STR is always added to damage, it's just that normal hit formulae is /10 damage. Bows always crit otoh which is why they do so much damage.
I saw where the combat formulas essentially make it so that you have to land critical hits to actually do any meaningful damage
Not sure, I think in the end farming as much STR as possible is technically a bigger increase in damage than skill. Also, you can raise skill with books and notr tablets so can leave it at ~30 in the beginning. (right, don't forget to save 30lp for skill needed to read tablets)
Btw, since you're melee, don't forget to donate fire mage in city 50 gold donations per donation to double your hp early.
Generally people love to kill everything chapter by chapter in G2 but reality is higher tiers of armor you get even in ch2 (notr or mine valley) make you close to invulnerable to many enemies soo
and later armor upgrades are tableturning stuff.
I have a good "1-2-dodge" combo using the little knife that Cavalorn gives you
You want weapon with longest reach, drop this garbo. With that of course you won't like 30% moveset.
Archery is indeed OP and boring but only when your skill is high enough that you can attack from semi-distance
You need 0 skill to be an archer. Most effective way is just to max DEX. You can throw some points in but again, due to tabletos, you will end up with 50-60.
There are many moments when you can't use distance at all, like when opening doors and there are some skeletons, for example. But due to noscope you can just tank hits with armor.
dex swords which generally have a much higher stat-to-atk ratio
They still take STR into formula which makes them semi-worthless tbh. Especially when Claw of Beliar exists.
You may want Acrobatics but that's honestly points wasted as G2 has many teleporters. And for Pickpocket you want max dex, definitely more than 100+. So unless you're archer, I'd go all out STR for any char.
The biggest problem in melee run would be that fun doesn't last for 60 hours - there are simply too many raptors to chunk through.
You do get fireball at circle 2 though which is decent, and lightning/small firestorm can get you through the mid game
Wouldn't waste time on fireball, when there is Ice Lance (100 damage).
It doesn't help that G2 is just generally harder to get into than G1. This whole first chapter is just a bunch of random sidequests around Khorinis and hunting mobs to kill for XP.
Yeah, after G2 I decided to replay G1 and a) it doesn't waste your time as much (although some quests like selling weed is meh, G2 finding bandits quest is very good tracking quest for example) and b) it gives loads of XP for quests (500+) which allows you to progress quickly without lawnmowing trash.
I finished some basic quests in all camps, spent a whooping amount of total 10LP (on lockpicking), joined Gomez, and with 2 rings of str, 1 bottle of str and good sword and heavy Shadow armor am going for eggs now, to become fire mage.
Oddly for me with system patches and all mouse behaves better in G1 than in G2.