Divinity Diaries: A New Hope

The ghoul who guards the lighthouse proved to be my undoing.  Time after time I kept throwing my little group up against the enemy in vain.  I tried switching my strategy, ignore the zombie dogs and archers and go straight for the ghoul, only to have my melee exploded by the explodoskeleton.  I tried laying down a massive pool of elemental devastation, but the ghoul kept resurrecting the baddies.  In a state of total frustration, I started Googling to find some advice on how to defeat this stupid ghoul.  I never really found the answer, but I did find out I had made it much more difficult than it really should have been.  I had made some pretty big mistakes.

Big mistake #1--when you level up and get new skill points the next level costs one more skill point than your current level (so if you are a level 1 crafter you actually need 2 skill points to gain another level).  I had instead purchased a bunch of one point abilities that would do me absolutely no good.

Big mistake #2--redundant skill choices.  I didn't pay close attention to which skills my characters had and was repeating skills.  Pick one character to be your thief-like character, one to be your crafter, and so-on.

Crafting--there's really not much of a tutorial on crafting, but you can make all kinds of stuff.  I was unaware of how this really worked so didn't utilize it at all.

So here's my advice to a new player--find as many guides as you can before you start.  Bookmark the heck out of them and call on them any time you are confused.  Divinity does very little handholding and instead can be a lot of trial and error or, in my case, just error.

My characters were so screwed up.  To unscrew them would require me to replay hours of content.  I decided that I would start fresh with a new group now that I had a better idea of what I was doing.  So RIP Elore and Roderick--sorry your short lives were so poorly executed.

My new group is going to be awesome.