Bros advise me on twitcher2 difficulty level

[yellowcake]

So I finished first The Witcher game few days ago and bought the second one off of GOG. I swore myself I'd wait for 4:3 patch as I got myself this cool used pro grade S-IPS 1600x1200 LCD few months ago but there came payday and I got bored and bough it anyway. I started it on hard difficulty just as the first one and I am now in Flotsam and getting my ass handed to me severely just checking out the neighborhood. I'm considering lowering the difficulty level seriously because I got pissed off really.

Before doing TW1 I read here and there that hard difficulty is OK because it forces you to use potions. I liked this because it's OK with TW lore from the books and I found hard difficulty in TW1 just right. Well, at least for 2/3 of the game anyway but I can't say I was feeling bad being badass later in the game. I kinda liked the alchemy minigame as well, always remembering to buy HQ alcohol at inns and alchemists for potion bases. Almost as in RL. I used tawny owl, maribor forest, petris philter and diamond dust and I was OK spamming IGNI.

Anyway, I started TW2 on hard and found fights not that pleasant I must admit. I don't like simplifying alchemy that much and I don't know what to think about restricted potion usage. Besides, environments in TW1 were more open an allowed you for some tactics - you could notice monster gatherings from far away and just lure couple of them for a party or fuckin circumvent the fuckers when in hurry. TW2 seems way more cramped and you can't see shit through all this bloom and shader effects. Effect is that I find myself surrounded by 5 bogeys out of nowhere all the time.

So please advise me Codex on a strategy that would fucking win the game for me on hard diff that would sustain some accordance with the lore to some degree. Should I use throwing knives? Bombs? Traps? I roll the floor like a rubber man already. Or should I just accept being a sissy and lower the difficulty.

please discuss!

 

[JarlFrank]

And if that pic doesn't explain enough by itself: make use of the rolling skill. A lot. Roll around all the time, it's perfect for dodging attacks and it allows you to position yourself better (behind or at the flanks of an enemy).

Other than that, make very liberal use of the Quen sign, but Axii and Yrden are also great to stun enemies for a while.

Always try rolling around and Yrdening/Axiiing the shit out of your enemies so that you'll only face one or two at a time. As soon as the others reach you, roll around again. Oh, and when enemies with shield block your strike, roll away and try getting at them from behind/the flank.

Increasing vigour is pretty much obligatory, too, so you can make liberal use of magic signs and can actually use the blocking function.

 

[Raapys]

Quen sign is your friend. Regular quen will make it easy, upgraded will give you godmode.

 

[sser]

Quen basically gets you through the opening parts until the skills trees allow you to not be so sucky. Just hit and run and reactivate Quen whenever possible. I liberally used bombs and knives to give myself space, but I was doing the Alchemy tree. Honestly, with Quen you should be okay so long as you keep moving. There was only one non-boss fight I had trouble with.

 

[Darkforge]

Jesus, and here I am playing it on insane with the re-balance patches for abilities and equipment because the game is too damn easy otherwise.

At default key to playing this game as mentioned, is liberal use of Quen and constant rolling it then becomes easy mode, even before CDpodred decided to cater to the whiners and nerf the prelude difficulty

 

[wire00023]

Here is some asking for an advice from Codex on a strategy that would win the games on twitcher2 difficulty level. He had finished the twitcher game 1 and found hard difficulty in TW1 just right. But noting seems to work right here and he is seriously considering of lowering the difficulty level as he got really pissed off.

 

[Neeshka]

Upgraded Quen, Poisons until improved mutagens. Sell every mutagen other than the highest ranks. Use them once you get the increased mutagen effect in the poison tree.
Do not level swords at all.

 

[Mrowak]

Roll. That's all there is to it. When you master the sacred art of rolling and Quening the game becomes a piece of cake, on any difficulty.

Both feel like a cheatmode.

 

[wader2k]

Yup....Rolling is the key.

Problem is, I hate the rolling around so much I finally set the difficulty to Easy about 1/2 way thru Chapter 1

I am now nearing the end of Chapter 2 and haven't rolled in so long I had forgot about it. Haven't used any potions or cast any signs (except to knock down an occasional wall) either.

I truly despise the combat in Witcher 2. Witcher 1 was ok, but Witcher 2 is unbearable in this respect.

 

[Mayday]

I really wish somebody made a game where doing stuff properly uses up your stamina, goddamnit.

 

[skyst]

I finally got around to playing Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings about a month ago. I played the game on the new "Dark" difficulty, which I read was the "Insane" difficulty with new items, merchants and craftables - an obvious choice! In retrospect, I would suggest either playing the game on "Normal" and enjoy the story or stick to the normal "Insane" difficulty, the items added by "Dark" are severely over powered and game breaking. Each chapter offers a new, easily craftable item set that blows any other gear option out of the water as well as providing enough life leech to allow you to derp button mash through every encounter. The swords also engulf your screen in a nasty, black fog since they're cursed, grimdark evil weapons. Bleh.

Additionally, beware the save file that you import. I had about 100,000 orens imported from The Witcher which made money pointless throughout the game. I think I ended with about 50,000 orens after buying absolutely everything I could possibly want. For reference, a "high stakes!" game of dice allows you to bet like 20 orens, max.

 

[Coyote]

Roll. That's all there is to it. When you master the sacred art of rolling and Quening the game becomes a piece of cake, on any difficulty.

I agree for the most part, but there is one exception to this: the first section of The Eternal Battle on dark difficulty with an alchemy-focused build.

Just played through this part a few days ago and it's absolutely ridiculous - at least 10 times harder than any other battle I encountered, and not in a good way. It's the part where you play as one of the wraiths trying to take the banner, and you can only do three things: attack, block, and run. No inventory items, signs, or rolling, your swings seem slower than when controlling Geralt, and whatever potions/oils you use before entering the mist don't have any effect at this point, making the vast majority of the alchemy tree useless.

There are 4-5 enemies, all of which attack you at once because the other wraiths on your side die by the time you get close and you can't attract one without attracting the others, no matter how slowly you approach them. They kill you in 3-5 hits even if you block - not that it matters, since if you get hit once, blocking or not, you will inevitably die due to getting locked into the animations. And you have to fight in a very small area because a circle of fire appears around you, so it's almost impossible to separate them (plus, running around leaves your back exposed for a one-hit kill, and they have greater reach than their animations would suggest).

The best part? The last point you can save is before entering the mist, which means you have to wait through ~30 seconds of loading, skipping through dialogue, and an unskippable cutscene every time you die.



I don't remember this part being nearly so hard on my other playthrough - in fact, I'd completely forgotten about it, despite remembering the parts that follow it where you avoid arrows and play as Seltkirk. For comparison, I took down the Vran who summons gargoyles in the Loc Muinne sewers in two tries with the same character.

I finally got around to playing Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings about a month ago. I played the game on the new "Dark" difficulty, which I read was the "Insane" difficulty with new items, merchants and craftables - an obvious choice! In retrospect, I would suggest either playing the game on "Normal" and enjoy the story or stick to the normal "Insane" difficulty, the items added by "Dark" are severely over powered and game breaking. Each chapter offers a new, easily craftable item set that blows any other gear option out of the water as well as providing enough life leech to allow you to derp button mash through every encounter. The swords also engulf your screen in a nasty, black fog since they're cursed, grimdark evil weapons. Bleh.

Bearing in mind that insane forces you to play ironman-style, I wouldn't let this stop you from playing on dark if you're interested in it. The new items are ridiculously expensive to craft, due to requiring both the diagram/crafting fees and the added expense of stocking up on robust cloths, hardened/studded leathers, and silver ores. You'd have to go out of your way spending several hours arm-wrestling and/or killing harpies/gargoyles (the quickest ways to raise money in each chapter) to make each set. I got one set in chapter 2 to see if it would help with the issue mentioned above and decided not to use it for the rest of the game because I didn't like the visual effect and figured the game would be more fun without it, so it's not like they're necessary either.

Additionally, beware the save file that you import. I had about 100,000 orens imported from The Witcher which made money pointless throughout the game. I think I ended with about 50,000 orens after buying absolutely everything I could possibly want. For reference, a "high stakes!" game of dice allows you to bet like 20 orens, max.

Are you sure about this? I imported a save with ~30k orens from TW1 and while I retained my armor and swords from TW1, I had only a few hundred orens at the start of TW2. If so, yeah, I'd agree. In fact, I'd recommend dropping the preorder items that were patched in at some point (herbalist's gloves, etc.) if you want to get the most out of the early part of the game, since some of them are more powerful than anything you can craft - aside from the cursed sets - until chapter 3 when the game is almost over. On my first playthrough, where I hadn't imported a save, I wondered why all the shops in Flotsam offered armor that was worse than what I was wearing.

Edit: I just checked and the default amount of orens you receive at the beginning is 115. When I imported using a TW1 save where I had 34821 orens, I started TW2 with 463 orens. (Both of these were true in easy and dark and no matter what part of the intro battle I started with, though I didn't test whether importing into the tutorial first had any effect.) 463 - 115 = 348, so it seems that the formula is most likely

orens in TW2 = 0.01(orens in TW1) + 115

Did you download a TW1 save from online, by any chance? I did a bit of searching and it seems that some of popular saves used trainers to raise their orens to absurdly high numbers in TW1.

 

[el Supremo]

http://uppix.net/1/e/5/db494c96e4aef1d2 ... bf0584.jpg

 

[Reptilian Shapeshifter]

Roll. That's all there is to it. When you master the sacred art of rolling and Quening the game becomes a piece of cake, on any difficulty.

I agree for the most part, but there is one exception to this: the first section of The Eternal Battle on dark difficulty with an alchemy-focused build.

Just played through this part a few days ago and it's absolutely ridiculous - at least 10 times harder than any other battle I encountered, and not in a good way. It's the part where you play as one of the wraiths trying to take the banner, and you can only do three things: attack, block, and run. No inventory items, signs, or rolling, your swings seem slower than when controlling Geralt, and whatever potions/oils you use before entering the mist don't have any effect at this point, making the vast majority of the alchemy tree useless.

There are 4-5 enemies, all of which attack you at once because the other wraiths on your side die by the time you get close and you can't attract one without attracting the others, no matter how slowly you approach them. They kill you in 3-5 hits even if you block - not that it matters, since if you get hit once, blocking or not, you will inevitably die due to getting locked into the animations. And you have to fight in a very small area because a circle of fire appears around you, so it's almost impossible to separate them (plus, running around leaves your back exposed for a one-hit kill, and they have greater reach than their animations would suggest).

The best part? The last point you can save is before entering the mist, which means you have to wait through ~30 seconds of loading, skipping through dialogue, and an unskippable cutscene every time you die.

Rage, indeed. It took me a good 30 tries before I was able to pass that battle on "dark" difficulty, and mostly it came down to luck. The trick is to take out at least one of the wraiths/spectres right off the bat. I was able to hit two of them at the same time with several swings, killing one on the spot and severely wounding the other. After that, don't bother blocking - just run away as fast as possible and keep running in circles around the ring until you can isolate one of them (or need to regenerate HPs). Go in for one, maybe two swings, and then run away. Repeat until only the Draugir is left.

I felt like murdering the dev who put that sequence together.

The rest of the game, as you say, was a complete cakewalk. I actually finished the game without taking any perks/upgrades, which meant no throwing knives or pumped-up Quen. I defeated the Operator and his gargoyles after several attempts using Fury traps.

 

[Raghar]

[
Are you sure about this? I imported a save with ~30k orens from TW1 and while I retained my armor and swords from TW1, I had only a few hundred orens at the start of TW2. If so, yeah, I'd agree. In fact, I'd recommend dropping the preorder items that were patched in at some point (herbalist's gloves, etc.) if you want to get the most out of the early part of the game, since some of them are more powerful than anything you can craft - aside from the cursed sets - until chapter 3 when the game is almost over. On my first playthrough, where I hadn't imported a save, I wondered why all the shops in Flotsam offered armor that was worse than what I was wearing.

There was a bug before patch. They simplified the beginning combats, and significantly decreased starting money.

 

[xemous]

Yup....Rolling is the key.

Problem is, I hate the rolling around so much I finally set the difficulty to Easy about 1/2 way thru Chapter 1

I am now nearing the end of Chapter 2 and haven't rolled in so long I had forgot about it. Haven't used any potions or cast any signs (except to knock down an occasional wall) either.

I truly despise the combat in Witcher 2. Witcher 1 was ok, but Witcher 2 is unbearable in this respect.

i agree with this post.

 

[deuxhero]

I really wish somebody made a game where doing stuff properly uses up your stamina, goddamnit.

Dark Souls.