Well, Gothic 3 is now finished. Went with the neutral ending and didn’t bother with any of the ‘Destroy the Rebels!’ or ‘Liberate the City from the Orcs!’ quests. Ended up with the following naked stats:
The snow area is a pain in the ass, both because there are tons of enemies and because it’s set up vertically as well as horizontally. I actually stopped looting things here and switched over to a magic-first attack strategy because there’s just far too much stuff to kill and melee is such a crapshoot. It’s very grindy. Not helping matters is that the neutral ending requires you to walk across literally half the world map (from the northeast corner of the snow area to the far west midlands area). At least the Hailstorm and Time Bubble spells are both pretty good. Some things to be aware of if you decide to play this game:
- General
- Do not turn on the Community Patch Alternative Balancing option if you do not know what to expect; being stuck with a subpar build can really ruin your day.
- The Alternate AI option is fine though.
- If you load a saved game, NPCs will have both lost HP and stolen weapons restored (this includes summons).
- Raising Endurance is a waste.
- You shouldn’t bother raising HP until the very end of the game, once you have everything else you want.
- Raising Mana is useful, but you’ll want to get Mana Regeneration first.
- The Resistance to Cold/Fire skills are useful in the relevant areas, but you can get those free from armor.
- Resistance to Poison is useful if you keep getting hit by Bloodflies.
- Acrobatics and Resistance to Disease are both completely unnecessary.
- Strength
- Melee is really bad compared to magic.
- You can apparently only learn Regeneration from two characters, and only once you’ve resolved the Rebel/Orc war.
- Hunting
- The three animal part skills are necessary for a number of quests.
- Bows are pretty good, but the hit detection is weird sometimes.
- Ancient Knowledge
- If you run from town to town you can get your Ancient Knowledge fairly high by reading books and buying Stone Tablets.
- The Mana Regeneration and Quick Learner skills are fantastic and you should try to get them as soon as possible.
- The Druid skill is basically useless, but the other 3 ‘Mage’ skills are essential if you plan to use damage spells of the relevant type.
- The basic Ice Lance spell is pretty godly since the charged version freezes most targets solid.
- Summon Demon is good, but note that anyone not in your party will attack it on sight.
- Frost Wave and Ice Explosion are too slow to be good for much of anything.
- Poison and Terror are good utility spells for when you need to single out a particular target.
- Amnesia is a panic button spell for when you’ve accidentally attacked an ally and don’t have a recent save.
- You can only learn the highest level spells once you’ve chosen a god to support in the endgame.
- Thieving
- The Pickpocket skills are worthless.
- Master Thief combined with the Sleep spell basically breaks the game.
- The Lockpick skills, the first two at least, may as well be essential.
- If you ever see a chest named something other than ‘Metal’, open it. You don’t have to take what’s inside, but the more you open the better the treasures get.
- The Knockout skill is inferior to the Sleep spell.
- The Murder skill is kind of cool but ultimately just a novelty.
- Smithing
- Prospector allows you to complete a number of quests much quicker.
- Sharpen Weapon is good if you use swords.
- The weapon-creation skills are only really worth it if you use 1H swords.
- The Pure Ore skill isn’t worth it at all.
- The Heavy Armor skill is decent, but not really good enough to spend points on.
- Alchemy
- There’s no need to ever spend LP on Alchemy.
- Brew Permanent Potions is good.
- Poison Arrows is decent, but Poison Weapon is pretty bad.
- You’ll rarely need Mana Potions once you get the Mana Regeneration skill.
- It’s doubtful you’ll ever need Transformation Potions.