Gaining Experience

How to Build a Witcher: Skills and Attributes

Geralt does not quite begin the game as a blank slate, but he does begin in an undeveloped state. He has access to all of the most basic abilities a witcher can have, but none are refined. In The Witcher 2 , you can begin with this “blank slate” Geralt and specialize his abilities in many ways.

This chapter presents a lot of advice and a variety of sample builds for Geralt, but this isn’t a game where the process of leveling up and buying skills is very complicated. When playing on a standard difficulty level, you can easily make a very strong Geralt build by just figuring out what you like to do in fights and investing in skills that let you do that better.

Geralt begins the game at level 1, with 0 experience. While you can gain experience from simply defeating enemies, the experience gains you earn this way are relatively small. This is not a game where you should go out and shank some monsters when you want to make your main character stronger. Instead, you gain most of your experience (or XP) by completing quests.

Generally, completing main story quests yields the most XP. A quest may award a large amount of XP when it is resolved or stagger its XP rewards throughout the quest. In addition to main story quests, you can take on side quests. These are completely optional, skippable quests that you can try to complete while you’re in a given area. Completing main story quests can make certain side quests inaccessible or cause you to fail them if you haven’t completed them already.

As a further complication, getting XP isn’t simply a question of blitzing through as many quests as you can between plot points. How you complete a given quest can radically change the amount of XP and other rewards it gives you. Many of the game’s quests can be completed in two or three different ways, and usually one particular way ends up being worth the most XP. This isn’t necessarily going to be the most challenging approach to finishing the quest. Often, what the game chooses to reward is lateral thinking and sticking to your principles once you’ve made a decision.

Consult the “Walkthrough” chapter for complete coverage of all quests, including the various ways of completing them and breakdowns of how to get the most XP from the decisions you can make. If you want to play the game blind and only look up information on completing specific quests, use the index to see which specific page of the walkthrough covers a particular quest.