Witcher III : PT III : Blood and Winos

[V13]

Fast attacks (Red)

- Muscle Memory
- Precise Blow
- Whirl

Battle Trance :

- Resolve
- Razor Focus

Defense

- Fleet Footed

----------------------------

Alchemy

Brewing :

- Heightened Tolerance

Oils preparation :

- Poisonned Blade
- Protective Coating
- Hunter Instinct

Mutation :

- Acquired Tolerance
- Tissue Transmutation
- Synergy

General

- Cat School Technique
- Metabolism Control (optional)

Max all of these , use 2 x greater red mutagens in synergy with the 6 red skills and 2 x greater green mutagens along with 5 x green skills (Heightened Tolerence , Acquired Tolerance , Synergy , Poisonned Blade , Hunter Instinct) + Cat School then run Ekhnida , Water Hag and Katakan decoctions + a superior thunderbolt potion. Have fun destroying everything in your path

 

[kurt]

Alchemy skills combined with melee skills are very powerful. Once you have the proper green skills , synergy , 2 x Greater Red Mutagen + 2 x Greater green mutagen and close to or maximum toxicity tolerance you can run 3 decoctions at the same time and you become an absolute killing machine.<<<<<<

Melee - Alchemy hybrid is the most powerful build in the game. Try it

Awesome - thanks. And thanks for posting the suggested build. I'll try it on my second play through.

 

[V13]

Awesome - thanks. And thanks for posting the suggested build. I'll try it on my second play through.

You don't need to do a second replay if you want to try builds though. There is a merchant in Novigrad who sell skills respec potions. You can just buy one and save scum.

I tried a bunch of builds that way

 

[Frankie Blueberries]

I just finished the game, absolutely loved it.

I want to do more of the secondary quests, contracts, treasure quests, etc. My issue is, most of them are low level (I'm level 33 now, and a lot of them are for level 5-20ish, which seems pointless to do at this point in the game). Are they worth doing? Are there any ones in particular I should do? I want to do the enjoyable ones first, before buying the DLC.

I'm also in the middle of building Griffin master armour and swords. My god, they take a lot of materials to build.

 

[Do Make Say Think]

If you want more then you should start the expansions: both are very good and lengthy.

Doing overleveled quests is boring unless you really like the stories but, let's be honest, they all play out as you expect and you won't be getting sweet gear.

Blood and Wine has a bunch of new armour sets and some of them are quite hard and very expensive to get.

 

[SpookyTsuki]

I just finished the game, absolutely loved it.

I want to do more of the secondary quests, contracts, treasure quests, etc. My issue is, most of them are low level (I'm level 33 now, and a lot of them are for level 5-20ish, which seems pointless to do at this point in the game). Are they worth doing? Are there any ones in particular I should do? I want to do the enjoyable ones first, before buying the DLC.

I'm also in the middle of building Griffin master armour and swords. My god, they take a lot of materials to build.

There are some good side quests. Witcher contracts are always good. Treasure no don't do those if you don't feel like it pretty useless

 

[ArGarBarGar]

How many side quests did you skip? There are some really good ones in there.

 

[Hammettf2b]

Hello all. Just picked up the game yesterday cuz it was on sale for a really good price. Does the game teach you what certain things do and what not? I seem to have some alchemy potions but have no idea how to use them. Im quite early in the game though. I just did my first mission. I had to retrieve a pan for an old lady. Will there be any tutorials coming up?

 

[Do Make Say Think]

The tutorials are in the in-game menus if I remember correctly.

 

[kurt]

You don't need to do a second replay if you want to try builds though. There is a merchant in Novigrad who sell skills respec potions. You can just buy one and save scum.

I tried a bunch of builds that way

Yeah I realize - potion of clarity or something? I'll need to do another playthrough if I want to get platinum (which I think I want to do), as I think I may have missed some stuff. I'm going to read the platinum guide though and see if I can make do with my current playthrough.

 

[HanSolo]

Hello all. Just picked up the game yesterday cuz it was on sale for a really good price. Does the game teach you what certain things do and what not? I seem to have some alchemy potions but have no idea how to use them. Im quite early in the game though. I just did my first mission. I had to retrieve a pan for an old lady. Will there be any tutorials coming up?

Depends on what you're trying to do but I got through most of the game without alchemy except where the game required it. Though I did feel at times that not taking part in alchemy was making things harder on myself in combat than it had to be so at times certain boss encounters would require me to dodge and roll significantly more than actually attacking.

 

[ArGarBarGar]

I didn't use alchemy my first few playthroughs. Got along fine with Aard or Yrden and upped my heavy attacks.

Tried out the build above for my fourth playthrough and it is pretty worth it to have all the alchemy upgrades. Not sure how well that works building from scratch, but with a full build I am pretty OP. Just gotta get thunderbolt upgraded.

 

[Belamorte]

Just finished the 2 expansions after taking a year or so away from the game on recommendations that I should. They were both great. I did like Blood and Wine a bit better, but they were both good. As far as better than the 'main story' well, not sure but excellent still and 2 of the best expansions in a long time and not just tacked on BS that only last an hour or 2 - I'm looking at you Mass Effect/Skyrim and the ilk.

 

[Sidney the Kidney]

Don't bum-rush the story, do some side quests. The core engagement of the game is world immersion.

This is a tremendous point.

With the Witcher 3 in particular, a lot of what makes it such a great game is the "game world", the minor stories of the villagers and those Geralt comes across in his travels. Doing their side quests fleshes out the world so much better than if one were to simply stick to the main quest path.

TW3 did sidequests better than arguably any recent games. Don't miss out on them.

 

[Do Make Say Think]

I didn't use alchemy my first few playthroughs. Got along fine with Aard or Yrden and upped my heavy attacks.

Tried out the build above for my fourth playthrough and it is pretty worth it to have all the alchemy upgrades. Not sure how well that works building from scratch, but with a full build I am pretty OP. Just gotta get thunderbolt upgraded.

I just can't stand how fugly Geralt looks when you are downing those potions.

I tried, I just can't.

 

[ArGarBarGar]

I just can't stand how fugly Geralt looks when you are downing those potions.

I tried, I just can't.

Yeah, not a great look.

Does that show up when Geralt is doing the deed? Can't imagine a lady would enjoy looking at a demon face during.

 

[Intoewsables]

Humble Bundle is selling the GOTY Edition of TW3 for $20, TW2 for $3, and TW1 for $1.50.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/promo/the-witcher-10th-anniversary-sale

 

[Do Make Say Think]

Honestly I think that, as much as I love The Wild Hunt, Assassin of Kings might be better.

 

[SpookyTsuki]

Honestly I think that, as much as I love The Wild Hunt, Assassin of Kings might be better.

That’s the worst one in my opinion. The combat is better in witcher 3 and the witcher 1 has a better story. So does witcher 3. It just doesn’t have something it does best in the series

All in my opinion

 

[ArGarBarGar]

Honestly I think that, as much as I love The Wild Hunt, Assassin of Kings might be better.

I played through it, never really got the appeal.

Thought combat was meh, wayfinding was awful, and the story was just okay. Still a fun game and the world building was incredible, but overall it just didn't have the same appeal as TW3.

 

[ColonialsHockey10]

Late to the party...just beat the original game (no DLCs yet).

That was an absolute masterpiece. I love nearly every second of that game. It will easily slot in as one of my favorite games ever.

The world, story and characters were amazing. So many unforgettable people you meet along the way, and Geralt is such a good protagonist. I liked him in the 2nd game, but he's got to be one of the GOATs after this game.

I only have two complaints, which were the difficulty scaling and the lore. On difficulty, I played on the 2nd hardest from the get-go, and it went from being Dark Souls-level hard (ok, maybe not that difficult but worthy of a few profanity screams and almost-controller throws) to really easy, seemingly when I reached level 15 or so. Everything after that was a pure cakewalk.

On the lore, the game does a poor job of explaining who and what certain things are, and reading the glossary only helps a little bit. The casualness with which the game drops info like "I remember Emrelith from when I used to ride in the wild hunt" and "Ciri is Lara Doreen's blood", is interesting. The game is chock full of storytelling that is told beautifully, but they struggled with tying in the other games, understandably so. I can't imagine how lost I would have been had I not played the 2nd game. Even then, it was years ago and I had to go on YouTube to remember scenes like Radovid and Phillipa Eilhart.

Would love to hear everyone else's (two year) belated thoughts on this last piece. I imagine everyone is in agreement that this is a near-perfect game. Excited to play the DLCs!

 

[Warden of the North]

Its in my top 5. I'd never played a Witcher game and I instantly was hooked. Youtube and Wikipedia filled in my lore gaps adequately.

I love the music in this game. When I got to Skellige and this started up I was blown away. I was totally immersed in the game and this just put it over the to.

 

[ColonialsHockey10]

Its in my top 5. I'd never played a Witcher game and I instantly was hooked. Youtube and Wikipedia filled in my lore gaps adequately.

I love the music in this game. When I got to Skellige and this started up I was blown away. I was totally immersed in the game and this just put it over the to.

There's an island north of Ard Skellig (never go there in the main quest) that has its own special music. Easily my favorite in the game, and will be an all time favorite!

Regarding the lore, I guess that's kind of my point. I understood it as well because I read up online and watched YouTube videos, but I don't think that should be mandatory for someone to understand a video games story to its fullest. An interesting solution of sorts would be a library or something in Novigrad, where you can purchase books to fill in the cracks on the lore.

Either way, the story and lore is amazing and it's a shame some people probably beat the game without fully understanding it. I mean they didnt even fully clarify who the Wild Hint are, with most of the basic info coming when you're 80% through. You visit their world and everything and then on the glossary it refers to them Spectral Riders, which I find very misleading. The fact that they aren't just some generic undead army, despite how they look, is one of the things that made them such good villains.

All of this is minor nitpicking though while I download these DLCs.

 

[Warden of the North]

There's an island north of Ard Skellig (never go there in the main quest) that has its own special music. Easily my favorite in the game, and will be an all time favorite!

Regarding the lore, I guess that's kind of my point. I understood it as well because I read up online and watched YouTube videos, but I don't think that should be mandatory for someone to understand a video games story to its fullest. An interesting solution of sorts would be a library or something in Novigrad, where you can purchase books to fill in the cracks on the lore.

Either way, the story and lore is amazing and it's a shame some people probably beat the game without fully understanding it. I mean they didnt even fully clarify who the Wild Hint are, with most of the basic info coming when you're 80% through. You visit their world and everything and then on the glossary it refers to them Spectral Riders, which I find very misleading. The fact that they aren't just some generic undead army, despite how they look, is one of the things that made them such good villains.

All of this is minor nitpicking though while I download these DLCs.

The DLCs are great. While shorter, I REALLY enjoyed Hearts of Stone. The characters introduced in it were superb. Blood and Wine was a really beautiful detour away from the core game, but Vampire stuff doesnt do it for me, so I wasnt super invested in its main quest.

 

[Chaels Arms]

It's a top 3 game for me. This was one of the few games where I actually felt pretty sad when it was over. I've had that happen a lot with books but not with video games.

I also had never played a Witcher game before and just used the internet to fill me in whenever the game dropped references I didn't understand.

Hearts and Stone was exactly what you would want Witcher 3 DLC to be. A new, self-contained, amazing story. Olgierd was an amazing character.