The golden bugs apply benefits to both you and the pawn at the same time, if anyone hasn't realized. Use them up.
Just an FYI. I'm a "pick up everything I find" type of person. I was exploring the western part of the map and one of my hired pawns had the specialty Hawker. They buy/sell items. Every time I talked to her there was never an option to do this, so I was beginning to think this was broken. Finally at camp she forced a dialog on me to either sell or not sell. I said yes since all my pawns were at heavy or very heavy. Then she goes and just takes all the weapons and armors and rare materials I had and I'm not sure what happened to them, other than they were no longer in my inventory. I'm not sure if maybe they go to your storage, but I suspect not? All I know is I'm never using a hawker specialty ever again. There was no other screen after. "Yes" to sell is her authorization to sell all the shit you wanted to keep.
Anyway in a panic, I loaded my last save and luckily it was right before that happened and got all the gear back.
I have killed 2 enemies that were my first encounters that ended up death by water. No option to retrieve rewards. So aggravating. I killed a lich that was in waist high water, you could stand over the items for a second or 2 before the brine killed you. No gather option.
Encountered my first dullahan and died right quick. Accidently said no to the wakestone.
Killed a drake! Super hard encounter, at level 25 or so, Archer class.
I finally maxed Archer vocation and switched to thief since the armor is sometimes interchangeable. Got the daggers from the token turn in. Turned my mage pawn into the Archer to make use of my old gear.
I think Archer might be the weakest class in terms of fun in this game. You really need to be grappling the big creatures. There is a tutorial page that says if you use exploding arrow while grappling, it melees the arrow into the creature. I never could figure out how to facilitate that. When you activate a special arrow, they have to do like a "dipping" motion to attach whatever tool.
Anyway, on to level 1 thief vocation leveling.
Encountered my first minotaur, he was kinda easy lol. I wonder if the same monster can have different difficulty levels so to speak. Some ogres fall pretty quickly while others are more aggresive. Might just be the adaptive difficulty I guess.
I have yet to even see a minotaur myself. But cyclops come in different levels. Some can have armor. Drakes come in all different types. I just recently saw 2 and fought 1. It's been a while since I fought drakes in the first one, but the one I fought seemed to have an extra skill that made him very hard.
Edit, forgot to add, I had a green grass camp kit and got attacked at night, where that dullahan was...The camp kit got destroyed I guess. Never knew that was the case. Now I can't camp until I find another kit.