To me Bards are all about using charisma to avoid fights, or create distractions while the rest of the party does the important work.
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Baldur's Gate 3
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Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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But if you play a sorcerer, you can have charisma for when you want to avoid fights and fireballs for when you don't!
Funny, the Bard was easily the MVP in my playthrough. Bardic Inspiration makes a huge difference for any skill check in dialogue and in combat they dominated the battlefield with Cutting Words to make enemies miss or fail crucial attacks or saving throws, crowd control spells like Hypnotic Pattern and Confusion and Counterspell from Magical Secrets.
Bards are awesome.
My experience in the game mostly feels like any turn that a character isn't dealing damage is a wasted action.
Sure there's a few exceptions, like putting haste on Karlach is insanely powerful. But I'm struggling to figure out how to use most support actions or classes effectively
Bard in BG3 can be one the single highest burst classes in the game if you go college of swords/sharpshooter/dual crossbows. And you can do that three times a day with the bard shirt rest. It’s absolutely disgusting.
Use more save or sucks. Stunning an enemy character(or - bless - several) is also super valuable, it puts the fight to a 3v4 right away. On the bard’s spell list alone, Sleep is incredibly valuable, you’ve got Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, Blindness, Hold Person, Silence, Fear, Confusion, I could go on.
Use more save or sucks.
How are you getting reliable success with any spell that allows for a saving throw? I'm seeing pretty terrible odds with my bard's offensive enchantment spells (on Tactician difficulty).
I actually have the same issue with Gale. Dude misses like every third shot.
Lucky. For me, Gale usually doesn't live long enough for three shots.
Admittedly haven't tried bard itself yet, but I've got access to all those spells on Gale, and I find a well-placed fireball usually ends up being the better choice. The main problem i have is that I almost never saw those conditions last for even one turn, they would just pass a save and it was like the spell might as well have just missed.
It's a little frustrating, because surely there must be value in using those spells... But I'm definitely not doing it correctly when I try them out.
For what it's worth I played tactician mode right from the start, which probably colored my learning curve a bit
Right click enemy -> find their lowest save -> cast save or suck that cripples them specifically.
You give the enemy barbarian an intelligence save, not a strength one.
Now that you have spelled it out for me, I realize this should have been obvious. I have not been paying attention to what kind of saves each spell has, or how to make sure I use the right one on the right enemy.
I imagine that should help quite a bit
Also! Make sure to check their save proficiencies - It should be represented with a little hexagon around 2 or so ability scores. Obviously you usually want to avoid rolling against that score.
It’s okay - DMing multiple campaigns for sweaty tryhards just massively overprepared me for anything BG3 could throw at me 😅 the solution to many dumb character builds is ~~talking to them about it outside of the game like an adult~~ “okay, roll me a [weakest stat] save”.
Many bosses will be immune to several effects, and scouting what exactly you’ll be facing is time consuming if even possible, so it definitely can fall into a “run into fight - oh I need change my spell list - reload quicksave” which is a little lame but you can’t always be prepared for everything unfortunately.
The main problem i have is that I almost never saw those conditions last for even one turn, they would just pass a save and it was like the spell might as well have just missed.
Some of the spells mentioned require concentration. As an example, if you cast Tasha's Hideous Laughter one turn, and then any other spell that requires concentration the next turn like Hex or Bless or any of the hundred or so spells, your character stops concentrating on Tasha's Hideous Laughter, thus ending its effects.
I really wish the game gave me a confirmation button if I'm about to cast a new concentration spell over my last one, I keep wasting spells
I mean, there's a "concentration" tag on the spell, and the character's picture in the turn display has an icon added when concentrating.
I know, I'm just dumb
Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you
So we're fighting monks today?