Best Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath's Blessings

This Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings guide will teach you which Berath’s Blessings are really worth using and which ones to skip.

What are the best Berath’s Blessings in Pillars of Eternity 2? Pillars of Eternity 2 features a New Game+ mechanic called Berath’s Blessings. Over the course of the game, you collect Berath’s Blessings as you complete achievements and central quests.

Once you’ve collected enough, whenever you start a new game, you’re able to spend these Blessings on perks that help you out in subsequent playthroughs.

What Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings do is not always immediately obvious. In this guide I’ll explain not only what the Blessings actually do, but also which ones are the most worthwhile to activate.

I’ll cover them from right to left and top to bottom, just like we’re reading across.

5,000 Starting Gold

Cost: 3 Blessings

The first of the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings is 5,000 starting gold.

This blessing is self-explanatory and it does exactly what it says it’s going to do. You start the game with an extra 5,000 gold. This is actually decently useful and allows you to buy some nice equipment at the start of the game.

In the long run, though, this has no effect on the game whatsoever. You might want to spend your leftover points here, but it’s not a priority.

50,000 Starting Gold

Cost: 15 Blessings

The second of the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings is 50,000 gold.

This Blessing is the same situation as the 5,000 starting gold, except a lot more. There is a lot of stuff you can buy right off the bat with 50,000 starting gold but, again, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run.

Since gold is not particularly scarce in Pillars of Eternity 2 to begin with, this Berath’s Blessing is a luxury, not a priority.

Start at Level 4

Cost: 12 Blessings

Starting at level 4 is nice, but keep in mind Pillars of Eternity 2 is a game where you will hit the level cap long before you’ve actually completed everything to do in the game.

Also keep in mind that you hit level 4 easily by the end of the first dungeon, and the difficulty of the first dungeon is the lowest in the game.

When it comes to Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings, this one is not worthwhile. You can skip it until you have enough Blessings to buy out everything.

Bonus Attributes (Player Only)

Cost: 15 Blessings

Now we’re getting somewhere. This perk gives your character +2 to every stat, which is hugely beneficial. This is the first of the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings I’d recommend.

Compare the long term usefulness of this Blessing to the 50,000 Starting Gold, which also costs 15 blessings; surely you would pay more than 50,000 gold in the game to get +2 to every stat, right? This should be a high priority to grab. Probably the highest priority.

Explored World Map

Cost: 12 Blessings

When it comes to Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings, Explored World Map is extremely useful.

It shows you every location including Rikke’s ship. Eliminating the fog of war allows you to click far off in the distance and wait instead of inching into the fog of war bit by bit, which is extremely tedious.

This is still more of a luxury than a priority, but if you have enough Blessings you should definitely consider picking this one up.

Bonus Skills

Cost: 3 Blessings

Bonus Skills is extraordinarily worthless, even for just 3 blessings. It doesn’t double your skill bonuses on level up, it just doubles your skill bonuses at character creation, as far as I can tell. Which means it’s just a few measly skill points.

You should avoid this one of the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings unless you just happen to have exactly 3 points left over with no other place to spend them.

Fine Equipment

Cost: 5 Blessings

This one of the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings allows you to start the game with slightly better equipment. Totally useless.

You’ll be acquiring fine quality equipment soon enough, and you’ll be throwing out the piles of fine quality equipment you loot from corpses soon after that.

For 5 blessings, this is a complete waste. Do not take this one unless you have enough blessings to buy everything.

Upgraded Ship Sails

Cost: 8 Blessings

This one of the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings lets you start the game with the Stormwind Sails. These sails are actually quite nice.

They’re one of the more high-end sail options and they increase travel speed by a very noticeable 15%. However, you can just buy these in Dunnage, so it’s not like you’re getting something special here that you can’t otherwise get.

Experienced Ship Captain

Cost: 4 Blessings

This one of the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings lets you start as an expert ship captain. I barely noticed any effect that the captain levels had on anything in any of my playthroughs of the game so I’m quite sure this will not be something you get very much mileage out of. Probably skip this one.

Unique Item Vendor

Cost: 5 Blessings

This blessing puts a new vendor in Port Maje that sells a number of decent starting rings, belts and other accessories at a 50% discount.

Normally I’d say that you should avoid the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings that don’t provide unique bonuses, but this one’s actually kind of nice because often you don’t fill up those accessory slots for all of your party members until fairly late in the game due to how rare they are.

The vendor sells decently useful accessories like Gloves of Ogre Might — just generally things that are direct stat boosts or immediately useful, unlike most of the early game accessories that give some fairly useless active skill and no passive bonuses.

If you have the points for it, you might want to pick this one up.

Infamous Past

Cost: 8 Blessings

This gives you the Infamous Captain passive and I’d definitely recommend you pick this one up, as Infamous Captain gives a 5% damage bonus as well as a bonus to Intimidate.

Moreover, even if you’re gunning for it, it’s actually very, very difficult to make your crew hate you so much that they mutiny. It’s definitely not a problem you’re going to accidentally run into.

So, even though you can get this perk on a normal playthrough, it’s much, much easier and less costly to get it here and it only costs 8 blessings.

There is a glitch with Infamous Captain that makes opponents in ship battles start the fight before you’re able to act, but ship battles are kind of a joke anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it.

Discount Craftsman

Cost: 15 Blessings

This gives you a significant discount on crafting and enchanting costs. Keep in mind it’s talking about the gold cost, not the item cost.

High level enchantments actually are extremely expensive, making this worthwhile, but 15 blessings is pretty steep.

Still, if you’re deciding between this and 50,000 starting gold, I might point out that this is going to save you more than 50,000 gold in the long run.

Among the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings, Discount Craftsman is more of a luxury than a priority.

Loaded Pockets

Cost: 12 Blessings

Basically all the garbage you loot from barrels and stuff has a chance to have actually worthwhile items. Most of the time this still doesn’t amount to anything genuinely useful, but think of it more as an income perk. The stuff you find sells for considerably more.

Since it’s only 12 Blessings, I’d definitely recommend taking this over the 50,000 gold blessing if you have enough blessings to spend them on luxuries.

Legendary Crew

Cost: 12 Blessings

This one of the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings gives you access to 3 legendary crew members right at the start of the game. If I noticed any effect crew members had on anything ever, I might say this is a decent blessing to pick. However, the crew doesn’t seem to do anything.

You can use the same weak crew you get automatically at the start of the game from beginning to end and it barely has any impact whatsoever. I’d skip this one.

…Can I Pet Him Anyway?

Cost: 15 Blessings

This Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessing gives Eder access to a pet slot. If you’re planning on using Eder, you should definitely take this, because pets generally provide a fairly potent passive bonus to the party and if you have this, you can have 2 of them (one on your player character, one on Eder).

This is, in effect, a permanent party-wide buff of your choosing. Definitely one of the better blessings.

Mythical Discovery

Cost: 30 Blessings

This one of the Pillars of Eternity 2 Berath’s Blessings gives you a mythical adra stone for free at the start of the game. You won’t use this stone until much, much later, but its purpose is to upgrade a Legendary quality item to Mythical quality.

There are only a handful of these stones in the game otherwise, and most of them come from Mega Bosses which are extremely difficult to defeat.

Seriously, even at max level when you’re crushing through all the DLC quest content without breaking a sweat, Mega Bosses take like an hour+ to kill and will wreck you multiple times. So I definitely recommend this one.