Hey, everyone. I'd just like to explain how the first dungeon isn't quite so bad if you know what to do.

1) Before going underground, kill all the rabbits and take their meat. Meat can't be hotkeyed and it weighs 10 lbs, but it restores 50 health. Early in the game, you won't get encumbered with loads of crap, so the weight isn't an issue, and a lot of battles are just one or three skeletons, meaning you heal afterward if you fall under 50% health, and then you're fine. Hotkey health potions for emergencies, but eat meat after battle. You can also make 2 or 3 jars of honey in Mardaneus' backhard - drag the honey rack onto the beehive, and then drag a jar onto the honey. These have some stat buffs, too, so they might be better for taking on the catacomb mini-bosses.

2) Complete the healing gem quest with the *good* ending for a free point in healing magic. If you don't rush to complete the quest and you explore the whole town and read every book, you'll figure out what to do, but if you want to be quick, go here: http://www.gamebanshee.com/divinedivinity/locations/aleroth.php

3) Healing Lanilor isn't that hard. Afterward, you get the first of two teleport stones. You need to set it up - I recommend placing it by the bed where you began the game. You will want to return here often when you have the other stone, both to heal and to shop.

4) Get a bow ASAP, no matter who you are. Mana and health management is a problem, and your armor is crap. Also, the mobs aren't as huge and strong as they can be later, so you can kite quite a bit. Also, see 5.

5) Right when it starts to get hard, you'll get a free tank. PLAN FOR THIS. Right after the orcs give you the Slasher quest (don't try to kill them when you first meet them) is when you get a free tank. Talk to a statue in the Southernmost room to do this. DON'T TALK TO THE STATUE UNTIL YOU'RE HEALED UP AND HAVE SOLD THINGS AND SPENT ALL YOUR MONEY AND SO ON. You can avoid a lot of damage and plink away with your bow with impunity for about half of the remainder of the catacombs, saving health and mana. DON'T WALK BACK TO THE ROOM WITH THE ORCS WHILE YOUR ZOMBIE IS ACTIVE. They will murder him rapidly. Those stairs going up on the floor where you find the zombie go right out of the ground and into the sunlight, so don't do that. (It's just one of countless shortcut options that are unlocked for ease of backtracking in this dungeon)
5b) Slasher quest: Slasher is the axe that requires identify Level 4 to use. Don't even bother identifying it - just hand it in for the free exp. Identify and sell the others, unless you're an axe user yourself. I find it helpful to throw all of them in a single room of the dungeon and to come back later to sell them when I have the other teleport stone. Carrying three axes or an axe and some miscellaneous loot is enough to encumber you before you know it.

6) Skill points: Many skills I don't mention might also be useful, especially later. But these stand out for me.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bless: Makes a big difference. Turn it on whenever you have halfway respectable foe. You get one or two free points in the game later, and you'll want to max it eventually, and the duration also scales. However, pure mages who never need to hit a target might want to pass. However, the dodge bonus from agility might be worth it alone, so I'd recommend getting it and hotkeying it.

Alchemy: More points help, but just one lets you make Minor Restoration potions. Drag a minor health potion onto a minor magic potion. Minor health and mana potions restore a smallish amount of health, but Minor Restoration restores 50% of your max. It's very bad balancing, but you might as well take advantage of it and start the habit.

Identify: One rank, maybe not immediately. If you get another rank from equipment, you'll be saving gold by the hundreds by the time you're halfway through the catacombs. This is a lot, early on. Two points is overkill.

Elven Sight: Better than Ranger's Sight, the totally pointless skill. It's great to have, doubly so for archers.

Hell Spikes: Nice spammable area of effect spell early on. One point of this will make the very end of the dungeon easier for mages and survivors. (Warriors have their own special for that) You can kill everything one at a time without it, but it's not pleasant.

Poison Weapon: I got by without it, but I hear it's great for formidable foes like the 4 catacomb mini-bosses. You have to be frugal at this stage.

Weapon Expertise: Very helpful. I like sword and bow. If it's not your style, I think everything's viable. I don't know how crossbows compare, but I don't seem to remember there being as many for sale in general. Swords I like because they rapidly become as fast as daggers when you spend more points. Swords require agility, but you need it for hit rating anyway, and the dodge bonus is nice; str also required. Str is kind of wasted on non-fighters, depending on how you play, but agi isn't wasted on warriors.

True Shot: If you get a bow as a Survivor, True Shot might be needed to boost the damage, especially if you haven't found/bought a nice one yet; warriors just dabbling might do better with strength points and Bow Mastery. Mages might want to skip this, unless they plan to use bows for the whole game.

Repair: One-point wonder. Save money. You're starved for points, though, so maybe skip it.
-------------------------------------------

7) Mini-bosses: four rooms. A spider, an advanced conjurer/summoner, a melee skeleton, and... I forget, some other skeleton. You can kite all of them, really. The ranged ones are tougher, because you have to move in a circle to dodge. Some nice loot. You can come back later, but you'll be a lot better off if you get it now while it's still comparably great gear.

General tips:
* Some items can be picked up by just clicking. Others have to be dragged into your inventory window (it has to be open). An important example is your Teleport Stone. You can drag it out of your inventory to drop it on the cursor, and drag again to pick it up. A single click on the stone when it's on the ground will teleport you into a place you don't want to go just yet.
* Some skills are all-or-nothing. Such as Stun (does it work with bows? I haven't tried yet). The duration, probability of activation, and range of affected targets all increase together, starting at a rare, small stun and ending with a stun that will be active more often than not if you fast-hit a 1v1. A lot of skills don't work if resistances are bigger than X, so these you'll have to level a lot to use. Curse can help, but as far as I know, some things just never work on bosses. So I just don't pick up Stun until it's eligible for a three-point investment.
* Catacombs is sort of early, but you'll want to take Enchant as soon as you have charms and slots, clearly.
* I found a character editor. It's not that stable, but if you limit your activity to uninvesting stat points, it seems to work without damage. Will have to test more. With so many ways to squander points and regret it, I don't feel guilty about this. There just isn't any moral high ground gained by wasting 20 hours on starting over because you took a point or two of the wrong skill or 20 points of the wrong attribute. http://xanlosch.de/kiyas_crypt/versuch.html
* Wisdom is bad. It seems like experience needed to gain a level is on something like an exponential curve, so getting 10% extra experience will never get you more than an extra level the whole game. And as soon as you gain a level, you suffer experience penalties. A free point is better than nothing if you find one, but don't spend on it.
* If you've seen the charts, it's absurd how much more warriors get out of STR than everyone else. It may not be worth even bothering beyond equipment requirements, and even then, you might just decide you don't really need to wear some items. This is why flat damage boosts like Poison Weapon and True Shot are good for Survivors and optional for Warriors. http://lparchive.org/Divine-Divinity/Update%20127/
* Potion spamming is absurdly encouraged in this game. I played through 80% of the game as a warrior just Spin Attacking, pausing, looking at health/stamina, deciding what needed restoration, unpausing, etc. It's a brutish and timing-sensitive way to go, but it works. It's instant every time, no limit other than your cash and your backpack size.
* Trading: Sell heavy items ASAP unless they're worth a lot. Small, expensive items should be saved for when you can get to a merchant who likes you and can afford to buy it. I never turn down a stack of minor health/mana potions instead of cash, though. Larger potions can make a decent exchange medium, since often a merchant will have 200 gold and 8 large potions. Gold is best, but trading in a pile of lackluster equipment for few big blues cleans up things.
* Stealth actually seems pretty good for getting melee characters separated from the ranged. The AI is dumb and they don't communicate with each other, so if you stealth and lead the melee attackers away, you can unstealth to fight them and get back to the rangers later.

Other than that, I'm just starting out as a Survivor after having played Warrior some time ago. I might try Hell Spikes (I'm told it improves later on and comes out ahead when resistances pick up) for dense mobs, Poison Weapon for tough foes, and bow plinking for everything in between. Also considering Backstab, but we'll see.

2 is a great point. By "tank", I mean let him take all the hits. If you have a nice bow, you should be killing faster than he is, so you probably won't suffer a lot of exp loss.

The first time I played through, I stacked Restoration Potions so much that it didn't matter much if I had other sources of HP recovery, and food is usually a bit heavy anyway. At the very beginning of the game, though, you need a boost in HP recovery where your potions would normally be because you're so poor. I guess if some of them are light and cheap, it's better than selling them.

Food that boosts certain stats might be worth paying attention to, though. I tend to be lazy about keeping track of that, but there are probably some fights that would go better if you used just the right foods before hand. There's a short level where magic is disabled, for example.
If you watch carefully, you'll see that exp rewards diminish as you level up, so that you'll get zero exp, for example, if you're too many levels above what you're fighting. So if your tank gets a few kills, you're not even permanently losing even a small amount of exp, really. It's just a small setback that filters out over time.

(I've read - and also checked - that quest reward exp either stays constant or *increases* with your level, meaning that in theory you could kill all 90% of monsters in the game and then go back and complete all your quests to get a big level boost going into the end of the game, since the quest exp won't be lowering your combat exp. I wouldn't bother, though, but at the very least, it's always worth completing any quests you missed.)