The New Game Plus (NG+) option of The Witcher 3 allows you to load a saved game you made at the end of your first playthrough, and carry over all the items that were in your stash, and that you were wearing, into your new game.
You get to keep pretty much everything that isn’t a quest item.
You also get to start NG+ at the level you ended the last game on. So if you were level 52 in your first game then you’d start NG+ on level 52.
Pretty much all weapons, armour, horse equipment, potions, oils, Runestones, Glyphs, and crafting items are kept and carried over in NG+, making it easier for you to get straight into crafting and combat. It must be noted, however, that the game does prevent you from getting too ahead of yourself by requiring you be a particular level before you can craft certain items.
New items are scaled to your level, and new Witcher items (like the Grandmaster Legendary items) are introduced to the game as you progress, allowing new weapons and armour to be crafted in line with the higher level numbers.
The downside, though, is that the absolute level cap is 100. Anything above that just doesn’t get any higher. You don’t earn experience any more after reaching level 100, and items that did level up with you now stop doing that. Aerondight, for example.
So you’ve basically got fifty levels each to play two games of The Witcher 3 – one set of 50 for a fresh start, and one set of 50 for New Game Plus. There is no NG++… Once you’ve completed NG+ you can either start afresh or replay NG+ with an old saved game.
New Game Plus doesn’t affect the game’s difficulty in any way. The actual difficulty level chooser decides that.
So is New Game Plus worth playing?
Well, yes, I guess it is. It’s debatable whether the new Grandmaster Legendary armours look any different to the previous best armours, but the numbers they show in their statistics are pretty startling.
I played NG+ on Death March difficulty to get the Walked the Path achievement and enjoyed every minute of it. Apart from the level cap, there’s nothing bad I can say about NG+. It just gives you a load of items to start out with, and gets you going quicker. It probably helped with my Death March run – playing NG+.
What would make the Witcher 3 NG+ better? More content that was only unlocked on a second playthrough? New locations? I’m thinking of like Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2 which had a brilliant NG+ mode.
You need to be level 90-95 to craft the final Grandmaster Legendary Armour.
The only person who can craft it for you is Lazare Lafargue in Toussaint.
https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Scavenger_Hunt:_Grandmaster_Wolven_Gear
https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Grandmaster_Legendary_Wolven_armor
Note: you don’t need the lower grade Wolven armour to craft Grandmaster Legendary Wolven gear. You can simply craft it when you are the correct level, and have the diagrams. So don’t waste your money making the other armours.
Adding Protection Words:
Once you’ve got the Grandmaster Legendary Armour you can then enchant Protection Words to it, and you can only do that once you’ve unlocked level 2 enchantments with the Runewright. The process is not cheap, but it’s well worth it because your armour will then cast Quen automatically when you enter battle, which is a beautiful, must-have thing.
You should also add a 100% reduction of durability loss to each of the gloves, boots and trousers, plus another glyph of your choosing on each, because there’s room. I chose Igni for gloves. Yrden for boots. And Quen for trousers.
To help with Greater Red Mutagen creation, harvest Winter Berries from the Corvo Bianco greenhouse.
- Buy the greenhouse upgrade from Basil.
- Wait for them to grow. There are three unique berries that can be harvested.
- Note: you may need to wait and update a local quest, for the berries to re-spawn
- Winter Berries allow mutagens to change colour
- You need a lot of red mutagens to unlock the final skill slots
- After completing the game Winter Berries continue re-spawning over time
There Can Be Only One
- Complete the 5 virtues for Aerondight
The new Aerondight in NG+ is an upgrade of the previous version although it stops levelling-up when you reach level 100. I’ve read stories of Aerondight disappearing in NG+, if you pick up the new one, but that didn’t happen to me. I had both the old version and the new version in my inventory simultaneously, and could compare them both easily.
Achieve each virtue, then fight the monk on the water.
Note: It costs about £18,000 to add three upgrade sockets to Aerondight – which is very expensive. But you must add them – they’re essential. I added bleeding, burning, and poisoning to mine.
The Witcher 3 Guide 
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