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.
How did you enter the church? You can sneak in the right hand side and avoid two of the fights. You only have to fight the skeletons (which you can disarm).
Also you can talk your way out of the first fight at the church. Or you can kill half the guys there by shooting the giant block hanging over their heads.
Don’t be scared of combat, just use quicksave liberally until you feel more confident. There is almost always a shortcut or easy way out of combat in BG3. My current run i’m trying to solo tactician so you gotta skip as much as you can. I’m at several hundred hours in the game so if you have more specific questions don’t hesitate to ask.
Are you using the terrain to your advantage? All of the fights you described getting wrecked at can become a breeze just by using the environment to your benefit.
Fights solutionsDuring the fight against the skeleton mages before Wither’s coffin, don’t try to fight them in the giant open room, go into Wither’s room and wait for them to come to you while throwing some grease on the stairs before. Have your ranged characters take potshots at them and run back into the room. Same exact strategy for paladins of Tyr, lure them out of the house while dropping nasty surfaces on the exit. Hyenas you want to try to nuke before they turn/run for help, your paladin has Smites for that and Astarion can work his sneak attacks.
General tipsWizards are absolutely busted when paired with melee characters even early game (they only get more and more insane as they gain levels). Sleep is your best friend. Guaranteed hit + critical is lethal when used with a Smite or Sneak attack. Hold Person is a near guaranteed kill on a target if it lands, especially if you have a Hasted melee. In general, your spellcaster’s job is crowd control and AoE damage. Shadowheart’s default Domain is pretty meh, I always respec her into Light for way better spells and abilities. As a paladin, 99% of your spellslots should be spent on Divine Smites. Your spells are generally pretty weak (Heroism is pretty good early game), while Smites are absolutely insane. Potions of Haste are crazy powerful early game, use them on your Paladin whenever you are in a tough fight. Wear good armor/shields, Gale can use a shield with no penalties so slap one on him for free +2 AC. The most important advice is action economy is king. Use any means available to deprive enemies of their actions. Line of sight, surfaces like grease or web, crowd control spells. Make them waste an action to Dash to you while you wait for them with a Fireball ready.
I wouldn’t say wrong - but there’s probably some nuance you’re overlooking. As a general rule healing is not super strong in D&D so you may want to forego having a dedicated healer, you also might want to focus on “control” spells that can either take an enemy out for a few turns or otherwise minimize their threat.
With exceptions… I busted healing with speccing Shadowheart as a life domain cleric and picked up some gear along the way - would not have made it through the game without my dedicated healer.
There are certainly some play styles that are less risk averse. I found wizards to be difficult to play early on, sorcerers less so, but still swishy without the right multiclass.
A fighter or barbarian makes fights much easier. It’s not that you don’t have a good front line, but shadow does no damage, astarion can’t really do his thing as a rogue yet, and gale is just weak early on. Can’t say much about paladins, but kitted out right should get you somewhere.
Personally, I’d swap gale out for someone like laezel. Or get a hirling and spec them out.
Fun fact, you can change the difficulty to balanced, make your multiclass, and then change back to explorer if you want. It’ll keep.
Take a look at some guides for your character types. You might be doing a bit more role playing and not enough combat specing. I mean not everyone in Faerun can hold their own with a goblin or giant spider. So make sure you’re not making all the wrong choices by mistake.
Also, I got wrecked in a few battles of Act 1 as well. Anytime I fight Githyanki I’m thinking, “Well, there goes half my health potions and revive scrolls.” Don’t be afraid of save scumming and don’t be afraid to stack the deck in your favor. Long rest, drink elixirs, apply buffs, strategically place exploding barrels, and summon familiars if you expect a hard battle. And unless you’re fighting a “boss” or an enemy that has lines of dialogue don’t get concerned about pushing things off cliffs. With most you’re not permanently losing good gear.
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).
I found “similar enough” looking models from Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniature Line and the Vulkyn Flameseekers from Warhammer’s Warcry.
Considering one was a bearded human bard and the other was a half-elf with a pony tail, I was lucky to find a bard with a beard and pony tail combo blister that could work for both (converting one with the signature crossbows), then I just picked a random sorceress from the line and replaced a Dwarf’s axe with the everburn blade. With a similar enough paintjob people dismiss all the indiscrepencies like one would a cold reading.
Running with Astarion as my main, this made the goblin camp super fun. Used Gale’s cat familiar to draw goblins out one at a time, then ambushed them. None of them could bang on any of the drums to cause the camp to turn on me, but I just slowly picked off one goblin at a time and dropped them here. I’d like to imagine the goblins started noticing their missing friends and panicking about a vampire. By the time I dealt with the three bosses, there were maybe 6 goblins left in the camp (immune to being lured by the cat). Fun RP ;)
I think I killed everyone at the camp, but I messed up the Dishonored style you got up to, and instead butchered my way through them. Who are the 3 bosses so I know I got em all? There’s the barbarian guy, and the M lady who leads them (kinda of an oops here I go killing again moment) who’s the third?
Yeah I think it was a Nature check. She assures you it’s a sedative to be under surgery, and then throws you in prison and says you’re not a True One. (Because a true one would embrace the worm not ask for it to be removed)
It’s so interesting seeing the prison in the warg pit with the chests that you know are meant for player gear during a prison escape sequence. And wondering how in the hell a player gets imprisoned in the goblin camp. Now I know :)
That’s brilliant! Such a better idea than I had, which was just to attack them from the rafters. Well, actually I hid in the rafters and used mage hand to open the spider cage door. But the spiders didn’t come out at all during the fight. When the fight was over and I went to close the spider cage door, then they decided to come out and fight, so I had to face them with very low health and spell slots. I did triumph in the end though.
I know this is a late response, but I had this occur on my druid. If you go into wild shape and equip a weapon this happens. You have to go back into wild shape to unequip the item.
I’m not a druid though. Nothing worked. Yesterday I jumped off a cliff to my death, and then had a companion resurrect me at Withers and that finally fixed it. Thanks for the suggestion!
Also, you can’t access items in a bag without an action if you’re in combat. So, you can hand a potion to a teammate if it’s in your main inventory, but not if it’s in a bag.
That technically matches RAW 5e behavior (unless it’s a bag of holding or similar), but should be handwaved for a video game given that containers are necessary for inventory management.
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