Going for a more evil (maybe durge) run next to get more use out of Laez & Astarion. I’ve heard great things about both but didn’t hang much on the chaotic good run.
I never used Astarion, didn’t really care for him. So i got rid of him for something more useful (don’t want to spoil anything, and can’t figure out the spoiler tag on Boost)
My experience in the game mostly feels like any turn that a character isn’t dealing damage is a wasted action.
Sure there’s a few exceptions, like putting haste on Karlach is insanely powerful. But I’m struggling to figure out how to use most support actions or classes effectively
Bard in BG3 can be one the single highest burst classes in the game if you go college of swords/sharpshooter/dual crossbows. And you can do that three times a day with the bard shirt rest. It’s absolutely disgusting.
Use more save or sucks. Stunning an enemy character(or - bless - several) is also super valuable, it puts the fight to a 3v4 right away. On the bard’s spell list alone, Sleep is incredibly valuable, you’ve got Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, Blindness, Hold Person, Silence, Fear, Confusion, I could go on.
How are you getting reliable success with any spell that allows for a saving throw? I’m seeing pretty terrible odds with my bard’s offensive enchantment spells (on Tactician difficulty).
Lol, he’s pretty much always the first to die. For some reason, he’s targeted first every time, taken out after 1 turn, and then continually taken out every time I try to revive him.
I may just need to replace him with Wyll. Haven’t used Wyll all that much yet.
Debuffs will rarely be outright reliable, they’d be broken if they did considering how much they swing the turn economy.
That said, boosting spell save DC goes a long way (either by primary stat or gear) and gets pretty strong by late game. Upcasting gives you more targets to try your luck on, too. Early game you’re bound to have some misses just like your martial fighters do, but Sleep does very well then, as does Phalar Aluve: Shriek.
In general, having options that check against different saves and being smart about your targets helps a lot. Don’t try to throw Hold Person on an enemy druid or cleric, and use Bane on low CHA targets like undead and constructs, for example.
Admittedly haven’t tried bard itself yet, but I’ve got access to all those spells on Gale, and I find a well-placed fireball usually ends up being the better choice. The main problem i have is that I almost never saw those conditions last for even one turn, they would just pass a save and it was like the spell might as well have just missed.
It’s a little frustrating, because surely there must be value in using those spells… But I’m definitely not doing it correctly when I try them out.
For what it’s worth I played tactician mode right from the start, which probably colored my learning curve a bit
Now that you have spelled it out for me, I realize this should have been obvious. I have not been paying attention to what kind of saves each spell has, or how to make sure I use the right one on the right enemy.
Also! Make sure to check their save proficiencies - It should be represented with a little hexagon around 2 or so ability scores. Obviously you usually want to avoid rolling against that score.
It’s okay - DMing multiple campaigns for sweaty tryhards just massively overprepared me for anything BG3 could throw at me 😅 the solution to many dumb character builds is talking to them about it outside of the game like an adult “okay, roll me a [weakest stat] save”.
Many bosses will be immune to several effects, and scouting what exactly you’ll be facing is time consuming if even possible, so it definitely can fall into a “run into fight - oh I need change my spell list - reload quicksave” which is a little lame but you can’t always be prepared for everything unfortunately.
The main problem i have is that I almost never saw those conditions last for even one turn, they would just pass a save and it was like the spell might as well have just missed.
Some of the spells mentioned require concentration. As an example, if you cast Tasha’s Hideous Laughter one turn, and then any other spell that requires concentration the next turn like Hex or Bless or any of the hundred or so spells, your character stops concentrating on Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, thus ending its effects.
I felt the same way. It’s 4v4. My turn is to make it 4v3 as quick as possible because even one hit on anyone other than karlach or a tank character will take me 1/2 hp. And God forbid they take 2 hits, then they’re out of the battle. My main is a bard (I’m still in the first map dealing with the goblin camp) and I’m using karlach as my tank, but if my bard isn’t doing a damage attack on an enemy I feel I’m worse off. I know I’m doing something wrong because this isn’t the way support moves are balanced to be.
Use your Bard’s abilities to buff your allies to give them advantage, or to break your enemies to give them disadvantage. Bards can also put enemies to sleep, make them fall prone with laughter, and sling horrible insults like “you have a visage well suited for scroll-writing.” This will make your allies less likely to take damage, and more likely to deal more damage themselves. A bard can also heal, so at least in the early game you can run 3 dedicated DPS and a bard and have no issues in most situations.
Buffing and breaking make DPS easier. If your DPS units are taking less damage, that means fewer turns are needed for healing, so your healer can do some other buffing, or even some damage. Heck, at least in the early game, you could run a bard as your healer and support, who on off-turns could also deal damage, then use three dedicated DPS units. That’ll help you out with your desire to see big bonks.
Spirit guard trivializes any difficult encounter that isn’t a boss fight really. Specially when weak enemies run right into it.
I do play on medium difficulty so maybe I should just raise the difficulty but I’m not that interested in a challenge really. I’m already challenged enough as it is
Orin’s sibling was the first of the Absolute’s tadpole victims, weren’t they? Haven’t played in a couple months but that’s what I remember from the dark urge storyline.
I was also under the impression that the emperor was in the astral prism since before the story started. I’m not sure if the mindflayers knew about the emperor either since they just left the artifact in a bag on the ground - their mission seemed to be all about tadpoling people
The story was left open to interpretation but I’m inclined to think the emperor was not involved in any kidnapping or tadpoling.
And Lae’zel was definirely part of a mission to recover the artifact (for Orpheus - they definitely don’t know about the emperor) and got captured, she wasn’t just hunting mindflayers
And Lae’zel was definirely part of a mission to recover the artifact (for Orpheus - they definitely don’t know about the emperor) and got captured, she wasn’t just hunting mindflayers
But when you ask her either about the Prism or the dragon riders she has no idea what they are about. She thinks they are just hunting the Nautiloid. She knows that there are Githyanki symbols on the Prism but that’s it.
Are you implying the mindflayer who abducted us was the emperor, not some rando? I missed that if so. I thought our abductor was dead on the ground in early act 1, the one who tried to make us feel compassion towards it or whatever. I just presumed an absolute lackey
Our abductor isn’t the near dead illithid near Astarion. None of the illithid that you can interact with in act 1 are our captors as far as i can tell. I think this because i once picked up all the illithid bodies and sent them to camp to see if the Dror Ragzlin illithid still accuses you. It does.
I thought that the one with Dror was our captor, but maybe it’s the one we fought the cambions with. The narrator tells you it’s the mind flayer that was on the ship, I guess it’s a little vague
The Narrator says that mind flayer near Ragzlin isn’t your captor.
This mind flayer’s build is smaller, its garb plainer - a fearsome creature even in death, but not the one that tormented you.
Then the first time Ragzlin asks who killed it it shows you this memory:
You see a clawed hand open a holding pod - devoid of flesh, only darkness.
Then Dror asks a second time and the mind flayer responds with this memory:
You see a clawed hand open the holding pod. The murk clears to reveal a face. Yours.
So we don’t have clawed hands first off. And we never opened a holding pod except Shadowheart’s. So is the illithid making it up? Did Orin (or another doppleganger) pretend to be us? Those are my two guesses at what’s happening.
I could be talking crazy here, but in regards to the clawed hand situation - perhaps the mind flayer is seeing it’s own hand opening a holding pod? I don’t know if more context is given in-game, but based on the quotes you provided it doesn’t explicitly state that the face belongs to the claw-handed figure. Maybe the memory you see is of the mind flayer opening your pod?
I was wondering that too. I haven’t finished the game yet so I was waiting for some confirmation that the Emporer was the one who infected you and Lazael.
It’s explicitly stated by the Netherbrain in act 3 that they allowed the Emperor to escape their thrall, anticipating all of the events leading to him discovering Orpheus and your adventuring party - as well as the the chosen of the Dead 3 discovering the Crown of Karsus and the Ilithid oubliette under Moonrise Towers. It is implied that the whole idea for the creation of the Cult of the Absolute and planned power grab by the Dead 3 was also anticipated/orchestrated by the brain from the beginning.
That is stated, but I’m not sure I’d consider the Netherbrain a reliable narrator. I feel like it was an attempt to intimidate the party. The sheer amount of secret knowledge and unlikely events that come together to begin freeing the brain at the end of A1 seems beyond the ability of an elder brain, which is all it would’ve been when it formed the plan.
The whole idea that it would use use an artifact that had only been seen once, very briefly, with no measurement or understanding of its true capabilities, to evolve itself into a being powerful enough to overcome the control it was submitting to as part of its plan… I know elder brains are scary smart, but this seems a ludicrous proposition.
Consider: what part of its plan could it not have achieved simply by tadpoling Gortash and anyone else to begin with?
Now it could be that what the brain says is canonically true and this is just weaker writing, but until I see confirmation I think the brain was trying to demoralize the party into thinking they’d always been dancing to the brain’s tune the whole time and everything they had done had been in service to its plot the whole time, when the truth is it has been (very capably) trying to regain the upper hand since Ketheric’s death.
Shadowheart’s “she looks like she could throw me over her shoulder and carry me to safety” really made me wish this was a thing lol. Also, this makes me wanna get buff, cause DAMN Karlach
Those outer ring powers are pretty good, it’s worth saying. There’s a good likelihood I’ll make the same choice because honor run. I want to get the golden die and then I’ll go back to roleplay runs.
Plus it’s good to have things push me out of my comfort zone. I just finished act 2 and Thorm killed Jahira. It’s a bummer to miss out on her storyline stuff, but that’s something I’d never let stand if I could just reload so I’m in uncharted waters. I don’t know what things will be different. I assume I’ll never meet the big guy at a minimum. Maybe some sad dialog I’d never have experienced in A3. Maybe interactions with the Harpers will go differently.
I like the chaos that comes from consequences for impulsive decisions and randomness outside the players control. I’ve never let Isobel be taken - I’m way too good at that fight after like a dozen times - and if the dice went wildly against me I would be in uncharted territory which would be kinda exciting even though I would hate to let all of those individual storylines end on such an unhappy note. But that should just make me hate the Absolute even more, right?
Those outer ring powers are really good but the reason I personally always use the astral tadpole is the free flight on everyone.
Fly to get around the battlefield is stupidly overpowered especially if all your guys have it. It basically doubles your movement as soon as you get it since fly is 60 ft of movement.
You make everyone take the astral worm? You are a monster lol. Lae’zel is one of my core characters and an absolute favorite and I can’t imagine bullying her into taking it. Besides at 22str I think she can jump about 60’ anyway.
I might try it because it sounds fun but oh man. Lae’zel and Karlach have been through enough! I could totally see Gale and Wyll and Halsin, though. It’s just that those three are never in my group except when needed for story reasons.
The worm gives you persuasion and intimidation expertise for a reason.
I tried to make them all eat it in my honor run. Laezel it didn’t work with since she has two checks but everyone else was fine since they put up minimal arguments against using it. Except Astarion of course, he used it as quick as I did.
Which sucks because he has all my lockpicking ability and a big chunk of my DPS and now he’s the only one who can’t fly. Maybe Minthara can respec as Gloomstalker and take his place. She was all about that worm. Didn’t even have to roll.
why not try and embrace it? this isn’t the only run you will ever do. it might be interesting to see what you might do with the choices you’ve made.
just because you’ve made a choice that you must live with, let yourself live with it. try and make the best of it. or fight against it. this is a story that you’ve written from start to end. but you gotta allow it to run and end. ya know?
I agree with this sentiment. Each play through is fairly unique. You might be the first person to ever make these choices. Keep it up cause not everyone will do exactly what you did.
I always find these kind of posts amusing, you guys remember this is a videogame right? Like he could have literally just gone back to a previous save and make a different choice
I always find these kinds of comments amusing, you know what honor mode is, right? It’s not like he could go to a previous save, there isn’t one; you’re locked in to every choice you make.
Honor mode is one single save, permanent death. You can’t go back once you make a decision. It’s the reason you should know exactly how you’re planning on running honor mode so you don’t make mistakes that bork your save file or kill you outright (taunting Vlaakith is one way to kill yourself via dialog). I died on my first honor attempt due to stupidity so take my warning to heart. My second run was much more careful and now I have the golden dice.
My first honor run ended when I forgot the hammer was on a different character, so I made bad dialog choices and got dominated by the Absolute for refusing to side with the emperor and kill Lae’zel.
Which was kinda dumb because I was all set to try sending Gale to his doom (gotta just finish once at all costs). I’ve never done that before but I had to be five minutes from the end if it works, and the lack of big O or the form change wouldn’t matter in the slightest. Hell I could - head canon - go back to camp and pop the guy free afterwards. Oh well. I’m back to the point of starting A3 now. These acts are so long… I have a ridiculous number of hours played and only finished the game once.
What gift? Not getting what specific part you’re talking about. Anyway, like other have said even a honor path of life will some mistakes during their life. You should move on with your playtrough.
It is when the >!Emperor offers to enhance the power provided by your tadpole by advancing you one stage further in ceremorphosis. You get access to the outer ring of illithid powers but your character’s face also becomes partly pallid and broken, and your eyes get black sclera (if they didn’t already have it. It’s more noticeable on a human or elf than a Dragonborn, though.!<
Gale is sus as fuck at first. He’s too charming. My first thought was “this dude’s hiding something…” and I mean… I was right. It just wasn’t about being evil. I never trust a character that’s immediately nice when everyone up to that point has been a jerk.
I know this is going to be painful to hear for a 100gb game but have you tried reinstalling the game? I had an issue on PS5 when the game first came out that only went away after a reinstall. I don’t believe there is a setting to disable the narrator voice.
I tried but all I got was a message that they are very busy and I should look on the forums. The forums don’t really have any good help pertaining to Xbox yet. Seems like there were a lot of audio issues on the PC version, which is all the information I can find.
Can you elaborate on the tempest cleric/sorc/abjuration wizard playstyle? Sounds interesting but I haven’t dabbled much with wizard much so I’m a bit confused how you’d play this one
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