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The Witcher 2 uses a simple, elegant leveling system. Every time Geralt gains 1,000 XP, he levels up. He begins at level 1 and can attain a maximum level of 35. His basic statistics grow somewhat as he levels up, but the most important thing that happens when Geralt levels up is that he gets a talent to spend. You can spend a talent to unlock a new skill or to purchase a second level of a skill that’s already unlocked. Since Geralt begins at level 1 with 0 talents, he can gain a maximum of 34 talents throughout the course of the game.

Before you can begin training Geralt in one of the game’s three main skill trees, you must first buy skills from the training tree. You must spend six talents in the training tree before you can spend talents on skills from any other tree. The training tree offers basic utility skills that serve as a foundation to build from. If you already have a long-term goal in mind for your Geralt build, take training tree skills that reinforce your specialization plans. If you aren’t quite sure what you’ll be doing yet, just put points into whatever looks interesting.

Since you must always spend six talents in the training tree, you can’t specialize Geralt at all until he reaches level 8. This typically happens somewhere in the middle of Chapter 1. Before you’ve gotten too far into Chapter 2, you need to have at least settled on a specialization or general plan for how you’re spending Geralt’s talents. While it’s pretty hard to create a Geralt so weak he can’t finish the game, spending talents in a scattershot way can result in a Geralt who begins limping through fights toward the end of Chapter 3.