Dragon's Dogma 2 Tips & Tricks

This page contains Beginner Tips & Tricks for Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s a list of everything you should know before starting the game to make your playthrough easier.

Remember where you find your first Seeker Token, write down the exact location or keep a screenshot of it. You need to find this again later for a Riddle. If you don’t remember it would be very annoying to find it again.
The recommended starting class is the Mage for yourself + Fighter (Calm Inclination) for your main pawn. As mage you can play from a safe distance and have access to powerful attack spells and supportive healing spells. The Fighter will act as a tank to draw the enemy’s attention away from you. As mage you start with a healing spell called “Anodyne” which is the default / skill. Hold + assigned shortbutton to summon powerful magic. As soon as you reach Vernworth, visit the guild hall there to unlock new skills. The defensive spell “Palladium” blocks all incoming damage for 3 hits, refresh it as soon as it expires. This makes you practically invincible as a mage. The attack spell “Levin” is very good for playing at long distance and is also effective against flying enemies. Buy the mage’s core skill “Quickspell”, then you can hold R1/RB while incanting to greatly hasten the spell casting time.
Dump all items you collect on your pawns immediately. Only carry the armor/weapon you have equipped. You want to stay at “Very Light” to “Light” inventory load at all times, this lets you run faster. At “Heavy” to “Very Heavy” load you walk very slowly.
There is no traditional fast travel system. You can only travel to certain Portstones by consuming Ferrystones. Instead, you’ll want to use Oxcarts to go from town to town. These cost only 100-200 gold per use. Interact with the Oxcart station, sit in the seat, pay the fee, press / to doze off. Then keep your portstones for main quests that require traveling from one end of the map to the other.
Items in your storage don’t perish! The storage has a lot of space, so don’t worry about weight limits there.
You can access your storage from certain inns, or at your house if you buy one (in Vernworth and Bakbattahl). Not all inns let you access your storage, so check them. In major towns there’s usually at least one that lets you do it. The storage contents are shared worldwide between all inns. So if you put something in storage in Vernworth you can withdraw it from storage in Bakbattahl.
Don’t sell raw resources. Put them in storage and combine them to higher value items like potions, then sell those potions for a higher profit.
For first region save your money. It’s better to buy the gear in 2nd region.
Buy better armor/weapons when reaching Bakbattahl, the 2nd capital city. The vendors there sell much better things than the Vernworth merchants.
Camping Kits can be used infinitely. They only break if you get ambushed at night and then die during the ambush. If that happens you can buy a new one from merchants for 1000 – 3000 gold. Resting fully recovers your health, even if you don’t grill meat. There are usually some animals near campsites that you can hunt for meat. The meat gives positive buffs to increase your stats.
Gear can be upgraded at weapon/armor vendors relatively cheaply. This is more affordable than buying a whole new piece of gear.
Remember to recruit new pawns that are scaled to your level.
Pawns that are 1 level below you don’t cost Rift Points to recruit. Pawns at your level cost 31 Rift Points, and the higher the level difference the more Rift Points they will cost.
You can recruit other player’s pawns who are significantly higher level than you. This will cost a lot of Rift Points but will make the game easy as they will kill everything in 1-2 hits (depending on the level difference). If you can recruit a Level 40 Pawn you are set for the rest of the game, this is more than sufficient for the endgame.
Pawns from friends don’t cost anything! You can immediately hire overleveled endgame pawns from your friends. If you have someone on your friendslist who has already beaten the game this will make it much easier for you.
At night the enemies that spawn are more difficult. It’s best to explore the open world at day. Visibility is also highly limited at night.
A team of 2 Fighters + 2 Mages is a good combination. The pawn mage will heal with their default / ability “Anodyne” and can deal powerful magic attacks from safe distance while the fighters distract the enemies at close range. You can also try replacing 1 fighter with a Thief or Warrior, they tend to have better damage output but lower survivability.
You can revive your pawns repeatedly when their health has depleted. If you are a mage just cast a Palladium Spell beforehand to become invisible for 3 hits.
Part of your health cannot be recovered after taking damage. So when you using healing spells and it doesn’t recover the full health, it’s not a bug. You must rest at a campfire or inn to restore your max health.
Don’t enter the water! It will instant kill you and your pawns. You can’t swim.
If your pawns die they are returned to the Rift. If your main pawn dies simply visit any Riftstone to get the pawn back. You cannot recruit pawns if your main pawn is dead.
If you want to run to a location quickly, press to command your allies “To Me!” and run past all enemies. Then the pawns will follow you and not fight every enemy along the path. But be careful when reaching new higher level areas, the enemies follow you for a long time and can quickly kill you. If you go to new areas it’s best to kill the enemies along the path to gain XP.
If you find a section too difficult, spend some time leveling up by killing enemies and doing side quests. Especially when you reach the 2nd region south of the border the enemy levels increase a lot but so does the XP reward per enemy. As a general guideline: for the northern half of the map you are fine at level 20-25 if you just focus on quests and not dragons. For the southern half of the map you should be level 25-40. For the endings you should be level 35-40.
The game only has one autosave, no manual saves. But on PS5 you can upload your save to the PS+ Cloud (requires PS+ subscription). Just make sure you turn off the Cloud Sync feature so it doesn’t overwrite your cloud save. If you want to test different options you can download your save again. This is also very helpful for trophies, as some are highly missable and you only have one attempt per playthrough (the cloud saves lets you get around that).
Be extremely careful with using the “Load from Last Inn Rest” feature upon death. This can cost you your entire progress if you haven’t rested at an inn in a long time. It’s best to always resume from last save on death.
AVOID resting at inns, or at the very least make a PS+ cloud save backup before you do so. When you rest at inns, your pawns will sometimes get dragon’s plague and go rogue, then they kill everyone in the entire city. This kills all quest NPCs including main quest givers, which can make the game impossible to complete. If you have to rest at an Inn, be sure to dismiss the hired pawns and kill your main pawn by throwing it off a cliff and not reviving it. Then it’s safe to sleep and your pawns won’t attack anyone when they’re not in your party.
Don’t be greedy with using ferrystones. They can be bought from vendors in all major settlements. The vendors refresh their inventory after a while, just rest for 14 days in a row on benches.
The big “miniboss” enemies stay dead for about 7 days once defeated. Most of them respawn if you rest for 1-2 weeks (good to know if you need to farm anything from those enemies).
Weapons/Armor are typically found inside caves/mines in big chests. Always explore such locations thoroughly.
You can carry any person (including pawns) with R2/RT. If you need to escort someone during a mission it can be easier to carry them. If you want to kill off your pawns you can carry them and toss them off a cliff with R1/RB, this is good to do if they got Dragon’s Plague (red eyes). You can even use ferrystones to teleport while carrying any NPC, this is useful for any lengthy transport quests to teleport any NPC to a Portcrystal of your choice
The last point where you can do all open world activities is before the end of Main Quest 14: A New Godsway in Bakbattahl. Keep a backup save from there. You can “Rest at Inn” there to create an Inn save (dismiss/kill all pawns beforehand to not get Dragonsplague). After finishing this quest you will be going to the game ending. After the ending you can go to the title screen and “Reload from Last Inn Save” to go back.
Upon finishing the playthrough you can choose to load from last save to try another ending, or choose to start from the beginning to enter New Game+. It’s best to do all ending paths first, then start NG+ after. It will transfer your current level and equipment to NG+. The full map is also unfogged automatically in NG+.