Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Combat help

While playing the game I've currently gotten my Female Ranger Knight up to a level 3. And so today I decided to re-arrange the icons on the bottom right taskbar that has your potions, spells, etc on it and noticed one that is a weapon. Now with the Ranger Knight, I get a +3 to my off-hand weapon with the dual wielder. Now, do I have to select the weapon each time before I make an attack, or is it automatically added?

Also why when you reload the game after a battle goes against you or other reason does it take about 3 minutes to reload? Is there any chance of this being shortened?

Thanks for any help or answers in advance

The off-hand attack uses your bonus action, and you can toggle dual wield on and off with a switch down below your fixed action bars (underneath the ranged-melee switch; it's grey and very easy to miss). If dual-wield is switched on ,and you're dual-wielding, then your character will automatically use their bonus action to stab with the off-hand weapon when you take an attack action with your main hand weapon. If it's not switched on, then you have to manually choose to use your bonus action to make an off-hand attack each time.

This is a bit clunky right now, and also has a variety of bugs in it that may cause it not to work properly, or to over-perform in breakable ways.

My load times are not that long, but I've heard others make similar complaints about loading, and I think it's Larian's current statements that load time should improve as the game moves towards a finished state.

Glad to hear that I don't have to select it each time. As I usually keep the dual-weapon selected. Only reason for which I know how long it takes to do a reload I timed it a couple of times but none the less I hope you're right about the load times getting faster.

I have to admit I'm unlikely to make another dual-wield character unless I find something like a weapon of warning or a defender, some sort of weapon I could set off-hand and never have to actually use to get a benefit from. One of the advantages of dual-wield in 5e is that there is no "off-hand" rule so you can just choose whatever mix of weapons you want for main attack.

An example that I admittedly haven't encountered yet.

If I were to encounter a creature that is immune to non-magical weapon damage... I could choose to make my main attack use the magical dagger in my left hand without needing to switch hands and just not use the non-magical battleaxe in my right hand.

This isn't possible in BG3. The game just automatically uses your right hand as the main attack. I could spend my one inventory manipulation to switch hands, but it's irritating.