You need to deal damage of the appropriate type to break down the armor of that type. The effects of your spells and abilities can activate only after you’ve knocked down the appropriate armor type. The hint text on your spell or ability should tell you which armor type needs to be knocked down before it will activate.

If you spell or ability does nothing, it's because it was "blocked" by either physical or magical type of armor and did not penetrate into the vitality of the enemy you're targeting.

You’re allowed to go anywhere at any time and getting yourself into trouble at any time. You may wander into a territory that has monsters way stronger than you.

If you wander into an area that has corpses that are a level higher than you, that’s a good sign that something even more powerful has killed them. So maybe when it seems like things are too tough for you, you should high-tail it out of there.

As a truly open world, you can go anywhere at any time. However, the maps are designed with soft boundaries that prevent you from encountering enemies that will one-shot you. But that doesn't mean you won't accidentally find a route into a place you weren't supposed to get to until you got to a higher level.

So be aware of where you are an exercise appropriate caution. Or use the quick-save often. The choice is yours. And this game offers lots of choice, for sure.

The floor will literally catch on fire beneath you or you’ll slip on ice or something else crazy that you never expected.

That’s because you’re not used to tactical fights getting so out of control. You’re used to your character doing their thing and then moving on to the next character doing their thing and so on. Well, Divinity’s combat system does do that in its basic form. But Divinity allows so much more freedom and expression in how their system interacts with the environment and the characters and everything else. This system is its own kind of science. You don’t have to learn it all, nor could you since it’s so vast and complicated by virtue of everything being interconnected.

Just know that dying is fairly normal in this game. You’ll find resurrection scrolls and they’ll become more and more common as the game progresses. Don’t worry too much about hoarding them.

When I first played, one of the party members died early on, and I only had one resurrection scroll, so I save-scrubbed that tactical combat until they survived until the end. This is not strictly necessary. Find the merchant who will sell you resurrection scrolls and put a pin on them in your main map. (You can create your own custom pins on the map. Just click on the map). Sure, this costs you precious gold that you could be using to buy better gear. However, you shouldn’t worry too much about your gold reserves because they are mainly for buying consumables like potions, scrolls, and resurrection scrolls. The best armor and weapons and hardware will be found through encounters and adventures across the map and not in the shops. And as you level up, you will need to find new gear to match your tougher enemies anyway. So saving up to buy gear isn’t really the great investment it would seem to be.

Just because things are quantified in this game doesn’t mean you need to optimize it. You don’t need to have huge stacks of resurrection scrolls because you’re not going to have an encounter where you die 15 times and need to resurrect 15 times in that encounter.

The game seems really hard at the beginning. but as you get the hang of it, you’ll realize that resources are easier to come by. The designers much strike a balance between giving you too much stuff versus not giving you enough. In between that space is where you’re challenged to make creative decisions to make do with what you’ve been given. This game has many many ways of accomplishing its goals. Having constraints and scarcity will bring out your creativity. Lean into it. Let yourself be a little bit scared of scarcity. It won’t ruin your game in the long run, but it will greatly enhance your feeling about the game as you’re playing it in the middle zone between too much and too little as the designers intended. Stay in that middle zone and you’ll be fine.

When first playing, I didn't understand that Fort Joy was not a tutorial. I wanted to quickly finish the tutorial and get on to the main game.

The jail break start is a bit of a trope in fantasy computer role playing games as a way to introduce the characters and world to the player. For this reason, i thought Fort Joy was a tutorial. I just wanted to smash through it and get on to start playing the game.

Well, I have news for you, new player. Fort Joy is the game! There isn't a tutorial big enough to teach you all the details of how Divinity's combat system works or how their recipe system works or how their crafting system works.

Instead, Fort Joy teaches you by way of experience. You'll have to learn how all of these systems work or don't work or what importance they have in the game. There is a wide range of importance of things you can do in the game.

In most games, we're used to being able to do only important things. Not so in this game. You'll need to pick and choose what you consider important. Otherwise, you'll find yourself nitpicking and sorting bags of inventory all day to get everything perfectly organized.

Well, it's not that important in the grand scheme of things to have all of your bags neatly sorted. If that sort of thing appeals to you, then go ahead and do it. But it's also safe to go about being messy and unorganized and just not worrying about it if it's not important.

Fort Joy teaches you lessons in an indirect way. Fort Joy is its own adventure. It is much larger than a tutorial. Don't feel like you need to rush it to get to the next part of the content. Fort Joy is already the content.

Because there is a finite amount of content, it’s tempting to quick save before battles or any whiff of danger and load back to prevent losing stuff like a resurrection scroll. Early on, your resources seem very limited so you’ll be worried that you won’t have enough for later in the game.

That’s a legitimate way to play the game. If you don’t have a lot of time to devote to the game, you might save and then look up a walkthrough online to make sure you experience all of the wonderful writing and dialogue that is in the game.

However, there is perhaps a better way to play the game which is to treat it as your own personal tabletop role-playing game master. If you make choices and you die, then you die and roll up a new character. This is how a table-top role playing game session would go. All of the stories and side quests and decisions are more impactful and tense if you don’t know what you’re facing.

If you play it like this, then the game can surprise you with unscripted moments. Of course, a game that is so open can sometimes wind up in a broken state through no fault of your own and outside of the designers’ intentions. If that happens, you’ll still have an autosave somewhere as a backup.

However, because there is a limited amount of content, I would recommend experiencing it as a mysterious table-top role playing game by intentionally not looking up spoilers and not quick-saving before encounters and other potentially dangerous situations. Real fear and heightened emotions create a tension that would not be possible in other media such as movies that do not allow you to suffer the consequences of your own decisions.

If you look up walkthroughs for the game, you will absolutely be powerful and godlike for each encounter. In a fantasy role-playing game called “Divinity,” you definitely are expecting to feel like a god in the game.

However, allow me to let you in on a secret: If you use walkthroughs and spoilers to give you all the details before each encounter and each dialogue, ultimately you will not feel like a god, even though you’ve maximized all of your gear and levels and skills. When the game is too easy, then it loses some of its fun.

To truly feel like a god, you have to allow yourself be constrained by scarcity. It’s true that randomness in the game may mess up your plans or make some things impossible. Or at least it feels that way at first.

And if that’s truly the case, you always have your autosave files to literally save you. However, please understand that there has been an effort to seed the game with redundancy so that you’re not blocked by that one particular thing. If something is not possible because of the randomness of the game system, then it probably wasn’t a main quest line anyway, so don’t stress about it too much. (As a reminder, this is "Definitive Edition" i'm talking about. I can't speak to earlier versions.)

However, the game is so wide open that you should be able to creatively find a solution that was maybe different than what that walkthrough would have recommended. As you gain a broader range of skills and abilities, you may find that your creativity is your true god-like ability. After all, you, the player, exist outside of the game.

You could use that divine privilege of the player to search the internet for walkthrough guides and dialogue scripts. You can easily know what the characters will say and do before they do them. That’s truly god-like. But I think it’s more fun to imagine that these are real people in a real situation and you have a chance to peek into their lives.

We all know that it’s just a computer RPG and you can murder them all for the XP and loot as the murderhobo that you are. But Larian has gone to great lengths to try to provide a story and flavor from each and every encounter. So I suggest accepting the form of fiction they’ve chosen to deliver in the way that it was intended--- as GM of a table-top role playing game to their players.

Enjoy the content. Don’t rush through it. Let the world be mysterious and unknown and dangerous. Let yourself be scared and surprised. The only way that can happen is if you don’t rely too much on spoilers and save/load. Allow scarcity. Allow constraints and difficulty and challenge. This is a bargain with yourself and you will be rewarded with your own creativity and unique situations and hilarious disasters and unexpected outcomes. Make up your own stories to fill in the gaps. Have fun with the world and put yourself in it.

Of course, play any way you like. This is just a suggestion to allow you to savor the richness and flavor that is baked into this world. You can only consume it once. My suggestion is just a way to enjoy and savor it more.

Slow down your leveling and hobomurderin' and enjoy the view!