New Player Help and starter tips for Divinity: Original Sin 2, gives you links and video to Getting Started Guide and some additional tips and tricks from the DOS2 community. Once you're familiar with Controls and Combat Systems, you'll find the whole experience a lot easier, but you might also want to check out Builds to learn how to make your party.
DOS 2 New Player Help
Selecting a Race and a Class
There are 5 races with special abilities and 14 classes in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Each race provides a special bonus which can be seen here, or you can refer to the table below. Classes are presets that automatically assign your skill points and determine the items that you start the game with, but classes are suggested builds only. You can ignore the preset skill and ability points and set your points manually.
It is highly recommended to start with one of the 6 Origin characters if playing for the first time as they get you the most out of the game. They each have their own unique quest line and a lot of unique dialog and exchanges.
Attributes and Skills
There are 3 types of points in the game:
- Attribute points that start at 10 and can be increased to a maximum of 40; Strength, Finesse, Intelligence, Constitution, Memory, and Wits.
- Combat Ability points that are capped at 10 but can surpass the cap with gear; Dual-Wielding, Ranged, Single-Handed, Two-Handed, Leadership, Perseverance, Retribution, Aerotheurge, Geomancer, Huntsman, Hydrosophist, Necromancer, Polymorph, Pyrokinetic, Scoundrel, Summoning, and Warfare.
- Civil Ability points that are capped at 5 but these stats can surpass the cap with gear; Bartering, Lucky Charm, Persuasion, Loremaster, Telekinesis, Sneaking, and Thievery.
Skills can be learned when one point has been allocated in the corresponding Combat Ability. Skills are actions you can perform in combat, in some cases necessitating specific weapon types.
Attribute | Description | Notes |
Strength |
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Finesse | ||
Intelligence |
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Constitution |
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Memory |
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Wits |
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Recruiting Party Members
The six Origin characters can be found early in the game and be recruited to your party. If you chose an Origin character to start with, they will not be available to recruit. You can customize the build of each of your party members regardless of their default class. You can have a maximum of 4 squad members (the player character and 3 others).
- Beast can be found west of Fort Joy past a large crab named Septa the Ineffable standing near a shipwreck.
- Fane can be found northeast of Fort Joy in the Hidden Alcove. Walk north from Fort Joy along the small cliffside until you see an opening covered with blue and green foliage. Fane is in the middle of that alcove bent over a corpse.
- Ifan Ben-Mezd can be found right inside the front gates of Fort Joy on the left standing with a female elf named Elodi as well as two humans named Burro and Kana.
- Lohse can also be found right inside the front gates of Fort Joy but she is standing in front of the waypoint shrine.
- The Red Prince can be found on the northwest coast of the map standing on a rock and gazing out at the ocean. He is directly south from where you first spawn on the map and past the Voidwoken bugs you fight on your way down.
- Sebille can be found below the south gate of Fort Joy near some boat debris. Take note that if you have the Red Prince in your party when you try to recruit her, she won't take kindly to you due to her bad experiences with lizards in the past. You must convince her to join anyway.
Where can I find a shovel?
If there is no Lizard in your team, you can find a shovel on the broken bridge towards the Fort Joy Gate.
How can I restore my health?
- Resting on a bed or bed roll which will will restore your health automatically, and a bedroll can be placed in your inventory and on your action bar to restore health out of combat.
- Drinking a health potion (or a poison potion if you're Undead or Fane since regular healing harms Undead characters), though this is not recommended unless you're in the middle of combat and are about to die.
- Healing yourself with a healing spell, most likely from the Hydrosophist school of magic. There are a few other healing spells from other schools like First Aid from Huntsman Skills.
- Eating food that you find.
- Leveling up!
How to open a locked door?
- Picking the lock. This requires having a lockpick in your inventory (which can be crafted by combining a hammer and nails) or an Undead character in your party and some locks require points in Thievery.
- Attacking it to reduce its health to 0, but attacking with weapons in this way severely reduces weapon durability.
Buy things from NPC's
Some NPC's don't have a proper trading dialogue, but you can click the trading button next to their names while talking to open a trading window. And one key thing to remember; NPCs that sell equipment (armor, weapons) will have "primary" stock at the same level as your main character plus anything you have sold to them in the past.
How do I build my characters?
There are a nearly unlimited number of ways to build up your characters and no one way is the best way, but there are a couple of key points that are worth considering. First, for the support skills like Persuasion, Thievery, Bartering etc, it is not helpful to have multiple characters all specialized in the same skill. If you have multiple characters in your team specialize each one in one of them, i.e. have one good at Bartering and do all your trading through them, one good at Loremaster for identifying items and scanning enemies for their weaknesses, have your main character good at Persuasion for all of the persuasion tests the main character will go through, have one character good at Lucky Charm and have them be the one to open all loot boxes, chests, search bodies, etc...then you can focus the rest of their skillpoints elsewhere.
Second, get movement skills as soon as you can, for two reasons: there are many times you will need to get to out-of-the-way areas by teleporting for treasures, campaigns and the like, and the Teleport skill can be critically useful for teleporting enemies in a fight into more key positions (away from a vulnerable ally they've rushed, off of an isolated safe area closer to your team to be easier to attack, etc).
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
I have the telekinesis civil ability, but can't figure out how to activate it. How do I get it to work.
- Anonymous
If you managed to pick up a bed roll on the ship, you can use that after combat to restore your health.
- Anonymous
Damn this game sucks I have never fallen asleep while playing a game before. Major disappointment
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
this site has another guide like this fextralife.com/divinity-original-sin-2-getting-started-guide
- Anonymous
this site has two getting started guides, this one and this:
- Anonymous
this site has another getting started guide at fextralife _dot_ com/divinity-original-sin-2-getting-started-guide
- Anonymous
So, don't bother buying this game if you aren't using a mouse and keyboard NOT mentioned on steam btw before buying.
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
Where are directions to play? Where do you learn how to read the map radar? What Ping is? Is there an instruction guide with the downloaded game? I'm so frustrated I want to return it if I could. I can't get off the first deck of the ship... and even google won't find me directions. I don't want a walk-thu. I want to know how to work the damn controls. There are no guides I can find. If they're built into the game, you guys sure did a great job hiding them.
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
I somehow locked one of my character's bag . How to unlock it?
- Anonymous
If you save the game and then get into combat you can't win or even survive, why can't you get back to where you saved the game?
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
Sorry for the dumb question. But is there a jump button or jump feature?
- Anonymous
It says that there are 12 starting classes here, but there are actually 14.
- Anonymous
Now that the game has been officially released, does anyone know the maximum number of points you can assign to an attribute?
Hi ! It sometimes happens, that skill signs disappears from the skills line at the bottom. Some can be activated in the skills tab, but he source vampirism can´t be activated in the skills tab, because it´s an innate skill. What can I do?
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