[Baldur's Gate 3] Reject Tradition, Embrace Bonus Action Healing Potion

Romanian My Escutcheon

Baldur's Gate 3 is out! It is a game that is basically D&D 5th Edition, except it made Jump a viable method of movement that does not require high level algebra, makes shoving people a viable combat action, and most importantly allows you to drink an entire bottle of healing Kool-Aid without requiring you to focus entirely on quaffing it for six uninterrupted seconds.

Borrowing from 3cl1ps3's IP from the last thread:

3cl1ps3 wrote:

It's huge, it's horny, it's the most anticipated CRPG of the year, it's Baldur's Gate 3 baby.

Please make judicious use of spoiler tags as the game is still very new!

later, but important edit: The Dark Urge and a regular custom character are not the same thing. I'm mentioning this because I imagine at least one other person will be a silly dingus like I was and not realize they're separate options that are just located in different places on the character creation UI for no apparent reason, and I don't want anyone else to have to restart after twenty hours after it gets pointed out to them.

Darmak

This game is so goddamned pretty. Couple screenshots of my Dark Urge and Minthara:

Morninglord

I don't want to change any characters into out of character modified versions of themselves via Withers in my first playthrough for roleplay reasons. I'd like my first introduction to them to make just a littttttle bit of sense.

This new shared stash bug is really shit though. Everytime I swap a character I get all their bags? Surely they don't think we care about those? Looking it up there's also apparently some critical bugs for some companion quests.

Quetzi

Yeah, I'm with you on the class thing

I've got kind of a short list for alternatives I'll do for each character on a replay, but even those I feel need to be at least somewhat plausible

Like Karlach could be switched to Fighter, Paladin, Druid, or maybe Warlock, but beyond that would be weird to me

Wyll is probably the most restricted by this logic, as he needs to be a Warlock kind of no matter what

Shadowhope

Minor act I spoilers regarding Mayrina:

https://twitter.com/MynJade/status/1706607279657923008?t=F8PpTifzhZjxZpdOmAMsGA&s=19

Shown: medieval styled art showing a woman who looks like Mayrina, with a zombie at the end of a rope behind her, captioned with “excuse me, this is my emotional support corpse.”

I am probably going to hell for laughing as hard as I did at this.

Brolo

Straightzi wrote: »

Yeah, I'm with you on the class thing

I've got kind of a short list for alternatives I'll do for each character on a replay, but even those I feel need to be at least somewhat plausible

Like Karlach could be switched to Fighter, Paladin, Druid, or maybe Warlock, but beyond that would be weird to me

Wyll is probably the most restricted by this logic, as he needs to be a Warlock kind of no matter what

I made

Karlach into a throw barb
Lae'zel into an empty fist monk
Astarion into a gloomstalker ranger/assassin
Shadowheart into a paladin
Wyll into a swords bard / swords warlock
Gale guarded the camp

Darmak

Brolo wrote: »

Straightzi wrote: »

Yeah, I'm with you on the class thing

I've got kind of a short list for alternatives I'll do for each character on a replay, but even those I feel need to be at least somewhat plausible

Like Karlach could be switched to Fighter, Paladin, Druid, or maybe Warlock, but beyond that would be weird to me

Wyll is probably the most restricted by this logic, as he needs to be a Warlock kind of no matter what

I made

Karlach into a throw barb
Lae'zel into an empty fist monk
Astarion into a gloomstalker ranger/assassin
Shadowheart into a paladin
Wyll into a swords bard / swords warlock
Gale guarded the camp

My current group is:

Dark Urge is an evocation wizard
Minthara is an open hand monk
Shadowheart is a life cleric
Astarion is a lore bard.

Lae'zel is the only party member I have back at camp, everyone else is dead or hates me and wouldn't join lol

Turns out that illithid powers and the special Dark Urge ability I recently got in act 2 really give me a lot of stuff to do in addition to spells.

Jars

my group right now is me as an infernal warlock, wyll as a druid of the claw, shadowheart as a light cleric, and karlach as an open hand monk. I might replace shadowheart with halsin, not sure he seems kinda dull.

Quetzi

I think my breakdowns would be

Astarion: rogue, ranger, bard, sorcerer, warlock, monk
Karlach: barbarian, paladin, fighter, druid, ranger, warlock
Lae'zel: fighter, monk, paladin, ranger
Shadowheart: cleric, paladin, monk, rogue
Gale: wizard, sorcerer, warlock
Wyll: warlock (but maybe multiclassed if you're into that)
Halsin: druid (but maybe multiclassed if you're into that)
Jaheira: druid, ranger, fighter, rogue, bard
Minsc: ranger, barbarian, fighter, corpse at the bottom of a well

Morninglord

Ok Wyll I'm replacing you with Karlach please don't give me all your bags you don't have anything in them I only put you in the party for this one short walk to go find her PLEASE DONT oh for fucks sake.

A Dabble Of Thelonius

First run was

Tav - Lore Bard
Karlach - Vengeance Paladin
Shadowheart - War Cleric
Gale - Evocation Wiz

This run

Durge - Thief
Astarion - Punchy Monk
Lae'zal - Battlemaster Fighter
Wyll - Warlock

Grey Ghost

Oh I hate the shadow cursed lands

Veldrin

So is the inventory thing a glitch or was there a reason they made this change? Because hoo boy it’s pissing me off.

WiseManTobes

Ya on my runs passed the first, My shadowlands tactic is now

Immediately follow to Last Light, do Isobel event, save her, immediately do ambush for Moonlantern, set Pixie free. Then can do rest of Shadowlands at leisure without worrying about the shadow crap

Brolo

It seems like it was meant to fix one problem of being able to "lose" quest items, but then created a whole bunch of other problems as the game is lumping all kinds of unrelated crap into the quest items category.

Romanian My Escutcheon

So far I've tried to keep everyone in their original classes so my first run is as close to what I assume was the intended design, but I have not hesitated to fuck with everyone's choice of subclass.

That said, I think Astarion is the only one who ended up not getting his first pick of subclass. He started out as Arcane Trickster, then got swapped to Thief when I realized he was basically useless as a caster in a party that usually included Gale, Shadowheart, or Wyll.

Darmak

WiseManTobes wrote: »

Ya on my runs passed the first, My shadowlands tactic is now

Immediately follow to Last Light, do Isobel event, save her, immediately do ambush for Moonlantern, set Pixie free. Then can do rest of Shadowlands at leisure without worrying about the shadow crap

My durge run through the shadowlands is going very differently than my first run

I killed Isobel so I could get the reward from my butler. Meaning everyone else in Last Light died. Jaheira managed to survive and I didn't want her in my party to see all the other fucked up shit I'm going to do, so I told her to go ahead and go to Baldur's Gate.

I feel real bad, because I really liked Isobel and Jaheira in my Tav run, but my new jimjams are pretty sweet

Shadowfire

Well I started down the path with mods. Because someone made a mod that makes whatever weapon you Bond with gain the thrown attribute.

Greatsword hurling is back on the menu, boys!

Grey Ghost

I never had this happen before the patch, but now if a conversation starts after combat it defaults to whichever of my party is closest to the character talking to us - not, you know, my super high CHA main character

WiseManTobes

Instead of splashing eldritch for cantrip shenanigans, just make your wizard a gnome and throw them at enemies after the greatsword

Coinage

Grey Ghost wrote: »

I never had this happen before the patch, but now if a conversation starts after combat it defaults to whichever of my party is closest to the character talking to us - not, you know, my super high CHA main character

It's always done this, it's pretty annoying.

Morninglord

I specced Karlach into a throwing build with tavern brawler and a couple of throw damage boosting items. She threw a pair of boots at a tanked up paladin with enraged throw, dealing half his life worth of damage and knocking him down long enough that she smacked him to death afterwards on the same turn.

They were her own boots.

Way more fun than Gale.

edit: Just had a fight where I'd toss a sword in my inventory, kill a guy, walk up to him, pick up his weapon, throw it at another guy, etc. Just running around grabbing whatever I can to throw. Heaps of fun!

Drascin

I think the only companion change I made was changing Shadowheart's subclass - I wasn't getting a lot of use out of Trickery and honestly given that she's offficially On The Warpath after the Act 2 bullshit, shifting her to War Cleric has ended up excellently serendipitous, really.

The Zombie Penguin

I'm full on the change everyone's classes train myself.

This run is currently Sword Bard Astaraion (i just couldnt stick to rogue, Sword Bard is so much damn fun), Land Druid Shadowheart, Storm Sorcerer Gale (i'm comiting to the bit, he does not know Fireball at all, all his offensive spells are stormy), and Battle Master Fighter Lae'zael.

Wait a minute, lae'zael's what youd expect anyway!

Previous runs have included Tricked Out Gloomstalker/thief/fighter Astarion with double crossbows and Throwbarian Lae'zael.

Morninglord

Throw barbarian item location spoilers

So I missed out on the only return to sender throwable in Act 1 (permanently, as far as I can tell, the vendor is dead). No takesy backsies, I killed him roughly a million hours ago by potshotting him at the edge of the goblin camp and deciding afterwards to come back later. Unless you can somehow resurrect a vendor and buy from them it's gone.

As far as I can tell the next one isn't for a good long while so I've just been stocking the hell up on javelins and sending them all to Karlach. She has like 20 of them atm. I pick them up after combat while looting. It's not too annoying. If in doubt of hitting something, I throw a random other weapon picked up off the ground. I also charge in and smack things because, I mean, she can still do that just fine.

The whole thing has led to a real procure on site mentality that I really liked about Metal Gear Solid 3 and certain survival missions in MGSV, so I'm actually all over this. I'm sure I'll get tired of it eventually, but I assume I'll find that other one later. I didn't look up exactly how to get it. In my heart of hearts I kinda hope I miss it and just have to carry around javelins for the rest of the game and throw a random goblin sword at the last bossses head to finish him. We'll see. That's why I haven't looked up how to get it. I'm playing TOTK in BG3!

Brolo

throw barbs can also toss barrels of oil/smoke powder to great effect, just make the surface is on fire first

The Zombie Penguin

Yeah, the boosts to throwing damage stack up to such a degree you can easily get away with just throwing random junk to dramatic effect.

Or random people to dramatic effect, goblins are shockingly effective projectiles.

Morninglord

I threw a javelin and it hit for 80 damage, that's silly!

Brolo

In keeping with Baldur's Gate 3 changelogs in general, this one has attracted a landslide of people complaining that the specific bug they're grappling with hasn't been addressed. Above all, Baldur's Gate 3 players are up in arms over one of Patch 3's grander additions - a shared stash feature whereby party members will dump their entire inventories on you when you dismiss them.

Larian have this to say on the subject: "We continue to look at your feedback, and are preparing additional hotfixes for issues you’ve reported. This includes an issue with shared items when dismissing companions, which we are aware of and looking into."

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/baldurs-gate-3-hotfix-7-released-larian-looking-into-shared-stash-complaints

The Zombie Penguin

Morninglord wrote: »

I threw a javelin and it hit for 80 damage, that's silly!

Crit? Or something else? Because that's pretty excessive! Though Tavern brawler does in fact get that level of wacky sometimes.

It is amusing to me that properly built martials in this game are ridiculously dominant. Casters can do some shit, but they definitely can't keep up with the brutal, brutal single target damage that martials are putting out.

Quetzi

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

Morninglord wrote: »

I threw a javelin and it hit for 80 damage, that's silly!

Crit? Or something else? Because that's pretty excessive! Though Tavern brawler does in fact get that level of wacky sometimes.

It is amusing to me that properly built martials in this game are ridiculously dominant. Casters can do some shit, but they definitely can't keep up with the brutal, brutal single target damage that martials are putting out.

How would you put together an all-beef party? Like, no primary casters, what do you think the setup ought to be?

Muzzmuzz

At the beginning of Act 3

Not looking forward to the whole ‘we don’t want refugees in our city’ thing. It better get resolved soon, because very few games can pull that particular storyline off without sounding preachy or having unfortunate implications.

The Zombie Penguin

Straightzi wrote: »

The Zombie Penguin wrote: »

Morninglord wrote: »

I threw a javelin and it hit for 80 damage, that's silly!

Crit? Or something else? Because that's pretty excessive! Though Tavern brawler does in fact get that level of wacky sometimes.

It is amusing to me that properly built martials in this game are ridiculously dominant. Casters can do some shit, but they definitely can't keep up with the brutal, brutal single target damage that martials are putting out.

How would you put together an all-beef party? Like, no primary casters, what do you think the setup ought to be?

Fighter and Monk for sure as your first two.

Fighter as a pure fighter, no multiclassing. Use and abuse respecs to let you dump STR and drink hill/cloud giant elixirs. Then Great Weapon Fighting, Savage Attacker at four, Great Weapon Master at Six, Mobile at eight. Whatever you feel like at 12, athlete being a strong choice for giving you insane jumps, but there's probably better options. Battlemaster is the obvious play, as Meancing Attack & Trip Attack are potent support options, While Riposte let's you convert your excellent heavy armour AC into counter attacks.

Ideally, make them a Githyanki - free 1/day Misty Step + the best legendary greatsword is just too hard to give up on if you're super optimising
Bonus points if you can get the ith powers are bonus action on them - GWM will let you get extra attacks as a bonus action sometimes, but being able to Force Tunnel/perilous stakes/black hole as a bonus action is huge vs one extra attack (even if said attack hits like a Mach truck).

Monk would be the bullshit Open hand 6/thief 4, last two your choice (more monk or Fighter are both fine). Tavern Brawler & wis stacking, make sure to have solid Dex just for the initiative.

No real idea on best race here, you have so many options. Wanna get stupid? Astarion and take the no good evil option - that's an extra 1d10 necrotic on every attack, and you make so so so many attacks. You'd be looking at melee attacks that are
1d6 bludgeoning, +21, 1d10 force, 1d0 necrotic, 1d4 psychic/radiant +5 once you've all kitten out

You make a minimum of 4 of those per turn, usually six per turn, and can nova this up to ten.
(turn 1, haste pot + wholeness of body. Turn 2: you now have 2 full actions and three bonus actions.).

This puts your base damage at 300, assuming everything hits, you never crit, and don't have resistance/vulnerability to anything. Your actual damage is "oh fuck off"

Anyway, This gives you your bullshit front line damage - The fighter will be more support until improved extra attack kicks in. These two will also have excellent AC and solid saves, though there's a strong argument to give the fighter the Risky Ring.

From there... I would have said Sword Bard, but since no primary casters, Gloomstalker 5/thief 4/champion 3 dual wielding hand crossbows. Give them Sharpshooter asap and go nuts on simply chainsawing things down with bolts. This also gets you some nice support spells - longstrider and Spike Growth are excellent

Final slot: this is actually a pretty hard choice. The ideal would be a sorcerer to act as a twin cast haste bot (haste the monk and Gloomstalker, the fighter can just drink speedpots), but that's right out.

Throwbarian is very solid, but it's going to run into the issue of injuring your teammates with the legendary trident. Also three characters needing to chug Hill/cloud giant potions is going to stress your resources immensely, and involve a lot of very boring long rest spam in act 3 - there's 3+ shops that can sell cloud giant fingers/elixirs, but none of them are garunteed. If you can stomach the partial rest spam, this is probably the play though - you just get so, so much damage out of Cloud Giant Tavern Brawler that leaving it on the table is foolish

Paladin is also tricky, as it's competing for a lot of the same resources that fighter wants (heavy armour, good 2-handers).

A flexible rogue could work, or a dex fighter/rogue hybrid. Honestly, just going for a second battlemaster fighter, but building them for Dex and longbow/rapier use is probably the play - eventually you'd pick up the legendary raiper + legendary longbow for them, and battlemaster manuvers still work at range. You could go Rogue and go hard on sneak attacks with crit stacking as well - there's enough sources of +crit while obscured to make this pretty workable.

I'd prefer the second fighter because of extra battlemaster manuvers and the flexibility that extra attack gets you, but it's very much as up to you type thing. Also just the synergy of having 3 characters who get their resources back on short rests is really, really good.

Caveat: once this party gets rolling (post 5-6, and especially post 8-9), all challenge in the game will cease. The only thing that's going to be remotely hard is swarm type fights, and those can be beaten with spike growth. And the stuff that can challenge you - running out of hill giant/cloud giant - is just very boring to solve, you won't be being asked interesting questions

Quite seriously it'll be "monk runs up to this group, everything dies from flurry of blows, fighter swords that group, Gloomstalker chainsaws down that group, etc".

So there you go. teambeefstake, ready to crush the world and grind it beneath their booted heel

The Zombie Penguin

Also now I've described all that: please pick something more interesting to do than playing that sort of team.

Or set yourself challenges like "I have to win the fight turn 1 or I reload".

Quetzi

Those were mostly my thoughts as well. I was looking at great weapon focused paladin, shadow monk or monk/rogue, battlemaster longbow fighter, and crossbow gloomstalker as my general setup.

I probably won't actually play it, and I certainly won't have it perfectly optimized if I do, because that's just not how I go generally.

My party choices would be probably Lae'zel as the paladin, Shadowheart as the monk, Tav I guess as the fighter (archery battlemaster also feels like a good Jaheira role once you get her, but that takes a bit), and Astarion as the gloomstalker. Which is too close to my current party anyways, so it's definitely not one I'd play anytime soon.

Brolo

Yeah, i'm not sure if

(Monk 6 / Fighter 3 / Rogue 3) or (Barb 5 / Fighter 4 / Rogue 3)

ultimately has the highest damage output, but Tactician difficulty can't really can't keep up with either in Act 3.

With some setup on turn 1, and blowing through all your resources for turn 2:

final boss spoilers
Monk

Flurry of Blows does 46-80 damage and you could do it 6 times per round (haste + action surge + fast hands + wholeness of body)

1d6 bludgeoning
+ 8 strength modifier
+ 2 wisdom modifier
+ 8 strength modifier (tavern brawler)
+ 1d4 + 2 radiant (mainfestation of soul)
+ 1d10 force damage (soul fist)

probably could stack another 2-8 damage per attack on there with aura buffs, and could increase the wisdom mod to +5 on top of that if I stacked stat points in wisdom and cut strength (solely relying on the elixir for strength for the day), and then + 2 with the ring that does extra damage to illuminated creatures

but for now it's
23-40 per punch, with 2x punches using Flurry of Blows, 6x in one round

somewhere around 375 damage in a round

Barb

with Haste and Mind Sanctuary + Elixir of Cloud Giant Strength:
10 attacks per round (5 actions with haste + fast hands + action surge, each doing 2 throw attacks, using mind sanctuary to use bonus actions as regular actions)

1d6 piercing
+ 3 Nyrulna
+ 8 strength modifier
+ 1d4 + 1 piercing (rage)
+ 1d4 + 2 piercing (rage)
+ 2 acid (malefic ring)
+ 8 damage (tavern brawler)
+ 1d4 + 1 bludgeoning (rage) (tavern brawler)
+ 1d4 + 2 bludgeoning (rage) (tavern brawler)
+ 3d4 thunder

(i feel like the game is double dipping on some damage sources, I'm not really sure how some of these repeat this often)

34-60 damage per throw

somewhere around 470 damage in a round, not factoring in the splash thunder damage

there's also some calculation for crushing damage based off of elevation/weight of object? but I have no idea how to reliably calculate that

none of this includes crit bonuses, monk lae'zel can crit on an 18, throw barb karlach on a 19

someone good at role playing check my math on this, my family is dying

there are probably specific circumstances and builds where you could eke out even more damage

Shadowfire

Meanwhile, me, an intellectual: SWORD GO IN OTHER MAN HAHA

Y'all are playing a completely different game.

The Zombie Penguin

Shadowfire wrote: »

Meanwhile, me, an intellectual: SWORD GO IN OTHER MAN HAHA

Y'all are playing a completely different game.

Yeah I've done the super optimised playthrough and beyond than annoying this thread with some of the repeated posts, it really does stop being fun past a certain point

That game was Monk/Barbarian/Gloomstalker/Wizard.

I think the therotical best "why." Party is Monk/Fighter/swordbard or Gloomstalker/haste bot sorcerer, but also see:

Why.

There's absolutely nothing in the game that needs that level of tactical optimisation. At all. And while it's fun for a few fights in act 3, it rapidly turns everything and anything into a joke.

Brolo

i do kinda wish there were a few bonus fights that made min-maxing worth it

but for the most part the game does not seem like it was balanced around multiclassing, and that's honestly for the best

i think I would have just homebrewed some fun stuff to make most classes level 12 unlock some big capstone skill/spell, instead of just being a third feat, which would have made hitting the max level feel a little more significant

The Zombie Penguin

Brolo wrote: »

i do kinda wish there were a few bonus fights that made min-maxing worth it

but for the most part the game does not seem like it was balanced around multiclassing, and that's honestly for the best

i think I would have just homebrewed some fun stuff to make most classes level 12 unlock some big capstone skill/spell, instead of just being a third feat, which would have made hitting the max level feel a little more significant

I think honestly 5e as a whole just doesn't cope with multiclassing. It's not a resilient system to players like myself who are somewhat compulsive on our optimising. Even single classing is balance is deeply questionable - just Bards, lol. Who looked at bards and thought they were a good idea. "They're a jack of all trades! Except that they're only very slightly behind the do this one thing really well classes". And then they got magical secrets... which yeah. Just yeah. Steal the unique and powerful Ranger/Paladin only spells before they can even get them. Fill holes in your spell list from any class!

I love bards when played seriously instead of a joke, but they're a ridiculous class on a bunch of levels.

The game just doesn't have enough levers to pull that players can't game excessively.

3cl1ps3

Brolo wrote: »

i do kinda wish there were a few bonus fights that made min-maxing worth it

but for the most part the game does not seem like it was balanced around multiclassing, and that's honestly for the best

i think I would have just homebrewed some fun stuff to make most classes level 12 unlock some big capstone skill/spell, instead of just being a third feat, which would have made hitting the max level feel a little more significant

The game in general is just not balanced towards 5e minmaxers even on Tactician. I played it relatively straight with zero multiclassing and not even really going for cheesy builds and was still just roflstomping lategame encounters due to item scaling + the stronger consumables like poisons and Potions of Speed.