How To Be A Better Witcher

Enhance your RPG experience with these handy tips and essential mods. Why not make it easier to appreciate The Witcher 2's genius instead of being frustrated at its difficulty? You're doing yourself a favor.

Problem: Inventory clutter
Solution: Crafting weight reduction mod

Technically this is kinda cheating, but I described the inventory system as a disaster in my review for good reason. If you don't pay close attention to what you're picking up from the thousands of lootable containers in the game, you'll find yourself overburdened in no time. To make this worse, there's no storage chest or stash. This simple mod reduces the weight of nearly all crafting items -- iron ore, timber, leather, etc. -- to 0.1 pound. It's not as drastic as the weightless mod, but it gives you a lot more leeway to loot reasonable amounts of items before having to make the trip back to a vendor to sell unnecessary crap off.

Problem: Crafting sucks
Solution: Bigger, better tooltips mod

Two issues make up the bulk of why crafting sucks in The Witcher 2. The mod above mitigates the first -- inventory clutter -- and this one fixes the second. How CDProjekt didn't realize the awfulness of the tooltips that describe crafting formulae, potion effects, and the like is utterly beyond me. It can take up to 20-30 seconds for a tooltip to scroll through all the information on some items. It's objectively terrible. I'm getting angry all over again just thinking about it. Anyway, this mod makes tooltips much larger and start scrolling almost immediately, which neatly fixes the problem. I highly recommend it.

Problem: Game isn't modded enough
Solution: GOG.com modding thread

Being a PC gamer rules sometimes. Head over to this thread on the Good Old Games community site to find the latest and greatest Witcher 2 mods, from making Triss more naked (or less naked) to making quests possible to complete if you missed their beginnings in the intro to removing the vigor drain on parrying.

[Next up: Gameplay and configuration tips!]

Problem: Vigor won't recharge
Solution: Stop casting Quen all the time

This one is probably blindingly obvious to some players, but I didn't figure it out until I dug into my journal to read up on Geralt's arsenal of magical signs. Quen, the extremely powerful and often necessary spell that protects you from damage and knockback while it's active, also prevents your vigor from recharging. I'm sure this vital piece of information was in a tutorial window that popped up in the middle of some hectic combat or another, but I missed it at first. The point is, casting Quen is as much of a strategic choice as every other decision you make in combat. If you can avoid damage by rolling, blocking, stunning, or other means, it's nearly always a better choice than casting Quen.

Problem: Getting owned repeatedly by group of Nekkers/Drowners
Solution: More bombs

Some of the hardest fights in the whole game are against early groups of Nekkers and Drowners in the immediate vicinity of Flotsam, right at the beginning of Chapter 1. Without the awesome armor and weapons or powerful abilities unlocked later in the quest, Geralt can be surrounded and killed in the blink of an eye in encounters with multiple enemies. The best advice here is to stock up on bombs and burn the bastards. I'm talking about dozens of Samum/Grapeshot here. You'll find plenty of herbs to make more -- trust me, you'll have more than you could possibly use if you keep an eye out while adventuring. Drowners and Nekkers don't have much in the way of hit points, but they are agile and good at evading sword blows. They can't dodge explosions, though, so you can quickly thin their ranks by flinging a few explosives at them. It may go against your RPG hoarding tendencies -- it certainly did for me -- but you'll thank me later.

Problem: Still dying all the freaking time
Solution: Slow down!

Combat is really hard in The Witcher 2, particularly at first until you get a few decent abilities unlocked (I personally recommend any of the disabling bombs, the Aard sign upgrade in the Magic tree, and Feet Work [increased roll distance] and Whirl [sword attacks hit multiple enemies] from the Swordsmanship tree). You can't play it like God of War or Batman: Arkham Asylum and get through any but the most trivial encounters. What I found helped me the most was to take a breath and think about how to approach each fight, not just go in swords flying whenever a bad guy spawned. You have a huge arsenal of tools to turn battle in your favor. Set traps. Throw bombs. Run away. Geralt is the king *** of most of the known world, but he's anything but invincible. Approach battles like a hunter stalking his prey, not a legendary warrior batting aside unworthy foes, and I guarantee you'll have more fun -- and be a lot more successful.

Problem: Minigames suck
Solution: Skip them

Frustrated by the stupid dice poker/arm wrestling? I hear you. Don't waste your time. The rewards are mostly mediocre. You can easily progress without doing them. Stop being a completionist, and just walk on by. There's plenty of content to enjoy in The Witcher 2, so you're doing yourself a disservice by forcing yourself to bang your head against the walls of poorly executed minigames.

Problem: QTEs suck
Solution: Turn them off

Quick time events in The Witcher 2 suck like they do in nearly every game. Unlike most unavoidable stupid QTEs, however, you can turn these off. It's in the options menu. How great is that? More developers should steal this feature. Or -- and here's a crazy idea -- make real gameplay instead of making me watch the corners of the screen during cinematics.

No, I don't have an axe to grind. Why do you ask?