knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
By the end of Blood&Wine I was mostly searching out the Grandmaster diagrams for story. I only made one Grandmaster set too. All the Grandmaster diagram treasure hunts are rated at level 40 btw.
I need more armor stands in my house though. I've got 5 and they're taken up by Master versions of Feline, Griffin, and Wolf armor, as well as the tourney armor and the Teshin Mutina set (my personal favorite)
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
So, are the witcher set bonuses basically bragging right rewards or what? To get it to mastercrafted I already had to be over the level the game expects you to beat it as and find all the pieces that are in maps found in the normal game, but still it's not enough to get the set bonuses, there's still a "Grandmaster" level, wwhich if the pattern holds should require somewhere around level 42 or so. I am genuinely starting to regret bothering with this, given the sheer amount of money, time, and materials invested here for something that will only become special by the time I have basically beat the game.
Uh the highest tier armor sets are intended for the DLC stuff, which is higher level than the base game
So, are the witcher set bonuses basically bragging right rewards or what? To get it to mastercrafted I already had to be over the level the game expects you to beat it as and find all the pieces that are in maps found in the normal game, but still it's not enough to get the set bonuses, there's still a "Grandmaster" level, wwhich if the pattern holds should require somewhere around level 42 or so. I am genuinely starting to regret bothering with this, given the sheer amount of money, time, and materials invested here for something that will only become special by the time I have basically beat the game.
Uh the highest tier armor sets are intended for the DLC stuff, which is higher level than the base game
So I'm imagining. And I have started Heart and Stone. Mostly I'm grousing at the fact that I'll probably be practically finishing said expansion before the armor set I've been keeping up with since level 11 actually does anything. At that point it makes one wonder, why put in item sets at the very low levels if they're not going to do anything special until well after you beat the game and are deep into, if not nearly finishing, at least one of the postgames. Having the highest armor tiers be meant for postgame is okay, but if you have set armors at minimal levels they should do something as a set before you're so deep into the endgame most players will never even bother to get there.
I have a brand new PC coming in tomorrow. Will spend the day setting it up but the first thing I want to do is replay the Witcher 3 again. It was already a gorgeous game on medium settings ... but now? I can practically feel Geralt's beard! Or see the twinkle in Geralt's eyes when he's "completely done with your shit".
Should I skip 2?
I've played up until the first village with the hangings, but never got quite hooked. I did beat W1.
Now I really want to dive into 3, I've played a bit too...
Should I skip 2?
I've played up until the first village with the hangings, but never got quite hooked. I did beat W1.
Now I really want to dive into 3, I've played a bit too...
I'm enjoying 3, stopped 1 before you did because I was getting nothing, and never played 2. It explains what's going on well enough.
You don't need to play 2 to get everything in 3, but I still enjoyed the game a lot. 3 is better, but 2 is not a bad game, especially the choice in 2nd act and how certain events play out. Letho is a great anthagonist.
Should I skip 2?
I've played up until the first village with the hangings, but never got quite hooked. I did beat W1.
Now I really want to dive into 3, I've played a bit too...
W1 sets up the main plot of W3. W2 sets up the state of the world. If you don't get hooked on W2 (which is really easy given how janky you move) then don't worry about it, you're really not missing much (especially if you didn't pay much attention to the politics in W1)
Well, beat the game. Which of the expansions should I tackle first? Or should I poke around in both simultaneously? I hear one of them has a system to power up further and stuff, which would be nice seeing how while fights are still easy, expansion enemies seem to take way longer to kill compared with normal game ones, so a little more DPS seems like a good idea.
Also,
Hearts of Stone looks to be a thoroughly unpleasant business, with basically helping what seems to be a Faustian devil cross what appears to be an evil hedonistic psychopath. This is going to be another complete no-win situation, isn't it.
For the record, I did fight and beat Olgierd just now in front of his burning house. He was entertaining. Pity about the whole immortality thing. Assuming he replaced his heart with some magic stone or something, hence the expansion's title.
Hearts of Stone looks to be a thoroughly unpleasant business, with basically helping what seems to be a Faustian devil cross what appears to be an evil hedonistic psychopath. This is going to be another complete no-win situation, isn't it.
For the record, I did fight and beat Olgierd just now in front of his burning house. He was entertaining. Pity about the whole immortality thing. Assuming he replaced his heart with some magic stone or something, hence the expansion's title.
Frankly, Olgried is well.. He's got his reasons. Some of them are very shitty reasons, but they exist.
Gaunter O'Dimmn can stay in the dumpster fire he belongs. He's just plain horrible.
(as to which expansion - stick with Hearts of Stone if you're finding things tough - Blood & Wine is a: more of a finale, and b: has multiple tough boss fights right at the start before you can go exploring and unlock the mutation system)
Hearts of Stone looks to be a thoroughly unpleasant business, with basically helping what seems to be a Faustian devil cross what appears to be an evil hedonistic psychopath. This is going to be another complete no-win situation, isn't it.
For the record, I did fight and beat Olgierd just now in front of his burning house. He was entertaining. Pity about the whole immortality thing. Assuming he replaced his heart with some magic stone or something, hence the expansion's title.
Frankly, Olgried is well.. He's got his reasons. Some of them are very shitty reasons, but they exist.
Gaunter O'Dimmn can stay in the dumpster fire he belongs. He's just plain horrible.
(as to which expansion - stick with Hearts of Stone if you're finding things tough - Blood & Wine is a: more of a finale, and b: has multiple tough boss fights right at the start before you can go exploring and unlock the mutation system)
So like I said, no-win situation. Joy.
And it's not really "tough" as such. I am at no point actually threatened or at any risk of dying - sometimes I only bother to dodge half the attacks just out of laziness. It just takes long enough that bosses get boring. The frog, for example. It wasn't threatening in the slightest, but every time you can get three hits in, it jumps and knocks you away, so you need to recast your Quen, and approach again. If you try to Igni it, it jumps away and dispels the fire. It was vulnerable to Yrden, but since it will jump the moment you spend a second next to it, and Yrden's area is limited, most of the time it will jump off before you can finish leaving the trap. And so on. So basically it's just poke, back off, poke back off, poke, back off, with tiny damage done per poke. Repeat until dead.
That said, how tough are we talking about? Because I sort of accidentally started Blood and Wine something like 12 levels ago - I ran into the knight dudes completely accidentally, beat the bandits, and then Golyat, somewhere around level 23 or so. That took a bit of time. Thankfully humans are super easy to kill in general even with the skull icon defense boosts. So technically I could go around Toussaint already. I just don't know if it's worth it.
Hearts of Stone looks to be a thoroughly unpleasant business, with basically helping what seems to be a Faustian devil cross what appears to be an evil hedonistic psychopath. This is going to be another complete no-win situation, isn't it.
For the record, I did fight and beat Olgierd just now in front of his burning house. He was entertaining. Pity about the whole immortality thing. Assuming he replaced his heart with some magic stone or something, hence the expansion's title.
Frankly, Olgried is well.. He's got his reasons. Some of them are very shitty reasons, but they exist.
Gaunter O'Dimmn can stay in the dumpster fire he belongs. He's just plain horrible.
(as to which expansion - stick with Hearts of Stone if you're finding things tough - Blood & Wine is a: more of a finale, and b: has multiple tough boss fights right at the start before you can go exploring and unlock the mutation system)
So like I said, no-win situation. Joy.
HoS
Not really? By the end I absolutely thought the path that I chose was a "win".
Plot spoilers:
Olgierd had some awful luck and made a really stupid decision in the past, but he'd absolutely suffered for it and Gaunter was the literal devil. No way I was going to pass up the chance to get one over on the bigger monster of them all.
Yeah, see, here's the thing. I'm currently doing the Dead Man's Party quest, and after five minutes with Vlodimir I'm kind of not against setting fire to the entire crypt and family and Olgierd with them. The entire questline in this expansion started at "I'm not entirely okay with this" and seems to be barreling straight into "ugh".
So my options seem to be "help what appears to be a bargain bin Nyarlathothep" or "humour a pack of psychotic fuckwads who seem to think murder and rape are positively hilarious ways to pass the time". The only way I can see for this to end up in a win is if there's a way to end up fucking both sides over, which I don't expect.
Yeah, see, here's the thing. I'm currently doing the Dead Man's Party quest, and after five minutes with Vlodimir I'm kind of not against setting fire to the entire crypt and family and Olgierd with them. The entire questline in this expansion started at "I'm not entirely okay with this" and seems to be barreling straight into "ugh".
So my options seem to be "help what appears to be a bargain bin Nyarlathothep" or "humour a pack of psychotic fuckwads who seem to think murder and rape are positively hilarious ways to pass the time". The only way I can see for this to end up in a win is if there's a way to end up fucking both sides over, which I don't expect.
I found Hearts of Stone to be less of a downer than Blood and Wine, story wise. Blood and Wine has some fun non-story and side mission stuff though.
Drascin, I'm not saying this in a mean way at all, but if you don't enjoy the quest that you're currently doing then I think you might just want to put the DLC down.
+1
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Out of curiosity, when to the sidequests in Velen end? Because I have been here awhile.
Drascin, I'm not saying this in a mean way at all, but if you don't enjoy the quest that you're currently doing then I think you might just want to put the DLC down.
Just finished my first playthrough of the main story. Finally. Only took me 14 months. I don't know how many hours exactly, but it's over 150. Well over.
I got (ending spoilers)
the Witcher ending with Ciri. I'm pretty happy with it; though I was freaking out for the first 15 minutes of the epilogue. You know why if you got the same ending...
I understand the Empress ending has more 'preconditions' to get, and is therefore the hardest and arguably 'best' ending to trigger, but this one is happier to me. Ciri has already defeated the Wild Hunt and eliminated the threat of the white frost (thereby saving the Aen Elle & the other worlds as well). She's earned her desired care-free life outside of politics. The rest of the world sorted itself out fairly well anyway, at least in my version.
Having the highest armor tiers be meant for postgame is okay, but if you have set armors at minimal levels they should do something as a set before you're so deep into the endgame most players will never even bother to get there.
Set bonuses at all have only been recently added to the game. The Witcher gear (whichever set that complimented your skills) is still the best to have at any given level, with very few exceptions, without any additional bonuses at all.
Since the set bonuses are purely B&W-level expansion content, I wish they had waited to reveal they exist at all until you reach that point of the game - like the runewright in HoS. They do take up an inordinate amount of the item descriptions now, and give the impression that you're 'missing' something during the majority of the game. Which isn't really true, since all of that content was designed without the bonuses in play.
Out of curiosity, when to the sidequests in Velen end? Because I have been here awhile.
Not to be totally glib, but they end when you want them to (or, minimally, when you have opened Novigrad). This game is a completionist's nightmare; I can't imagine trying to clear all quests on the board before moving on.
+3
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Just finished my first playthrough of the main story. Finally. Only took me 14 months. I don't know how many hours exactly, but it's over 150. Well over.
I got (ending spoilers)
the Witcher ending with Ciri. I'm pretty happy with it; though I was freaking out for the first 15 minutes of the epilogue. You know why if you got the same ending...
I understand the Empress ending has more 'preconditions' to get, and is therefore the hardest and arguably 'best' ending to trigger, but this one is happier to me. Ciri has already defeated the Wild Hunt and eliminated the threat of the white frost (thereby saving the Aen Elle & the other worlds as well). She's earned her desired care-free life outside of politics. The rest of the world sorted itself out fairly well anyway, at least in my version.
Having the highest armor tiers be meant for postgame is okay, but if you have set armors at minimal levels they should do something as a set before you're so deep into the endgame most players will never even bother to get there.
Set bonuses at all have only been recently added to the game. The Witcher gear (whichever set that complimented your skills) is still the best to have at any given level, with very few exceptions, without any additional bonuses at all.
Since the set bonuses are purely B&W-level expansion content, I wish they had waited to reveal they exist at all until you reach that point of the game - like the runewright in HoS. They do take up an inordinate amount of the item descriptions now, and give the impression that you're 'missing' something during the majority of the game. Which isn't really true, since all of that content was designed without the bonuses in play.
Out of curiosity, when to the sidequests in Velen end? Because I have been here awhile.
Not to be totally glib, but they end when you want them to (or, minimally, when you have opened Novigrad). This game is a completionist's nightmare; I can't imagine trying to clear all quests on the board before moving on.
I actually meant the Velen map, I've been doing Novigrad stuff for awhile. I'm helping Dandelion with his Cabaret, and also am about to...midgame?
I actually meant the Velen map, I've been doing Novigrad stuff for awhile. I'm helping Dandelion with his Cabaret, and also am about to...midgame?
help kill that bastard King Radovid.
Ah, well, in that case - you're actually quite close to the point where the game pushes you to move on, at least for now. You probably don't want to skip the quests you're working on now though...
I'm playing the main game (only got started on The Witcher 3 about 1 1/2 months ago) and have just finished the main quest on Skellige. Is this a good point at which to take a bit of a break? It feels like I've been playing this game only forever (other than VR and PS4 gaming), but I don't want to risk coming back and having lost interest.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I'm playing the main game (only got started on The Witcher 3 about 1 1/2 months ago) and have just finished the main quest on Skellige. Is this a good point at which to take a bit of a break? It feels like I've been playing this game only forever (other than VR and PS4 gaming), but I don't want to risk coming back and having lost interest.
If you have finished novigrad, you have I think one (or two) more quest before things really kick off
So I've been playing a shitton of this after buying it a few weeks ago. I'm up to the quest "Final Preparations" in the main story, which sounds ominous so I've put it off to do Heart of Stone and Blood & Wine. The level requirements on the two are a little goofy: they both start out at ~32 but once you do Heart of Stone you end up a bit over-leveled for the early Blood & Wine stuff. Oh well! Heart of Stone was kind of fun. I liked the soundtrack - pretty creepy at times. The wedding was great fun. Blood & Wine seems neat from what little I've done so far. The new area is pretty. I gave my majordomo a bunch of money to upgrade the house but I hope at some point I get to set up the wine orchards or whatever and become a wine tycoon. Then I could have lots of money!
0
Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
So I've been playing a shitton of this after buying it a few weeks ago. I'm up to the quest "Final Preparations" in the main story, which sounds ominous so I've put it off to do Heart of Stone and Blood & Wine. The level requirements on the two are a little goofy: they both start out at ~32 but once you do Heart of Stone you end up a bit over-leveled for the early Blood & Wine stuff. Oh well! Heart of Stone was kind of fun. I liked the soundtrack - pretty creepy at times. The wedding was great fun. Blood & Wine seems neat from what little I've done so far. The new area is pretty. I gave my majordomo a bunch of money to upgrade the house but I hope at some point I get to set up the wine orchards or whatever and become a wine tycoon. Then I could have lots of money!
I wouldn't get too far into B&W (IMO) without finishing the main quest with Ciri. There's interesting/cool bits of dialogue and scenes you'll miss out on otherwise.
So I've been playing a shitton of this after buying it a few weeks ago. I'm up to the quest "Final Preparations" in the main story, which sounds ominous so I've put it off to do Heart of Stone and Blood & Wine. The level requirements on the two are a little goofy: they both start out at ~32 but once you do Heart of Stone you end up a bit over-leveled for the early Blood & Wine stuff. Oh well! Heart of Stone was kind of fun. I liked the soundtrack - pretty creepy at times. The wedding was great fun. Blood & Wine seems neat from what little I've done so far. The new area is pretty. I gave my majordomo a bunch of money to upgrade the house but I hope at some point I get to set up the wine orchards or whatever and become a wine tycoon. Then I could have lots of money!
I wouldn't get too far into B&W (IMO) without finishing the main quest with Ciri. There's interesting/cool bits of dialogue and scenes you'll miss out on otherwise.
Okay, I guess I'll go back then. I was worried the game would end when the main quest ends.
So I've been playing a shitton of this after buying it a few weeks ago. I'm up to the quest "Final Preparations" in the main story, which sounds ominous so I've put it off to do Heart of Stone and Blood & Wine. The level requirements on the two are a little goofy: they both start out at ~32 but once you do Heart of Stone you end up a bit over-leveled for the early Blood & Wine stuff. Oh well! Heart of Stone was kind of fun. I liked the soundtrack - pretty creepy at times. The wedding was great fun. Blood & Wine seems neat from what little I've done so far. The new area is pretty. I gave my majordomo a bunch of money to upgrade the house but I hope at some point I get to set up the wine orchards or whatever and become a wine tycoon. Then I could have lots of money!
I wouldn't get too far into B&W (IMO) without finishing the main quest with Ciri. There's interesting/cool bits of dialogue and scenes you'll miss out on otherwise.
Okay, I guess I'll go back then. I was worried the game would end when the main quest ends.
As @KetBra said, they are intended for post game. But also, what's nice, is even after you beat the main stories with the central game plus all the expansions, you're still allowed to roam the world, do side quests, and just be a badass witcher. It doesn't tell you you're done just because the central story is done. Those drunken peasants aren't going to save themselves.
0
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I finally made it to Skellige....
I think finishing everything in Novigrad may have been slightly silly.
Up to here, Blood and Wine is being a lot nicer than Hearts of Stone was being when I just sorta left it hanging and left for Toussaint. Always time for everything to go to hell, of course, but for now, I'm liking Toussaint.
Very sad about poor Milton, though. The vampire better have a hell of a good explanation for this shit.
That said, hell, I'm hard up on money. Between remodeling the house and trying to get the grandmaster level of my armor done, my finances look like a seesaw. I haven't even spent in upgrading the runesmith guy beyond the first level. I probably shouldn't have just bought a pile of alchemy ingredients to complete all the potions I don't actually use, back in the main story, but back then I didn't even know there was going to be any use for money later!
Posts
I need more armor stands in my house though. I've got 5 and they're taken up by Master versions of Feline, Griffin, and Wolf armor, as well as the tourney armor and the Teshin Mutina set (my personal favorite)
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Uh the highest tier armor sets are intended for the DLC stuff, which is higher level than the base game
So I'm imagining. And I have started Heart and Stone. Mostly I'm grousing at the fact that I'll probably be practically finishing said expansion before the armor set I've been keeping up with since level 11 actually does anything. At that point it makes one wonder, why put in item sets at the very low levels if they're not going to do anything special until well after you beat the game and are deep into, if not nearly finishing, at least one of the postgames. Having the highest armor tiers be meant for postgame is okay, but if you have set armors at minimal levels they should do something as a set before you're so deep into the endgame most players will never even bother to get there.
And dye them pink.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Yeah you'll find armor pieces with better individual stats but the set bonuses are so good
I've played up until the first village with the hangings, but never got quite hooked. I did beat W1.
Now I really want to dive into 3, I've played a bit too...
I'm enjoying 3, stopped 1 before you did because I was getting nothing, and never played 2. It explains what's going on well enough.
W1 sets up the main plot of W3. W2 sets up the state of the world. If you don't get hooked on W2 (which is really easy given how janky you move) then don't worry about it, you're really not missing much (especially if you didn't pay much attention to the politics in W1)
Also,
For the record, I did fight and beat Olgierd just now in front of his burning house. He was entertaining. Pity about the whole immortality thing. Assuming he replaced his heart with some magic stone or something, hence the expansion's title.
Frankly, Olgried is well.. He's got his reasons. Some of them are very shitty reasons, but they exist.
Gaunter O'Dimmn can stay in the dumpster fire he belongs. He's just plain horrible.
(as to which expansion - stick with Hearts of Stone if you're finding things tough - Blood & Wine is a: more of a finale, and b: has multiple tough boss fights right at the start before you can go exploring and unlock the mutation system)
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And it's not really "tough" as such. I am at no point actually threatened or at any risk of dying - sometimes I only bother to dodge half the attacks just out of laziness. It just takes long enough that bosses get boring. The frog, for example. It wasn't threatening in the slightest, but every time you can get three hits in, it jumps and knocks you away, so you need to recast your Quen, and approach again. If you try to Igni it, it jumps away and dispels the fire. It was vulnerable to Yrden, but since it will jump the moment you spend a second next to it, and Yrden's area is limited, most of the time it will jump off before you can finish leaving the trap. And so on. So basically it's just poke, back off, poke back off, poke, back off, with tiny damage done per poke. Repeat until dead.
That said, how tough are we talking about? Because I sort of accidentally started Blood and Wine something like 12 levels ago - I ran into the knight dudes completely accidentally, beat the bandits, and then Golyat, somewhere around level 23 or so. That took a bit of time. Thankfully humans are super easy to kill in general even with the skull icon defense boosts. So technically I could go around Toussaint already. I just don't know if it's worth it.
HoS
Plot spoilers:
Overall it's a ghost story, though it doesn't just revel in doom and gloom.
So my options seem to be "help what appears to be a bargain bin Nyarlathothep" or "humour a pack of psychotic fuckwads who seem to think murder and rape are positively hilarious ways to pass the time". The only way I can see for this to end up in a win is if there's a way to end up fucking both sides over, which I don't expect.
I found Hearts of Stone to be less of a downer than Blood and Wine, story wise. Blood and Wine has some fun non-story and side mission stuff though.
Both of them, or just this one?
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-10-23-the-making-of-the-witcher-3s-greatest-villain
I got (ending spoilers)
I understand the Empress ending has more 'preconditions' to get, and is therefore the hardest and arguably 'best' ending to trigger, but this one is happier to me. Ciri has already defeated the Wild Hunt and eliminated the threat of the white frost (thereby saving the Aen Elle & the other worlds as well). She's earned her desired care-free life outside of politics. The rest of the world sorted itself out fairly well anyway, at least in my version.
Set bonuses at all have only been recently added to the game. The Witcher gear (whichever set that complimented your skills) is still the best to have at any given level, with very few exceptions, without any additional bonuses at all.
Since the set bonuses are purely B&W-level expansion content, I wish they had waited to reveal they exist at all until you reach that point of the game - like the runewright in HoS. They do take up an inordinate amount of the item descriptions now, and give the impression that you're 'missing' something during the majority of the game. Which isn't really true, since all of that content was designed without the bonuses in play.
Not to be totally glib, but they end when you want them to (or, minimally, when you have opened Novigrad). This game is a completionist's nightmare; I can't imagine trying to clear all quests on the board before moving on.
I actually meant the Velen map, I've been doing Novigrad stuff for awhile. I'm helping Dandelion with his Cabaret, and also am about to...midgame?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
If you have finished novigrad, you have I think one (or two) more quest before things really kick off
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
As @KetBra said, they are intended for post game. But also, what's nice, is even after you beat the main stories with the central game plus all the expansions, you're still allowed to roam the world, do side quests, and just be a badass witcher. It doesn't tell you you're done just because the central story is done. Those drunken peasants aren't going to save themselves.
I think finishing everything in Novigrad may have been slightly silly.
If you enjoyed doing it and had fun/memorable moments then you did everything right.
That said, hell, I'm hard up on money. Between remodeling the house and trying to get the grandmaster level of my armor done, my finances look like a seesaw. I haven't even spent in upgrading the runesmith guy beyond the first level. I probably shouldn't have just bought a pile of alchemy ingredients to complete all the potions I don't actually use, back in the main story, but back then I didn't even know there was going to be any use for money later!