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Dragon's Dogma 2 is perfectly happy with straight-up not telling you about some of its mechanics. Or, rather, the game will tell you about them, but it will absolutely not go into any meaningful specifics on how they work. This is fair, we think. Preferable, even, especially if you're one of those who like discovering things for themselves! Vocation upgrades, sadly, do fall into this category in our book.
Vocation progression is one of the things we've found to be woefully underexplained in Dragon's Dogma 2, to the point that it might outright keep you at a serious disadvantage unless you're proactive about it. In this game, the only real way to build up meaningful flexibility in how you handle enemies is to unlock new Vocational Weapon Skills, as they allow you to go wide, tall, or to just get weird with your foes in real-time. Here's how to actually invest in your Vocation and build a powerful Arisen without wasting hours of playtime on buffing your stats!
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Upgrading your Vocation is key in Dragon's Dogma 2
Of course, stats do matter, as we explained in our weapons and gear upgrading guide, but they are not the be-all-end-all at all. As you level up and build rapport with your starting Vocation of choice, you'll slowly gain access to more and more Vocation-specific abilities. These are, broadly, separated into three different (but equally important) categories:
- Weapon Skills
- Core Skills
- Augments
Weapon Skills are your active-duty abilities, and you can have up to four of them active at a given time. Core Skills are Vocation-specific abilities that are situationally relevant. The Fighter, for example, can tuck behind their shield during a long fall to reduce the amount of damage they get upon... uhh, reaching their destination. Finally, Augments are entirely passive bonuses that, once unlocked and purchased, will remain accessible even as you move on to different Vocations and beyond.
Each Vocation has 10 levels for you to unlock, and though there's only very little overlap between them (mostly), Augments can be a huge boon as you explore what your ideal Arisen combat build is. Ideally, you'll move from one Vocation to the other and essentially unlock all of them before entering Dragon's Dogma 2's endgame. If that's not a realistic option, though, the Warfarer Vocation may be a good choice, as it allows you to mix and match even Weapon and Core skills into your ideal combat setup.
You'll earn the Vocation Guild currency - Dcp - in combat alongside regular experience and Gold, and it shouldn't be a huge problem to build up a fair bit of it as you complete quests and duke it out with monsters in the field. Whatever you do, make sure that you know where your nearby Guild is, and that you visit it often: this will ensure that you're on top of whatever problems you might come across in your travels!
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