Nah; if he was Hitler, half of GD would show up to sing his praises.
Befuddled Halfling said:
Serious question – on the PC, are you better off playing this with a controller? On the keyboard, if you mistake d+space for f+space, that will usually cost you the fight.
I couldn't tell you (never used a controller for a PC game).
Responding via numbers to avoid block-quoting again...
1) Not sure what you mean by "1 strength upgrade", but strength and dexterity both can be raised up to a maximum of 200, with 100 being the max possible from training alone (you can get the rest from potions, which makes alchemy 3 one of the best uses of your LP in the game). A single upgrade will only raise it by 1 or 5 points, which won't make much of a difference. If I'm playing a melee fighter, I generally look at the strength required for the highest-damage weapon available in my preferred category of weapons and try to match it. Between the damage from your increased strength and the damage from the weapon, this will usually have a profound effect on your fighting ability. Oh, and if you feel like you're doing abnormally low damage, try switching to a weapon that deals a different type of damage; some creatures, like skeletons and war crickets, are weaker against blunt damage and will take more damage even if you end up using a lower-damage weapon.
2) Nothing much to say here, except that every enemy type has patterns that can be exploited to fight it in a twitchy manner if you choose to do so. I prefer leveling up and letting my character do the heavy lifting, though. One thing to keep in mind if you do try to twitch-fight is that the length of your weapon affects your timing; it's much easier to keep an enemy at bay using a longsword than a hunting knife, and not just because of the difference in damage. (At one point, although this might have been in Gothic 2, I found that I was better off using a weaker, longer weapon rather than upgrading because doing so messed up my timing and made it too difficult to avoid being hit.)
3) Sword- and axe-fighting are much more powerful than staff-fighting, both in terms of damage output and being able to use shields. At any given moment, you're likely to have access to more powerful axes than swords; however, axes can only be wielded two-handed until you raise your axe-fighting skill 6, and axe users benefit less from smithing since you can't forge any axes. Sword-fighting is probably the most balanced overall unless you're very good at two-handed fighting.
As for builds, it's okay to put points in lockpicking and other miscellaneous skills at the beginning, since most of the early game is spent in the bandit camp, Harbor Town, and monastery. In fact, this is generally a good idea, as you'll have a much harder time raising the money to invest in early training otherwise. Do keep in mind that level 3 chests are rare until chapter 3, though, so you might want to save some LP early on by sticking to lockpick 2 and simply making note when you encounter them so that you can come back later.
Once you really want to start exploring the world, I'd recommend investing 10-20 points in strength and getting the best weapon you can wield (I prefer swords to axes, so this would be either the cutlass, which can be bought in Harbor Town and requires 20 strength, or the skullsplitter, which can be bought in the bandit camp - or looted from some skeletons, if you manage to take them down - and requires 26 strength). This should be enough to take out most of the early-game enemies (hungry wolves, stingrats, grave moths) in 1-2 hits, while giving you greater leeway in fights against tougher enemies. I would personally recommend this for any build just to give you some breathing room early in the game; your LP investments early in the game make much more of a difference than later in the game in terms of enabling you to explore more of the world, and boosting strength provides a more noticeable benefit early on than boosting weapon skills, so unless you intend to become a mage by going straight to Harbor Town and then the monastery, this should prove a useful investment.
After that, it depends on your goals. If you're a mage, you'll want to invest as many LP as possible into your crystal of choice as soon as you are able. The crystals use a set amount of mana that never changes and become more powerful as you level them up, which, combined with how damage reduction works, makes this much more useful than splitting your investment between the crystals and mana. Don't worry about wisdom; it can only be raised by reading books and tablets, which you'll come across as you explore.
If you're a melee fighter, you'll want to keep investing in strength and make sure that you always have enough to wield your most powerful weapon; maybe keep 10 LP in reserve so you can boost strength when you find new weapons, and spend the rest to boost your sword-/axe-fighting skill and whatever other skills you find useful. Never played a pure archer, but I'd imagine it plays out very similarly, just with dexterity instead of strength.
Smithing 2 is useful for everyone because it enables you to produce rings that increase your armor by 8; two of these are almost equivalent to getting an upgrade to your armor, and there are fewer ways to boost your armor in the game than there are to boost your damage, so this can make a big difference. Smithing 3 is useful for melee fighters because it enables you to produce a +15 strength amulet and two-handed swords, including the most powerful sword you can obtain until chapter 4. Mages and (I'm assuming) Order members get a very powerful armor-boosting amulet fairly early in the game (bandits get it too, but not until much later), though, so you may not want to invest in the third level of smithing if you find your strength adequate and don't use swords. And alchemy 3, as noted above, is the best investment in terms of overall returns for
anyone, though you can put this off until later in the game if you want to use potions to max out your primary attribute. (If you don't mind not reaching 200, though, you should invest in it earlier; you'll be slightly weaker at the end of the game, but much stronger throughout the majority of it, which may appeal to you if you're still having trouble.)
Metro and I
recently had an exchange that goes into a bit more detail, though as mentioned there, you don't really need to optimize your character to a great extent; just make sure you're good at your primary fighting style and that should be enough.
4) I can usually keep three wolves in check by doing a lot of circling/blocking and only attacking when all three are in front of me; it's not a perfect strategy, but they generally don't give me much trouble. If there are more than three, I try to take out the closest one before they have a chance to attack by striking while it's in the middle of the growling animation, although this requires precise timing. A lot of the groups you encounter in chapter 2 are also less intimidating than they look because they contain a mixture of hungry wolves, wolves, and black wolves, of which only the latter should take more than a hit or two if you've invested your LP well and kept stocked with the latest weapons. Merchants gain new goods between chapters, so be sure to check back with them.
5) The area scaling is most noticeable in the transition between chapters 1 and 2 with regard to wolves and a few sets of moths/stingrats. After that, the only new enemies that appear in previously-explored areas are lizardmen and lizardmen elites. Most areas remain the same; you'll never see gnomes, ghouls, skeletons, worms, etc. replaced with higher-level counterparts, and I don't think any new enemies appear inside caves/ruins.
As for boars and Brogar: multiple boars are a pain to fight; I can never get the timing right, and I usually let them be until I'm strong enough to take them down quickly, at which point they're a cakewalk. Fortunately, there are very few groups of them and they're generally out of the way. And although fighting humanoids is more fun when you've fully upgraded your weapon skill and use all the tricks at your disposal, the surest way to defeat them for a beginner is quite boring: always block, attack once after they finish a sequence of attacks (unless your character attacks with a surge of speed as happens occasionally, in which case you can go for a full three-hit combo), and keep a healthy distance so that if they start to use an attack that can break through your shield, you can move out of its range. IIRC, that's how I managed to defeat Brogar the first time despite wielding only a thorn mace and a shield. In the Gothics you could also dodge when they charged at you and hit them in the back, but I've found much less success doing this in Risen.
