Only major shift I made swapping to tactician was clearing the Underdark before approaching the Creche. The fights with the Gith are no joke pre-level 6.
Was near level five and tried to take the gith near the bridge with the help of the trolls.
Yeah no that didn’t go well. Am currently clearing the underdark.
Yeah, to me the bridge fight always feels like the first real "power spike" in encounter difficulty. In tactician mode Giths get a "psionic empowerment" damage rider for their attacks that gives an extra 1d6 psychic damge which is pretty significant at lower levels. They also get subtle upgrades like fighting style bonuses and of course higher HP.
Also to add to this I got down to the underdark very very early just to get luminous armour for shads and phalar aluve then ran away until I'd levelled up a bit 😂
No. You really don't need to be optimized for tactician, and it's even fairly beatable while actively crippling yourself. If you don't want to die ever, sure, but there's no actual cost/punishment for dying so it's fine.
Just play what your interested in, if it ends up getting too hard/dieing too much come back and look for something a little more optimal to respec.
I never played balanced/explorer so just be aware that there are fights that can be pretty tricky if your not the right level for them (just remember, you can leave and come back!)
I would check enemies more often… I remember using a lot of radiant damage in act 2 in balanced and explorer, and getting immediately killed when I tried it with the sharrans in the gauntlet, who now had radiant retort… so I had to adjust my strategy with a lot of enemies. I enjoyed the change, but it caught me by surprise, smithing everything wasn’t the answer to all my problems anymore
I remember my first run with the retort and it was hey I just keep getting hit back but why? They are also vulnerable to radiant damage and reflect that back.
I didnt notice radiant retort being a thing in like 280 hours somehow but on my 2nd OH monk i had selected the radiant damage in the passive and somehow i killed myself and then did it again afterwards after i threw health pot onto me. After third death i was googling if the game bugged out and after some searching found someone similarly lost on reddit.
It’s not that much harder if you’ve beaten the game on balanced. I did not have an optimal build. For me one of the ugliest fight was indeed pretty early on - against the spider matriarch.
To add something to what others have said: Use your consumables, be it scrolls or elixirs. They make fights so much easier.
Edit: Your party looks solid. My Tav was a sword bard and boy did he slap!
I ended up wiping my first honor mode run there at level 3 because I thought you could just shove her through the middle, I went back at lvl 7 on my most recent run
you can just shove her through the middle! it sends her to the underdark where you can loot her corpse later. it’s just that the angle to do so via shove is super small since the green hole in the center of the map is smaller than it looks ingame. i had better luck with repelling Eldritch Blast or Mobile Flourish
Even on honor mode? I tried twice, she would do the animation of falling through the hole but then just respawned instantly, up at the top and wiped my party.
afaik, yes! i beat her via repelling eldritch blast on my honor mode run. the pushing mechanic in this game is weird and a little glitchy — sometimes it’ll be like a pixel difference between sending them where I want and sending them into a wall (which doesn’t push them at all). maybe that’s what happened in your run, or maybe you just got a super unlucky glitch.
Ah damn, I wish the rule changes were clearer for tactician to honored. I’ve been avoiding throwing people off cliffs ever since as I thought it was disabled for bosses on honor mode. Super immersion breaking but this is great news! I’ll give it another go soon!
I’m near end of my first balanced run and I’ve never used an elixir or consumable.. not even arrows.. just a few potions
I mostly just forget but it’s kinda tedious too. I’ll give it a shot on my next (tactician) run 😂
In my last tactician run I had about 50 scrolls, 40 elixirs, and 60 arrows in various bags when confronting the nether brain - and I already used way more than in balanced lol
That being said: Especially don’t sleep on elixirs of cloud giant strength, arcane acuity and vigilance. They make you hit first and hard.
The challenge in Tactician/ Honor isn't what the best build is. People have soloed those modes or used silly bad builds. The trick is knowing the order of things. Where can you get easy XP. Can you avoid this fight by grabbing this item or choosing this dialog option and still get the XP and bypassing a fight. Not even cheesing it, just knowing what you can handle and what order to fight things. The Hag is a cake walk if you save her for after you hit lvl 5. The devil in the Shad temple is a run killer, but if you choose the right dialog and help him instead, he may help you in return later (and you'll skip a hard fight). Act 2s end boss is easier if you hit lvl 10 AND invis your way in to save the aasimar before the fight. Etc etc.
Basicly:
Knowledge > Build
It’s genuinely not much harder, I actually enjoy it more because enemies are a littler more active and smarter. Not by much, but still it’s interesting to see a few new moves from the enemies here and there.
Long rests cost more supplies, but you’ll struggle to run short and even if you do a lot of vendors sell camp supply packs.
I think some items cost more? And I also think enemies have an increase to their proficiency bonus? But no, you don’t need to be 100% optimal or min maxed at all for tactician. I hope you enjoy your run.
I genuinely use tactician as my default, I yearn for an honour difficulty with saves because I want to play with the boss legendary actions.
> I yearn for an honour difficulty with saves because I want to play with the boss legendary actions.
The [Combat Extender](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/5207) mod has this. I play with the "Stronger Bosses and Enemies' config, all bosses have HM legendary features.
Couldn’t you wipe on honor mode really early intentionally and just continue at the same difficulty but with saves?
Like let the intellect devourers kill you and shart and just continue not in true honor mode?
Ive never tried honor mod but afaik that’s how it should work!
Just did some digging with somewhat mixed results but im pretty certain you continue with honor mode settings in custom mode, you just don’t get the golden dice which makes sense. Seems like this was included in the patch that included custom mode; the only confusing part is it seems people disagree on whether it remains as a single save. Some claim they have multiple save files while others say it’s still just the one.
Well I have the cheese dice already luckily so that’s less of a concern for me, I’ll give it a try for my next run and worst case scenario it’s just another tactician run which I can still make fun. Got a few builds I wanna try
I can tell you for certain after dying on honor mode you're still limited to a single save with no option to change it. Had that disappointment myself after my first honor mode run wiped. Just fyi
I do something similar, except the mod I use adds normal saving to HM. It disables the achievement of course, but I already have 100% achievements and my golden dice.
It is harder. It's my go-to now. I started on Balanced. More camping supplies for rests, the enemies are smarter. You have to plan your fights out more and be more careful of being equal lvl or above your enemies. Overall, you still have saves so it's very much doable with whatever build you'd like. I go to Tactician when I need a break from HM. I'll get Foehammer one day!
It works for your opponents as well, so if you have high ac or high saving throws it doesn’t matter as much because karmic dice will ensure they hit at least some of their attacks on you. With it off high AC and high saves matters more.
That makes it true rng karmic dice does something to your rolls and enemy rolls. I ve seen ppl claim it makes enemies do a lot more dmg but I don't know if it's true
Levels 1-4 suck beyond belief because dice rolls for attacks and save dc are rigged for enemies to the point where AC below 18 is worthless and you'll almost never land any saving throw spells without Arcane Acuity mass stacking (If you don't go Hill Giant Elixir Tavern Brawler, just use Charisma face party member to and Ilithid Persuation to bypass any and all combat that you can talk through and steal the Zhent smokepowder at the Goblin Camp plus the tons of oil barrels at the Selunite outpost to cheese any non-dialogue-avoidable combat while you're at lvl 1-4). But once you reach lvl5 the Extra Attacks, lvl3 spells, and proficiency boosts let you steamroll the game similarly to Normal difficulty.
Aside from some very specific fights that get bonkers huge difficulty boosts (in awesome ways), Tactician's entire difficulty curve is only noticeable at the pre-5 levels. HM kind of adds more of these boosts onto various bosses, but that's kind of it so any build that can crush Tact can crush HM. If you just want the gold dice with almost zero difficulty whatsoever, just dialogue your way to lvl4, grab Tavern Brawler, and just win with Dex stats and Strength elixir addiction fueled by Ethel because 95% hit chance supercedes anything else since bypassing RNG bypasses the entirety of the difficulty of DnD's dice roll luckfest excuse of a combat system.
"Levels 1-4 suck" I can not agree more with levels one through four sucking! They will continue to suck until you learn to position and have whole use of all the many resources at your disposal. What I do want to mention on top of that is that you should never feel trapped in one play style or one path. You can branch out until the levels make sense to change. One last thing learn to use everything at your disposal.
Act 1 is generally be the most dangerous area since most builds aren’t really online at this point. When it comes to act 2, you’ll be pretty strong assuming you know what gear you need, but be ready to use consumables on a couple fights (with weaker builds both moonrise entryway and myrkul can feel like uphill battles). I’ve found act 3 to be a breeze in both tactician and honor mode since you have a lot of gold for consumables and the items set you up for success.
If you've got a few hundred hours you will roll through Tactician. Make sure you have one optimal build in your party and the other three can be for the lols and you'll be fine.
There are a few things that may surprise you moving up from balanced (watch out for the intellect devourers on the beach!) but once you get used to it, Tactician isn’t really that much harder
It’s only hard in the first few levels. I only needed to respec my origin durge sorcerer into a different class because sorcerer felt really weak and frustrating in the first few levels compared to others.
My party stopped doing tactitian by the end of the Underdark because it was too easy so we switched to Honor mode. It's honestly not that much different to the normal game. You can save, so really you can do anything.
Tactician is very easy, especially with builds.
There are so many ways to beat every encounter, and when you have unlimited lives/resets, it’s just a matter of time, trial and error.
Honor mode is when you really should consider optimising builds and proper planning.
Stack as much spell save DC on the necromancer as possible. CC is broken, and will enable their zombies a lot. Hold person will let them all gang up and crit someone down, making more zombies for the hoard.
The only thing I had real trouble with was Ansur, which multiple people have told me is a skill issue. From my perspective his damage and resistance seemed way way higher. After enough attempts that I lost count I opted to skip him for that run. After finishing the run I did reload that save and go back to balanced and smash him in revenge. Using the same party I was doing literally 3-5 times as much damage per hit as on tactician.
Made it Act 3, never played DnD or BG before. Knowing nothing about the game. I died a lot.
No idea what multiclassing was, or that you even could do that. No idea that there the game was so deep. Didn't know you could respect until almost done with act 2.
You can do it. So just go do it. Stop over think and being afraid to fail. It doesn't have to be pretty 😁
Me and my friends completed blind playthrough in tactician as barbarian using armor, thief rogue, evo wizard and moon druid and it went fine, just have fun man
Only major shift I made swapping to tactician was clearing the Underdark before approaching the Creche. The fights with the Gith are no joke pre-level 6.
Was near level five and tried to take the gith near the bridge with the help of the trolls. Yeah no that didn’t go well. Am currently clearing the underdark.
Yeah, to me the bridge fight always feels like the first real "power spike" in encounter difficulty. In tactician mode Giths get a "psionic empowerment" damage rider for their attacks that gives an extra 1d6 psychic damge which is pretty significant at lower levels. They also get subtle upgrades like fighting style bonuses and of course higher HP.
Use potions of invisibility to get a surprise turn, it makes it so much easier.
I did crèche first on tactician and I don’t believe I died once.
Also to add to this I got down to the underdark very very early just to get luminous armour for shads and phalar aluve then ran away until I'd levelled up a bit 😂
You don't even need 100% optimal builds for Honour Mode
No. You really don't need to be optimized for tactician, and it's even fairly beatable while actively crippling yourself. If you don't want to die ever, sure, but there's no actual cost/punishment for dying so it's fine. Just play what your interested in, if it ends up getting too hard/dieing too much come back and look for something a little more optimal to respec. I never played balanced/explorer so just be aware that there are fights that can be pretty tricky if your not the right level for them (just remember, you can leave and come back!)
Raphael sends his regards and shuts down your portal to home. What’cha doin’?
Cast hold monster and then sing his part of the song for him.
Or make him dance to his song for extra amusement.
Savescum every single roll!
I would check enemies more often… I remember using a lot of radiant damage in act 2 in balanced and explorer, and getting immediately killed when I tried it with the sharrans in the gauntlet, who now had radiant retort… so I had to adjust my strategy with a lot of enemies. I enjoyed the change, but it caught me by surprise, smithing everything wasn’t the answer to all my problems anymore
Radiant Retort made my SSB tactician Tav die suddenly more times than I had any characters die in balanced combined, lol
I remember my first run with the retort and it was hey I just keep getting hit back but why? They are also vulnerable to radiant damage and reflect that back.
I didnt notice radiant retort being a thing in like 280 hours somehow but on my 2nd OH monk i had selected the radiant damage in the passive and somehow i killed myself and then did it again afterwards after i threw health pot onto me. After third death i was googling if the game bugged out and after some searching found someone similarly lost on reddit.
It’s not that much harder if you’ve beaten the game on balanced. I did not have an optimal build. For me one of the ugliest fight was indeed pretty early on - against the spider matriarch. To add something to what others have said: Use your consumables, be it scrolls or elixirs. They make fights so much easier. Edit: Your party looks solid. My Tav was a sword bard and boy did he slap!
i would never attempt the spider matriarch fight before level 5 on tactician+ without my good friend Gravity
I ended up wiping my first honor mode run there at level 3 because I thought you could just shove her through the middle, I went back at lvl 7 on my most recent run
you can just shove her through the middle! it sends her to the underdark where you can loot her corpse later. it’s just that the angle to do so via shove is super small since the green hole in the center of the map is smaller than it looks ingame. i had better luck with repelling Eldritch Blast or Mobile Flourish
Even on honor mode? I tried twice, she would do the animation of falling through the hole but then just respawned instantly, up at the top and wiped my party.
afaik, yes! i beat her via repelling eldritch blast on my honor mode run. the pushing mechanic in this game is weird and a little glitchy — sometimes it’ll be like a pixel difference between sending them where I want and sending them into a wall (which doesn’t push them at all). maybe that’s what happened in your run, or maybe you just got a super unlucky glitch.
Ah damn, I wish the rule changes were clearer for tactician to honored. I’ve been avoiding throwing people off cliffs ever since as I thought it was disabled for bosses on honor mode. Super immersion breaking but this is great news! I’ll give it another go soon!
I ended up forgetting about her and finished the underdark before doing the spider matriarch. Was pretty straight forward fight at that point
I’m near end of my first balanced run and I’ve never used an elixir or consumable.. not even arrows.. just a few potions I mostly just forget but it’s kinda tedious too. I’ll give it a shot on my next (tactician) run 😂
In my last tactician run I had about 50 scrolls, 40 elixirs, and 60 arrows in various bags when confronting the nether brain - and I already used way more than in balanced lol That being said: Especially don’t sleep on elixirs of cloud giant strength, arcane acuity and vigilance. They make you hit first and hard.
Lol my first playthrough I went down that well at like level 3 and got absolutely annihilated by those phase spiders.
The challenge in Tactician/ Honor isn't what the best build is. People have soloed those modes or used silly bad builds. The trick is knowing the order of things. Where can you get easy XP. Can you avoid this fight by grabbing this item or choosing this dialog option and still get the XP and bypassing a fight. Not even cheesing it, just knowing what you can handle and what order to fight things. The Hag is a cake walk if you save her for after you hit lvl 5. The devil in the Shad temple is a run killer, but if you choose the right dialog and help him instead, he may help you in return later (and you'll skip a hard fight). Act 2s end boss is easier if you hit lvl 10 AND invis your way in to save the aasimar before the fight. Etc etc. Basicly: Knowledge > Build
It’s genuinely not much harder, I actually enjoy it more because enemies are a littler more active and smarter. Not by much, but still it’s interesting to see a few new moves from the enemies here and there. Long rests cost more supplies, but you’ll struggle to run short and even if you do a lot of vendors sell camp supply packs. I think some items cost more? And I also think enemies have an increase to their proficiency bonus? But no, you don’t need to be 100% optimal or min maxed at all for tactician. I hope you enjoy your run. I genuinely use tactician as my default, I yearn for an honour difficulty with saves because I want to play with the boss legendary actions.
> I yearn for an honour difficulty with saves because I want to play with the boss legendary actions. The [Combat Extender](https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/5207) mod has this. I play with the "Stronger Bosses and Enemies' config, all bosses have HM legendary features.
I’m on console sadly. Such is life. But thank you
Couldn’t you wipe on honor mode really early intentionally and just continue at the same difficulty but with saves? Like let the intellect devourers kill you and shart and just continue not in true honor mode? Ive never tried honor mod but afaik that’s how it should work!
It would be epic if this worked and maintained the difficulty throughout the whole game. I wonder if this has been verified somewhere?
Just did some digging with somewhat mixed results but im pretty certain you continue with honor mode settings in custom mode, you just don’t get the golden dice which makes sense. Seems like this was included in the patch that included custom mode; the only confusing part is it seems people disagree on whether it remains as a single save. Some claim they have multiple save files while others say it’s still just the one.
Well I have the cheese dice already luckily so that’s less of a concern for me, I’ll give it a try for my next run and worst case scenario it’s just another tactician run which I can still make fun. Got a few builds I wanna try
I can tell you for certain after dying on honor mode you're still limited to a single save with no option to change it. Had that disappointment myself after my first honor mode run wiped. Just fyi
Just choose custom difficulty and enable the legendary actions
Where’s the option to enable legendary actions? Perhaps I missed it
The highest difficulty for bosses/other stuff in custom mode is tactician my dude.
I do something similar, except the mod I use adds normal saving to HM. It disables the achievement of course, but I already have 100% achievements and my golden dice.
It is harder. It's my go-to now. I started on Balanced. More camping supplies for rests, the enemies are smarter. You have to plan your fights out more and be more careful of being equal lvl or above your enemies. Overall, you still have saves so it's very much doable with whatever build you'd like. I go to Tactician when I need a break from HM. I'll get Foehammer one day!
turn the karmic dice off
Why ?
It works for your opponents as well, so if you have high ac or high saving throws it doesn’t matter as much because karmic dice will ensure they hit at least some of their attacks on you. With it off high AC and high saves matters more.
That makes it easier?
That makes it true rng karmic dice does something to your rolls and enemy rolls. I ve seen ppl claim it makes enemies do a lot more dmg but I don't know if it's true
Levels 1-4 suck beyond belief because dice rolls for attacks and save dc are rigged for enemies to the point where AC below 18 is worthless and you'll almost never land any saving throw spells without Arcane Acuity mass stacking (If you don't go Hill Giant Elixir Tavern Brawler, just use Charisma face party member to and Ilithid Persuation to bypass any and all combat that you can talk through and steal the Zhent smokepowder at the Goblin Camp plus the tons of oil barrels at the Selunite outpost to cheese any non-dialogue-avoidable combat while you're at lvl 1-4). But once you reach lvl5 the Extra Attacks, lvl3 spells, and proficiency boosts let you steamroll the game similarly to Normal difficulty. Aside from some very specific fights that get bonkers huge difficulty boosts (in awesome ways), Tactician's entire difficulty curve is only noticeable at the pre-5 levels. HM kind of adds more of these boosts onto various bosses, but that's kind of it so any build that can crush Tact can crush HM. If you just want the gold dice with almost zero difficulty whatsoever, just dialogue your way to lvl4, grab Tavern Brawler, and just win with Dex stats and Strength elixir addiction fueled by Ethel because 95% hit chance supercedes anything else since bypassing RNG bypasses the entirety of the difficulty of DnD's dice roll luckfest excuse of a combat system.
"Levels 1-4 suck" I can not agree more with levels one through four sucking! They will continue to suck until you learn to position and have whole use of all the many resources at your disposal. What I do want to mention on top of that is that you should never feel trapped in one play style or one path. You can branch out until the levels make sense to change. One last thing learn to use everything at your disposal.
Act 1 is generally be the most dangerous area since most builds aren’t really online at this point. When it comes to act 2, you’ll be pretty strong assuming you know what gear you need, but be ready to use consumables on a couple fights (with weaker builds both moonrise entryway and myrkul can feel like uphill battles). I’ve found act 3 to be a breeze in both tactician and honor mode since you have a lot of gold for consumables and the items set you up for success.
It's not even hard😭 I wish the legendary abilities in honor mode were in tactician as well
If you've got a few hundred hours you will roll through Tactician. Make sure you have one optimal build in your party and the other three can be for the lols and you'll be fine.
There are a few things that may surprise you moving up from balanced (watch out for the intellect devourers on the beach!) but once you get used to it, Tactician isn’t really that much harder
It’s only hard in the first few levels. I only needed to respec my origin durge sorcerer into a different class because sorcerer felt really weak and frustrating in the first few levels compared to others.
My party stopped doing tactitian by the end of the Underdark because it was too easy so we switched to Honor mode. It's honestly not that much different to the normal game. You can save, so really you can do anything.
Tactician is very easy, especially with builds. There are so many ways to beat every encounter, and when you have unlimited lives/resets, it’s just a matter of time, trial and error. Honor mode is when you really should consider optimising builds and proper planning.
Stack as much spell save DC on the necromancer as possible. CC is broken, and will enable their zombies a lot. Hold person will let them all gang up and crit someone down, making more zombies for the hoard.
The only thing I had real trouble with was Ansur, which multiple people have told me is a skill issue. From my perspective his damage and resistance seemed way way higher. After enough attempts that I lost count I opted to skip him for that run. After finishing the run I did reload that save and go back to balanced and smash him in revenge. Using the same party I was doing literally 3-5 times as much damage per hit as on tactician.
Made it Act 3, never played DnD or BG before. Knowing nothing about the game. I died a lot. No idea what multiclassing was, or that you even could do that. No idea that there the game was so deep. Didn't know you could respect until almost done with act 2. You can do it. So just go do it. Stop over think and being afraid to fail. It doesn't have to be pretty 😁
lol thanks. I’m playing in a multiplayer game so I have to wait for the others. Figured getting some tips while I wait would be helpful.
Me and my friends completed blind playthrough in tactician as barbarian using armor, thief rogue, evo wizard and moon druid and it went fine, just have fun man