Started this game up shortly after finishing the prequel, with the only modifications being the Community Patch (with both alternative balancing and AI off, though I may turn the AI modifications on later).
Three things immediately become clear after the opening cutscene: The mouse sensitivity is insane, the movement is much improved, and the melee combat is still pretty unfair (albeit in a different manner). In the second game you had to make quick attacks and then back off against humanoid opponents to avoid their lightning fast counters, here you can just keep swinging until they’re dead; once you hit someone it’s incredibly rare they can get a hit in if you just keep attacking. Some creatures on the other hand (e.g. wolves) are now far more deadly, being able to do the same thing you can do to humanoids to you. As for ranged combat… it’s pretty damn effective once you get the hang of aiming the bow.
Character advancement is also a bit different. You still get 10 LP per level, which is once again used to learn everything from attributes to skills, but LP costs now appear to remain constant at all skill levels and you no longer gain free HP per level. Strength, Dexterity (which has been renamed ‘Hunting’), and Mana are still the same while weapon styles have been streamlined into sets of skills. Hunting has also been streamlined; you no longer spend LP on each specific creature item, instead only having to learn three universal skills. There are also some new things to spend LP on: Endurance, Ancient Knowledge, Health (mentioned earlier), Thieving, and Alchemy/Smithing.
Endurance affects how often you can sprint and… that seems to be it. I thought running out would have some sort of detrimental effect in combat since attacking depletes it, but my attacks at 0 Endurance seem to be just as effective as the ones at full Endurance. Maybe you take more damage when hit at low levels? If it really only affects Sprint time, then there’s really no point in ever raising it (and that Transfer Disease spell will be utterly useless). Ancient Knowledge affects both what spells you can learn and how effective they are when cast, which is to say that it does what the Mana stat should have done last game. Health is your HP of course (which no longer increases automatically when you level up), while the three thief skills in the last game have been split off from Dexterity and expanded into a Thievery attribute with a bunch of related skills. In contrast, Alchemy and Smithing have been somewhat condensed so that you no longer have to learn each item individually. Instead you just learn the required core skill for a general group of items and then buy whatever recipes you want with gold (speaking of gold, all attribute/skill learning now costs gold in addition to LP).
Having cleared most of the area around the first three towns (except the Ogre/Dragon infested cave and the large wolf pack roaming around near the starting point) I’m close to level 13, with stats looking like this:
The original plan was to go from here to 150 Str for Dual Weapons, then max out Thievery for Master Thief, next aim for 240 Str for the best craftable 1H sword, and finally put whatever points were left into getting a spell or two for crowd control (either a summoning spell or maybe Fire/Frost Wave). Miscellaneous skills to pick up when relevant being Resist Fire/Frost, Smith Ore/Pure Ore weapons, Brew Permanent Potion, and possibly the Sleep spell if it synergized with Master Thief.
However, I’ve been thinking I made a mistake in not rushing to pick up Quick Learner (+1 LP per level) as soon as possible. The common endgame level seem to be in the 60s for most people, so that’s at least 45 free LP assuming the skill is picked up at level 9 and you plan to use at least one spell (30 AK from items in the first 3 towns, 70 AK from LP, 5 LP for the skill itself). Which is no small amount. So I may frontline getting that skill now, before level 20, since 35+ free LP is still pretty attractive. Well, we’ll see how things go in the 4th town.