Baldur’s Gate 3 - Discussion Post #3
How are everyone’s stories coming along? Have you finished the game? If so how many times?
What tips, remarks or other things of note do you have that you want to discuss here?
As always try to keep things as spoiler free as possible.
Also should I do these posts more regularly (shows up on people’s feeds more and so has more traction) or like this is fine. Definitely don’t want to spam people.
Lucky rolls to you all!
After seeing an article about dark urge and how special it is I decided to give it a shot. I also read a comment on here saying romance between Shadowheart and Seluna's cleric MC is great. So I decided to combine those two things for my 3rd playthrough! ( i have yet to experience act 2 btw...think I have a problem)
I made a Seldarine drow with the idea being that she used to be bloodthirsty Lolth sworn but eventually she found Seluna and became her cleric, now she's trying to be better. I thought that worked well with heroic dark urge story I wanted and I get to experience the enemies to lovers relationship with shadowheart. Don't know if the way the story will unravel will validate my headcanoned backstory for her but so far I'm quite enjoying it.
This is also the first playthrough where I met Timber the squirrel, I didn't know he was in the game before this playthrough, I was kinda excited to meet him...yeah.
Im at the end of my durge run rn. My advice would be to not shy away from doing evil things despite what other people say about losing out on content. You really dont miss that much, and you get some pretty sweet cutscenes, especially if you commit to it. Plus, astarion and minthara will support you the entire way on your descent into darkness :)
You know I would do that if for nothing else than just for the sake of variety, but I'm such a coward >.> Just don't have the stomach for it lol. The idea of this messed up person redeeming themselves is appealing to me, I'm not doing 100% "goody two shoes" kinda character but more of a reluctant hero who's still bit of a dick. Maybe I'll start another playthrough where I play the way you're suggesting...I'll never experience act 2 at this rate <.<
Closing in on 100 hours and I still haven't finished the game lol. Could I? Yes. Will I? No. I'm exploring every nook and cranny and doing every damn quest I can. This game is just too good not too.
Yeah, it took me almost 150h to finish my first playthrough, and instead of touching grass, i started a new one.
I'm at 160 and just got to act 3.
I am at 120 and just started act two. You are fine.
80+ hours on my main playthrough and I’m wandering around the Shadowlands, just finished going through Last Light. I tend to be a completionist and have to explore every possible nook and cranny before moving on. Just a basic druid and keeping everyone else the same classes. There’s so many crazy-ass multi-classing options I’ve seen that I can’t but feel I’m not playing optimally, but it’s going ok. Thank goodness for the Magic Mirror though, my character looked ugly at first and it was really starting to grate on me given the total lack of PC personality.
I have a separate Dark Urge playthrough, but it’s so hard to go the evil route that I avoid doing it, 30+ years of RPG playing habits is hard to break.
You can resist your dark urge too. That has a fun ending too.
Just started a new playthrough with the mod that removes the party size limit - and damn, it's awesome not to have to choose. Of course it makes things a good bit easier, but to have so many more companion dialogues and so on... Wow, it really improves an already amazing experience.
Same here! Even on Tactican it's very easy with so many players on the field. So what I've done is reskill most of my characters and start to really have fun with it. I've utilized spells and manoeuvres which I previously had omitted for being too weak, buffs and debuffs I never would have considered for the action economy, more or less useless roleplay stuff, or simply some funny shenanigans. My battlefields are more colourful and playful than ever. It's not a tactical challenge for sure, but damn it's a lot of fun to play this way.
And all the banter :D That's almost the best part of having the whole band together.
I got to the start of Act 3, but I kinda stopped because I found out a few things...
I kicked Gale out of my party. His special needs were to much and I am a Githyanki Dragonborn Sorcerer myself, which is a pretty interesting combination, because you are able to wear medium armor and wield a sword.
Probably close to 40 hours now and ive just reached the goblin camp and im trying to plan how i want to deal with the goblins
Romance them
I'm fairly fresh into act 3, just did the shadowheart part and man, that was heavy.
Definitely gonna be doing a new play though with my opposite choices though.
I do gotta say, I'm enjoying the challenge of tactician but man does my lvl 11 monk suck and is just so squishy, anyone got any recommendations to strengthen her up to take more than 2 hits?
Multiclass into 3 levels of Rogue and pick the thief subclass for additional bonus action to dish out unarmed strikes like a mad man.
Yeah, I hit a wall I can’t overcome; Shadowheart or Karlach?
Karlach because she's hot....
I'll see myself out.
I chose Shart on my first playthrough because she was kinda nice? And Lae'zel and Astarion were both kinda dicks. On my next playthrough I'll try Karlach first, I think I'll fall in love immediately.
Lae'zel is a huge dick at first, but come act 2 and her romancing scenes and she tends to turn around. She's also a prime example of a character that has her pride but her respect for you makes her question her believes
I would go for Karlach but none of them want me.
Think my game is bugged because they both like me quite a lot but stuff doesn’t move forward
Might take halsins offer
Me too man, I've just barely made it to last light for the first time, and I've been going for shadowheart the entire way, but maaaaaaaaan, Karlach is so damn precious
Shadowheart easy, actual character growth and development. Karlach is so simple
Karlach, 100%, she starts to grow more in act 3 too, though shadowheart does the whole story.
44 in one swing with a one-hander at level 6. Phalar Aluve is busted.
I think I have around 200 hours and haven’t finished the game yet lol. First playthrough was with an evil drow warlock, but bugs with Minthara’s quest made me quit during act 3.
I’m now playing an evil dark urge (sorcerer dragonborn), and just started a parallel Githyanki Monk too (I would like this one to be a good playthrough, let’s see). I also have a gnome bard somewhere but I don’t have the time 😂
I just can’t stop myself from trying different things, and I love how the slightest change in conversations and choices can results in very different things and how the game accounts for almost every possibility, just love it.
It’s what keeps me entertained vs a regular story, where once I know how it progress I find it kind of boring to replay.
I just finished my first play through. My friend hosted and I joined. He wanted to go “good” on tactician difficulty. So, we did. It took us 25 days. We got a lot of the more difficult achievements out of the way.
Next time I’m hosting and we’re doing an evil play through. Larian killed it. One of my better purchases this year.
I've just finished the game on normal difficulty after about 90 hours, probably because it was a 'blind' playthrough so I managed to just never encounter more than the first 5 companions.
Have to say the ending was stylistically great but very WTF in terms of closure, even after the patches to extend the epilogue. It feels a lot like the Mass Effect 3 ending before they added the director's cut. And even then, the ROs are a lil buggy in terms of contradicting your previous conversations.
Everything leading up to that was really fun though. Maybe the real treasure was the magical artifacts we stole along the way.
I just started playing for the first time and did some of Emerald Grove and just completed the ruins near by that took me 5 hours. What an incredible game, I want to stop and talk to everyone. My first play through I’m trying to say and do things I actually think I would do since I created a custom character for the first go around.
Enjoy!! The game is huge. No need to rush it but you will have plenty of things to do.
Thank you!
I am over 100hrs and made it to the Last Light. Exciting. Really enjoying it.
Second playthrough, trying out dark urge and being evil. It's really hard, honestly. I've lost half of my beloved companions and slaughted some favourite NPCs. It feels really fucked up. Minthara better be worth it lol.
Despite the fact I tried to be a completionist in my first playthrough, I've still been discovering lots of things I missed. The biggest so far is that there was a massive amount of the creche to explore on the exterior. I missed that before and basically only went into the basement. I also last time missed that there were 2 mythrils, among many other smaller things.
I'm kinda in the same boat. I'm doing a second playground with a human Bard Dark Urge, named Dirge of course, and I'm having trouble going full evil. I'm picking every Bard and Dark Urge text when I'm given those options but I'm not going out of my way to be evil yet.
Close to 200 hours and I'm still in Act 2. Even with all the patches and hotfixes, my game is still crashing all the time. I tried to play for a few hours yesterday and had to have over 10 crashes. Sometimes it crashes even when I'm loading into the game. My wife has an almost identical setup and experiencing just as many crashes, but she's running two campaigns side by side, good and evil, and is currently in Act 3 with both.
Still fucking love this game tho!
It's not like my rig is ancient either..
Getting rid of one of your cards would probably resolve most of your issues. SLI hasn’t been properly supported in a decade.
Starting my 2nd playthrough with a lolth sworn drow cleric(1) bard(11) build. Going dark urge, but resisting it.
I like the idea that through my character's relationship to an evil deity, they recognize the dark urge is something wholly other than Lolth's influence. So lawful evil in the sense that, "yeah I'll be evil, but not because you told me to."
My favorite thing so far had been Shadowheart hesitantly confessing she worships Shar, only for me to be like, "Oh that's nothing. Have you heard about our Lord and Savior, the Spider Queen?"
I have 180 hours. First playthrough was learning DnD rules and mechanics (I knew nothing about it before), I started on the easiest setting, got up to act 3 but I missed a lot of stuff and I wasn't satisfied so I restarted on normal.
I finished the game on normal, tho I rushed act 3 a bit because I wanted to see the end of the story. Then I started a dark urge run, still at the very beginning, I'll probably get additional 100+ hours by the end of it XD.
Fun for me to hear about experiences like yours. This was my first CRPG after years of TTRPGs. Out of curiosity, would you say you are more interested now in trying D&D as a tabletop experience?
I don't think so.
I mean, when I was a kid, personal computers didn't exist, we used to play some tabletops but they've never been my favorite form of entertainment, I find them too slow.
That's not to say I would never do it, if I'm in a group of friends and they all want to play it (so far it's been usually Risiko), I would join them, but I wouldn't look for it on purpose.
Recently finished my first playthrough. Played as Dark Urge, which was interesting but was probably better saved for a 2nd playthrough, but oh well. I kinda see what people mean about the game being weakest in act 3. At a time when I was starting to see the finish line, the game kept widening and it made me just want to be done with it. I still did a lot of the side content, but I also missed a lot more of it. It also got way too easy. The act 2 boss was the last fight that really threatened me with maybe the exception of Raph. And I wasn’t even min maxing my characters or anything. I’ve seen people build stuff with like a bajillion attacks or infinite spells, but I was just playing the game normally with whatever I found.
This was on normal. I know there’s a harder difficulty, but it’s weird that the intended experience basically lets you ignore most of the difficulty mechanics. I never had to think about long resting because I had basically Infinite food. The only reason why I wouldn’t just instantly do it after every fight was because the load screens would be annoying to sit through. By the end of the game I was hoarding bags and bags of unused consumables and like 50k in unspent gold, which I could have only spent on more consumables I didn’t need. I barely even used the extra powers you get in the finale. If there’s already a story difficulty for people who want to completely ignore the mechanics of the game, why can’t normal be balanced around being a reasonable challenge that makes you at least consider using the tools the game provides to you?
For anyone who’s played tactician, what’s it like? Is it a reasonable kind of challenge or is it more of a masochist difficulty?
Curious to know about tactician as well. I am still early in act 3 but the fights have become increasingly easier.
Is there even a way to change difficult mid play through? I haven’t checked tbh
You can change it at any time i think.
I was playing balanced and changes to tactician two days ago to see how it was. Was expecting to get clobbered, but actually it’s been going fine. The fights are tough, but it sorta quickly pushes you to pay more attention, examine enemies, think about positioning a bit more. The Grymforge fight was way larger than I had expected, and I decided to play it a bit, die and then reload, but I ended up beating it (although poor station did get treated into the lava, and I tested Nere in after him).
Anyway, so far I’m loving tactician, don’t think I need to shift back down. It uses up camp supplies more, both because the cost is 80, and I find that I need to long rest more frequently because I use my character resources up more fully in every engagement. I don’t foresee it becoming a situation where the supplies economy actually starts to become a pressure point, supplies are super prevalent, but it does make make me more “excited” to pick up and store all those wine bottles and mushrooms…
Caveat is you do have to be comfortable getting wiped in engagements, then reloading and trying a different strategy. I’m doing my first playthrough, so most encounters are unknown to me when they start, which means it’s easy to get caught in bad positions, etc.
I say try it if you’re curious—you can switch it back down if you find it frustrating with no downside.
I'm currently level 7 in my Tactician run, and much like Balanced, everything gets a lot easier when you hit level 5. Tav is one of the best starters (Bard) even if the rest of my party was kinda meh at low levels (Champion Fighter, Monk, CotL Druid). The martials are starting to take off now--especially the Monk--though I'm still not thrilled with the Druid. It's possible it would have been a little too punishing if I had a weaker party.
Now I still have 5k gold and probably still more food than I'll ever need (even with the 2x food penalty). I think ultimately food is what would have made the difficulty masochist level, but there's more than enough if you actually loot the scraps you come across. At that point it's all about whether you can handle a single fight with full resources or not, and I haven't come across one that's been too much (although maybe doing the hag at level 4 without Magic Missile was ambitious and I got a bit lucky). Hell, I just breezed through the fight against ::: spoiler Grymforge spoiler all the Grymforge duergar with Nere tagging along, :::
and that's one of the more difficult fights in the game. Smart tactics still matter, though. I just had that fight go spectacularly wrong in my Explorer difficulty multiplayer run with a friend where we decided to just range them from above. I tossed the Runepowder Vial without lighting it, figuring I'd have time, and they threw it right back and hit it with a fire arrow, killing one of my party on the spot and knocking the other into the lava.
Lol that reminds me. 2 of the hardest fights I had in my playthrough happened because I was a bit careless with my positioning and Shadowheart got yeeted off a cliff to her death right at the start of the fight. One was that same grymforge fight, the other was even funnier because it happened during the act 2 fight that’s relevant to her story.
Got shadowheart yeeted into lava in that fight, was hilarious but made it a fair bit harder than most for sure.
I have two campaigns at the same time, one solo, one with a friend. I am amazed how different the campaigns are. Moreover, by discussing with my other friends that play the game, I could play two or three more campaigns and there will be significant differences between the four of them. Per exemple, I have not played dark urge, broken oath paladin, no evil run (I have one but I wasn't evil enough). The replayability is surprisingly good.
I have not finished the game. I'm in Act 3 in one of the campaigns. One thing that help make the campaigns differents is to do the quests in different orders. It lead to unexpected changes.
First playthrough I didn't experience the Bulette burrowing away during a fight, but on second playthrough it does. I don't mind that on it's own but I'm wondering if it's broken or OP. I managed to get it low enough to put it to sleep. I figured one more round of attacks would finish it off but after one attack it woke up and burrowed away. Can it burrow as a reaction?
I've never tried this kind of thing before but a mechanic seems bugged. I had a tough persuasion check (30) and my character had only one bonus. Guidance wasn't enough to get me to 30 if I rolled a 19 so I looked for other options. I thought I'd get some kind of bonus if I charmed my target but it didn't help at all. I never use Charm for conversations so I don't know if that normally helps. Possibly the normal effect is negated because (avoiding spoilers) the outcome of the convo was very important to the plot. If that's the case it still seems unfair. Took me like 8 reloads to roll a Nat 20.
Also, venting a little, charming that character was only 1% easier than rolling a 20.
About 50 hours and just got my ass handed to me by Fist guy or whatever at the inn while most of my party had 1 HP left, so there's that. This is my first playthrough.
I'm on my 2nd playthrough, after ending my first abruptly in Act 2 (Someone here knows how that happens). Currently just hit Act 2 in my new game. Going on 458 Hours total. Think that includes OA time as well...
I'm having a really hard time playing my character different from my first playthrough. I >!killed Karlach so Wyll doesn't get horns!< and it feels so wrong that I'm thinking about going back to an older save.
I'm in act 2 on first playthrough, but I haven't touched it in weeks.
I guess I got bored of it.
Same. Although I don't think it was boredom so much as the daunting prospect of another sleepless night as I inevitably get sucked in after thinking I'd be able to play for just an hour. That and I overplayed Act I. Could have finished the story by now, but instead I played through 3-5 variations in act I
220h in, +/- halfway act 3 and still havent finished the game haha.
Like a few here i inspect every nook and cranny, do all quests i can do and read a lot of books and letters. Its amazing and very nice.
I did loose shadowheart and gale though ( oh no /s. Didnt like shadowheart anyway ).
I dont think i will do a second playthrough as ive seen a lot of stuff already, and dont want to go through it all again but i can understand some people do as there is still things to learn and see ( like the evil route )
