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. That rule survived The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, which launched on 29 September 2026 and rebuilt every skill tree. Almost nothing else in the General tree came through unchanged. This guide covers the twenty General skills as Remastered left them, the exact price you pay for slotting one, and which of them still pay it back. For every skill's prerequisites and rank values across all four trees, use our Remastered skill tree guide.

Updated 26 October 2026. This guide was first written for the pre-Remastered General tree (Patch 4.0). Gorged on Power, Steady Shot, Trick Shot, In Combat's Fires and Heavy Artillery are no longer in that tree, and the skill values below are the Remastered ones, with the old figures shown only for comparison.

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; all twelve ability slots are open by 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 wiki's Remastered abilities page still 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. The mutagen values come from a wiki page last edited before Remastered, and CD PROJEKT RED's Remastered patch notes don't mention mutagens, so treat them as the last published figures rather than re-tested ones. Every General skill 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.

What the General tree used to give back for that penalty was freedom from branch gating. Before Remastered, Combat, Signs and Alchemy rows past the second needed points banked in their own branch, and General skills did not. Remastered removed points-based gating everywhere: CD PROJEKT RED's patch notes say every skill now has three ranks and unlocks when you have its prerequisite skills, "rather than spending a set number of skill points." General is still the loosest tree. On the wiki's Remastered General table, the six School Techniques list no prerequisite and every other General skill needs one connected skill unlocked first — and unlike the other three trees, General lets that connection come from any direction. Neither CDPR nor the wiki says how many points a rank costs.

What Remastered did to the General tree

Set the wiki's Remastered General table beside its archived pre-Remastered one and the tree still holds twenty skills. Which twenty is where it changes:

Focus did not vanish entirely. A skill with that name now sits in the Signs tree, but it raises Sign intensity per Adrenaline Point only; the old General version raised weapon damage as well.

The bigger change is the numbers. Every General skill now runs over three ranks. For most of the ones this guide leans on, rank 3 lands near the old single-pick value (Survival Instinct ends higher, Gourmand lower), so rank 1 pays roughly a quarter to a half of what the skill used to:

The wiki's table also lists a Vitality gain of 1% per rank on every General skill, 3% at rank 3. Neither it nor CDPR says whether that needs the skill slotted.

The six 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. The School Techniques read that weight class and pay out per piece. Four pieces is the maximum, because swords are not armour. Remastered took the tree from three School Techniques to six, and four of the six read medium armour.

Ranks 1 and 2 pay a third and two-thirds of those percentages, and that decides whether the slot is worth taking at all. A full medium set with Wolf or Griffin School Techniques is +24% Sign intensity at rank 3 and +16% at rank 2, both ahead of the 10% Sign intensity that slot would have handed a greater blue mutagen. At rank 1 it is +8%, which is less than the increment you gave up. Before Remastered, Griffin's single pick paid +20% from four pieces straight away.

Cat at rank 3 lands close to its old +100% critical hit damage from a full set. It pairs naturally with crit chance, and the tree hands you that directly: Battle Frenzy unlocks from Cat School Techniques and adds 3% to 9% critical hit chance per Adrenaline Point, by rank.

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, and any medium armour feeds Wolf, Griffin, Manticore and Viper alike. The name on the skill does not have to match the name on the gear.

Places of Power without Gorged on Power

Places of Power are the second source of ability points in the game, and the wiki's Remastered abilities page keeps the tally 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. Before Remastered, Gorged on Power made that buff last indefinitely, one bonus at a time, and it was this guide's top pick. It is not in the Remastered General table, and nothing else in that table makes a Place of Power buff last. The ability points are what remain.

The wiki also 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.

Which ones actually earn a slot

The rule this whole article reduces to: a brown skill 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. Remastered makes that bar harder to clear early, because most General skills now open at a fraction of their old value.

The School Technique matching your armour, from rank 2. A full set pays +16% of a stat at rank 2 and +24% at rank 3, against 10% from the mutagen increment you gave up. This is still the least arguable pick in the tree. Just do not slot it at rank 1 and expect the old payout.

Metabolic Boost, on any build that drinks. Rank 3 spends Adrenaline to cut potion Toxicity by 30% per point, against 33% before Remastered. The old version took a potion's Toxicity to zero with three points available; three points at 30% each is 90% off. It no longer makes potions free, just much cheaper, and Toxicity is still the real constraint on an alchemy build — the alchemy guide covers the potions themselves. It unlocks from Viper School Techniques or Synergy.

Gourmand, early, on the hardest difficulties. On Blood and Broken Bones and Death March, where the wiki says meditation does not restore Vitality, food is your healing budget until Swallow is reliable — see the beginner guide for the difficulty table behind that. Gourmand stretches food's regeneration to 5 minutes at rank 1 and 15 at rank 3. It is no longer the one-point, no-prerequisite first pick it was as Gourmet: it needs Bear or Griffin School Techniques, Strong Back or Elemental Attunement first. Sun and Stars is the other early-healing option, at +10 Vitality per second out of combat by day at rank 1 and +30 at rank 3; it unlocks from Cat, Wolf or Bear School Techniques or Survival Instinct.

Synergy, if you want a brown skill working for your mutagens. It is the odd one out: a brown skill whose whole job is mutagen bonuses, which the wiki lists at +10%, +20% and +30% by rank. CDPR's Patch 5.01 fixed the skill's bonus displaying incorrect values, and the wiki's table was written before that patch, so read the in-game tooltip before you trust any figure for it, ours included.

Everything else is conditional. Crossbow builds have lost both of their dedicated skills, Steady Shot and Trick Shot. Bomb builds get Manticore School Techniques, Element of Surprise (a bomb hit adds 10% to 30% melee damage for 10 seconds, by rank) and Advanced Pyrotechnics, which now gives a thrown bomb a 10% to 30% chance of not being used up and makes you immune to your own thrown bomb. Battle Frenzy, Adrenaline Burst and Attack is the Best Defense still form a coherent adrenaline package, but that is three of your twelve slots, so take them as a set in one group or not at all. Survival Instinct at rank 1 is worth less than the old 15% and only overtakes it at rank 2. Strong Back is the one I would slot last and unslot first. You may unlock it anyway, because it sits between Gourmand and Battle Frenzy on the tree, and CDPR's Remastered notes add an Ignore Item Weight option to the new Bard's Ballad accessibility preset.

Quick Action Checklist

• Count the cost before you slot brown. One General skill 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.
• Do not judge a General skill by its old value. Most now pay between a quarter and a half of it at rank 1.
• Pick an armour weight and take a School Technique that matches it. Four of the six read medium: Wolf, Griffin, Manticore and Viper.
• Slot a Sign-intensity School Technique from rank 2. Four pieces at rank 1 is +8%, under the 10% a greater blue mutagen increment pays.
• Use Levity, Balance or Heft from Hearts of Stone if you want the wrong-weight set to feed the right School Technique.
• On Blood and Broken Bones or Death March, reach Gourmand early through Bear or Griffin School Techniques. It is no longer a no-prerequisite pick.
• Sweep Places of Power for the thirty ability points. Gorged on Power is gone, so nothing in the General tree keeps their Sign buff lit.
• Check Synergy's in-game tooltip before slotting it. Patch 5.01 fixed its displayed values.
• Treat Manticore School Techniques, Element of Surprise and Advanced Pyrotechnics as bomb-build picks. The crossbow-only General skills are gone.