Premise
The main difference with playthrough 9 is that I wanted to try Honor Mode for the first time (with mods). I try to play as different classes for each run, both to see how combat develops through the game, and to see if there are any class-specific events/dialogue. This time, I tried a Way of the Four Elements monk. Essentially Aang from “Avatar the Last Airbender.” All monks work best with unarmed combat, and have Ki points that regenerate on short rest. The most powerful monk subtype (Open Hand Monk) focus on using their Ki points to blitz several attacks, as well as stacking powerful buffs to build on each attack. In comparison, Four Element monks can use their Ki points for elemental spells like “fangs of the fire snake,” “water whip,” and more.
Monks are effective mostly due to the feat “Tavern Brawler,” which doubles your strength bonus when making an unarmed or throwing attack. This then stacks well with Elixir of Hill Giant strength, which brings your strength up to 21, so an elixired-up monk with tavern brawler does their damage roll PLUS an extra 10 damage (strength of 21 gives you a +5 bonus) every single strike. Given that most monks will be using their ki points to make extra attacks, this adds up very quickly. In fact, Open Hand Monks are one of the top builds for honor mode runs.
So of course, I wasn’t going to do that. Why would I make life easier for myself?
Four Element monks are arguably the weakest of the monk subtypes (maybe tied with Drunken Monk, but at least they’re funny). Most people go for the above build with tavern brawler/giant strength elixir/flurry of blows, but since my goal here was to roleplay an element-bender, it didn’t make much sense, because that would just make my 4E monk the equivalent of an OH monk with more steps in between. I wanted to save my Ki points to cast my element spells, and I put my feats into increasing dexterity instead. It made for a less powerful build, but it was more consistent in my brain for the role playing.
Fangs of the Fire Snake is the best 4E monk spell because it stacks with the extra attack at level 5. Since I was playing a firebender, I wanted her to have a burn scar across her face (Zuko-style) and ended up leaning more into the fire aspect, hence the name Azar.
Originally, my plan was to have an entirely elemental team. I wanted to control all elements with my Tav, but have her work as a team with a fire sorceress, a lightning cleric, and an ice druid. Theoretically, I wanted the elements to play off of each other, like an enemy getting frozen and then melted with fire, then be wet to take extra damage from lightning, then get frozen again, that kind of thing. In actuality, it did not work that way. The initiative rolls were all over the place and nothing made sense. Being wet made the enemy resistant to fire, lightning made the area hostile to any of my melee fighters, etc.
I ended up making mostly a fire team (Azar focused more on fangs of the fire snake), Shadowheart played a fire sorcerer, Karlach juiced up with her Soul Coins to do extra fire damage. So even though I did not choose ANY of the recommended honor run builds, it turned out fine.
Monk subclass
One of the things I like to do in playthroughs is to choose all the race/class specific dialogue. I figure it’s a way to get the reactions I wouldn’t get in other playthroughs. For this playthrough, in act 1, all the monk-specific dialogue had to do with peace and tranquility, calling out greed and cowardice, etc, etc. Sure, fine, that tracks. Then in act 2, monks get MEAN.
In one scene, you are involved in a battle where one member of another team gets killed in front of his friend Meygan. I found out in a previous playthrough that you can collect his sword from his fallen body, and later give it to her at the funeral to console her, which she appreciates. In this run, I found her crying at his grave, and intended to do the same thing. While that option did pop up, I noticed a monk-specific dialogue, and clicked on it. My monk then called her out on how she is being ruled by her emotions, and she needs to still them or we will all die.
Dude. She just saw her friend murdered right in front of her. I feel like it’s reasonable to be feeling some emotions, especially because she’s crying in a safe space, not over his body while the battle is still raging on. She also didn’t ask for a freaking opinion. She’s literally crying AT HIS GRAVE, like ten minutes after it happened. That’s just mean as fuck. When I tried to talk to her again to give her the blade, she just cried harder and the dialogue option was gone. I left the blade at her feet and walked away feeling like a jerk.
Hey monk, maybe inner peace doesn’t mean being an asshole?
That being said, there is a fun easter egg that made being a monk ENTIRELY worth it.
Hirelings
Since the goal was to be a ‘do not harm but take no shit’ kind of character, I named my hirelings Sivis, Pacem, and Parabellum, because I am a giant nerd that way.
However, I was not able to get a photo of them, due to the shenanigans that happened in this playthrough.
Honor Mode
So this is the first game that I tried Honor Mode. I did have some mods on, the vast majority of which were my usual QoL ones (faster movement, cosmetic mods, outfits, etc) but did have some that made it somewhat easier. For instance, I had the extra encounters mod turned on, which on one hand would carry higher risk of wiping, but on the other hand, got me more XP.
The biggest thing with Honor Mode is that there is only one save file, and you cannot go back on it. Even if you try to exit the game, it automatically saves before closing it, so no save-scumming. It means you can’t really take chances with the backup plan of “I’ll just reload.” I had to be careful about pickpocketing because if I got caught, I couldn’t just try again. Granted, I could just break my way out of jail, but that’s annoying. I also couldn’t take chances on dialogue choices that I hadn’t tried before, in case it wrote a check that my ass couldn’t cash.
What about fights? That would surely be the biggest risk, right? Well, yes, although I like fights. The big game change in HM is that boss enemies have Legendary Actions, some sort of special move or aura that affects the fight. Some allow all enemies within a certain radius to have an extra action. Some summon extra enemies upon taking damage at any point.
I also don’t like to read ahead and find out what the legendary actions would be. As a result, most of my boss fights started with the battle music beginning, me reading what the legendary action was, and then squawking in disbelief/outrage. I had to run from some fights, which I’ve almost never done before. HM runs end when your entire party dies (called a Total Party Kill), but if even one of them manages to run away and escape to camp, they can resurrect the others once things calm down.
The first time I nearly had TPK was early in the game, when I ran across the owlbear mother. She is already a fairly decent fight so early in the game, dealing massive amounts of damage, and raging halfway through. In Honor Mode, owlbear mom summons owlbear dad. Suddenly having TWO enraged owlbears, one of which enters the battle by launching off the top rope and knocking over my party, was one of those squawky moments. I managed to win the fight by sacrificing two of my party members to be constant die/heal cycle people, and my other two whittled away at the boss HP.
The second fight, the one that brought me the closest to TPK in all of my runs, was the Grym fight. I did not have a Fat Ass Owlbear to launch at Grym, so I figured I would use the forge itself to kill Grym, which I have done before. There is a certain rhythm and positioning to make the anvil into a weapon, but it depends on luring Grym to the right place at the right time. Except in honor mode, Grym has twice the movement that he otherwise has. Which means that he doesn’t stop on the convenient red X under the piano dangling by a thread. He runs right past it and double attacks the person who lured him. And there are a ton of lava mephits that fly around to do extra damage. And because the whole fight takes place on an isolated lava platform, you can’t just run away and escape to fight another day. Crap!
Luckily, I had left Lae’zel up top (since the lava platform is, wait for it, underground) to throw things at Grym if need be, and to be my backup plan of “run like hell.” So my three other characters were flailing around down on the platform trying desperately to deal damage at first, then just to survive, and then I just left two of them as extra crispy lumps down there. Lae’zel kept throwing things at Grym until she ran out of weapons and started throwing random shit. She was trying to outpace Grym killing the other teammate, since they still needed to lure him around the lava, so she ignored the lava mephits that kept spawning and spitting fire around her. Because of this, she kept chugging Speed Potions, which gave her an extra action per turn.
Finally she threw the killing blow (with a piece of leather armor, no less) just as the last teammate succumbed to Grym, leaving Lae’zel the only person left standing. She only had a few HP left, and the speed potion wore off, leaving her lethargic, meaning that she could not take any actions for a full turn. While she was burning in a puddle of fire. I frantically hammered the heal button trying desperately to heal her before the fire burned her to death and I ended up in a TPK. I succeeded in just the nick of time.
Romance
So, readers with a good memory (or those who have looked at Bill’s BG3 logbook) will notice that I have romanced everyone—some twice!—before romancing Shadowheart in her ‘light’ form in this one.
There is a reason for this. I’ve been dragging my heels on romancing Shadowheart because, quite frankly, I find her deeply unlikeable for most of the game.
Don’t get me wrong. I know many of them are. Gale is pretentious and needy, Astarion is a self-absorbed asshole, Laezel is highly abrasive, Wyll is boring, Karlach… well, we all have our favorites. But Shadowheart for me hits a lot of my personal pet peeve buttons.
She is deeply racist, right off the bat, against githyanki, duergar, etc. Like, literally her second sentence out of her mouth is to talk shit against Lae’zel. She makes a big fuss about you needing to respect her privacy while demanding to know everything about your choices and actions. She’s highly religious and makes sure EVERYONE knows it.
She worships Shar (and we all know how I feel about Shar) and somehow despite Sharrans being all about secrecy, she is openly very bitchy to Selunites. Any time we come across anything regarding Selune, she immediately makes a snarky comment (”Selunite idol, really? Are you in need of a paperweight?”) Even when a Selunite does us a giant favor in Act 2 (literally a save our lives level of favor), she makes a face and bitches about it. Then she has the absolute audacity to admit that she worships Shar like it’s some big reveal.
I have no idea how she was a successful trickery domain cleric. Freaking Austin Powers was a subtler spy than this.
I did romance her in playthrough 3, but that was Dark Justiciar Shadowheart, and I have made no qualms about the fact that I HATE that version of her. I will never romance that version of her again. I chose to stab her at the end of the game, with no remorse. This soured me on her romance, even though cognitively, I know that DJ Shart is her ‘worst’ form.
There is an extra layer to it for me in that everyone seems to LOVE Shadowheart. She is far and away the most popular female companion to be romanced (51.3% of playthroughs romanced her, according to Larian’s stats). The game makes it very clear that she is special. There’s even a tongue-in-cheek moment at the end of the game where she refers to herself as “God’s favorite princess.” The game offers special dialogue to check in with her that is not offered to any other companion, to the extent that she is much easier to romance than anyone else (except maybe Gale). It is very clear that she is The Favorite of the writers, at least in terms of female companions. But I just really don’t see her that way, and true to form, I resent that she is shoved down my throat.
So how was romancing Light Shadowheart?
Honestly, it does soften her a lot. Her character development and story arc does not change – being in a romance with her is extraneous to that. I never made it all the way to the end (more on that later, but it didn’t seem like that was going to change much either), but you do get to see a bit more about her thought process as she expresses what she wants.
Her Act 3 romance scene is quite nice (the extra length of naked time we get of course has nothing to do with this judgment) and is one of the things that ties her romance into her plot, so that was one of my favorite moments with her. It almost makes up for its dark counterpart in my playthrough with DJ Shart.
Also, of the three characters that are okay with a poly relationship with Halsin, she is the one that is most open and okay with it.
In fact, she’s enthusiastic about the idea of an orgy with him.
Of course, he’s just as enthusiastic.
However, my issue with her is that most of her character arc comes from her own individual story. Nothing really changes about her whether I was in a relationship with her or not. Don’t get me wrong, her character arc is great, possibly the best of the companions. But my romance with her was utterly superfluous to her growth. Given that I’ve had her choose this particular path 8 out of 9 times, I was hoping for more difference in romancing her. There are a few lines that make it easier for you to convince her to Do The Thing, but otherwise you are simply more privy to her thoughts, even if the thoughts always remained the same.
It is possible that there is something in the very last part of the game that would have changed my mind on it, but it will likely be a bit before I loop back around to romancing her again to find out.
A Most Ignoble End
I keep mentioning that something kept me from reaching the very end of the game, so what the hell was it?
I was three missions before the very end of the game, feeling kind of cocky that I was doing so well on Honor Mode (albeit modded) and charged right into the Steel Foundry. What happened? Did I actually lose to some Banites? Did I make a horrible story decision that shamed me so much I had to stop? Did I finally get bored and rage-quit, nine playthroughs in?
Nope. It was a bug.
When I went down the stairs into the Foundry, my character suddenly froze like she had activated some sci-fi laser trap. I suspect that the game thought I had triggered the cutscene, but without the cutscene actually happening to move things forward. Azar was just stuck frozen there. Couldn’t move, couldn’t switch to other characters, couldn’t fast travel out of there. She just became a cabinet on the floor.
The insult to the injury is that it has happened in some of my past playthroughs. I suspect that it is an interaction with one of the mods that I use. Normally, I just reload to my last save (the game helpfully autosaves about a minute prior to this) so it hadn’t been an issue before. Except remember that whole Honor Mode thing? Where it autosaves whenever you try to reload the game so that you can’t go back into anything? Yeah. It just reloaded me back into the same frozen spot.
I tried multiple reloads, tried to change equipment, anything that would get my character un-frozen. Nope. After multiple attempts, I had to give up and admit that my first honor run was taken down by a bug, one of my own responsibility.
So as T.S. Eliot put it, “it ends not with a bang but a whimper”. Or at least with roars of frustrated rage.
Takeaway
The actual combat of Honor Mode turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. It made me holler and think and have to figure some stuff out, but I did not have to spend 2 hours planning things before going in, even with using suboptimal builds.
Some of this may be those mods. For the most part, my mods are quality of life and cosmetic. However, the extra encounters do give me extra XP and help me to level up faster, and since they aren’t part of the vanilla game, I’m typically a level (maybe two higher at end game) when I hit the specific game beats. I’ve done a mod-less version of Tactician mode, but have not yet done one for Honor mode.
Do I have any interest in doing honor mode without mods? Eh, yes and no. I don’t really care about the trophy. Honor mode is fun for the battles, but the single save thing is not something I need to hang my hat on. If I do something stupid due to a mis-click or a bug, I want to be able to reload for something more than bragging rights of “oh because that’s honor mode.” But I might just end up doing a custom campaign where I have the difficulty of honor mode combat but keep more than a single save file.
That being said, Bill and I are currently trying to do a mod-less co-op Honor Mode run, so it’s already happening. Let’s see how that ends up going.
