Various Thoughts

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.

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.

The 4th chapter seems to give Mages the short end of the stick. While Paladins get a bunch of Orc warchiefs to kill and Mercenaries get hoards of Lizardmen and the Dragon Eggs they guard, Mages just get a ‘Find the Possessed’ quest which results in an amulet that protects against stifling. It’s a bit useful, sure, but the Dragon Eggs or combat XP would have been better. All classes get a ton of new spawns in the add-on world (Dragon Snappers, Trolls, Skeletons) and Valley of Mines (Orcs, Dragon Snappers) which combined with the Dragons equals quite a bit of XP to be gained.

Chapter 5 once again seems to give Mages the shaft. Here Paladins and Mercenaries get their best armor while Mages get a potion that gives +5 Str & Dex. I could understand Mage armor having the lowest Weapon/Arrow/Dragon resistances… but it also has the lowest Magic resistance. Respawn-wise there’s only a relative handful of new Seekers wandering the main area, so the XP gained here is rather paltry. My naked stats at the end of this chapter looked like this.

The final chapter takes place in a new area infested with Orcs, Lizardmen, Undead, Seekers, and even a couple Dragons. 4/5-on-one battles here are rather common so if you have access to Fire Rain or Wave of Ice Runes/Scrolls now’s the time to use them. Make sure to save two Wave of Ice castings for the Dragons though. Lots of XP and stat-boosting potions here.

In the end there only really ended up being 3 notably useful spells: Ice Block (incapacitates most things), Ice Wave (incapacitates multiple things at once, even Dragons), and Fire Rain (kills everything around you). There’s no point in spending LP on Runes for any other spells when scrolls will suffice.

I kind of want to try a replay with a Dex-focused Mercenary now, but I think I may wait a bit and instead go right into Gothic 3. I’m a bit worried that there don’t seem to be any comprehensive walkthroughs for it, but unlike with this game it’s supposedly extremely difficult to cripple your character in the 3rd game with unoptimized LP usage… so maybe I’ll be okay doing a ‘blind’ playthrough.

About to start chapter 4 now with the main area, add-on area, and Valley of Mines (except the dragon lairs) all cleared. Naked stats at level 39 are: 84 Str, 88 Dex, 81 Mana, 59 1H, & 38 Bow with 71 LP currently available. In case it isn’t obvious, I’ve been saving all the permanent Mana bonus items/rewards. Initially I wasn’t going to use them until I hit 124 (which is when raising it would cost 5LP per point)… but I don’t think I’ll gain enough levels to make it that far, and so will instead use them once I hit 94.

At this point a few things have become clearer and I’ve had to revise my earlier plan. Learning Ice Lance was a mistake (it’s faster and cheaper to kill things in melee) and I’m going to skip learning the Awaken Golem spell since there are plenty of scrolls lying around. I think I’ll also skip Destroy Undead since the only thing it seems to be really useful for are Shadow Warriors (Skeleton Mages turned out to be very easy to kill in melee), which are rare.

Seekers ended up being a joke since their direct damage spells are the same as yours (i.e. bad). Sure they might cast Rain of Fire, but you can clearly see when the spell switch happens and they should be long dead before then. Compared to the hoards of Orcs and Lizard Men I’ve had to clear out so far they’re a walk in the park. Speaking of Lizard Men, I find it odd that they die quicker than Orcs.

One last thing to note is that the Gold/NotR version of the game has removed most of the stat-boosting items from the Valley of Mines. Elixirs that used to be in remote locations are gone, Dragon Roots appear to be gone, the lone King’s Sorrel is gone, and most of the Goblin Berries are gone (I found two; there used to be 9). So keep that in mind when planning your build.