I'm having another crack at restarting Divinity Original Sin 2, any tips?

I've tried to get into this game at least three times now. I always get to the second act and then peter out for one reason or another, then when I try to pick it up some time later the screen is just a mess of skills and abilities that I have no idea what do anymore. Has anyone got any tips as I restart this thing yet again?

It's not 100% necessary, but if you want an easier time decide up front whether your party is going to do physical or magic damage and get classes/skills that support that. You need to eat through an enemy's physical or magic armor before you can cc or kill them so being all physical or all magical allows you to focus down bad guys faster.

Crowd control skills are super useful. If you knock an enemy prone it takes them their entire turn to recover - stopping them damaging you and giving you another turn to damage/kill them.

It's great to have a summoner in your party. The incarnate they conjure both does damage to enemies but more critically gives them another target to attack.

One thing the game doesn't make super clear is just how big a difference one character level makes. Doing an encounter with level 6 enemies when you have a party at level 5 can be quite tricky whereas if you're at level 7 it will probably be a cakewalk. Don't feel bad about avoiding an encounter until you're at the right level. This goes for gear too. Try to update most of the gear for your entire party every 2-3 character levels. It's a pain but it makes a pretty big difference.

Save often. Sometimes the difference between an encounter being impossible and a cakewalk is solely due to the positioning of your characters at the start of the fight.

Teleport and other movement skills are godly. Not only can they help a squishy character from getting insta-gibbed but you can do stuff like pull a mage/archer enemy and drop them on top of a melee enemy next to your melee character. This will hurt both of them AND cause the mage/archer to take an attack of opportunity (if you've specced that way) from your melee dude when they try to run away.

Necromancy is great as a second skill tree for a tanky melee character as merely having points in it will give you some life leech. 1 or 2 points into Polymorph is good for pretty much any character as each point you put into it gives you an attribute point back and there are a bunch of awesome skills you can learn that only require a point or 2.

If you can, give the character you walk around as the persuasion and bartering skills. A lot of times an npc will initiate conversation with the character you have currently selected so if a different party member is your persuasion dude you're boned. Bartering will affect how much things cost and sell for so you want that on your main otherwise you have to constantly swap to another character to buy/sell. Alternatively do what I did and get a mod that applies the highest persuasion/bartering skill you have to everyone in the party and don't worry about micromanaging it.

Hrm ... typing this makes me want to start a new playthrough.

My brother and I just finished this game! It's great!

As someone who also restarted this game a few times at Reaper's Coast, I think it's the least interesting part of the game. It's still great, but it's also the part of the game that could really be trimmed and it could use much better direction. It sorta just dumps you in yet another forest and expects you to figure out where to go. You'll find the most success at first in the southwest corner of the map. Just spread east from there, save often, and don't be afraid to turn around if you find something too hard. Also, take frequent advantage of the free and easy respec mirror. Also also, as with any game of this size and length, playing it consistently and not just bingeing it 'til you're tired helps a lot with the fatigue.

As far as gameplay hints go...

Decide early game if you're going to be more focused on wearing down magic armor or more focused on wearing down physical armor or if you're going to split it - two people go hard one way, two the other. Our party when my brother and I beat the game was mostly physical with one pure mage and we found it quite effective. I'd strongly recommend not making everyone half and half - you can get an effective party this way, but only with a lot of planning and understanding of the game.

Somebody needs persuasion and bartering, so that you can get what you want out of conversations and so that you can buy stuff at reasonable prices. If you're morally dubious, stealing and pickpocketing everything in sight is also extremely useful. And lockpicking is, of course, necessary in an RPG.

Necromancy is powerful and awesome but doesn't really blossom until late game. If you're having a problem building an effective character, don't go Necromancy. If you do go Necromancy, damage from Necromancy skills scale with Intelligence and Warfare, and the actual Necromancy stat only deals with how much it heals you. Only put five or so in the actual stat and everything else in Warfare.

Hydrosophy is damn near necessary if you want healing magic.

Everyone needs some kind of teleport spell. Tactical Retreat, Cloak and Dagger, Phoenix Dive, give one of these to everyone.

Play an Elf, Sebille or custom, for Flesh Sacrifice. OK, now make her an archer. Now give her Adrenaline. Now give her Stench. Now give her Glass Cannon. Fire an arrow -> Flesh Sacrifice -> Another arrow -> Adrenaline -> use the rest of your AP. If you kill someone and have executioner, you get two more. This is how you cause tons of damage in one turn, but be warned that Glass Cannon can really kneecap you if you're not careful.

All of your party members have an "attitude" stat. This is honestly kind of annoying, but the game understates this stat's importance to mid-late game companion quests. Get this stat as high as possible for everyone.

All of your mages should have shields. Dual wielding wands sounds awesome and some staffs are great, but frankly your mages should always be using skills and shields provide by far the best armor ratings in the game. Having a shield-focused one-hander and a critical chance focused two hander is also a good choice.

Peace of Mind is one of the most useful buffs in the game. It can clear several status effects - which is important very late game - but it also gives you several good buffs to stats. I think it's five for Strength, Finesse, and Intelligence, which is really a lot.

EDIT: Also, there's a geomancy skill - I think it's Worm Tremor? - that entangles everyone in its vicinity. Get it and torturer and you don't even have to break magic armor to stop anyone in their tracks. They can't teleport out of it either. Great skill to counter any close-range damage dealer that you're having a hard time with it.

And it can't be overstated - save often! Mash that quicksave key!

There's already a bunch of great tips in those two posts so I'll just add that in addition to all that you can respec your characters for free basically whenever so go ham trying things out and don't let analysis paralysis get to you! Just throw stuff at the wall and see what you find fun.

Maybe this was more of a personal problem, but: Games like "Baldur's Gate 2" had weird systems-level exploits as a result of being too adherent to the AD&D origins of the games. You COULD do things like "set up 80 traps in a room before you talk to the red dragon to trigger the battle, and the dragon takes 300 damage in turn 1", but that wasn't really within the parameters of the game.

Divinity says: what if we INTENDED all that shit?

For me personally, the hardest thing in this game is divorcing myself from playing fair or "within" some kind of parameter. If it's possible, do it.

I 100% wish I knew the answer to this. I've done the same thing half a dozen times; just got to the second act and got overwhelmed and didn't ever come back to it.

I will say that it's pretty easy to add a cheat to the game where you can talk to an NPC on your ship to get all the spellbooks that you might want. That was always my big frustration; trying to change classes and finding that the relevant spellbooks were too expensive to buy. Might be worth a shot!

Don't let the black cat go near the gates in Fort Joy

@zombiepie: If you let that cat die you lose the game!

No joke, the summon you get for saving the black cat is incredibly useful and viable far longer than you'd think.

Also, there's no shame in respecing. There's a value in checking out other skill trees like Necromancy or Rogue, finding out they are not your playstyle, and cutting bait by respecing in a different direction.

A lot of really good tips here but I'll emphasize the ones I found most useful:

The ranger build @justin258outlined is insanely OP. It starts peaking around Act 2 (a lot of OP builds take a little longer than that) and scales well into the endgame from there. It is the supreme physical damage dealer in the game and can even support with magical damage of any type via clever use of elemtal arrows. For more info I highly recommend these guides - though they might be a tad confusing / overwhelming depending on how familiar you already are with the game.

Every character needs a mobility spell (Tactical Retreat, Phoenix Dive) or ideally 2 or 3. These are easy to "splash" into any build as their skill requirements are typically low.

(Almost) every character needs Skin Graft - it is single-handedly the best spell in the game. The value drops slightly for characters using their default attacks more than spells. Every character needs the easy to "splash" spell Adrenaline. You'll be surprised how useful it is.

One character needs Thievery especially to steal all those precious skill tomes (except if you're against it RP-wise). One character should have Persuasion for dialogue options, though it is not strictly neccessary. One character should have the perk Pet Pal for additional dialogues and quests.

For relative newcomers I recommend a split magic / physical damage party to be most flexible. Raw physical is generally a little more universally powerful but I find it a little boring and it will struggle in a few fights with high physical resistance enemies. Especially with a "flex" character that can output both types of damage (e.g. the ranger build or a Hydrosophy / Necromancy cleric-type build) splitting damage types this is a pretty safe way to build your party.

Fane and Sebille are the most powerful companions simply due to Fane's unqiue source skill (Time Warp) and Sebille's racial ability (Flesh Sacrifice). Both their questlines are also pretty cool. My favorite companion is Lohse for her personal quest. Her source skill is niche but powerful. It is worth considering taking one character of the starting two without an origin story. That way you get the unique source skill Dome of Protection. It's a great "get out of jail free" card when you're still learning the game. Once you know what you're doing however, it becomes relatively useless. Beginning during Act 2 the game is all about raw alpha strike damage, followed by high-powered CC - rinse and repeat. Talking about Tactician difficulty since I don't play the permadeath "Honour mode" (technically the highest difficulty).

With that wall of text: hope you enjoy. DOS2 is a fantastic coop tactical combat game. Not an amazing CRPG in the traditional sense but awesome at what it does.

One thing to help the issues that people run into at the start of act 2: use a map like this to guide you to the places you should go. It's far too easy at the start of act 2 to wander into a fight that will kick your ass (hello scarecrows!) and this plus the vague lack of direction is probably a big factor in people falling off the game at this point.