Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks Dual Weild?

Maybe I'm just not being patient enough and I need to find different weapons... but if longswords can be used in one hand, why can I not equip two of them as a fighter with the skill? Waiting to get two daggers to see if I can DW that - or is it not working in early access despite being able to select it as an ability?

You can dualwield daggers / shortswords etc even without being a fighter/having the feat, just gotta be proficient in them. The feat adds your proficiency bonus to offhand attacks.

Because they don't have the attribute 'light'. I think only two light weapons can be equipped for dual wielding, for instance daggers and short swords. Rapier don't count in it, which is a pity, cause I was looking forward to dual wield rapier + dagger.

handaxes, short swords, and daggers can all be used in any combination to dual wield. Right now they have a weird way of handling the chance to hit and damage dealt but those three shouldnt give you any issues.

Looks like scimitars as well (of course)

And lit torches! (Which is great for my human fighter in the dark)

Yeah - Artemis is a haxxor apparently.

The full list of all NINE dual wieldable weapon types: clubs, daggers, scimitars, hand crossbows (!), hand axes, light hammers, shortswords, sickles, and torches.

On top of all this, taking the Dual Wielder feat at lvl 4 allows you to dual wield all single-handed and versatile weapons.

Ah nice! Not that I'd ever do it, have you tried dual hand crossbows? Does it literally give you two ranged attacks per turn?

Not sure how it works in the game, but by the 5E book you need the Crossbow Expert feat to dual wield a hand crossbow -- otherwise it's just melee weapons. Without the feat:



and with it:



This removes a lot of the restrictions: your main weapon just needs to be one-handed (no longer melee only, or light only), and you add your ability modifier to the offhand hand-crossbow attack.

Allowing hand-crossbows to be used with two-weapon fighting even though they're not melee weapons without the feat doesn't seem game-breaking to me -- the feat still gives the benefit of being able to use a better weapon in your main hand and gives that extra damage.

No, I haven't actually had two hand spare crossbows to try it out. However, I have seen somewhere that it DOES give you the ranged offhand attack bonus action if you dual wield them. However, this is problematic from a 5e standpoint, primarily because crossbows need to be reloaded after every shot, which requires a free hand. In other words, you cannot effectively dual wield hand crossbows for more than a single turn. Note that this restriction still applies even if you are using a melee weapon + hand crossbow or hand crossbow + shield.

So I tried on Astarion and you actually get the offhand attack as a bonus action (like melee dual-wielding). But it also bugged Astarion to the point where the game crashes, whenever he climbs a ladder or tries to unequip the crossbows. Sooo... maybe make a save before trying that out.

With the current BG3 implementation, you can switch between sword-and-shield and a longbow on a whim, so this seems minor in comparison

Thanks for looking into the crossbow piece.

On a side note, I feel like I wasted a talent...

So, I took the dual wielder at level 4, so that does at least give me a +1 to AC.... but outside of flexibility if I find magic weapons.... I'm always going to favor sickles aren't I? (2-8 damage per). I guess it's actually quite a benefit to have the flexibility since a 1d8 weapon that is +1 is 2-9 damage now that I think of it.

Also didn't realize the off-hand swing is your bonus action for a while, I was confused when I was only swinging once sometimes, and when I swung twice I couldn't down a potion to recover some HP.... took me a sec to figure that out it would have been nice if it were called out in the feat description but no biggie.

That’s not specific to that feat. You can dual wield light weapons and just turn off the dual attack option by hitting X at lvl one. Hopefully they’ll put in a combat basics in the prologue at some point

Ah so that's what that is.... thanks. Good to know that's there if I want to attack first then do a bonus action.

did you actually get the +1 AC bonus? When I took the feat I never got the bonus...

Also, I think torches do 2d4 damage as well? Plus fire damage? ridiculously overpowered...

I noticed that crossbows have a "loading" property in its description. Is that implemented at all in the game? I'm trying to figure out if there is any real difference between bows and crossbows, outside of damage.

Does it properly treat torches as improvised weapons? You should not get your proficiency bonus to attack with them, unless you have Tavern Brawler.

I haven't tested this out, since several of my characters usually have darkvision and I never really needed to use a torch.

I think so; but this doesn't really affect things in EA all that much. "Loading" does two things:
1. Restricts the number of times that weapon can attack per round to 1.
2. Requires a free hand for the weapon to be usable again the next turn.

The former doesn't really matter in EA since the only way to get multiple attacks is through something like Action Surge, which you can't use more than once in an encounter, even if you rest after each encounter. The latter matters to the extent that it restricts dual wield and weapon-and-shield combos when using crossbows, but since you can freely switch between melee and ranged on a whim, as Postwave mentioned, this doesn't really matter either (you can use a weapon+shield or dual wield melee in the melee slots and use a single crossbow in the ranged slot, and switch to melee to get the AC bonus or to make offhand attacks).