The Witcher series - thread

It's funny you mention that, because I'm actually trying to find the build that plays the least like Dark Souls.

All of them. The big difference between the two games is precision. In Dark Souls, whenever you push a button you know precisely what in the fuck your dude is going to do, down to the angle of the swing and the shape his hitbox will make. Witcher is mostly okay, but the fact that the sword strikes seem to be entirely randomized removes some of your ability to control that. Of course, if they weren't randomized I'd just spend the entire game doing that somersaulting sword thing that hits like eighty times and things would get boring pretty fast, but that's the difference I notice, anyway.

Not that it matters. What I've noticed is that a properly cultivated Quen build is basically easy mode, regardless of the difficulty you pick. Once you get a bunch of points into it and its related talents, you can take two or three hits before anything drops, which is generally enough warning for you to back away and get yourself into a better position. Doing something like that turned Dark Mode, which is supposed to be the hardest the game can be (there's another difficulty on PC that takes away the Dark Sets that's worse, but I did it on console) into....basically, the same as every other difficulty that I played the game on, which was all of them. If it was nerfed before I got it, I hate to think how it worked originally.

It was a kitchen sink "roleplaying" build, without any particular synergy. Mostly I went to maximize stacking mutagen effects onto swordplay, with a side of (non direct) magic, bombs, and lots of traps. It certainly wasn't as effective as the Sword or Magic builds I'd tried earlier, though it might once have been before they made the more potent Mutagens rarer drops. I was looking more for a change of pace than an effective build, as the game is fairly easy once you get going and I wanted some challenge. Which isn't to say that it was weak -- bombs in particular can be brutal.

That "no magic regen" limitation was what always kept Shield from being as potentially potent as other magic. I think when they nerfed it they just reduced how much damage it can block?

I'm currently playing the Witcher 2 and enjoying it, although it usually takes me a death to figure out what I should have done.

The Igni sign is useful as an interrupt at the early stage of the game, or to help finish off an enemy. I think the trap sign is probably more useful (even un-upgraded), especially once you've got a good sword. But I'm only a bit ahead of extarbags though.

MINOR EDIT - how do you tag someone i.e. get their name linked in a post that includes their name? Success!

Using @, like so: UnSub. If the name has spaces just include them verbatim.

[Edit] Which of course gets replaced by a [USER] tag by the forum software, so take two:

@ Unsub -- just remove the space before Unsub.

Thanks!

That's about all you could do. The way it works now, at basically no points your Quen will stop one attack. When you put two into it, you can count on it to stop three from full duration (hits subtract from the available uptime). I believe it also effectively turns off environmental damage effects, so you can stand in fire.

You're still going to have to roll out to put it back up, though. That's just how combat works in this game, so far as I can tell. You're not supposed to stand there and take hits. Ever. You always have to always be running around and dodging.

I haven't really tried parrying, but I believe that's an option one-on-one.

Depends on the difficulty. If you're on Normal, parrying is certainly in play, but on the harder difficulties you'll get murdered trying to catch your opportunity. It's also not useful against some of the monsters that will tear you up - I mean, I'm pretty sure I never had the opportunity to use it on an Endragora on the playthrough where I was using parry.

But I played a boring build (Swords/Quen, with a focus on always having my shields up). I'm guessing there are probably magic builds that are just as effective that I never bothered with.

Parry is more for offense than defense. Rolling around (especially with the roll range upgrade) is just better defensively, but if you can stick the riposte parrying is pretty deadly.

What the fuck is wrong with the maps in this game? I've been looking for the same NPC for like an hour because they're just unbelievably useless. The full map is laughably high-level to the point that it might as well just say that the next stop in the quest is somewhere in the town, and the minimap frequently leads you to either the wrong place or two places simultaneously or nowhere at all.

Which NPC?

The map doesn't show Z-coord locations very well - Sile is in a room above the inn, but the marker doesn't make that clear.

That's the one, and I ended up looking it up on Youtube. The fact that out of this huge expansive game you guessed the exact one I was looking for hopefully means that this won't be a common occurrence.

Now I'm dealing with this somewhat irritating boss fight, which mostly just makes me feel bad about my prospects for enjoying RPG boss fights in a post-Dark Souls world. The meaty RPG stuff in this game is good, so I'm looking forward to getting back to it.

I'm in the second town now, where the lack of Z-indicators on a map featuring a dwarven town is even more annoying.

The karyan isn't too hard once you get into the swing of it, but the QTE bit surprised me.

I really like The Witcher's world as well.

I really recommend to just explore the whole towns, walk through it few times and no map is really necessary..

I've explored the first town very thoroughly and walked through it scores of times, and I can assure you that a map is still necessary when the game tell you to go to a person, since a person is not an unmovable location and also since there are are huge number of people milling around which makes it pretty hard to remember where the last place you saw one particular one of them was.

I'l just warn you that one stage of that boss fight puts/used to put the minimap marker somewhere completely wrong (and deadly) so you could be about to combine your two particular peeves :|

Personally, that fight was the low point of the game I thought. Although various other boss fights came close.

To an extent, but Vergen requires you to travel through a lot of doors and move up and down onto different levels, so that you can end up near an indicated checkpoint / character, but not actually be able to get to them.

What's not to like about beating the everloving hell out of a boss and then somehow coming out of the fight, post-cut scene, on the losing end?

Once you get the Kayran down it's trivial. If you didn't make the trap, that will take care of the first phase for you, and turning off complex quick time events helps.

And Vergen does suck, but eventually you'll learn where everything is.

Well I did beat the kayran, and while I found it pretty cheap and irritating it was ok. Immediately afterward I got right back to super-enjoying the game again with the surprisingly deep and interesting options for developing my relationship with Triss (which hopefully continues but please do not spoil it for me). I also decided to re-gear my guy and when I looked up the available options to that end, I found out that I should have looked it up much, much earlier. I've been using the big huge two-handed sword that you find early on which is at least not too terrible and the noob silver sword which totally sucks, which has meant that all monster fights (which is almost all of the fights so far) have been a little frustrating. Turns out I could have upgraded both significantly a long time ago. Ah well, I'll do that now.

Or will I? Question: when the quest line you're on tells you to talk to a guy and you do, and he's like "sure let's go do it now" and starts walking to the next thing, do you actually have to go do it right then?

Not usually. For instance, when Triss walks off at some point to go investigate the Kayran, if you just let her go she'll stop most of the way there and wait forever for you to show up. Some of the end-of-chapter events for Act 1, though, you might need to stay with her, but I'm pretty sure you're locked into those and you can't go anywhere anyway.

Gear makes a huge difference, especially your silver sword...

Not sure whether you have to do the "follow me right now" quests right now, but I always did in an effort to avoid the typical CRPG dithering-while-the-world-burns.

And yeah, they did a real good job with the characterization in this game, in all aspects: story, lines, voice acting, etc. The whole love triangle with the redhead sorceress certainly had plenty of potential to be utterly terrible and cliche, especially combined with an off stage 3rd and amnesia, but they navigated it well (much better than in Witcher 1).

That reminds me: in the scene in chapter 1 where you and Triss are under that elf statue, she tries to persuade you to just not bother looking for the assassin, and there are dialog options that seem to agree to this although I didn't take them. What happens if you do? Game just ends early a la Torment/Shadow Complex?

That would be spoilers! Suffice it to say it's not quite so easy to escape interesting times.

Ok, cool (and thanks for not spoiling). Sounds like it might be interesting to go down that path then if it isn't too late.

I'll tag it, but I'm not sure this is really a spoiler. Just the same, you might want to make your call before you read it.

Finished The Witcher 2, Ioverth's path, on Normal. Great game.

The thing I love about the Witcher series is that characters are rarely fully good or fully evil. They seem to be consistent in their motivations, which can lead to some interesting developments.

Anyway, restarting on Dark difficulty and will see what Roche has to say for himself.

The importantest thing about Dark (and, coincidentally, tghe bit that makes it not that big of a deal compared to Normal once you get it done) is finishing the special Dark sets. This will take some farming. Or possibly all the farming. There are some things you can do early on to help with the first one, but for the second (and it's good you're going Roche), you're probably going to have to farm harpies for a little while to buy all the recipes. Which isn't the worst thing in the universe. Once you get even the first Dark set, you should be able to hang with most opponents. I want to say that I went to the trouble of finishing that before I did the Kayran (despite that fight being highly scripted) - I hope I'm not remembering that wrong.

Hmm, I haven't been watching my cash in Chapter 1. I may have to save money / ingredients for the Chapter 2's version.

I'm also going Magic path to make it easier as well.

Alright I picked this up on the stupidly cheap Steam sale.

First of all, these menus kinda suck, so I might pick up some mod on the Nexus that apparently makes it easier to tool through. Whatsup with the four unnamed icons to the left of the inventory sections? I don't get that.

I got my ass kicked about 5 times the first fight at the assault during prologue. I'm assuming this is supposed to happen as I do jumpkicks and shit without paying attention to important things like crossbowmen and parrying.

I elected to kill the punk at the top of the tower. Took me 5 times, but it felt good when I finally did it.

Is Normal the way to play this game? I see a Complete Equipment rebalancing mod on the Nexus that implies that the game becomes very easy later on due to stacking tons of resists with enhancements, so it changes item values and upgrades to make the equipment curve fit the game curve (i.e. makes the game still a challenge later on). Does this sound worth it?

Final thought... god damn this game is beautiful, and at this point it runs great, though I fear trying it on 1920x1200 on my GTX 460

I can't talk for mods.

Early on, you suck a lot. Your quick attack / dodge away combo is vital to your survival. Don't let people hit you from behind (and in that intro area where you take out the gate with a ballista, search around to find a character from another video game that will give you a backstab bonus). Having Quen up - which gives you a one-hit shield - also increases your survivability a lot.

Unless you have an enemy pinned up against a wall, you generally can't button mash to their death either.

Then pick what training path you want to take. Swordsmanship was fun in Normal, but Magic makes things a lot easier.

Dammit, I already did that area!

I may have to restart anyways if this one mod requires it, though.

Coincidentally, I've just started playing 'The Witcher'. The voice acting is terrible and the combat tutorial is almost non-existent, to the extent that I had to find a tutorial online to explain it (which is ridiculous, because it's not even that complicated). But there's something charming about it and unlike whatsisface upthread, I'm sort of relieved that I don't have the tyranny of choice that usually makes RPGs a bit too stressful for me.

There are these hidden 'attributes' that you can unlock by doing things like being set on fire / running through enough fires and when you achieve certain actions in game. The absolutely essential one is the 10% XP bonus you get if you cut down 10 training dummies - there are five in the first camp and then 5 in Flotsam, including 2 or 3 in front of Loredo's house.

I don't get the option for Polish VA, I already checked because I would have preferred that immediately.

Looks like the Steam EE version needs you to toggle the language in the Steam properties of the game before it will download the Polish voiceovers that you can select in the Launcher.