Minor spoilers follow. If you’ve never played Baldur’s Gate 3 before, you might want to consider not reading this post until after your first playthrough.
This post records some notes I made during a conversation with Real Angela.
Roughly half-way through the game, characters have the option to gain advanced powers. Of these powers, by far the most useful is Fly. The skill allows you to fly instead of walk/run to a destination. During combat, it’s quite useful to be able to fly over obstacles and difficult terrain. Fly doesn’t require any Standard or Bonus Actions.
However, there’s a price to pay. Gaining the advanced powers changes your character’s appearance.
There are those who say that the characters look more beautiful after they choose to accept the advanced powers. The appearance change doesn’t bother me. Real Angela doesn’t like it at all. And there are role-playing reasons why you might not want to accept these powers.
Here’s my list of alternatives to the Fly power from the advanced skills, assuming that you’re not using any mods. I won’t claim they’re better than Fly; for example, most of them use either a Standard or Bonus Action to accomplish what Fly can do with a mouse click.
- Potion of Flying. This isn’t hard to find; many vendors sell it. You can also learn to make your own. Using this costs a Bonus Action, and it lasts 10 turns.
I discussed in an earlier post how you can get a Potion of Flying to affect minions like Scratch. - Enhanced Leap, which triples a character’s jumping distance. It’s surprising how effective this is. Frequently an Enhanced Jump will take a character further than they could fly. It costs a Standard Action to cast, so consider the alternative…
- Potion of Glorious Vaulting, which is not hard to find and even easier to make than a Potion of Flying. It only takes a Bonus Action to drink one, as opposed to a Standard Action to cast Enhanced Leap.
- At level 2, Circle of the Stars Druids can choose Starry Form: Dragon. That gives flying at level 10. It only has half the range of normal flying, but that can be enough.
- Arrows of Transposition, which are easy to get from vendors. They do take a Standard Action to fire, but their range can be greater than a character’s movement. This may be especially valuable for characters with Extra Attack, since one arrow is just one attack.
- Familiars who can fly can do an awful lot that you’d want flying for. A Beast Master Ranger‘s Dire Raven is grand. Many classes can get the spell Find Familiar, which can summon a Raven. These have very few hit points and will typically be taken out in a single strike by an enemy. But if you think of them as one-shot Blindness spells, you can do a lot with them to inconvenience enemies.
- If I’m going to mention flying familiars, I should include Elementals, most of whom can either fly or teleport. They’re only available in the higher levels, and cost more to summon. But they’ll last all day or until destroyed. You may not be able to move across the battlefield, but they can!
- The jewel of them all: Misty Step, which teleports a character to any point they can see. It’s available as a spell, on scrolls, and some magic items.
- There’s a related spell, Dimension Door, that has a larger range and allows you to take another character with you. It’s more expensive than Misty Step, but worth it. (One strategy I keep forgetting: the “other character” can be an enemy. If you’re dueling and nearby enemies are making things difficult, teleport the two of you to a remote location and settle things one-on-one.)
- Grant Flight is at the end of this list because it’s the one with the least utility (though this list isn’t in any particular order). It’s a spell available to some spellcasters and can be found on scrolls. It lasts 10 turns, but it requires the one who cast the spell to Concentrate on it. Concentration is a limited resource (a spellcaster can only Concentrate on one spell at a time); there are much better uses for it than to give a character an ability that’s available via a potion.
I won’t claim than any of the above can fully replace the Fly ability. For one thing, they all require some preparation, ideally before the combat begins. Also, spells and abilities that enhance movement speed (such as Dash or Haste) will affect Fly, but not most of the options I list above.
Hey, if nothing else but Fly will do, you can always take Real Angela’s suggestion: Make your helmet visible in the character display, and have your character wear one of the many helmets that hide their face.
