The Witcher 3 Remastered Skill Tree: What Unlocks What

The five skills that raised each Sign's intensity in The Witcher 3 are not in the Remastered Signs tree: Aard Intensity, Igni Intensity, Yrden Intensity, Quen Intensity and Axii Intensity. Quen Discharge, the skill that sent absorbed damage back at whoever hit your shield, is gone too. The new Signs skills that add intensity all come with a condition: Catalyst works only against enemies inside Yrden, Chain Reaction only when you switch Signs, and Focus scales with your Adrenaline.

CD PROJEKT RED has described the overhaul in three bullet points and has not published a skill list. The Witcher wiki's editors have since filled in all four Remastered trees: every skill, its prerequisite, and its effect at each of the three ranks. This guide is built on those tables, checked against CDPR's patch notes, its Remastered FAQ and Patch 5.01. Prima Games' 8 October skills guide covers many of the same skills and broadly matches the wiki's descriptions. What still can't be confirmed is listed at the end.

What CD PROJEKT RED has confirmed

The Remastered patch notes, posted on 28 September, give the skill system three lines:

• Skills now sit in a tree, every skill has three ranks, and a new skill unlocks when you have the prerequisite skills, "rather than spending a set number of skill points". Your skill points were reset as a result.
• The tree was rebalanced: skill bonus values, effects and synergies were refined.
• Some skills were renamed to better match what they do.

The UI section adds that the skill screen itself was reorganised into a tree layout. CDPR's Remastered FAQ covers old saves: they are compatible with Remastered, but because of the skill overhaul, your skills are reset when you load one.

Patch 5.01 on 8 October is the only post-launch patch whose notes mention a skill:

Nintendo Switch 2 isn't on 5.01's platform list. CDPR says a Switch 2 update is in the works that brings the same global changes as the other versions, but it hasn't given that update a date, and no Switch 2 patch has been posted since.

Exploding Shield and Synergy are the only skills CDPR's patch notes have named, and the notes give no skill values and no point cost per rank.

How unlocking works now

The wiki's Remastered abilities page sets out the rules:

• Each tree has entry skills with no prerequisite. Combat has two, Signs has five (one per Sign), Alchemy has three and General has six, its School Techniques.
• Combat, Signs and Alchemy only open downward. You can't cross into a different column partway down. The wiki's example: Muscle Memory, then Three Strikes, then Undying does not open Resolve. Resolve needs Arrow Deflection.
• General opens in any direction. Any General skill becomes available once you have unlocked at least one skill connected to it.
• One prerequisite is enough. Where the wiki lists more than one prerequisite for a skill (up to three in Combat, Signs and Alchemy, up to four in General), it joins them with "or".

The same page keeps the rest of the system as it was. Abilities still do nothing until you place them in one of twelve activation slots, arranged in four groups. A group still boosts its mutagen when the abilities in it match the mutagen's colour: red for attack power, blue for Sign intensity, green for Vitality. General (brown) abilities still don't count toward that bonus. A Potion of Clearance still refunds your points. Points still come from levelling up, the 30 Places of Power, the magic acorn (2 points), the golden egg in Blood and Wine (1) and redoing Turn and Face the Strange in New Game Plus (1).

"Skills deep" counts the skill itself plus each prerequisite on the shortest chain the wiki's prerequisite lists allow.

Two things in that table have changed from the old game. General skills used to be single picks with no levels; all twenty now have three ranks, and every rank adds Vitality. And Alchemy's per-rank bonus has shrunk: the pre-Remastered tooltips paid 5% potion duration per level, the Remastered ones pay 2%.

Cut, renamed and new

Set the wiki's Remastered tables beside its archived pre-Remastered ones and each tree still holds 20 skills. Which 20 is where it changes:

The "same slot" column is matched on the wiki's own filing: each of those skills sits on the old skill's icon. A new name doesn't always mean the old effect. Precise Blows raised fast-attack crit chance and crit damage; Three Strikes gives the third attack in a string a chance to power up the next one. High Tolerance does close to the opposite of Heightened Tolerance, covered in the Alchemy section below. Signs' new Focus is not the old General one either: the old Focus raised weapon damage and Sign intensity, the new one raises Sign intensity only.

Combat: the same twenty, rewired

Combat is the one tree that kept all twenty of its skills. What changed is how they connect and what several of them do.

Three things in that table change how you play.

Muscle Memory now pays you to dodge. Before Remastered it was a flat 10%, 20% or 30% to fast-attack damage. Now the bonus is 30% at every rank, and it only applies to the fast attacks that follow a dodge or roll: one attack at rank 1, three at rank 3. Counterattack works the same way, firing off a dodge as well as a counter.

Rend is the cheaper big attack. By the wiki's prerequisites, Rend is four skills deep: Muscle Memory, then Strength Training and Crushing Blow, or Three Strikes and Razor Focus. Whirl is five, because it sits behind Undying and Fleet-Footed on either route in. Whirl is also Crippling Strike's sole listed prerequisite, and Crippling Strike is the deepest skill in the tree.

The crossbow line got serious. Before Remastered, Lightning Reflexes was a single level that slowed time an extra 50% while aiming. Its rank 3 is now 90%, with a 250% headshot bonus and a 15% instant-kill chance on top. Behind Arrow Deflection, the same branch holds Cold Blood's Adrenaline per bolt and Anatomical Knowledge, which adds part of your silver sword's damage to bolts.

Signs: the Intensity skills are gone

With the five Intensity skills gone, the Signs tree's own intensity bonuses that don't need Adrenaline come from two skills. Catalyst adds 30%, 60% or 90% to Aard and Igni against anything standing in Yrden, which makes Yrden the setup sign for a damage build. Chain Reaction rewards rotating Signs, adding up to 15% to the next different Sign and stacking five times.

Two more intensity skills run on Adrenaline, and so do two General skills that support a sign build:

• Focus (Signs) adds 10%, 20% or 30% Sign intensity per Adrenaline Point.
• Flood of Anger (Combat) spends 3 Adrenaline Points to cast a Sign at its highest level with 50%, 100% or 150% more intensity.
• Adrenaline Burst (General) lets your Signs generate Adrenaline.
• Anger Management (General) lets you cast on Adrenaline when your Stamina is empty, for 2 points a cast at rank 1 and 1 point at rank 3.

My read: the pure blue build is over. A Remastered sign build wants a few red and brown skills keeping the Adrenaline bar full, because Focus and Flood of Anger pay out nothing without Adrenaline in the bar, and no Signs skill generates it.

Quen players lose less than the cut list suggests. Exploding Shield is an entry skill, and Active Shield is one step below it with no Stamina drain at rank 3. Reflection is back in a different place, too: Patch 5.01 added damage reflection to Exploding Shield, the first Quen skill you can take. CDPR hasn't said how much it reflects, and the wiki's Exploding Shield text predates the patch and still mentions only the push-back.

Resonance is the deepest skill in the tree, seven skills in, and the one that closes the loop for hybrids: after a Sign, your next three sword hits add up to 30% of your Sign intensity as damage.

Alchemy: the safety net became a dare

The headline is High Tolerance, which sits in Heightened Tolerance's slot and turns it inside out. Before Remastered, Heightened Tolerance raised your overdose threshold, so you could carry more Toxicity before it started to hurt. High Tolerance makes running hot dangerous on purpose: at 80% Toxicity or more you take 150% damage, and in exchange your crit damage rises by up to 100% of your current Toxicity. It is a damage-for-safety trade, not a safety net.

Acquired Tolerance got much bigger. Its rank 3 adds 3 maximum Toxicity per learned recipe. The pre-Remastered tooltip gave 0.5 per known formula. That growth feeds High Tolerance's crit bonus, which scales with how much Toxicity you're carrying.

Fixative is gone. It was the skill that made oils last and, after Patch 4.0, let you run more than one oil at a time. None of the twenty Remastered Alchemy skills, as the wiki lists them, extends oil charges or adds a second oil.

Poison is a branch now. Poisoned Blades leads to Toxic Shock, then Debilitating Poison and Potent Sting. Viper School Techniques and Elemental Attunement over in General both add poison damage too. Killing Spree, the old kill-streak crit skill, didn't make the cut, and Synergy has moved to General.

General: three ranks and six School Techniques

General now has six School Techniques, and four of them read medium armour: Wolf, Griffin, Manticore and Viper. Cat still reads light and Bear heavy. Cat's rank 3 lands almost where the old single-point version sat: +24% crit damage and +6% fast-attack damage per piece, against the old +25% and +5%.

Gorged on Power is gone. Places of Power still pay their ability point, per the wiki, but nothing in the Remastered General table makes a Place of Power buff last.

Synergy moved here, which is a little awkward. It raises your mutagen bonuses by up to 30%, but as a brown skill it doesn't count toward a group's colour bonus itself. Its numbers also come with a caveat: Patch 5.01 fixed Synergy's bonus showing incorrect values, and the wiki recorded the skill before that patch.

Several old one-point picks are now spread over three ranks. Survival Instinct goes 8%, 16%, 24%, against a flat 15% before Remastered. Gourmet is now Gourmand, and runs 5, 10 or 15 minutes, against the old 20. Strong Back goes 20, 40, 60, so you only get the old +60 at rank 3.

Older build guides, including ours

Our build guide, General skills guide, Signs guide, alchemy guide and the skill sections of our beginner guide were written for the tree as Patch 4.0 left it. Their row thresholds, "zero points" unlocks and several skill names describe a system that ended on 29 September. Use this page for the current tree, and read those for oils, mutagens, potions and gear, which CDPR's skill notes don't mention.

Two other parts of character building sit outside it. The Blood and Wine mutations aren't mentioned in CDPR's Remastered notes or covered by the wiki's Remastered abilities pages, so our Blood and Wine guide is still the reference there. Armour weight is what the School Techniques read, and our witcher gear guide covers which sets are light, medium and heavy.

What is still unconfirmed

• There is no official skill list. Every name and number in the four tables comes from the Witcher wiki's Remastered pages, not from CDPR. Prima Games' guide broadly matches them where it covers the same skills.
• The wiki's tables predate Patch 5.01. Their last edits were made before 5.01 went live on 8 October. That is why Exploding Shield's entry doesn't mention reflection, and why Synergy's figures may be the incorrect ones the patch fixed.
• Point cost per rank. CDPR's notes don't say how many points a rank costs, and neither does the wiki.
• Some effects have no number. The wiki gives no figure for Exploding Shield's push-back, Melt Armor's Armor reduction, Aftershock's damage or Attack is the Best Defense's Adrenaline, only that each grows with rank.
• Switch 2. CDPR says a Switch 2 update with the same global changes as 5.01 is in the works, but it has no date, so Exploding Shield's reflection and the Synergy fix aren't confirmed live on Switch 2 yet.

Quick Action Checklist

• Loading a pre-Remastered save resets your skills; that is expected, per CDPR's FAQ. Plan your path before spending the refund.
• Plan the chain to the skill you want before spending. In Combat, Signs and Alchemy you can't cross columns partway down, and only a Potion of Clearance refunds points spent in the wrong one.
• Want Rend? It is four Combat skills deep through Crushing Blow or Razor Focus. Whirl is five, behind Undying and Fleet-Footed.
• Building signs? Plan for Adrenaline. Focus and Flood of Anger turn it into Sign intensity, and Adrenaline Burst and Anger Management keep the bar filling and your Signs casting.
• Use Yrden as the setup for Catalyst, which adds up to 90% Aard and Igni intensity against enemies inside it.
• On Quen, take Exploding Shield and then Active Shield. Since Patch 5.01 on PC, PS5 and Xbox, Exploding Shield also reflects damage.
• Running alchemy? High Tolerance trades taking 150% damage at 80% Toxicity or more for crit damage. Pair it with Acquired Tolerance if you take it.
• Wearing medium armour? Pick from Wolf, Griffin, Manticore or Viper School Techniques by the stat pair you want.
• Don't count on Synergy's listed values until the wiki or CDPR posts post-5.01 numbers.
• Read older Witcher 3 build guides, ours included, as pre-Remastered.