Things Avowed Doesn't Tell You - Avowed Guide - IGN (2025)

Whether you’ve played other games in the Pillars of Eternity world or not, Avowed can have some unique elements you might not be aware of. Certain features aren’t always explained well, or their tutorials may only show up at a later point that might be worth knowing about early. With that in mind we’ve rounded up the top tips that Avowed Doesn’t Tell You.

Leveling Isn’t As Important As Upgrading

When you get your first level up in Avowed, it may seem like a pretty straightforward RPG where being higher level means getting stronger and being able to take on tougher threats. However, that’s not entirely true.

While you’ll gain access to new abilities and boost your stats a bit, you’ll soon find that enemies will start to deal more damage to you, while you’ll deal less in return. This is because both enemies and your weapons and chest armor are on a Quality System that are tied together. Each Quality tier has additional levels, leading to a rank up to the next Quality Tier. Starting with the Common Tier, you may begin to encounter enemies of Quality +2 or +3 that will have a skull icon, meaning your gear is less effective.

The only way you can match an enemy’s quality is by upgrading your own gear at a camp where the Adra Waystones are located. Using plants, wood, metal, and leather, you’ll be able to upgrade to +1, +2, and +3, at which point another more costly upgrade will take you from Common to Fine, and so on.

You can try using the amount of skulls in your quest journal as an indicator for how tough things will be toward you (though that difficulty often varies), but by upgrading your gear and checking again, you’ll find that the amount of skulls will eventually reduce, which means you’ll have an easier time completing that mission.

There Is No Such Thing As Stealing

While Avowed hits a lot of the traditional RPG notes, one thing you may not realize at first is that literally everything is up for grabs. Whether its because nobody wants to confront the Godlike Aedyran Envoy, or people in the Living Lands are just pretty chill, there’s no penalty for walking into a home and looting everything not nailed down.

Because of this, you should be constantly looting everything you come into contact with. Open every shimmering lockbox and treasure chest regardless of where you find them. Take everyone’s lore books and notes from their office. Grab food out of the homes of starving villagers and sell it back to them, it really doesn’t matter!

You Can Resist Your Godlike Calling

As the patron of an unknown god, you’ll start the game with a Godlike Ability to backstab unaware enemies, and the Godlike Ability Tree will initially be locked and open up over time… if you want it to be.

You’ll soon come to know a Voice in your head that asks a lot of questions, and you’ll have more than a few encounters to have lengthy conversations with them. As it happens, this is one “voice in your ear” character you can actively tell to piss off, but be warned. There are certain points of the game when you can commune with them at large Adra Pillars.

However, if you tell them to go away and stop talking to you, you can actually miss out on unlocking Godlike Powers. Whether you want to challenge yourself, roleplay it up, or just see where the story leads, the choice is up to you!

Not Every Skill Check Matters

If you’re no stranger to RPGs developed by Obsidian, you may not be surprised to find a lot of conversations include skill check choices that require a certain amount of attributes to select. Before you start freaking out that not every answer is available to you, not every dialogue locked by a skill will actually have meaningful effects.

More often than not, especially in basic conversations, you’ll just get additional insight into a particular topic, appear to be more smart than you actually are, or just immerse yourself that much more into a particular role.

That said, there are still a few times where being able to talk your way out of a situation can actually work with the right attribute levels. If you’re really worried about missing these, be sure to save before what you think might be an important conversation, and try to equip Unique Gear with stat boosts, and eat cooked food that also boosts your attributes temporarily!

Enemies Don’t Respawn

Another RPG trope you might be expecting is for enemies you kill to eventually repopulate the wilds in certain areas as you progress through your adventure. Avowed is not that kind of adventure.

Avowed is composed of four fairly sized regions around a central town, with a set range of enemy difficulty that usually increases the farther you travel from the (relatively) safe town. While there are many, many enemies to find in your travels, you’ll want to make the most of looting the camps you defeat, as they won’t be coming back.

This means you won’t be able to grind to increase your level, nor can you continually “farm” resources and materials forever to upgrade as many items as you want. Be mindful of this when gathering supplies to upgrade your favorite gear, and consider breaking down excess gear into materials if you’re having a hard time finding them in the wild. This also leads into our next tip:

There’s Rarely A Reason to Go Back

With no enemies to respawn, you’ll soon find that when your main adventure starts ushering you to visit the next region, you won’t really have a reason to come back. Remaining enemies don’t scale, nor do the items they drop, and new regions will usually offer things that outclass whatever you’re currently finding, with a few exceptions.

With this in mind, you’ll usually want to make sure you’ve accounted for everything before moving on: Take out all the bounties listed in town, track down all the fragments of this region’s God Totems, and finish off any remaining Side Quests.

While your adventure will have you making choices that can effect the Living Lands, they don’t usually manifest in areas you’ve already visited, so you don’t need to worry about revisiting locales you’ve already completed. The only exception is Sanza’s overarching quest to find all of his missing cartographers!

You Store Health and Essence in Reserve

Along with Health and Essence Potions that quickly replenish your character in battle, you can also eat various types of food for similar boosts. So why eat food at all when the potions are right there? Because Food has the hidden ability of being what is essentially auxiliary regeneration.

When eating food that restores a certain number of health, essence (or both) while either of those bars are already full, a circular icon with a number will appear next to your health and essence bars. This is the total amount of health and/or essence to be regenerated, but the kicker is it will remain in reserve until the moment you take damage. You can essentially stuff your face with food before a fight, and then immediately start regenerating in battle without having to open up your radial menu!

The only tradeoff to this is that while in combat, the rate at which your health regenerates will be very slow showing an eventual top end that is slow to complete. Only when battle has completed will your food buffs restore lost health and essence at a much quicker pace comparable to a potion.

Companions Will Use Abilities on Their Own

Once you recruit Companions like Kai and Marius to your group, you’ll be able to unlock a few Abilities that can be set to your hotkeys on PC, as well as the radial menu that you can choose from.

The good news is if the idea of managing your own abilities alongside theirs seems a little too daunting to remember, your allies will do a pretty good job of using their abilities without being told to, and help you out in a fight even if you don’t remember to tell them.

The only downside is that if a companion chooses to use their ability without your command, it will still be on cooldown, which can sometimes be detrimental to trying to synergize certain strategies with proper timing, so keep them in mind!

Notes Can Actually Hold Importance

There’s a lot to read in Avowed, and tons of lore waiting to be ingested through many different books and notes found all over the place. If the larger world doesn’t interest you, that’s fine, but you should still skim over the smaller notes you find in the wild.

Certain notes — even ones that aren’t related to any sort of quest — can still point to interesting things you may otherwise miss. Sometimes it might clue you into treasure hiding nearby, or reveal information about a character that you can sometimes actually bring up in conversation!

Talking At Camp Can Be Beneficial

Campsites are a great place for getting to know more about the various companions that join your team in Avowed, and you can often have some lengthy conversations with them. Many of these will appear after you’ve encountered certain events, causing a notification icon to appear in the corner that means they have something new to discuss with you.

Another important piece that can be overlooked is that at certain points, you can unlock more dialogue with a character in camp that will lead to them offering to do some training with you. This will give you the option of allowing the companion to passively increase certain Attributes by a set amount, and you’ll be able to pick which ones you want to focus on. Don’t sleep on these upgrades, as they’ll be the equivalent to earning several levels of experience at once!

Most Clothing Has No Weight

In most RPGs you have to worry about upgrading an entire suit of armor, juggling weight, stats, effects and more. In Avowed, you may not notice but only your Chest Armor actually has weight and defensive stats attached to it.

Gloves and Boots on the other hand all have a small passive effect, but no weight. Once you start encountering Unique Items, you’ll find various Glove and Boots with a variety of effects that may be more useful in certain situations, like increasing attributes, run speed, or more. Since they don’t have any weight, and can’t be broken down into materials, you may want to keep them all in your inventory instead of shipping them off to your camp stash, and equip whatever gear helps in the moment, like putting on some +Intelligence boots before debating with an Animancer.