, the easier it will become for you to take it down.

This is why “Mortal Blow” (reduces enemy parry by 6, does x2 damage, ignores armor and automatically deals 2 wounds) is arguably better than “Strike of Wrath” (which multiplies damage x3 and knocks down, but does nothing against armor and whether or not it deals wounds depends on enemy resistance), though of course it somewhat depends on what kind of enemy you are fighting.

Resisting Damage:

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If you're looking to improve the “tankiness” of a character, you want as much “Armore Value” as possible, which will most likely result in high Encumbrance. Since there is an active parry mechanic in the game, you want to keep the effect of that encumbrance low: Pick up the “Armor Use” special abilities when possible, and I think I would prioritize them over “Shield Fighting”.

If you're coming from D&D, where Armor Class affects whether or not you get hit at all, you need to remember that in this rule set, Armor Value affects damage, not hit chances. Meaning that, especially in a “tanky situation”, where you probably get attacked more than you can parry, resisting damage is overall better than potentially (!) avoiding another hit.

Fun fact: A magic-user capable of casting “Fastness of Body” on top of being stuffed into (non-metallic) armor may actually be able to withstand being wailed on as long as all incoming damage is basically negated by the sum of Armor Value. However, if you think that's the perfect exploit, think about that whenever it does NOT negate all/most damage, “squishy” types may suddenly lose Vitality and gain wounds rapidly by not having enough Willpower and the stats to roll well on it.

Defensive Combat Style II can actually shine in combination with Shield Parrying II to have some serious Parry score without investing in the expensive Tier 3 Shield Fighting III ability, provided you have enough endurance to soak up the endurance cost of Defensive Combat. Defensive Comabt III however seems hardly worth it, as it eats too much endurance too quickly for the provided benefit as far as I am concerned.

Healing & Support During Combat

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As mentioned in the section on talents and exploration, "Treat Wounds" is what commonly may save your life, since in many fights, you will sooner die to having reached the maximum of 5 wounds leading to an Auto-KO rather than losing all your Vitality. Restoring Vitality is rather easy: drink a potion, like Oneberry Juice or an actual Healing Potion, or have someone cast the Balm of Healing spell, though over-relying on the latter is not something I would recommend (not saying it isn't good; but don't expect to cast it over and over).

Once one of your melee fighters receives 3 or more wounds and the battle is not almost done, it is a good idea to pull them out and have someone treat their wounds - at this point, their fighting ability is severely hampered already, so even if their Vitality is still half-full, you're objectively dealing with a glass-half-empty situation.

A certain red-haired charlatan you meet in Wagoner's home, for example, makes for a good "combat medic", as with her stats, you don't really want her in melee to begin with, and can have her hang back on passive mode, casting spells to support your party. Whenever necessary, have a wounded character run to her and get treated.

As such, resist the urge to just put all characters in Aggressive mode all the time, because especially in tough fights, you don't want your supporter being wailed on while they try to help others in danger. Even when your supporter is a ranged attacker, you might not want them to shoot all the time, and rather bide your time until you are certain their services aren't needed, and rather just manually use a Special Ability to help finish an enemy off (or you're certain they can outright one-shot a target, like using Master Marksman with a long bow and special arrows).

Notable Spells

For now, just naming a couple of “Must have” spells. This list is not complete as of yet.

ATTRIBUTO STRENGTH

Easily the most powerful Attributo-spell, it will raise the enchanted character's ST attribute by +1 per 3 remaining spellpoints - meaning that you can, at high spell talent levels, easily increase your Strength by +3 to +5. Since this magic buff will stack with any other form of buff (a strength increasing ring, armor or potion), you can easily reach a strength value of ~25. Combine this with something like the Dragonslayer Hammer and 'lo and behold damage values like: 1d+15. Yep

FASTNESS OF BODY

Because with it, your magic-users often achieve higher armor values than your medium fighters. In the tabletop game, where Astral Energy recharges on a per-day basis and you want to conserve power, this is different, but since in this game AE recharges rapidly when not in combat, it would be a sin to not use this whenever you can.

BALM OF HEALING

This spell can serve you during combat since quaffing potions is not a very economic thing to do in this game; outside of combat, it can also heal wounds, but this is only an added benefit if you're not collecting plants and have stacks of Whirlweed to treat wounds with.

MOVE AS LIGHTNING

When you run into a tough enemy, this spell is useful to cast once combat initiates, and is useful for either your fighter or tanks; both receive better defensive/dodge chances, and get a flat +2 damage to their damage output, which is more significant than it sounds, as it's overall a bigger gain than most fighter types gain from their Strength attribute over the first half of the game.

PARALYSIS

This spell can save your butt whenever you run into trouble or tough enemies, as it can remove a threat from combat for quite a while so you can focus on one enemy, or even flee, end combat and recover.

THUNDERBOLT

This spell is at the same time great and terrible. It's terrible because many rely on it too much as their basic “magic missile” attack, for which it is rather bad, because the damage AS WELL as the Astral Energy needed is RANDOM. You can get a good hit in right at the start of the battle, sure, but that also will leave you missing a good chunk of spell energy reserve in return. You might rather consider using this spell to finish an enemy off when you really need to – for that, it's great. Otherwise, resist the urge to fire off these all the time.

IGNIFAXIUS

Another better alternative to the Thunderbolt, as you can change the modifier and the damage as well as the required astral energy, and it will let the enemy burn for further damage - this makes it especially handy to deal with enemies that regenerate health, or those with high armor values.

IRON-RUST

Another cheap and quick spell that can turn a frustrating combat against humanoids into a cakewalk: The spell will debuff your enemies weapons and make them deal less damage, provided they are made from metal; that means, a skeleton wielding a two-hander will be affected, as will be an ork wielding a byakka, but not an ogre with a big wooden club. Also consider that human enemies will use special abilities against you that multiply their base damage - so the lower their base-damage, the less their techniques will hurt you. The spell also lasts a good amount of time, so you will often not need to reapply it.

CORPOFRIGO

While the damage of this spell is unimpressive, it's not the true effect here; the Coldshock will apply a hefty debuff to enemies that is a lot more substantial than the Lightning Find You and last a bit longer - but sadly, it's overall length is not too great, you will need to recast this once or twice in a longer fight. (Then again: the bit of damage you also do with this still makes it much better than the Lightning Find You, despite its longer casting time.)

CULMINATIO

Learned once you reach Tallon, this is easily the best combat spell in my opinion, far better than Thunderbolt, for the following reason: You can make it ridiculously cheap to cast. While the damage is fairly random (1d20+5), you can bump the cost down to about a measly 5 AE per pop: the base cost is 15 ASP, minus your Remaining Spellpoints. At around a spell talent value of 15, this means that with proper attributes (14+), you will have 7-12 SP* on average. Combine this with a certain robe of astral regeneration or a magic potion or two, and the casting time of 3 actions, and you can basically chainlighting things to death, dealing about 6-8 damage ON MINIMUM for about 7-8 AE a piece, or up to 20-25 damage for as low as 5 AE a piece. That beats Thunderbolt and its steep Astral Energy cost by far.

SUMMON SPELLS (Elemental Minion, Summon Djinn, Skelettarius, Ecliptifactus, Nature Spirit)

There's a couple of summoning spells available in Tallon; hopefully this helps you decide which one you would like to use for a full-mage in your party.
* Summon Djinn: Arguebly the best or the worst summon, since the Djinn's power depends on your remaining spell points on the summon test. It lasts 20 mins, which is a plus, and fights with a twohanded khunchomer, but doesnt take a lot of a beating. It can however use a few combat spells like Culminatio, Ignifaxius and Corpofrigo (all great) at high levels (12 remaining SP and higher). It also the most costly of summon spells. Consider summoning a djinn before a fight, and once he falls, summon a skeleton or elemental minion.
* Skelettarius: Each modifier summons a different (better) type of skeleton. 1-11 summon a melee skeleton (with plate armor and a twohanded weapon around mod 8-11), 12+ summons a skeleton mage that will use some combat magic, like Culminatio, Ignifaxius, Corpofrigo and Thunderbolt. In melee, it will only use a rapier. The duration of the spell consistently increases the higher the modifier is, regardless of melee or mage skeletons are summoned.
* Eclipse Shadowform: one of the advantages of this spell is that like the djinn, its base duration is fairly high (10mins) and independent from the spell test. Its values are somewhat comparable to the djinn, but I think overall the shadow-summon is weaker, and also does not cast spells... so I see little reason to pick it over the other available summon spells.
* Elemental Minion: a fire spirt that is fairly weak and will die quickly, but enemies hit will start burning, which is useful against regenerating enemies.
* A Helpful Paw: Depending on the modifier, summons a wolfrat, wolf, boar, bear or nature spirit (spectral bear), of which the latter is quite beefy and durable (on the highest level, it will have a whopping 90 Vitality).

THE BIG WHOMPS: Ignisphaero Fireball & Aerofugo

In terms of area-of-effect blasts, these two would be your likely candidates, however, they are very hard to target; Fireball cannot be cast on the environment, while Aerofugo can be. However, Ignisphaero is easier to get off from a distance before/without triggering a fight. Both spells are somewhat useless when you already are in a fight, because of a) the immense casting times, and b) their friendly fire effects, c) the dumb-as-brick-party AI. Often you will find your allies charging into your fireballs or Aerofugo zones unless you put them in Passive Mode (which you should do when using these, honestly).
These spells aren't worthless, but they may honestly not be worth the trouble - frankly, I don't consider them EFFECTIVE, but they sure can be FUN (there is just something very satisfying about launching an Ignisphaero into a group of goblins charging towards you). If you intend to use them, be warned that you should treat them more as a fun diversion or time-saver in encounters where you can pop them off without a hassle, but stacking them sky-high and using them for every combat is not something I would recommend.

Companions

Early in the game in Avestrue, you will meet 2 other characters that are willing to accompany you on your journey: Rhulana, an amazon warrior, and Dranor, a foppish rogue. To get you started, here's a bit of a closer look at these two, mainly at Rhulana - after this guide, you should hopefully be able to tell who is good at what yourself.

RHULANA THE AMAZON

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--- AS MELEE: aside from being generally tough, Rhulana comes with Mighty Blow, Dodge I and Shield Fighting I, so buying and equipping her with a shield she gets 2x parry per Combat Round. Being able to wield sabres as well as starting with Axes & Maces talents is not too shabby either, as it means you can just raise either of these and be good for the entire game if you want to keep her being a “flexible fighter”. However, as she starts with high CO, CN and ST, she could just as easily be taught Two-handed Swords or Maces later, and lay on the hurt. Just remember to raise her Willpower talent.

--- AS RANGED: she comes with a bow and the basic special ability for archery, so consider it a backup if she ever becomes too hurt to remain in close combat. In terms of becoming a full-time archer she initially lacks the Intuition and Dexterity for a good base ranged value, but you can of course always compensate by just raising the “Bow” combat talent more. Maybe raise her Intuition by 1-3 points over the course of the game, in which case she gains more base Parry on the side – combined with already having Shield Fighting I and Dodge I, she can still be a decent backup-melee fighter in a pinch, should you decide to focus on her archery more.

Other uses:
She comes with some nature talents activated, so she can be your "ranger-substitute" for the time being, but don't expect too much - the attributes that these talents require are not her strong suite, she will often fail to harvest plants or animal parts. However, with being in the 10ish range across the board, these are also not TOO terrible. Still, if you intend to gather a lot of ingredients for alchemy or other crafts, Rhulana isn't your best ressource gathering investment.
Should you keep her being a fighter mostly, she might be a good candidate to become your blacksmith or bowyer, as these don't require many points, and aside from your main-combat-investments, she will likely have the occassional odd points to spare when saving up for that next attribute or special ability raise.

DRANOR

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Your starting sneaky guy and swashbuckling rogue, to get you accustomed to the basic thievery tasks. Dranor has all the basic rogue skills activated and ready to use when just raised slightly.

If you are playing a sneaky/thievy type yourself, you may want to make Dranor your sweet-talker, 2nd line fighter with a fencer-flavor, or just a plain “merchant”, by raising his Haggle as high as possible and otherwise pumping his points into crafting skills – as you will not much later meet another companion that can do the “rogue job” (and possibly even better due to having access to magic, which Dranor will never have).

Not to spoil too much, but even if you are yourself a thief or burglar, you may ESPECIALLY want to follow Dranor's and his buddy Runkel's questline in Avestrue, as the resulting "reward" at the end will be very useful to you.

As a light spoiler, Dranor will leave you shortly after completing the introduction in Avestrue, but don't worry - you'll soon find a replacement for him.

OTHER COMPANIONS

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In the spirit of being mostly spoiler-free, these are just quick pointers what kind of companions will join you, and WHEN - so you can plan accordingly. As you can see, you essentially will be able to cover all bases with your companions, though you may not want to hold out too much for the last two mentioned on this list - personally, I feel you get them so late that it seems hardly tempting to use them over your other, already well-developed pals. Yet, in case you developed your buddies not as straight-up fighters, I suppose the game hands you two combat specialists for the last, very combat-heavy stretches.

After arriving in Ferdok (early game)
- a fighter of the stout and scruffy kind, who also brings some know-how in blacksmithing
- a charlatan (a magic-using thief basically); this character will likely replace Dranor for a while, or even permanently. Arguebly, this one has an edge, because of magic, and can do anything Dranor could otherwise.

Around midway through the game:
- a magic-using ranger; much like the charlatan, this character is no full-mage and has a restricted spell-set, but makes up for it in having a wide array of useful other skills - if you can stand the voice actor.
- a full-fledged magician; this companion will be able to learn mightier spells later on, which the charlatan will not have access to
- an archer who is also proficient in daggers and fatal strikes; this one is highly optional, and comes at a hefty fee of 200 dukats to hire - however, even if you do not intend to use him, his equipment may be well worth the investemt of recruiting this character...
- a valiant knight, wielding an impressive two-hander and plate, coming with a good chunk of great combat special abilities. If you have no dedicated fighter among you, the knight will come in very handy, especially since you get this character after a section of the game that shows you how tough fights can get.

Late game:
- a magic-using hunter and spear-fighter; who can be useful, but joins pretty late when you likely have not much use for the likes of this
- an alchemist; recruiting this character requires fulfilling a questline for a certain alchemist you meet fairly early, but can only be begun once you meet the character again in Ferdok and agree to do them a favor. Unlike the magician, this character is not a "full", only a "half"-mage like the charlatan who can not learn all spells, but comes with a wide array of useful magic already learned. Has also the probably most annoying voice and lines in the game. Pick your poison. As this character is a bit trickier to get, most people never even bother, but it is a nice addition to have because having a high alchemy crafter is good in late-game, where your need for potions might rise.

Suggested Talent Values & Stats

For quick reference, here's an overview of numbers you can use as a guideline when building your characters and what to look for.

Suggested Attribute Values

For easy reference, these are three suggested attribute spreads for different archetypes you can use as a guideline. A ~ marks an "irrelevant" stat that can be any value you desire depending on talent uses for that character, or just any general advantage (like: any characters profits from a high constitution, obviously, but not every character needs it desperately)

FRONT LINE FIGHTER
Courage 16+
Cleverness ~
Intuition 12+
Charisma ~
Dexterity ~
Agility 14
Constitution 16+
Strength 16+
You will want Courage, Agility, and Strength high for your Attack Base Value and Intuition for Parry Base Value, and furthermore Constitution and Strength for Vitality and damage boni. You will want at least Courage 15 for the high level combat techniques, and Agility of at least 14+ or higher to acquire Dodge II; as some attacks are non-parryable, even your tanks will get crunched at times despite high parry and shields.

ROGUE / ARCHER
Courage 15
Cleverness ~
Intuition 14+
Charisma ~
Dexterity 15+
Agility 14
Constitution ~
Strength ~
You will want Courage 15 for those nifty high level combat techniques, and Courage, Intuition and Dexterity for your Ranged Base Combat Value. Intuition and Dexterity will also be used in the typical "rogue" skills like pickpocket, disarm trap or pick locks.

MAGIC-USER
Courage 14+
Cleverness 15+
Intuition 15+
Charisma 14+
Dexterity 13+
Agility 12+
Constitution 13+
Strength 12+
Note that combat spells will often demand "un-wizard-like" attributes like Constitution and Strength on the talent roll - meaning that wizards and charlatans are usually the most likely characters to profit most from a fairly even attribute spread.

Suggested Talent Values

Here are some talent values I consider practical; it certainly won't hurt to cap out some of these talents, but since they all get much more expensive as you level them up, you may in general want to stick to the 12-15 range for most of them.

BODY:
--- Sneaking 0-5 (depends if you ever care to sneak)
--- Willpower 12+
--- Perception: ca. 10 - your party leader should have the highest value, but it can't hurt to have two characters with solid perception in the party, depending on their attributes
--- Pickpocket: none or max;
--- Dwarfnose: don't raise, starting value will suffice

NATURE:
--- Animal lore: 10+, Plant lore: 10+; if your stats on the relevant attributes are below 13, put more points into these talents if you are using them. If your attributes are 14 or above, you will find that 12 or so plus using the herb sickle will suffice. 15 is probably as high as you'll ever need.
--- Survival: 10-14 should allow you to find all relevant plants and animals on the minimap
--- Traps: 10

LORE:
--- Streetwise: 10 or so should provide you with all you need out of this talent
--- Treat Poison: none or 5-7 (if not using Clarum Purum magic); if you have any sort of magic user, go with the spell. It saves you materials, and also will give you a temporary immunity to poison. Only invest in Treat Poison if you're going with an entirely magic-less party.
--- Treat Wounds: 10 should suffice, unless your relevant attributes are below 13 on average
--- Arcane Lore: 15 is the max value needed to identify the most-hard-to-identify item in the game. You can actually cheat the system though if you raise the Arcane Lore talent WITHOUT confirming the increase, then go to the magic item, identify it, and cancel the leveling up... but hey. That would be cheating, right? Shame on you.

SOCIAL:
--- Seduce: I think 7-8 should be all you need; seduction is not very common in the game.
--- Etiquette: Together with the Medal of Ferdok or the Rondra-Amulett, 3-5 points is probably all you'll ever need (with the aforementioned items, it would be 8-10)
--- Haggle: As high as you want. One point equals 1% discount when buying/selling.
--- Human Nature: 10 should suffice, if you feel you need more, go with the Empathy spell.
--- Fast Talk: 15; fast talk actually occurs somewhat often, and sometimes the game forces your main character to step up (instead of the common option of having a companion step forward when a social talent roll happens).

CRAFTING:
All 15 (with Alchemy being the exception of 18);
Pick Lock: 15; when using Lock Picks (which give a +5 bonus), you can tackle even difficulty 20 Locks without at least a penalty, and if your attributes are high enough, you should be able to pick these locks without reloading constantly or frustratingly numerous attempts.
Disarm traps is actually not that critical, since only few of them will actually ever do more than temporarily annoy you, so going higher than 15 for it would be a bit of a waste.

Appendix: Talent Roll Statistics & Success Rates

I've decided to add this section to close off the guide on one of the most arcane aspects of the Dark Eye rule-system, the talent-rolls and the actual success rates tied to it. Some people will try to eyeball the attributes and rolls and some people may be able to do percentile calculations in their head, others may not (or even do it totally wrong), but the fact remains that we have 3 variables plus a modifier that can be applied to all three variables, making this an absolute nightmare for rough on-the-spot math - especially considering you usually not only need to know whether or not the check succeeded, but how many of your points remain.

Long story short, here is a condensed table with some pre-calculated values, taken from the one of the original game's rulebooks, which you can memorize around certain values that interest and concern you, and at least have a rough idea of what your actual percentage of success on a roll here is.

SUCCESS CHANCE FOR A TALENT/SPELL ROLL

The first column will list an array of attributes, and the following columns will give a success rate depending on an effective talent prowess value. The arrays used will try to reflect common attribue value combinations of starting characters or a point to which you would raise them ingame, boosts from items or spells on average included. These are mostly rounded up or down for ease of reading the jumble of numbers.

ATT.-ARRAY................EFFECTIVE TALENT/SPELL PROWESS VALUES...
.....................-10..........-5..........0..........+5..........+10..........+15..........+20
***********************************************************************************************
8/8/8.............0%..........0,3%.....6%........22%.......45%..........70%........88%
8/12/16.........0,2%.......3%........19%......49%.......78%..........95%........100%
8/16/16.........1,4%.......5%........26%......60%.......85%..........99%........100%
12/12/12.......0,1%.......4%........22%......53%.......86%..........98%........100%
12/12/16.......0,3%.......7%........29%......65%.......93%..........99%........100%
12/16/16.......0,9%.......11%......38%......79%.......98%..........100%......100%
12/16/21.......1,7%.......15%......50%......83%.......99%..........100%......100%
16/16/16.......2,7%.......17%......51%......96%.......100%........100%......100%
16/16/21.......5%..........24%......64%......99%.......100%........100%......100%

Case in point: As stated way earlier in the explaination of game mechanics, you should now see why raising attributes is important, as an array of 12/12/12 has only a 53% chance of success with 5 Talentprowess, while 12/16/16 has a 65% success chance, and 8/12/16 has less of a chance at 49% - so raise your attributes, people, not only your talent prowess, and aim for those 14-16s, which combined with a talent value of 10 will get you through most tests fine. Also consider that every point spend in an attribute will also raise the chances of any other talent or spell that rolls on these attributes, making the rather steep attribute costs often on par with raising 5 talents over a prowess of 10.

REMAINING TALENT/SPELL POINTS

This table will give you some values how many TP* (remaining talent points) or SP* (remaining spell points) you will score with certain arrays and prowess values on average. This will often be most interesting for your spells, where the effects rely heavily on your SP*.

ATT.ARRAY.....TALENT/SPELL PROWESS.....
.....................+5..........+10..........+15..........+20
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8/8/8.............3.............5.............7...............10
8/12/16.........3.............6.............9...............14
8/16/16.........3.............7.............10.............15
12/12/12.......3.............6.............10.............15
12/12/16.......3.............7.............11.............16
12/16/16.......4.............7.............12.............17
12/16/21.......4.............8.............13.............18
16/16/16.......4.............9.............14.............19
16/16/21.......4.............9.............14.............19

(These are once again rounded, so the last entry is no copypaste mistake; some of these are some decimals lower than the numbers given, but again, average numbers for memorization and eyeballing.)

And there you have it; hope that helps in gauging your chances in The Dark Eye: Drakensang!

[celsinhu16]

Very good. Thanks

[Woofy]

Thank you! This is quite helpful, especially your spell advice!

[Ardjun]

I am using this nicely written guide for my current run but found this inconsistency:
I would like to point out that for archer/rogue courage 15 is only needed for melee special abilities - strike of wrath and mortal blow. Base ranged combat value formula is (int+dex+str)/5.
Therefore courage 15 only if rogue wants to use one of the two high level melee special moves.
12 Strength would be useful for armor training I and will improve both ranged and melee.
You want either int 15 + dex 15 + str 10 to reach base ranged combat 8 or 14/15/11 - that is in order to get marksman. For master marksman base RC 9 is needed therefore 15int/15dex/15str to achieve this goal or 17/17/11...etc sum total 45 of these 3.
I appreciate the guide and kudos to author for the work.

[team.malice]

Regarding spells, the advantage of the Thunderbolt spell is that it ignores armor. Also the damage is not random. It's a 2D6+SP* (SP* = remaining spell powress), so a potential 22-32 if you have good values in the related attributes and a decent spell powress. All other damage spells are subject to armor. Casting time should also be taken into account. Thunderbolt takes 2 actions to cast, while Ignifaxus takes 3 actions.

Another important spell for a spellcaster is Calm Body, Calm Spirit. This regenerates SP*/4+1 vitality, astral energy and endurance per second (for 10 seconds) and can be cast in combat. Only downside is, that the target is asleep for the spells duration.

["Power Man"]

Did you just say my waifu Gwendala has a bad voice actor?! Okay fine, you're right. But at least she's cute and considerate.

[xWingsOfRequiemx]

I was wondering what class to pick? So based on your suggestions and spells picking any human full mage would be the best option? For gameplay as well as being nicely fit with the rest of the companions

[Pandada-sensei]

I LOVE YOUR ART!

I can't believe you made a guide for this game either, I wasn't even sure at first but the avatar made it obvious XD

[Bazyl]

A very useful guide, precise and concise. I can play now with pleasure, still able to find my own solutions, but avoiding dead end choices. Thank you. By the way, I am curious what kind of pictures does a Dark Eye fan paint?

[vonBork]

Awesome guide, thank you!

[Meat-King, The Ultimate]

Excellent guide. Thank you very much!