This may be a bit premature, but this can be updated once the game is out and hopefully I can get some advice from EA Access players. One of the most powerful things in the game seems to be the Inquisition perks that you buy from the war table, with Influence. I read a reddit post from one of the developers that said they're pretty rare, and you can only get about 15 in a playthrough so choosing wisely is very important.

There is one perk in each tree that opens up new dialogue options with people, and increases XP from codex entries. I want these right away. How do you earn influence? How easy is it to unlock these perks? Can I ignore the early game codex pickups and get them when I have those perks or will they disappear? I get anxiety over these things.

You earn influence from doing most content, similar to power. I'm about 5 hours in and just earned my first point. Although I should mentionthat something like 2 hours of that was talking to everyone in Haven, and messing around with crafting and such.

Those points certainly are coming at a rather slow pace, but I don't think you really need to go for the xp ones specifically, since there's respawning enemies and all that anyway. Getting to max level probably isn't gonna be dependent on those perks.

Anyone know if Inquisition Agents count as "points spent" in the categories? Probably not, but it would be cool if the do.

@sessh: I've recruited a couple agents but only have 1 point in the trees, so it seems not. Like the idea though

@epiccyclops: Now that I have a few agents in every category (except the last one, where I'm assuming you can't get any) I can confirm that they actually do count for spent points. Which is awesome frankly, since now you don't have to waste points in useless stuff do get to the more advanced perks.

@sessh: good to know! What do you think the most important/best-looking perks are?

Some of the perks sound really good, like the extra range on your search. However, I don't see how you could not choose the extra 3 dialog perks. If not for the extra dialog, the quest options opened up by those additional dialog choices.

@epiccyclops: Yeah, the dialogue options are useful and pretty much a given in an RPG anyway.

Aside from that:

• the 4 extra potions are a must (on Nightmare at least)
• the two for additional focus are good
• the 10% defense bonus is great (again specifically on higher difficulties)
• the one for an extra potion slot
• the one for advanced lock-picking, since it always sucks to find doors you can't open
• the one's that give you a bigger inventory are also okay, especially if you find yourself in a story instance, where you can't just quickly teleport to Haven to sell stuff

I'm still undecided on the forward scouts (description says it reveals additional landmarks/points of interest on the map), since you can probably find all that yourself anyway. For the same reason I'm not that into the extended ping range.

I'm also unsure about the 5% xp bonus. Bonus xp is always nice in general, but I think if you do almost everything in the game you are gonna hit level 20 anyway.

I also haven't done too much crafting yet, so I'm not sure what to think about the crafting perks yet. The shopping perks seem a bit useless to me.