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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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’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’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…
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?
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?”
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
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.
You can change it at any time i think.
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).
44 in one swing with a one-hander at level 6. Phalar Aluve is busted.
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.
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.
