Overview
What you need to know before you start playing – stuff that will make your game more fun / less annoying.
Everything you wanted to know about The Witcher 2 (and now asked)
* Delete your outdated save files constantly. The game autosaves often and never overwrites the saves. This starts to affect your game performance very quickly. Ideally, you shouldn’t have to scroll through your saved games list at all.
* You can (and should) turn down QTE difficulty in the options.
* Go through the prologue in chronological order (from the first topic Geralt suggests, to the last). Dealing with the dragon before you had time to figure out the movement controls is not a fun time.
* The game’s combat system takes inspiration from Dark Souls and the like more than it does from conventional RPG’s. That means you need to roll around. A lot. The moment I realized I could just let most guys swing, roll, then flank and shank them instead of slugging it out made combat SO much easier.
* Blocking an enemies attack depletes your vigor, so you can’t block forever (or even for very long, when the game starts) hence my emphasis on rolling. Using signs also depletes Vigor, so talents that give you more vigor can be welcome in any build.
* Another Dark Souls-style combat thing – make sure to move around so that you’re only engaging one foe at a time. Enemies will happily flank and destroy you. So roll, kite, use signs / traps / bombs to separate groups and take them down one by one.
* If you’re having trouble with a particular opponent at the start of the game, you always have the basic options of: rolling behind them and backstabbing / hitting them with the Aard sign and whaling on them while they stagger (if a shield guy is hit with the Aard and goes down on one knee, roll behind him, otherwise you’ll still hit the shield) / blocking and riposting when prompted (with the riposte talent).
* Get the Riposte talent. You want the basic Swordsmanship path talents regardless of your build, but more importantly, there are a number of sections where you’re playing a different character, and riposte is the only Witcher skill you have that carries over.
* Make sure you destroy 5 training dummies in Foltest’s camp in the prologue, then destroy another 5 anywhere in Floatsam for a minor but important bonus.
* When you’ve fired the ballista in the prologue, find and examine a corpse near a haystack to your left for another neat bonus.
* Enemy Quen can’t really be dispelled. You have to wait it out (or better yet, disrupt them with an Aard as they try to cast it)
* When you arrive at Floatsam, you are invited to visit the commander. Doing so will give you a fairly good armor and silver sword design, so that should probably be the first thing you do before you go out and do some sidequests.
** Correction to the above (apologies to anyone I misled): Follow Tris to Cedric and the shipwreck first. This will prompt you to get the key to the Royal Mail, which will come in handy when you visit Loredo. There are a couple of tough-ish fights along the way, but nothing you can’t handle.
* The game is fairly good about correlating what an item costs in Orens and how good it is. If a weapon / armor / trophy is worth twice as much as what you currently have, it’s probably about twice as good. There are a few exceptions, but the rule is fairly reliable.
* A lot of first-time players don’t realize that Floatsam has a swamp area, complete with a bandit hideout. The huge fallen… stone thing… over the river will lead you there.
* On the same note, the Blue Stripes have a house in Floatsam. Right next to the inn, two guys guarding the entrance.
* Whenever you need to gather certain alchemical ingredients for a particular quest, drop them off into a storage chest (you get one at any inn) as you gather them. The game does NOT make an exception for quest items when preparing potions, and will happily use them up, leaving you screwed. So keep one copy of: Endrega embryo, Troll Tongue, Arachas Eye, Essence of Death, Queen Endrega’s Pheromones and Bullivore Brain. Your stored items transfer from chapter to chapter. (Also, save all the Harpie Feathers you find. You’ll need about 80 for a sidequest – easy enough, unless you decide to sell all the ones you’ve collected over the chapter just before the quest starts)
* Do you see all those “Bonus to X when poisoned” talents in the Alchemy tree? “Poisoned” means “Under the effects of a potion.”
* Mutagens are basically just set bonuses applied to Geralt’s abilities that you’ll find when exploring/killing monsters / brewing potions. The name “mutagen” and the fact that you apply them to a talent might be slightly confusing, but you’re not actually “mutating” the talent in any way. The talent itself is irrelevant – just a slot into which you insert the mutagen bonus. You’ll find a lot more mutagens than you’ll unlock talents, so only use Greater Mutagens (andor Madness if it ever drops for you) to make the most of your bonuses. If you’re planning to get the Impregnation talent (improved Mutagen bonuses), save your mutagens until you do so, since it’s not retroactive.
* Your basic potion list when exploring should be some combination of: Swallow (health regeneration), Tawny Owl (high vigor regeneration), Rook (+sword damage) and Petri’s Philter (+ sign damage). The other potions are bit situational (though they can be quite good when combined with the alchemist tree “greater potion bonuses, lesser potion disadvantages” talents).
* Stealth sections:
The first stealth section, in the dungeons, is actually completely optional. You don’t lose anything should you slaughter all the guards instead.
As far as stealth in general goes, you should note that people have peripheral vision in this game – you can only sneak on them from behind. Waiting behind cover until they turn their back, then rushing in and knocking them out is as decent a general advice as I can give you.
During the stealth section at Loredo’s place, you’re NOT supposed to knock out the guard Roche calls over. Also, the highlighted buckets aren’t containers you’re meant to loot – they’re noisemakers you’re supposed to avoid.