Lurtch is east of Lindale, but in the middle space there is a question mark. You can go there and stand in the middle of their little market and apparently the secret is below. I tried running around the little hilly areas but I haven’t found an entrance to a cave that runs under the town.
You can reduce the combat in any game to this.
CoD is hide behind cover, shoot, shoot, shoot. Maybe throw a grenade. Rinse and repeat.
I am not sure what difficulty level you are playing on but I’d suggest bumping it up a level if you want better combat.
I am playing on the one just below the most difficult setting and combat is challenging. Yes, it is a lot (a helluva lot) of dodge-rolling. But you really need to move more. At this point (level 7 doing Bloody Baron quest) groups of Drowners still scare me. I can kill them easily enough but a group is trouble because while you run behind one to whack him three are running behind you to whack you and they are pretty fast (so are wolves but I kill them a lot faster now so they are less trouble). They hit really hard too…a few hits and I am in trouble by them. If unlucky two or three can get a hit in quick succession and I am in trouble and worried.
It is even more problematic because meditating will not heal you. You need food which is weirdly scarce (yes you can kill animals which helps and no, I do not have the Quen level yet to help here). As a result you find yourself going into battles in less than ideal circumstances. I got all the way to the end of the bit with Keira Metz and ran out of food to heal. Had to load a much earlier save, stock up a bit and do it all over again (that and I got better at fighting).
As a result it becomes important to use oils on your blade when you can, use potions, bombs, setup your second tier abilities well, keep your stuff repaired and so on. I am not sure if experience leveling is nerfed at higher levels but I am often a level behind the mission indicated level making it even more challenging.
I have heard the game is lopsided in its difficulty levels though. Pretty hard at the start and you are unstoppable near the end. Haven’t got that far myself yet. Maybe some balance mods will address that and the money issues at some point.
Meh, not really. Some games offer a bunch of spells, skills, different weapon types with different styles, etc. This doesn’t have as much of that. Yeah, sure, you press the mouse button in all of them but part of what makes a game solid is how much they can switch up the results of clicking that button.
That said, I don’t think the combat is terrible. It’s just not particularly impressive.
You don’t really, though.
I mean I was just like you, but having played the game more I now realize that food is completely dispensable. Options available :
- pick that one unique talent that gives passive health regen during daytime and energy regen by nighttime. That’s really a one-stop food shop (personally I deliberately didn’t pick it because both aspects of that talent seem really overpowered)
- I don’t recall when exactly you gain access to the Swallow potion, but IIRC it’s pretty much immediately. About that sweet sweet nectar : alcohol for refills is fucking everywhere. There are no penalties for meditating, you can do it anywhere (unlike Witcher 2 where you couldn’t do it in the wilds, to force you to plan that stuff ahead. Also unlike previous games, toxicity decreases on its own so you can keep on chuggin’ as you go). Medding even for one hour will fill all your potions back up. You could top up on swallow then meditate at the end of every fight if you really wanted to. Dungeons like the Keira Metz quest might restrict this (I’m not even sure), but then they’re pretty few and far between and if you do rely on potion fillups in the overworld you’ll organically build up a huge stockpile of food over time.
- later in the game you get access to a second type of healing potion, and upgraded recipes of both which heal more and give you more potion uses/rest, giving you that much more endurance per flask of booze.
- As a previous poster said, upgraded Quen = invulnerability and health back, all the time, for free. Liiittle bit OP :).
- In tier 2 of the alchemy tree is a hidden gem : “gain 5 percent health each time you chug a potion”. With 5 points in it you get a full quarter of your health back, immediately, with any potion whatsoever (except decoctions, for obvious reasons). Now I wish you had more than two potion quickslots or that you could chug from the inventory screen, I really do :).
Even with all that, I still die to drowners in close quarters, once in a while :o.
Well, you can use your sword, crossbow, bombs, oils and a handful of spells not to mention many different ways to gear yourself.
So, I’ve upgraded to my second-tier feline armor. Instead of a t-shirt under my leather vest I now have a blue turtle neck sweater. I mean, it’s nice and it’s more practical in Skelige having my biceps covered, but I do feel like I’m now a tough guy in a 70’s movie.
I do like the story missions, though I have to say they seem to seriously slow down my running around the map pre-killing monsters I don’t have any missions for yet and picking up map markers.
I do get frustrated when Geralt’s response to a situation ignores information that Geralt has available to him. I think, for example, that Reuven’s explanation for why Radovid must die is quite dead on, but Geralt is only allowed to respond to his emotional connection to two people persecuted. In the Alchemy Mastery quest, you are given reason to believe that the succubus has killed people, but you can’t bring it up in the conversation with her and are therefore forced to make your choice as though you are merely deciding whether to pre-judge a sentient being for what she’s capable of. If you choose to spare her, you are chided by her for being a hypocrite for being willing to kill other kinds of monsters, with no opportunity to mention the information available to the player that succubi are capable of moral choice and do not generally mean any harm. If you choose to kill her, only then are you given Geralt’s claim that does not appear in the bestiary entry that each encounter with the succubus does some permanent harm, which makes it appear that this is some personal prejudice that Geralt uses to rationalize his actions.
No spoilers, please. Tag them if you must - I’m pretty far into the game, and I haven’t gotten to either of those two plot points yet.
Anybody know where to find the schematics for the tier 1 Bear armour (or who sells the maps) ? I’ve stumbled upon most of the enhanced and superior ones already, but no basic :smack:.
I seem to have stumbled on the bear armor quest in Skellige. I still have two pieces to find, one of which is showing as north of Holmstein’s Port, on the east side of the woods east of the road. It’s up a little and right from a Place of Power.
The cave entrance has a Lion symbol scratched into it, though the game swears it’s the bear. You can find it with Witcher Senses. You run in there and kill the three trolls a-fartin’ and a chest in the cave contains the Boots diagram. I think finding that one piece will give you the quest for the rest.
Sorry. It turns out those are all upgrade diagrams, even though they’re the first quest in the chain. Maybe this will help?
http://www.accelerated-ideas.com/news/witcher-3-walkthrough--bear-school-gear-quest.aspx
Wait, sorry. It looks like I do have a quest for the basic gear. I don’t know where I picked it up, but the first step is Search the Ruins of Clan Tuirsearch’s Castle. The castle is on a crescent-shaped island where Urialla harbor is found.
All right, will start looking there. Cheers !
I think they’ve patched the skip-a-step=broken-quest bug, since I’ve had at least one contract end up being “Here about the contract.” “It’s done.” Which, unfortunately, keeps you from asking for more money…oh, well.
I really hope they patch a slower weapon degrade in. There’s been one or two big fights where I started with 100% and ended with the damaged weapon icon up. Not to mention long missions. Not as big a deal with armor…since it only degrades if you get hit without quen up.
The chance-to-stun on weapons is disgustingly good against humans. I had a fight where one light attack stunned 3 bandits…which lasted long enough to execute them all.
Was entertained meeting Trollololol (who is a surprisingly good painter), explored the …cheese…wizard’s lab, and shut down the preacher who narrated the game intro.
I ran into a preacher lecturing, and gave him my mind about his claims. Later in the game, I got jumped by guards saying I had embarassed a holy man. From then on, I was on a campaign of passive aggression ‘accidentally’ bumping into any priests I met as I walked down the street. Also, witch hunters. Fuck those guys.
Also fighting Dordan the Tailor in a clandestine boxing club (get it ?). I appreciate the fact that they threw a few chuckles, but not too many, into the mix. As much as I love love love the Witcher games, they do edge on the grimdark after a while.
ETA : BTW, I looked it up and divination by observation of cheese ? Totally a real thing.
A piece of information that is currently precious to me:
In Skellige, in the town of Arinbjorn is a smith who has the Greater rune diagrams. Not only does tnis mean I can stop feeling the need to horde them, but the 3000 zorkmids I blew on those those, the guy has enough cash to buy my loot for a while.
Just found the body of a blond dwarf in reddish leathers inside what Geralt describes as a “sky cell”. He mused it was a shame the dead guy never learned to fly.
Hmmmm… 
Question about Keira Metz (BIG spoiler if you have not done this yet):
[spoiler]So, I had sexy time with Keira, felt like I was cheating on Yennifer though.
Keira puts me to sleep, I confront her, I kill her (to be fair she attacked me…I had no idea it was going there).
I feel bad but picked up a book that said necromancy was the one truly evil magic and it looks like Keira was down with that so…
My question is how else does that one play out? I have gotten kinda far past that now and not keen on backtracking that far to find out.
[/spoiler]
Is anyone else using the Witcher 3 Hunter’s Config?
Apparently it is the bomb when it comes to controlling the graphics in Witcher 3. My only problem is the options available are overwhelming (i.e. there are a LOT of them).
Are there any presets for this or guides? I looked but did not find any (didn’t look too hard).
well…
The other endings I’m aware of are:
1 & 2) you (do/don’t) let her keep the research and send her to Kaer Morghan…not sure what the difference is there.
3) you let her leave on her own. And she later turns up on a spike in Novagrad.