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!
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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 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!
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 <.<
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
hardest fights act3
Nothing yet has compared to telling Gortash where to shove his deal, sorry Wyll. Only fight I’ve had to reload and prep. Helped being rested with all spells (and more lightning spells), but used a lot of consumables to win that one.
I am disappointed that Lorrakane wasn’t harder. It was a cool idea, but I think the AI needs to have him retreat and throw down some big spells not just rely on the rebuke damage as a deterrent.
Is that one in
act 3
the Audience Hall? I’ve never fought him there. Does seem it’d be pretty rough with the Steel Watch up.
That’s actually where I had the hardest time in the game, in that multiplayer run. We were tapped out after fighting him up top, and before I realized what she was doing, she started going downstairs instead of teleporting out. Had a hell of a time trying to find enough distance to escape to camp (Steel Watch was up, too).
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 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.
Go strength and tavern brawler hit like a truck 8 times per turn
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.
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.
A DC 30 check in the DMG is considered Nearly Impossible. If it seems unfair it’s because you aren’t supposed to be able to make the check unless the character is literally built for it.
All Charm does is grant Advantage (roll twice and take the best). This will make you more likely to roll a Nat 20, but won’t help you hit 30 otherwise.
That said if you do build for it you can get a +17 to +30 with the right buffs(+6 Cha Mod+4 Proficiency+4 Expertise+1d4 Guidance+1d4 Bless+1d8 Bardic Inspiration).
All Charm does is grant Advantage (roll twice and take the best). This will make you more likely to roll a Nat 20, but won’t help you hit 30 otherwise.
If that’s really what it’s supposed to do then the mechanic wasn’t working as I didn’t get advantage when the character was charmed.
If your character cast it and they failed their save you should be getting advantage. If you didn’t it might be worth making a bug report.
I got to the start of Act 3, but I kinda stopped because I found out a few things…
- I missed an Act 1 companion
- I learned you can respec companions (d’oh)
- Being a wizard who’s romancing Gale means too many wizards in my party (and I didn’t know I could maybe respec him…)
- I felt like I was only really “understanding” how best to play by Act 3 and I basically just want a do-over so things are less messy.
Oh no, you are showing the first signs of Restartitis. This disease is incredibly contagious and currently at epidemic levels in the CRPG community. Good luck my friend.
44 in one swing with a one-hander at level 6. Phalar Aluve is busted.
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’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…
