Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General Is a rogue/ranger secret&trapfind char mandatory?

Been reading up on the wiki, the game manual, and various sites about how the game works etc. before playing; there's one thing that's still not clear to me though:
Assuming I go with a 4-character party (the mage & knight companions, and 2 main chars), do I have to have one character in there that's specifically for exploration duty? Meaning - do I have to dedicate a character to stuff like perception, sneaking, trap disarming, lockpicking, stealing? If I don't (e.g. I do 2 magic charaters as mains, or 2 barbarians), will I basically miss out on a significant part of what the game has to offer?

Generally, I love exploring game worlds, but I don't much care for having to make a character non-combat-worthy to handle exploration (as was largely the case in Dragon Age 1, for example)... It seems DOS has a lot of secret stuff, so... yeah. Do I have to dedicate a char for that?

Chests can be destroyed for their loot, doors broke, all with enough effort and a blacksmith to repair stuff. I have a rogue with lucky find, perception, lockpick, pickpocket, sneak. Lockpick was usually way too low to open stuff, perception helps find things on the map. Basically the secrets vendor sells a lot of maps perception could find. I havent found many things requiring super high perception.

So no, I dont think its mandatory, but a rogue or someone with a reason to 'lead the pack' does help.

Without a high enough perception you will probably miss some things, but they are not essential, and there may be alternate ways to do the same things (ie perception can just indicate a shortcut, or give some extra loot). There are potions and skills which give temporary perception boosts, as well as equipment bonuses.

There isn't really a reason to disarm traps, as opposed to using a ranged attack to trigger them, and as Mental Poison said you can use magic or brute force on many doors/chests that you don't have the key for. The basic sneak will be good enough for the start of the game (you can boost it later if you find it useful for your builds or tactics), and there are teleportation and invisibility skills which overlap in most of the sneak functionality (you need to sneak to pickpocket, though that probably isn't a concern if you don't want to sneak in the first place).
Stealing is fairly easy, even without boosting any scoundrel type skills.

Hm, alright, that sounds pretty good.

Are these shortcuts/extra loot stuffs indicated by perception just highlighted (made visible to the player) by it, or are they explicitly unavailable/inaccessible without enough perception points?

In some cases an item may not be there if no character has the perception to spot it, in others (such as dig sites) you can find the loot if you (as opposed to the characters) know where it is, or just by trial and error (though you'd have to know your characters were close for that to be feasible).

Apparently the spider summon has good perception, so summoning it when you think you may be near a secret can help.