I've been wanting to play this game for a while and finally am getting around to it...

I've been wanting to play this game for a while and finally am getting around to it. What starting characters would you recommend. I was thinking of making nne a knight and the other a witch. Unsure if that's a bad combo though.
Anything I should know before starting? This is my first divinity game by the way.

Stop shilling your shitty game. Pillars of Eternity is better in everyway

You can get 2 additional companions. You can choose between 4 NPCs to do this (not much of a spoiler, they're in the first town): an wayfarer, a knight, a lightning/water caster and a scoundrel. They each have their own quest. This may affect how you build your initial characters. If you want more freedom over the additional characters, relatively early in the game you will gain access to somebody who sell you henchmen. They are randomly generated, but the pool is quite wide so you will probably find some classes that fit your need better (you can't customize their stats, but in general they make sense).

In general, know the elements. A simple combo is to pour oil/poison on the enemy then set fire to it, creating a firestorm. Note that fire enemies doesn't just resist fire damage, they usually are healed by fire damage. This may influence how you choose your caster: if you make a fire/earth caster (for the combo I mentioned), he/she will be useless when facing fire enemies.

Knight/mage isn't a bad combo, the rest you're probably better off exploring yourself.

Thank you, that's very helpful. Basically exactly what I was looking for.

...

Wizard
Uninstall Wizard to be exact.

>They are randomly generated
Henchmen aren't random. This is important because one of them, Cain, was better than the others simply because he began with pre-nerf Weather-the-storm.

Cainposting was a wonderful thing in the early DOS days.

just make sure one of your chars has pet pal

also you get a knight NPC fairly early on so maybe you wanna run with something different.

I really enjoyed Madora (Knight) and Jahan (Hydor/Aero) so i ran with a ranger/rogue (ranged fighting, lockpick, stealth etc) and another mage (fire/earth/witchcraft)

You'll want to stay inside the walls of the first city until you are level 3-4, otherwise you'll get fucked by the monsters outside

>Pillars of Eternity is better

Man I hope they will bring ways to raise stats to 100% again, or at least single ones. I want to make a firey undead warrior, and the thought of not being able to stand in fire saddens me.

I believe Phoenix makes you immune to it for 1 turn, and they will probably bring back those elemental shields too. Then all that's left is the Demon trait and gear resist (if it's still a thing).

75% was a soft cap in EE. Any temporary resistance bonus could take you above it.

>they will probably bring back those elemental shields too
I personally doubt that. It seems like they've dropped the DOS1 shields in favour of the new armour system instead

Do the generic henchman have dialog/opinions/whatever the fuck or are they just mooks?

I also want to know this

The latter. Only the four companions found inside the city have their own dialogue/story

Afaik the love/hate thing is only a thing with the origin characters you can recruit.

That's DOS2

Download epic encounters mod if you want to play DoS the way it was meant to be played. Roll at least one scoundrel partly so you can open every door/chest but also because the epic encounters mod redoes the class and it's by far the most fun in the game. Also, the enhanced edition of the game gutted too many abilities, and epic encounters adds a lot more as well as dual-class abilities, which are all very well done.

>Also, the enhanced edition of the game gutted too many abilities
Any examples? I only played the original when it came out so I have almost no memories of it, but I do remember exploring the skill system in the EE version. Only thing I know is they removed the lava ability

Not him, but I can think of a ton in a heartbeat.
>Cure wounds
Was a solid (50-60%) heal with a massive cooldown and huge AP cost. Changed to a minor heal (5-10%) that can only be used once per battle, still with the huge AP cost.

>Dust Devil
Removed so that people can't use it and whirlwind.

>everything related to Glass Cannon
They don't let you combo it with LW anymore, because it undoes the HP loss. They nerfed Picture of Health for the same reason (+25% HP to +15% HP). Despite removing the things that broke Glass Cannon in this manner, they still went nerfed GC to +4 AP instead of doubling it, while keeping the -50% HP loss. GC is less than useless now.

>Power Stances
They all have cooldowns now so you can't toggle it whenever you knock a guy down.

>Leech
First they removed the ability to heal during your opponents turn, because it combo'd with Comeback Kid. Despite this, they won't let you take the two abilities together anyways in EE.

>Quickdraw
Removed.

>Elemental Shields
Only absorb their X damage of their own elements, instead of being immune to those elements and absorbing X any damage.

There's a lot more, but that's what I can think of at the top of my head. They really took a hammer to a lot of stuff that already received the scalpel.

Don't try Tactician Mode if you don't have the patience:
That mode is made for people who already played the original and planned some counters to famous tricks used. It will straight up rape your party until you left the first area of the game.
Me and my friend trought of going revert back to Normal but we managed to endure the fucking rape and the game felt waaay more manageable compared after the first area, especially after you get more powerful abilities that helped by a long shot.
And steal everything that has a value, paintings are the most valuable thing after the Diamonds and high level weapons and you need money early on.
Buy Resurrect Scrolls, they are cheap, you won't find a lot on them trought loot and the learnable spell is a Level 4/5 Witchcraft spell and not worth to waste a slot for more useful spells.

I actually remember a bunch of those now that I read about them on the wiki
Madora was definitely my strongest fighter when I beat the original

Lava was also removed.
No more one-shotting final bosses.