y’all gonna make me play this again
edit: I am playing this again, fighter main + ranger pawn, it’s been a long time since I’ve tried to make a straight ranged pawn but hopefully I can get inclinations worked out so that it tries to use great gamble on weak points
i just realized one of the barks goblins have is “WHO LET THE DOGS OUT” and im flipping out
I’ve been slowly playing small amounts of this game, and I just got to the main town. It was cool to be able to immediately respec! I started as a strider, but I tried out mage and ranger. The way magic works in this game seems pretty cool, but I think I prefer strider/ranger, though I seem to be still at a point where both those classes aren’t very different from each other yet.
I’m frustrated that no matter which class I pick, I’m doing SO little damage to big monsters. My arrows especially seem totally useless. How do I start shooting arrows that feel like they mean something?
Also, the inventory system in this game is giving me the shits. I’m trying so hard not to weigh down my character, but the entire world is filled with random items that don’t seem very useful on their face. Do I need to do deep wikidives to learn what items I need to focus on and what can be ignored, and how things need to be combined? I really don’t like bothering with inventory management even at the best of times, and this is just way too much info to deal with in a system I don’t care about. Can I safely ignore all this stuff, not pick up items, and just let my pawns gather to their hearts’ content?
Mighty Bend is a shortbow skill that hits fairly hard. Spamming the Fivefold Arrow technique is also pretty effective. If you want really strong archery skills you should use a ranger, and if you want weird magic homing archery skills use the magic archer. They each use different types of bows but they’re all dagger classes.
Large monsters have weak points where they take more damage, and if you knock them down they take even more damage while they’re prone. Protip: cut off the snake head on a chimera first, it’s a guaranteed knockdown. And if you encounter a cyclops with a helmet on, uhh, make him scratch his back 
I found the items overwhelming too at first but you can ignore most stuff that’s not obvious healing items. Don’t fuck around with the million different specific ailment cures imo.
There are really only a handful of combinations worth remembering too. In fact, here are all of them:
greenwarish + wormwood sap = potent greenwarish
potent greenwarish + curious wine = matured greenwarish
sap and wine are dropped by goblins and hobgoblins, respectively
sour meat (any type) + foreign knife, or some kind of rock/ore = backfat oil, gross but strong stamina regen item
moldy grandgrapes + water = red wine
moldy apple + water = red wine
good single person healing items
harspud sauce + large nuts (nice) = balmy perfume
good group healing item
You can also just fill a hundred glass bottles at a healing spring if you’re patient lol