Blog

Somehow I managed to get seven blog posts out of a single Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough.

In my defense:

• When I add up the word count for all the playthrough 11 posts (not including this one), I see I’ve written longer posts for previous playthroughs.

  

  You may not believe me, but the reason why the posts are so long is because of all the photos (and occasional video) I intersperse through the text. The text-only version of most of these posts wouldn’t even be long enough for a high-school essay.

  

• They demonstrate the layers that Larian Studios incorporated when designing the game. I write the posts because I like the game and want to enthuse about every new aspect I discover.

  

  There’s the issue of whether this game (or any other) is worth the amount of time I put into it. That’s a valid point that I will conveniently ignore for… wait, here’s a fun screenshot!
  

System

You’re in luck. We’ve come to the part that you love to skip: a discussion of characters’ system characteristics in the playthrough.

Before you agree with Big Huido and click away, I offer the following: This time around I’m not going to include lists of stats and items. That may make a system discussion more palatable for those not familiar with D&D. Give it a try and see if it’s interesting.

Karlach

At the start of playthrough 11, I decided that I’d have Karlach use a “punch drunk” build. It requires your character to drink alcohol frequently during a battle. It’s a build I used before:

The build doesn’t start happening until the middle of Act 2, because it relies on an item, the Punch Drunk Bastard, which is not available until then.

It worked fine until the end of Act 2. Then I decided to make a general strategy switch that affected the entire party: to use the Resonance Stone. That strategy focuses on doing Psychic damage, while adding some risk to an enemy’s mental attacks.

At that point, using the Punch Drunk Bastard became inferior to the many other weapons available in the game that inflict Psychic damage, such as the Shadow Blade. I switched Karlach to a standard Tiger Heart Barbarian:

It helped that I picked up BOOOAL’s Blessing for the entire party. Karlach got the enemy to bleed; everyone else found it easier to hit them.

The main long-term issue with using the Resonance Stone is that, as the game gets to its end, there will be many opponents that will take advantage of your vulnerability to mental attacks. For each of the members of the party, I tried to mitigate that. In Karlach’s case, it was the Fey Semblence Amulet.

Barbarians are powerhouses, and this was no exception. The only advantage of the punch-drunk approach is that it could damage all the enemies surrounding Karlach, while a Tiger’s Bloodlust attack could at most affect three enemies at once. But that mattered less as the game went on.

Verdict: Would play a Tiger’s Heart Barbarian again, no question. The punch-drunk build is nice for the novelty, but I don’t think I’d return to it any time soon.

Gale

Karlach had a “classic” build, and so did Gale. I made him a regular Evocation Wizard:

I made my usual modification with Feats and such so that he could hold two staffs at once.

His mental protection for the end-game was the Cerebral Citadel Armour.

I didn’t have the problem that I had in earlier playthroughs with Wizards, that of spell slots being too limited. I’ve learned how to handle it. (Scrolls help!)

Verdict: Would play again, no question.

Astarion

I went with a build I hadn’t tried before: the Bard Assassin:

The build, combined with lessons I learned from playthough 9 when I played him as a Gloomstalker Assassin, made this a highly effective build. I didn’t quite get to one-shot a dragon, but I got pretty close.

His method of avoiding the negative effects of the Resonance Stone was to be far enough away from it that it didn’t affect him.

Verdict: Once more, would definitely play again.

Shadowheart

The build I chose for her was the “bug zapper”:

In an earlier post I described the “zapper disaster” that arose from this build. As I said then, there are simply better builds for Shadowheart. It’s a nice novelty build, and might have been more amusing if I were using it for a solo run as in the above video.

To put it another way, this build was as funny as Shadowheart’s jokes:

Verdict: I wouldn’t try that build (or that joke) again.

Minthara

By the time Minthara joined the party, I’d discovered mods and learned it was possible to play as a Witch. As a Wiccan, I couldn’t resist giving it a try:

It was a decent build. However, the Witch class in its current state has some problems:

• The Witch class is only defined to level 12. This wouldn’t be a problem, except when in combination with the UnlockLevelCurve mod that lets characters go up to level 20. When the game tried to display the equivalent of “Do you want to go up one Witch level past 12”, it hung instead.

  The meant that every time the party leveled up to level 13 or above, I had to be careful with Minthara. I had to understand when the game would prompt to level her up as one of her other non-Witch classes (see the stats photo below), or would hang looking for a non-existent 13th level. I got through it, but I think I’d be inclined to play a Witch in a playthrough without the Level Curve mod. Hopefully the Witch mod will be revised to allow additional levels.



• Another Witch class problem: Their spells cannot be upcast. For the other spellcasting classes, if they can cast a Fireball (for example) as a 3rd-level spell, if they were able to cast fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-level spells in general, they could cast Fireball at a higher level and do more damage.

  Minthara couldn’t do that with any of her spells. One of her most useful spells was second-level. But as the game went on, that spell became less powerful compared to the enemies in the game because she couldn’t cast it at a higher level with more damage.

  The mod’s author says they’re working on this.



• In the case of the Frost Witch in particular, it “felt” too much like a typical Frost-based spellcaster.

  I know how to work with Ice/Frost/Arctic builds by now. The Frost Witch sub-class brought a few new spells to the table, but I had hoped for something different.

Minthara protected herself from the negative effects of the Resonance Stone by wearing the Cloth of Authority. Not only does she like to sit in dead men’s thrones, she likes to wear dead men’s robes.

Verdict: I definitely want to play a Witch again, but with a different sub-class so I’d have a more distinctive experience. That won’t be for a while, which may give the mod’s author a chance to remedy some of its problems.

The End?

We’ve come to the end of my write-up of playthrough 11.

But I’m not done with Baldur’s Gate 3 yet! My next post will be related to BG3, but not playthrough 11 specifically: I’m going to talk about using facial recognition software on the photos I took while playing the game.