The Witcher 3 General Skills: Which Ones Deserve a Slot

Look at the character panel above. Two red mutagens, three ability slots wired to each, identical tier. The left group reads Attack power +40%. The right group reads +30%.

The difference is one icon. The left group holds three red Combat abilities. The right group holds two red abilities and one brown General ability — and brown does not count for anything.

That screenshot is the entire argument of this article. The General tree is the branch with no colour, which makes it the only part of the skill system that charges you rent for showing up. Our build guide covers what to do with Combat, Signs and Alchemy. This one covers the twenty abilities sitting in the fourth tab, what each of them is actually worth, and the exact price you pay for slotting one.

The branch mutagens do not see

The Witcher 3 sorts abilities into four branches marked by colour: Combat (red), Signs (blue), Alchemy (green) and General (brown). You get twelve activation slots, arranged as four groups of three, and every group has a diamond-shaped mutagen socket beside it. The sockets unlock at levels 4, 9, 16 and 28; the twelfth ability slot opens at level 30. Blood and Wine adds four more on top of those twelve — the centre column in the screenshot above — released one at a time by the Strengthened Synapses mutation at 2, 4, 8 and 12 mutations researched.

The colour rule is where the money is. From the wiki's mutagens page: each ability placed in a slot connected to a mutagen of the same colour increases that mutagen's bonus by 100%, so filling all three matching slots raises it by 300%. Abilities whose colour does not match "neither increase nor decrease it."

The abilities page then states the exception in a single parenthetical: this rule does not apply to the General abilities (brown).

So a brown skill is not free. It costs you one increment of whatever mutagen sits in that group. On greater mutagens, that increment is a real number:

That is the +40% to +30% gap in the screenshot, rendered as a rule. Every General ability in this guide has to beat that number to be worth one of the twelve.

One exception, and it is sitting in the same screenshot. The four centre slots that Strengthened Synapses unlocks are, in the wiki's words, not linked in any way and so provide no mutagen bonus at all — which means they cannot forfeit one either. What is allowed in them is decided by the colour of the mutation you have active rather than by the slot, so treat them as a separate question; our Blood and Wine guide has the mutation tree.

In exchange for the colour penalty, the General tree drops the branch gating. Combat, Sign and Alchemy abilities past the second row need a set number of points banked in their own branch before the row opens, and the wiki records that requirement as a tier on each ability — Undying is tier Level 2, Killing Spree tier Level 4. Six General abilities have their own wiki page (Sun and Stars, Metabolism Boosts, Gourmet, Cat School Techniques, Metabolic Control and Strong Back) and all six read tier None. The Gourmet entry says the quiet part out loud: the skill costs one point, can be unlocked at any time, and is therefore a live candidate for the first point you ever spend.

All twenty General abilities

Effects below are the wiki's current descriptions, which reflect the next-gen 4.0 build of the game. The verdicts are mine.

Two of those deserve their own footnote. Metabolism Boosts is the one that changes how alchemy feels: the wiki notes that with all three Adrenaline Points available, potion Toxicity is reduced to zero, and it records a bug where the skill does not actually spend the Adrenaline, letting you drink your whole potion belt in one go. Metabolic Control stacks with the Alchemy tree's Acquired Tolerance to push Geralt to four simultaneous decoctions, which is the gate the alchemy guide build is built around.

Strong Back is the honest disappointment. It is a genuinely useful +60 carry weight — combined with Beauclair saddlebags and the fiend decoction the wiki puts the ceiling at 250 — but it is a menu convenience occupying a slot that costs 10% Attack Power.

The three School Techniques and what a full set pays

Armour in The Witcher 3 comes in light, medium and heavy, and consists of four pieces: chest, gauntlets, trousers and boots. Three General abilities read that weight class and pay out per piece. Four pieces is the maximum, because swords are not armour.

Compare those totals against the table further up. A full medium set with Griffin School Techniques is +20% Sign intensity from one slot, against the 10% Sign intensity that slot would have handed a greater blue mutagen. It is a straight doubling, and it is the clearest case in the tree for accepting the colour penalty.

Cat's +100% critical hit damage looks even better and comes with a caveat the wiki is explicit about: like most stat boosts, it reads base damage only and ignores your other multipliers, so it does not literally double a fully buffed crit. It still pairs naturally with crit chance — the wiki's own tip points at Killing Spree over in the Alchemy tree, and Battle Frenzy does the same job from inside this one.

Three things stop this from being as simple as "wear the matching set":

• Mixing weights splits the payout. Two light pieces and two heavy pieces means Cat School Techniques counts two, not four. Pick a weight and commit to it, which is the same conclusion the witcher gear guide reaches from the set-bonus side.
• Hearts of Stone lets you cheat the weight class entirely. The Levity glyphword makes every equipped armour item count as light, Balance makes it medium and Heft makes it heavy. Our Hearts of Stone guide has the runewright's price list.
• The bonus is on your armour, not your school. Any light armour feeds Cat School Techniques. Cat School Gear is simply the largest concentration of it.

Gorged on Power and the thirty free ability points

Places of Power are the second source of ability points in the game, and the wiki's tally is exact: one point per Place of Power, thirty in total.

Each one is tied to one of the five Signs and boosts that Sign's intensity when you draw from it. Normally that buff is temporary. Gorged on Power makes it last indefinitely, with the restriction that only one such bonus can be active at a time — so you pick a Sign and keep it lit permanently instead of topping up at a rock before every contract.

Two practical notes. Like every ability in the game, it only works while it is sitting in an activation slot; unlocking it in the tree does nothing on its own. And the wiki records that ability points from Places of Power carry into New Game Plus while the places themselves reset, so a New Game Plus run can bank another thirty.

What Patch 4.0 changed in this tree

One real change, and one that looks like a change and is not.

Survival Instinct was a flat +500 maximum Vitality before the next-gen update. It is now +15% of your maximum Vitality. That is a scaling rewrite rather than a straight nerf, and the arithmetic is easy: 15% only overtakes a flat 500 once your maximum Vitality passes 3,333. Below that line the old version was stronger, above it the new one keeps growing while the flat number would have stopped mattering.

Heavy Artillery reads differently in the current game — "bomb damage is tripled, but the number of bombs in slots is decreased by half" — and the wiki notes the pre-4.0 wording was "+200% damage, slots decreased by 50%." Those are the same two numbers. Nothing was buffed; the text was tidied. Worth saying plainly, because a rewritten description is exactly the kind of thing that turns into a false patch note.

Which ones actually earn a slot

The rule this whole article reduces to: a brown ability has to beat 10% Attack Power, 10% Sign intensity, or 150 Vitality, because that is what its slot would have been worth to a greater mutagen.

By that standard, four clear it comfortably.

The School Technique matching your armour. +20% of a stat from a single slot against 10% from the mutagen increment you gave up. This is the least arguable pick in the tree.

Gorged on Power. A permanent Sign intensity buff for one slot, and the thirty points that come with sweeping the rocks are the reason you can afford to experiment at all.

Metabolism Boosts, on any build that drinks. Zero-cost potions is not a percentage, it is a different relationship with the Toxicity bar, and Toxicity is the real constraint on the alchemy build.

Gourmet, early. One point, no prerequisite, twenty real-time minutes of Vitality regeneration from meat you loot off pigs. On Blood and Broken Bones and Death March, where meditation no longer restores health, that is your healing budget until Swallow is reliable — see the beginner guide for the difficulty table behind that.

Everything else is conditional. Steady Shot and Trick Shot are dead weight unless you are actually shooting things. Advanced Pyrotechnics and Heavy Artillery want a bomb build to exist first. Battle Frenzy, Adrenaline Burst and Attack is the Best Defense form a coherent adrenaline package, but that is three of your twelve slots and two full mutagen groups compromised, so take them as a set or not at all. Strong Back is the one I would slot last and unslot first.

Quick Action Checklist

• Count the cost before you slot brown. One General ability in a mutagen group forfeits that group's increment: 10% Attack Power, 10% Sign intensity or 150 Vitality on greater mutagens.
• Group your brown skills together. Concentrating them in one mutagen group wrecks one bonus instead of spreading damage across four.
• Spend your first point on Gourmet if you are starting on Blood and Broken Bones or Death March. It costs one point and has no prerequisite.
• Pick an armour weight and take the School Technique that matches it. Four pieces of one weight, not a mixed loadout.
• Use Levity, Balance or Heft from Hearts of Stone if you want the wrong-weight set to feed the right School Technique.
• Sweep Places of Power for the thirty ability points, then slot Gorged on Power to keep one Sign buff lit permanently.
• Take Metabolic Control alongside Acquired Tolerance if you want four decoctions running at once.
• Treat Steady Shot, Trick Shot, Advanced Pyrotechnics and Heavy Artillery as build-conditional. They do nothing for a sword-and-signs Geralt.
• Remember Survival Instinct is percentage-based since 4.0. It is worth less than the old flat 500 until your maximum Vitality clears 3,333.