In this Avowed Beginner guide, I’m going to be giving you guyssome helpful beginner tipsif you’re just starting out the game. These are things that aren’t inherently obvious, although you’ll probably figure out most of these as you go through the game. The idea behind this guide is just to give you some useful information that you would probably learn 10 to 15 hours in, but rather have it at the beginning so you may save yourself some headache.
Avowed - Best Tips For New Players
Eat Food out Of Combat To Replenish HP
So the first tip is touse yourfood and consumablesthat aren’t potions. Your first instinct when playing is going to be to use a health potion or use an essence potion in combat when you take damage and you need essence. But what I would highly recommend you get in the habit of doing is instead, before you go into a tough combat or outside of combat,use your food to replenish your HP and your essence so that you save your potions for key momentsand also because this is going to give this to you over time, even if you’re full. So if you run into combat full and then use an ability and drain some essence, it’ll continue to keep coming back for a while. Or if you take damage, it’ll continue healing for a while and you won’t have to stop to keep using health potions and essence potions. So get in the habit of using food before and during combat.
Do Not Neglect Your Stamina
The next tip is thatstamina is super important in combatin Avowed and even so for melee characters than ranged characters, but also ranged characters, particularly ones that use wand, you’ll often find that your DPS is limited by your stamina, that you’ll just chew through your entire stamina bar by attacking as quickly as you can in a lot of cases and then you have to wait for your stamina to recover and you do this dance of waiting for your stamina to recover before attacking again.
The higher stamina pool you have, the more attacks you’re gonna be able to dobefore you run out and the better stamina regeneration you have, the more attacks you’ll be able to do constantly as your stamina regenerates. So look for items that increase your stamina. Don’t neglect resolve completely. Consider putting a couple of points there. Consider taking passive abilities that reduce the stamina penalty of armor.
Choose Your Playstyles Carefully
The next tip that I’ll give you is that by the end of the game or middle late of the game, you’re gonna have enough ability points for essentially two styles of play very effectively. You could actually even goFighter,Wizard,Rangerand probably still be fine by the end of the game. But if you want like uber effectiveness, you’re gonna be able to go eitherFighter/Ranger,Fighter/Wizard,Ranger/Wizard, or even pure Wizard if you want lots of different spells.You should plan to make a build that utilizes more than one weapon type.
If you’re talking about like Fighter, Ranger, like that is to say either different like a ranged weapon and a melee weapon setup so you can do some ranged and melee. Or if you want to play melee and have some spells or if you want to play ranged weapon and have some spells, you should plan for those kind of setups. So when you’re thinking about making your character plan for like two different styles of play to be incorporated or two different types of weapons.
Getting Your Godlike Abilities
Also note that yourgodlike abilitieswill be acquired as you progress the game and if you mouse over them, it will tell you in some cases why you have a godlike ability versus a different one.
There are certain parts of the game where you can choose to accept a gift or not and it will change the godlike ability that you have. So I would consider recommending you either check on thewikito see what these are when you get to that point or save before you use a memory and reload and see if you can get a different one if you don’t like the bonus that you got.
Area Zones Corresponds To Item Quality
And lastly, when it comes to combat, it seems likeeach zone of the game has a quality difficulty level that corresponds to the equipment of the game. The first zone is usually balanced for common items, second zone is balanced for fine, the third zone exceptional, fourth zone superb and so on. So ensure that you’re using equipment of the appropriate level in those zones and that you’re not falling behind. Even if you have like a unique item that you really like, maybe you would consider upgrading it to that quality in order to be competent in combat in that new zone that you’re in.
Look For Keys Before Lockpicking
Outside of combat, there’s a couple important things that I’ll mention too. There are a lot of opportunities where you can lock pick a door or you can use a key and a lot of times you won’t have that key so it’s easier to just lock pick it. I would suggest looking for the key and saving your lock picks. Usually the keys are not very far away from the doors, so spending five minutes can save you the lock picks.
Lock picks are very valuable in the game because you often will run across chests out on the landscape that need to be lock picked and you will go through a lot of these. So buy them every time you see them at vendors, make sure you loot them every time you see them on corpses and try and save them if there’s another way to open a door if possible. The last thing that you want to have happen is you get somewhere far out on the landscape and you don’t have any lock picks and you have to go get some and come back.
Keep An Ear Out For Loot
The next tip is thatchests and shiny loot like on corpses that’s glowing have a high-pitched noisewhen you get near them that lets you know loot is near. And the closer you get the louder this is. It’s very high-pitched.I highly recommend turning down your music volume a bitso it’s easier to hear. But a lot of times this can let you know that there’s a secret nearby like if you’re out exploring and it will allow you to find treasure more easily. So take advantage of that.
Another way that you can help deduce that there are secrets nearby or loot nearby is thatyou can see the corpses of enemies on your mini-map with an X. So if you kill enemies and you’re wondering which ones have loot, you can just do a quick look at your mini-map and see where the loot is or maybe you’re exploring a dungeon or something and you see a corpse somewhere but you can’t figure out how to get to it. That usually tells you that there’s some sort of secret nearby. You got to figure out how to get to it.
I will also say look very thoroughly for secrets when you’re exploring. There’s lots of things hiding in plain sight and a lot of times if you like break through a wall and you see a chest you’re like, oh, obviously the chest behind the wall that’s what was hiding. Sometimes there’s a lot more than that. So make sure you do a thorough job of exploring. Take your time. Don’t sprint through the dungeons and different ruins to explore throughout the game. Actually look everywhere in every nook and cranny because there is loot everywhere. And if you need help with this too, we have an interactive map that has pretty much everything on it. So make sure you bookmark the interactive map.
Reading Is Important
And kind of piggybacking off this a bit, I would also say make sure you read the things that are around the landscape. There are lots of things to read. Might seem like you shouldn’t but a lot of times they give you tips on where loot is or where certain things are along with a lot of interesting lore and backstory to the game. You know, one of the big things about thePillars of Eternity universe is its lore and story. It’s all fantastic. So highly highly recommend that you read things, particularly if you’re having trouble finding certain things for like quests and things like that.
Loot EVERYTING and ANYTHING
And the other thing is loot everything, right? Like anything you see, pick it up. If it’s food or plants or whatever, pick it up. You can use it for healing or essence later. If it’s common equipment or rare and you’re already on exceptional and superb equipment,pick it up anyway. Pick everything up. You can either send it to your stash if you get over encumbered and deal with it later, sell it for gold if you want. Oryou can deconstruct it for crafting materials in order to upgrade your gear, even if it’s common or something like that. So verify that you’re always picking up everything that you see. And it’s also a good way to realize where you’ve been and where you haven’t been, even though there is a fog of war on the map. Sometimes you don’t see everything, but if you see something that you didn’t loot before, it can give you an indication that you haven’t been there. Or maybe you didn’t explore it thoroughly enough. So make sure you loot everything.
Collect Totem Fragments
And another tip is that there are thesetotemsyou can put together on each map that give you bonuses and theirpiecesare scattered throughout when they’re kind of all over the place, usually hidden within ruins and things like that.If you talk to vendors, sometimes they’ll sell you like clues that will show you where these are. So make sure you look thoroughly through vendor inventories when you’re looking at them. They can give you treasure maps that will lead you to valuable uniques and things like that as well. So check vendors to get treasure maps and totem clues.
Zones Are Separate
Another tip is thateach zone is more or less separated from every other zonein the sense that there are very few quests that take you across zones and back. So what I would suggest doing is try and complete each zone before you move on to the next zone. That means try and do all the quests that you can. If there’s like one left or two left, that’s fine. Try and do most of the quests there. Try and get all the exploration done there that you can. Especially since as I mentioned earlier, each zone is kind of separated by quality, right? Like the quality of gear tends to go up one every zone that you go to. So it’s a good idea to try and complete a zone as much as possible to your satisfaction before you move on to the next one.
Soft Caps On Stats
A tip regarding character building is that each stat has soft caps at five or equivalent of five in eachattribute. You will start seeing diminishing returns. And thenonce you hit 10, you’ll start to see even more diminishing returns. This is linear, right? So you hit five, you get full value. Then you go from six to ten. You get two-thirds the value. Then you go from 11 to 15. You get one-third the value for each stat. So you might want to consider spreading your stats around early on. And a lot of times you’ll get gear in the game or you’ll get passive benefits that will improve an attribute. And then your effective level for that attribute is actually higher. And that means like periodically throughout the game, you might want to respec in order to optimize your attributes depending on what’s going on. So don’t be afraid to do that either.
Talk To Your Companions In The Camp
Lastly, you should definitely talk to yourcompanionsvery early on in the game when you go to camp andtry and have a conversation with them every timethat you’re there if possible. Even making yourself go to camp more often than not if you can sometimes. And that’s because if you progress their conversations far enough, they’ll actually give you passive benefits to your attributes that are permanent. So you can get like plus two to an attribute or something like that or plus one to an attribute that permanently stays with you throughout the whole game. So ensure you speak to your companions regularly. And if you don’t find yourself going to camp to talk to them enough, you might have to make yourself do this a little bit.
So that wraps up our beginner guide for Avowed. I hope you guys found some of these tips useful. A lot of these things you’ll just figure out as you go as you play the game. But some of them you won’t figure out for like 20 hours or 25 hours or 30 hours. And then you might be like, “oh man, I wish I would have known this sooner.” So this is really a list of tips that you will figure out. But you probably would love to know at the beginning of the game or at least I would have.
Hopefully, this helps you. As always, if you have other tips for other players, make sure you leave them in the comments. And if you have other questions about certain things, leave them there as well. I’m going to be doing a series of guides for this game. I’m having a ton of fun with it. So if there are other things you’re looking for like character development, we have a video on that or specific builds. I’ll probably have a few builds out as well. What do you guys make of Avowed so far? Are you guys enjoying it? Let me know in the comments below.
