Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General What do you spend your money for?

With the new patch I have started the game again. In classic mode I have beaten a few enemies, but now I am lv2 and most fights seem very hard. My equipment is pathetic, I am happy if I have any equipment in a slot.

So what is your priority for the little money you got?
- skill books? (you want to CC enemies, but you have to breack their armor first and do some damage to defeat them)
- weapons? (more damage is always nice, but a slightly better weapon will not kill them with one or 2 hits)
- armor? I am happy if I find any armor. It is hard to CC enemies who have both physical and magic armor with my pathetic damage while enemies have no problems to CC me and cut me to pieces.
- something else?

I will play something else and then I come back in easy mode. I managed to finish the alpha in classic mode before, but I needed to use all kinds of cheese to do so (like fleeing in the middle of combat, heal and come back)

#1 priority is skillbooks for me.
#2 are rare items that give nice stats, that likely won't be replaced soon. E.g. rings or belts with memory or mainstat.

Nearly all weapons can be crafted each level, so you don't have to invest money in that.
http://divinity.wikia.com/wiki/Crafting_(DoS:2)#Weapons

On a related note, I usually have one character stacking bartering doing all of the buying and selling, which helps a lot. I also craft grenades every level which flip for a big profit.

Things are lot more challenging at low levels this patch. I'd recommend getting a party of 4 characters as soon as possible and attempt to gain levels off of the weaker enemies and non-combat quests first.

Same here, skillbooks are always priority. After that are any high quality gear.

Can only afford the 50 gold skillbooks for now, even at level 4. I don't remember the economy being this harsh before. I feel like the jump from the 50 gold skillbooks to 250 is a lot. 150 would feel like an easier step. It seems more like the better skills might be worth the cost of 3 cheap skills, instead of of 5 of them. Some ingredients (like the sovereign's orb, which is for the holy hand grenade, no?) seem ludicrously expensive too.

Slightly unrelated, but jeez, I wish you could swap items between characters on the trade screen

Skill books are always my priority. DOS is very much a game about piling on status effects and elemental damage.

The thing to remember about the economy is this is still very early in the game. I remember having the same problem in DOS 1 at the start but by the mid point (level 11) I was drowning in gold with seemingly nothing worth spending it on until I got to the end game merchants.



I could see that being exploitable and prone to duplication bugs. But I do wish all transactions in the trade screen were done with the barter/charisma stats of the character who initiated trade.

I prioritize based on what's available. Usually I'll get a skillbook or two first, but there might be equipment that is worth getting first.


I wish you could just access your entire inventory right there, removing the need to swap items around. Since Bartering doesn't affect the entire party, just the character actively trading, it makes trading kind of a pain since you have to shuffle your inventory around. Would be better if we didn't need to shuffle items around at all.

plus one

Skillbook first, usually the Snipe and Stealth that becomes available at around level 3. The game becomes way easier when you can initiate every fight with a massive amount of damage, especially with early Houndmaster Crossbow. Stealth also allow me to steal without having to set-up and distract the NPCs first.

Battering Ram is also a must-get because of the early game double knock combo for bosses like Migo. It's far easier to get Physical CC than to get Magical one because you only 1 mage or 2 at the start and Lohse can't deal any damage yet since she's a Wind-Water, not a Fire-Earth.

With a few quest done and money-portrait method, this becomes available really fast. There's also the card table with the Speck card to get all the gold (and you can kill them afterward because they tried to cheat you anyway)

After that, I start to cycle gold with buy-and-steal to make sure Lohse start learning as many spells as possible so she can be useful after I teach Ifan, my char and Red Prince all the stuffs required. If I can get +3 Thievery from 2 Rings and 1 Glove after leaving the fort, there's no money issue even after buying all the powerful Gareth stuffs at the end.

Could you by chance explain the money-portrait method? I know you can sell them and steal them back I was just curious if it was as straight forward as I suspect it is.

And whats the speck card? I haven't actually approached the card guys more than once and that ended in a fight >.>

You can get a "sparkler" card from the injured guy just outside the elf cave to the south of the prisoner camp if you don't provoke him into a fight. Apparently it's some sort of trump card that can be used when invited to participate in the card game up on the battlements, though I haven't paid attention to how much gold it nets you.

EDIT: I just stole the card from him and used it, its only 100g.

Portrait in the magister room sells for ton of money.

Do the Migo quest and kill or steal key from the Magister
Get the teleporter glove

Teleport yourself to the fort (near the tent with the necromancer npc) and go inside with the key. Use Lohse (Telekinesis 1) to pick up the portrait and put it in your inventory. The 150 weight stuffs sells for like, 80-90 gold. You can also pick up Lucian Portrait at the Shinre to the Seven and sell that as well for another 80-90 gold. You can make pretty much 500-600 gold to recycle around with pickpocket from this method.

THe one you want to sell it to first are the Griff NPCs because you can end up killing them and take them back again to sell once more.

The speck/sparkler card can be used at the card player table if you play along and just say "Blah blah this always win" and you will get another 100 gold. You get it from the dude that died at Doctor Leste.

All those paintings are completely unguarded too. No guards around, no patrolling guards who could catch you. They aren't even considered owned by the Magister faction so you can sell them to prison-area magisters!

Most of the ways out of Fort Joy go right through the fort, which means easy access to the paintings. Larian might as well have placed a huge heap of 500 gold in the middle of an empty room for all the balance the paintings have.

This is not a good way to handle the game economy. Every single painting on Fort Joy should be changed to be worth exactly 0 gold, because absolutely no one on the island has any use for such paintings.

Ok, I wasn't sure if there was some special thing to do to get that cash. I knew about the paintings and stealing already, but haven't really done too much stealing from NPCs since you can only pickpocket once.

Its hard to decide when to steal though in my opinion, sometimes they get nice new gear you really can't afford and you just wanna nab it and those expensive skillbooks. :l

All I can say is hopefully they add a way to make more cash easier after Act 1 cause we are insanely restricted when it comes to making any money.

Oh and repair hammers, holy mother of the divine, GIVE US MORE HAMMERS!

Although the paintings might not be the most logical choice, I think the game does need that 500 gold (or perhaps a bit more) that needs a little work to get otherwise there's pretty much no chance of getting your team kitted out with at least some half-decent equipment and skills before they head out into the marshes. If they do give the paintings zero value, I think they're really going to have to put something in their place; though one could also argue that even arms and armour and their sellers are out of place in a prison area where everyone is dressed in rags. But I guess at that point I'm inclined to overlook the need for realism, in much the same way as I tend to do for things like "abridged" versions of building interiors that you usually get in video games.

The one thing about painting they can do is to make them harder to pick up. At the moment, rank 1 Telepathic is enough and make STR a joke for picking up items. They do need to be expensive though because they clearly are made from material that aren't cheap and those are the expensive part.

There's also another 40-50 gold if you talk to the Geomancer NPC and pick, IIRC, when telling the story, pick 3 - 1 - 2 (Origin too wild to be believed, make amend, something I forgot) and you get a gemstone that can be sold for 40-50 gold. Might differ between char because I'm a lizarddude every game.

And cash cycle in this game is 100% pickpocket atm, which depends on your base level. Not sure about Thievery level but it averages around 60-80 gold per character base level.

Your first stealing should happen around level 4 or 5. Try and get stealth book first at level 3 so you can buy it again at level 5 and have 2 people pick pocket without the need to set up using the Card table gold, random pick-up gold and the gem selling gold.

and then, do everything to level up before you steal from everyone in Gareth camp.

I ended the game with 2.3k gold, fully geared.

I can definitely agree that the gold is needed. It's the way it's handled that I dislike. It completely skews the economy curve to have that equivalent amount of gold sitting there for the taking with no risk. Once you get past the very loosely secured perimeter, you have the run of Fort Joy, all the Magisters are in fixed clusters elsewhere. You're starved for resources early on - and rightfully so - but once you're inside, you get a windfall.

In addition, as I've said elsewhere many times ad nauseum, paintings are not something which people on this island should have any interest in buying. Prisoners can't eat them and can't use them. At best, they might use the paintings to patch holes in their tents, which would put their value in about the 1 gold range given all the other canvas sacks lying around. Guards shouldn't buy them, they are obviously stolen. Seekers shouldn't buy them, they have bigger problems like how to get the hell off the island.




See my paragraph just above.



The game's economy should be reasonable for players and parties who don't methodically pickpocket everyone, if only because you're not guaranteed to have a Rogue in the party (and because of the famine of Civil points available even if you do have a Rogue).

Eh, I see paintings being valuable to everybody, including prisoners. First off, art in this world would be extremely rare and valuable in general. A beautiful painting in a medieval world would be quite a feast, especially to a prisoner, if anything, where they have so much ugliness in their life. The prisoners or seekers would recognize the items as valuable, something worth keeping onto to sell if they were ever to escape. Obviously the extra large painting is a bit comical to sell to some random person, but at a certain point, it's a game.

But they should be marked as stolen, really, so you can't sell them to the magisters at least.

regarding money:

- I dislike that NPC drop everything you sold them when you kill them. If exp for killing are not enough, this is one more reason to start a genocide. Selling the same item several times feels like cheating.

- It is OK that you can pickpocket each char only once. But you should only get one item. I have heard that you can sell a container full of expensive stuff and steal back the full container. This feels like cheating too.

- generally speaking, I dislike that economy is based on selling the same item again and again, at least if you want to make tons of money fast.

- It is good that almost each person on this island is somehow involved in some kind of quest. But unfortunatly that means most shopkeepers (espicially for skill books) are involved in a quest that might get them killed.
Was it an intentional choice of Larian to say: "Do you want to buy skill books or do you want to finish this or that quest?"
Now I have to delay several quests until I find new shops in the seeker camp. (Of course I do not know when and where (or if at all) I find the next shop when I play it the first time.)

In D:OS1 +2 I did not use those tricks, but sometimes I could not avoid it because I had to kill somebody for a quest and I sold something to this person before.