Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Considering Buying This Game....2 questions

DOS looks awesome and I am most likely buying it soon. I have 2 questions that I am hoping an experienced player will answer...

# 1. Is crafting essential?? I love RPGS but I despise crafting. I prefer to save gold and buy from merchants or find gear as loot. In DOS can I get away with this or I will have to craft to get worthwhile gear?

# 2. Will I be able to level up/chose skills for my companions or henchman, or are they auto-level? I prefer controlling every aspect of all party members....

These are not deal-breakers for me, but am curious. Thanks in advance for the input!

and yes, I just realized this should have been in the help/tricks/tips section.....sorry.

1.) No not required with the exception of a few quests that have a crafting solution.
2.) Yes, though the base game does set the initial build for NPCs though there are mods to change that.

Crafting is not essential, but gives very good benefits. I'll mention some:
-High crafting and blacksmithing can create very powerful weapons that can do about twice the damage of looted and bought ones (I think it's imbalanced).
-It's good to use crafting to create special arrows if you plan to have a ranger in your party.
-Heavy armor + anvil eliminates the movement penalty, considerably improving the performance of STR characters.

As Vaxsan said, crafting is actually pretty overpowered. You'll probably enjoy the game more if you don't use crafting because combat won't be such a breeze. Also, if you're looking for a challenge and willing to wait, you should wait until the next patch comes out which will almost certainly have a harder difficulty mode and a ton of other changes. It will probably come up out fairly soon and probably in January.

There will be a patch relatively soon, but AFAIK it will not contain the harder difficulty mode.

Well I stand corrected. They really are spending a while on the new mode, so at least it's surely going to be really well done. But given the changes in the beta patch, I imagine there's at least going to be a number of balance changes. And improvements to the editor *crosses fingers*.

Cool, thanks for the good tips. I will wait for the new patch.

I understand it takes some points to be put in skills like blacksmithing if you plan to craft. Did anyone feel like they would rather have used those points in other abilities that can be used in combat? Or was it worth it?

Blacksmithing is good anyway because you can then repair your equipment while traveling instead of going back to a merchant to get it done.

You only need one point in Blacksmithing, and one point is cheap enough.

Some people use one of the companions that they don't want in their party to learn crafting and blacksmithing. Each time you level you can ask a companion to leave and then recruit a companion left in the hall of heroes to level them (henchmen do not get a boost up to the player's experience when hired or re-hired, though).

It would be kind of a pain swapping equipment and materials back and forth, and heading to the homestead whenever you need to do any crafting or blacksmithing, but it would conserve ability points on your other characters.