I’m playing the new difficulty and its great. If you fuck up there is no way back except to your last save. You can’t even quickload. I don’t think it’s more difficult than tactician so far but I’m still in act 1.
I think I read somewhere that it is but don’t quote me on that. The biggest reason I’m playing it is because if you beat Honour Mode you get golden dice.
Do you have karmic dice on? On the lowest difficulty with karmic dice the enemies tend to hit and crit more often since they get the same +hit you do. Turning that setting off will make your rolls more random which means you can have good and bad streaks but the enemies are less likely to crit you every other hit.
Those three fights are the “big ones” in act 1, probably as hard as the goblin camp, what level were you when you did them?
The easiest difficulty make combat a faceroll (which is a great way to experience the story, if that’s your primary goal); balanced makes you care about what level you are for the encounter, positioning, and your party make-up; Honour makes you think about terrain, party make-up, item use, damage types, and resource management.
Your ranged characters shouldn’t be close enough together that they can be hit with an AoE, and ideally, they are somewhere that gives advantage.
:::spoiler Party make up Shadowheart is mean and stupid, and she’s also easily replaced as long as anyone else in the part has “Guidance”. :::
I think I was level 3 for the church and level 4 for the other two fights.
:::spoiler party I mainly carry Shadow because of the Guidance and I want to try romancing her (so I can build up the approvals) but otherwise my paladin Tav can heal as well. I might try switching her for Lae’zel or Karlach. :::
To be fair those are definitely the toughest fight in Act I. I’ve only played on balanced, so I can’t vouch for story mode. I would highly recommend adding Lae’zel or Karlach to your party though. This is a good idea.
I’m on my first honour play though, just hit level 11, and my party is the same as yours, but swapping the person who is stupid and mean for the second person you mentioned.
It might be a matter of changing battlefield positioning, or focusing on “action economy” if you’re not already. Unless you are doing an AoE, someone with concentration needs to be interrupted, or there is an odd mechanic, it’s best to kill enemies one by one. That means one less person is attacking you each round, and this advantage grows each person you kill off.
Make your paladin a 2h smiteadin with a bard dip for college of swords maneuvers. Yes bring karlach and laezel and all 3 of you single-target 2h shredder your way through the enemies.
Assassin astarion is a monster and can usually sneak attack kill targets in one shot. Especially if you go the ranged route and add the extra base damage from that one ranged feat.
Once gale has fireball you can trade him out for astarion and just huck those things around as much and as often as you can and rest every time he’s out. He’s also really good at magic missile spam with those electricity items.
Most importantly, you should always prioritize killing one enemy at a time so that you’re quicker to remove them from the turn order and prevent them from doing damage on their turn. Basically never split damage with your single target party members.
::: spoiler Just south of the druid grove there’s a hill you can climb up that has an amulet that gives Guidance. If that’s your only reason for including Shadowheart, that might be a good alternative. :::
If you are going to keep Shadowheart, I’d recommend respeccing her to switch subclasses (I’m a fan of Tempest cleric, but there are several good options) and fixing her stats (like choosing either STR or DEX rather than splitting both).
Make her a vengeance paladin. She’ll hit like a truck and can still heal. Also thematically she’ll still have the sharran choices as she is identified as a paladin of shar (the only one in the game).
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
Shart is your first romance, when your options are her (who is more or less ambivalent towards you at first) or the frog (who fucking despises you). Of course people pick her while they don’t know about Mommy Karlach.
Second playthrough you know there is someone better waiting for you out there!
The player has the option to either ask Halsin to stay in human form, or let him get his furry paws all over them; 66% of players asked for the former.
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