Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Build Discussion Pact of the Tome - How does it work in the Full Game.

So does anyone know if with pact of the Tome you can choose any 3 Cantrips like it says in the PHB?

I have someone on my discorbs that REALLY loves Warlocks and is freaking out because they think that Pact of the Tome *selects your cantrips for you* and so you only get 3 that are chosen by the game.

That's obviously completely wrong, but can anyone confirm how it works?

Personally I think Warlocks are silly, wannabe wizards that don't have the focus to learn real magic - but this gal is really crazy about them.

To my understanding, as of now, the full release will pick the three cantrips for you.

If I remember correctly, they are:

Guidance,
Vicious Mockery, and
Thorn Whip

ETA: lol, I just noticed you had the screenshot in your post, so I'm just saying what you already posted really.

If I remember correctly they did the same with the college of lore bard and the proficiencies it gets at level 3. I don't know why they would take the ability to choose from you and I think it's a terrible idea, hopefully these are just placeholders and we can pick what we want in the release version.

Honestly those three are not bad cantrips. I can understand wanting to try some other stuff and whatnot but those are really good cantrips nonetheless. I can be happy those. And besides there weren't a ton of cantrips to choose from in the game...even in the footage of the final game. The big one that Warlock was missing access to was guidance.

Why would you take the ability to chose from the player specially when you put so much emphasis on player agency and customization? The only reason that comes to mind is to make things easier on people with low D&D knowledge and even so is a bad reason because you're picking your spells everywhere else in the game already so... I don't know, doesn't make any sense to me.

I'm sure Larian had their reasons. The point of Pact of the Tome is you get cantrips that Warlocks wouldn't normally have access to so maybe they couldn't get the game to offer access to those cantrips belonging to other classes only one time. I don't think they did this specifically for the intrinsic joy of refusing to give you choice. It can be difficult to always get things to work as intended in a videogame. But honestly, this is fine. That is a very good selection of cantrips.

I agree that guidance and thorn whip are good choices, not sure I'd ever pick vicious mockery though, but the point is that it feels unnecessarily restrictive, I can't imagine any reasonable justification to why they'd make these choices for us.

EDIT because there were new posts while I wrote mine.


Sure, I don't believe that they did this just to spite us, but there have to be other ways of implementing this other than taking the shortcut and choosing for us. I don't think it would be unreasonably complex to create a new spell pool for this feature that includes versions of all the available cantrips but with CHA as their spellcasting ability.

The "justification" is most likely a restriction of the game code or engine. The point of Pact of the Tome is you get access to cantrips that Warlocks normally don't get access to...but getting the game to only show you the cantrip list of other classes only one time and selecting different cantrips from different pages...I can easily imagine that getting messy and buggy. As for vicious mockery, it's really good to impose disadvantage on hard hitting enemies. Can definitely protect your party's tank in tough situations.

Yeah, I don't know if you are forced to take those three or if you can choose and then your tooltip updates with the three choices that you make.

See this is where I feel we missed an opportunity to do a proper deep dive into the mechanics and choices that have been made over the last few years - where we will need to wait until the full game release.

I loved the Panel from Hell, but it was light on content where I wanted a Prime Rib Steak dinner I got a Bologna sandwich with mustard.

What I really want to see is everything from a mechanical perspective, all the settings, class choices, race, spells*, abilities and subrace choices. I honestly, and I truly mean this, do not care at all about the story, the companions, the romance, and even the locations, because contextually they don't matter. They are the least important part of anything - from my perspective as a GM. I don't care how boring that sounds to other people - I would be completely entranced and would watch the entire thing.

My Guild is the same way, and they are curated to be this way.

Look, I do NOT know if they actually did make this change, I hope not. There would be no reason to. it's not like Pact of the Tome is overpowered. If someone wants to be a Cantrip Master then this is a great way to go!

*including cantrips which we have no idea what cantrips are in or have been added.

The same thing happened with the Lore Bard, right? The expertise skills are picked for you. Seems like whatever the issue is, it's the same in that case.

Yeah well, they must not have got the memo to make the presentation just for you. But really there will be over 600 spells in the final game...they could have spent the entire 7 hour stream and not finished getting through the spells, forget about anything else. That and they probably didn't spoil too much and they are sill balancing and adding bits here and there. In the nearly finished game some content creators got to play there were still some bits missing like one cutscene had a placeholder text saying cutscene would go there. That sort of stuff. They're still fixing and balancing the game.

Let me rephrase, I meant not as part of the Panel, which was great, but as a supplement.

The Panel from Hell is more of a party - where we all get to have fun, but the Panel is over. Can we get some meatier info now? Throw a Playtester in front of a camera and let them show us how the systems work. Or get an intern to do it - what happened to the guy we sent to update the website banner?

Aug 3rd coming soon buddy

I get the feeling Larian won't be clarifying much more, they like the mystique of being a bit vague.

Really? That doesn't even make any sense. Maybe it's just not finished.

Interesting.

I obviously don't think they are doing it just ''to get a kick out of our despair'' but they can just be wrong. You might remember how they categorically refused to go the solasta route with the reaction system and 3 years later here we are. I think not being able to chose in this particular instance is just bad and unless they just can't do it because of tech reasons (wich I find reaaaally hard to believe) they should let the player chose.

I remember back in the day when bard got introduced into the game one mod had a workaround for you to get the expertise where you wanted instead of the ones you got by default (I don't remember much because I don't play bard and it was a long time ago but I remember being sad about not being able to chose)

You only get 12 lvl ups and some of them don't add much, just don't make a good level up worse without a VERY good reason xD

If you take this to it's ultimate conclusion, how does any class get spells/abilities in the game?

Where ever that definition is spelled out, all they have to do is check mark or select Warlock and define at what level. There is no technical reason this isn't implemented. It is 100% a decision that Larian has made, for whatever illogical reason.

And this decision being so, so illogical, I would almost bet that it won't be like this in Release but it's obvious how this should work and such an easy fix.

Just to be clear - I do not know if this is true or not.

But yeah if it is then it's really arbitrary.

Maybe it breaks the game somehow?

I think the game has different spell lists for every class...there can be spells on multiple lists but they are still separate lists. And the reason they can't just go add Warlock tick next to all the cantrips is because then all the catrips would be available to all warlocks when they hit that level...including non Pact of the Tome warlocks and allowing warlocks to take more than 3 cantrips they normally couldn't have, etc. It's supposed to be a strictly one time access to the cantrip lists of other classes just for Pact of the Tome. That's why it's not that simple.

Fiend and Great Old One warlocks already have differences in their spell pools, as an example: fiend warlocks get exclusive access to burning hands and command, while GOO warlocks get dissonant whispers and hideous laughter. I really don't think getting something similar for the pact of the tome warlock would prove overly complicated.

I'm pretty sure there's 3 different feats to get a cantrip from Cleric, Wizard, and Warlock respectively, right? How is that any different from a trait that lets you pick 3 instead of 1? xD
I'm not a 100% sure those feats are in the game tho, I think they are but I might be wrong.