Witcher’s Tricks

A witcher is both swordsman and mage, but doesn’t rely on those skills exclusively. Witchers were bred to fight monsters, who are ruthless and inhumanly powerful foes. To compensate, witchers are taught to fight dirty and take advantage of every possible edge they can find in a fight. This philosophy is expressed in gameplay through witcher’s tricks, items you can equip in Geralt’s pockets and unleash against opponents in battle.

Items equipped to Geralt’s pocket slots are always consumables you must find, craft, or purchase before you can use them. You have a limited supply of each trick item and may eventually run out. Most witcher’s tricks are situational items that tend to be either overwhelmingly powerful or somewhat useless, depending on how well they fit the situation. A skillful player is one who knows exactly when to deploy a particular witcher’s trick.

Ranged Weapons

Ranged weapons in The Witcher 2 are different forms of thrown daggers. You don’t need to be a magically enhanced mutant like a witcher to throw a dagger well, but it doesn’t hurt. A thrown dagger works a bit like low-level Igni. It deals a relatively small amount of damage, usually what you might deal with one strong sword blow, to an enemy from a safe distance.

Throwing daggers can be incredibly powerful against single strong opponents, provided you have enough of them. You use steel thrown daggers against human opponents and silver thrown daggers against monster opponents. Some difficult to find and powerful throwing daggers, like stings and poisoned harpy claws, can inflict critical effects on your foes.

You do not have the ability to throw daggers in the game by default. This is a skill from the training tree that you must purchase if you wish to use it. You can invest in it further to get a damage bonus to attacking with thrown daggers. Whether or not you want to invest in this ability is purely a matter of player style. Play the dagger-throwing portion of the game’s tutorial to see if you like the feel of it.

Bombs

Bombs also let Geralt attack his foes from a safe distance, though there are some major differences between ranged weapons and bombs. Generally, bombs do less pure damage than ranged weapons but can affect multiple targets. Geralt can throw bombs from the beginning of the game. Where ranged weapons often must be found or purchased, bombs can be created on the fly through alchemy.

The ideal situation for bombs is when confronting large groups of enemies. You can effectively soften up a group of foes by dodge-rolling in circles around them, tossing bombs, and then going back to dodge rolls. Certain bombs let you incinerate and stun foes, which can create openings for you to wade into the group and begin eliminating disabled foes with your own sword attacks.

The main disadvantage to bomb use is the relatively low maximum damage, though you can increase this by investing in skills from the alchemy skill tree as Geralt levels up. There’s also a limited number of critical effects you can inflict through bombs. A handful of bombs do negligible damage when thrown but instead enhance the effectiveness of particular signs or increase a monster’s vulnerability to critical effects.

Traps

Cross a bomb with Yrden and that gives you a trap. To use a trap, you must place it on the ground and then lure an enemy (or ideally a group of enemies) into stepping on it. Once the trap is triggered, all opponents within range take damage and may suffer from other effects. Traps are best used when you can thoroughly rig an area with traps before any enemies are present in it.

Traps can be used effectively for crowd control or to deal heavy damage to large, slow enemies. In cases like this, you can set several traps on top of each other, so the enemy takes catastrophic damage upon stepping into the trapped area. Be careful trying to place traps when lots of agile enemies are already active in an area, as they may take that opportunity to attack you. You can also be damaged by your own traps if an enemy triggers one before you’ve left its area of effect.

Traps can inflict critical effects as well as pure damage. Most traps you must purchase or craft before you can use them. Some traps let you inflict extremely exotic status effects, like the Talgar winter’s ability to inflict the rare critical effect freeze or the Fury’s ability to cause an Axii-like effect on several enemies at once.