"'Tis a troubling foe!"

One of the best things about Dragon's Dogma was the dedication to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, resulting in an open-world RPG quite unlike anything else out there. The downside being that to novice or unattentive players some of its intricacies can go unnoticed, at least for quite a while.

Let's make sure you hit the ground running with some tips from a veteran player, shall we?

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Big and Tall Pride

Character height and weight aren't just cosmetic choices.

Taller characters, due to their larger arms and legs, have greater reach in combat and a larger stride making them walk and jog faster, on the other hand their hitbox is also bigger. Shorter characters big advantage is just their smaller hitbox, although you're not supposed to be getting hit either way, and if they are really teeny tiny 1,40m they can use goblin tunnels to move around, but that's more a novelty than anything else.

Character weight increases knockback resistances, plus it has direct effects on your stamina. Lighter characters have faster stamina regen, however, both that and speed are also affected by encumbrance level, according to this chart. Heavier characters can carry more items and wear heavier armor without being encumbered, making them probably a better pick than lighter characters.

Bottomline: it might be a good idea to make tall characters and give them some extra pounds.

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Pawn Inclinations

Upon finishing the creation of your main pawn you will be asked a few questions to determine its inclination, a.k.a. its behaviour in battle. This can later be changed further by using Knowledge Chairs in Inns, Inclination Elixirs, and issuing orders during battle. Here's a list of all inclinations and what they do.

Be mindful of your pawns' inclinations. You don't want a warrior pawn with the medicant inclination, going around babysitting everyone with healing items instead of kicking ass. Two good all-rounders are the Utilitarian inclination, which focuses on group tactics like imbuing teammates' weapons with elemental effects or holding down and immobilizing enemies, and the Challenger inclination, which focuses on taking down the strongest opponents first.

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Don't Get Attached

Only your Arisen and your Main Pawn gain levels, the pawns you hire from other players, or the random offline ones, do not. After one or two quests you will outpace those pawns, cut them loose and get new ones at your level.

As you progress you'll do this less and less. There is little difference between a level 120 and a level 125 pawn, but in the beginning of the game a 5 level difference can mean having access to 4 skills or just 2.

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'Tis Weak to Fire!

Always have at least one mage in your party with access to a healing spell and at the very least one elemental affinity spell. Imbuing your weapons with the element the enemy is weak to can mean the difference between wiping the floor with them and merely tickling them. Even if they are not weak to that specific element, most of the time it will grant a significant damage boost to your attacks regardless, so be sure to have it in your party.

If you don't play smart and use advantages fights will drag on much longer then necessary.

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Rule Number 96: AIM!

Don't just swing blindly. Where you hit enemies matters.

Landing headshots with your bow will deal extra damage.

Most monsters will have weak spots that you can hit for massive damage, and change the state of the battle. Cutting a Saurian's tail will make him take more damage in general. Hitting a Cyclops in the eye will leave him blind for the rest of the battle. A Chimera's lion, goat and snake parts all have their own attacks and can be disabled separately by attacking each indicidually.

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Climb up.

You can grab small enemies, but when using that same skill against giant foes like a Cyclops or a Griffon allows you to grab onto enemies. From there you can climb up on their back or head and swing at their various weak spots, Shadow of the Colossus style.

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Don't carry everything on your back

As mentioned before, there are encumbrance levels on the game. They range from Very Light to Very Heavy and will affect your movement speed and stamina regen. However, unlike other games it's not really a way to enforce the "light armor=quick, heavy armor=slow" dynamic. As long as you don't carry weapons and armor you are not using at that very moment, and always transfer your upgrade materials to storage when you reach town, it's not difficult to spend most of the game with either Very Light or Light encumbrance.

Also, the Leg-Strength augment from the Strider vocation will allow you to operate at one encumbrance level lower than your current weight, and it is not useless to have it on when at the Very Light level, the game doesn't say it but it actually gives you access to an Ultra Light encumbrance level, that is just slightly better than Very Light.

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"They're masterworks all, you can't go wrong."

Don't forget to enhance your equipment at vendors. It will increase its attack and defense stats, and resistances, plus lower its weight.

In order to accomplish that though you will need all kinds of different junk, so be sure to pick up everything you can, from hunks of ore to harpy claws, you never know what you'll need to upgrade an item in the future. Fortunately, these items don't need to be in your inventory, they can be taken directly from storage, so pick up all kinds of junk, yes, but store it all afterward.

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Love in the Time of Cholera

It's part of the game that the Arisen finds a beloved. Whether you cared to court someone or not, a time will come when the game will pick the NPC you have the most affinity with and make it your beloved, remove it from the game world until a certain quest is performed, then return it and that NPC will open a store in the Arisen's hometown.

So far so standard, right? The tricky thing here is that almost every single NPC in the game can be romanced, and that the game tracks affinity by the amount of interactions you had with the NPC. More than a few players were quite surprised by seeing their player character rolling in the hay at the end of the game with someone like the court jester, or the innkeeper.

You don't want to be caught by surprise, so here's what you need to know:

This is the Dark Arisen version, so vendors have been made harder to gain affinity with to avoid inconveniences, a few characters like the childhood friend gain affinity more easily. There's an item you may acquire at the end of the game that gives maximum affinity with a character, but it doesn't exclude other characters you may have maximum affinity with already, as such it's not a guarantee that your choice will become the beloved at the end. The simplest course of action is to give gifts non-stop to the NPC you want to raise affinity, and if you ever talk to another NPC you don't want to romance and their cheeks blush, there's a little glow behind them and a bell in the distance, pull out your weapons right in front of them, the scare will bring their affinity right down.

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Be quiet!

There are big on screen subtitles for your pawns' battle and environment chatter, these can be disabled under gameplay options.

If you want your pawn to not talk quite as much, you can give such directions to it in a Knowledge Chair. Pawns you hire from other players though aren't affected by this.

However, if you are sick and tired of hearing that "Wolves hunt in packs!" for the thousandth time, and don't want to hear another word they have to say, useful or not, you can disable pawn chatter completely in the gameplay options.

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Switch Vocations

Whether you are the type to get a few levels in each vocation, or maxing out a vocation before you switch, make sure you do switch eventually. The characters are stronger by mixing and matching abilities and augments from the various classes. For example, the Mystic Knight's Adamance augment reduces stamina consumption of shield blocks and is useful for any vocation that uses shields.

Unless you are really hoping to min/max the hell out of the game, by the end you should have played and, if not maxed, close to maxed, all vocations.

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