LogFAQs > #890682068

Quen's great until you get to the DLC and find out they apparently don't want it to be good and introduce various enemies/attacks that just arbitrarily bypass it.

Still worth using overall.

I went with a magic/alchemy mix and I was regularly killing enemies so much higher level than me I couldn't even see what their level is, on the second hardest difficulty, and later the hardest.

You should try to warm up to using magic because it's mostly not a primary combat style, it's more like some tools in your Batman Utility Belt to use in specific circumstances.

Igni as was said is good for crowd control, but it has a greater benefit: if you can set enemies on fire with it, the damage this does is the best way generally to kill enemies way beyond you that would take like 20 minutes to kill with melee. Damage over time is a colossus-slayer of sorts in this game. I forget if bleeding was too, but certainly poison as well. Most enemies aren't immune to all 3. They nerfed the alt cast to the point it's largely not useful unless your ignite chance for base Igni is too low against a high level enemy and you want to do SOME reliable damage but as you progress your ignite chance will be high enough that there's no point keeping it.

Quen of course is pretty apparent why it's useful, but also keep in mind the alt cast that can heal you which is mighty handy.

Yrden sucks for almost the entire game but is still nearly mandatory against wraiths, not that you need to really invest into it to make use of it for that though (but when you can get grandmaster griffin armor at the endgame, then it becomes a big deal).

Aard is very useful for dispatching trash enemies that are trying to swarm you with one hit kill stabs when they're knocked down, and the alt cast can be used as an even better crowd control as you can cast it faster, or as an assistance for melee by staggering scary enemies regularly while you smack them in between. Great friend of meleeing big enemies.

Axii or whatever it's called, there are a few enemies it is really useful on but largely I found it the least useful, for combat. Even turning an enemy on your side just seemed kinda underwhelming, though also fun, because the AI is just sorta dumb. Definitely wouldn't prioritise this for combat at least.

In Witcher 3, the game honestly feels like the level/strength of enemy placement was done with little to no thought of progression/coherency, so you will run into a lot of stuff that can easily wreck you and you can barely do anything about it. If you want to be able to handle those encounters, which is very possible, alchemy and magic is definitely the way to go, because they can get very strong. I remember there's a... Crap what are they called. Decoctions? There's one of those, that consumes some stamina on a strong attack or something, and makes your hit, do damage proportional to a % of their current max health. This is incredibly useful for dealing with an enemy who you can handle in melee, but they're just SO tanky, and immune to DoTs. Stuff like that, DoTs, and Quen to round things out and make sure you can take a hit, you can take on just about anything.

Alchemy indeed gets to be very strong, but magic is more just for specialised use purposes. However, in the last DLC things get introduced that makes magic quite a bit more. But that's nothing to concern over any...week soon.
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