Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Is mage hand only being castable once per rest intentional?

Basically makes it completely useless now.

I'm assuming once per short rest is intentional though I guess you could try reporting it as a bug to Larian to see if you can get confirmation.

I'd disagree it makes it useless, at least for me given I don't tend to use it multiple times a day anyway. Out of interest, how do you use it such that once per short rest isn't useful?

Because it's a cantrip. The whole point of cantrips is that they can be used at will because they're not strong in the first place.

Sure, cantrips can generally be used at will and without using a spell slot, and this change means that for Mage Hand only the latter is now true and therefore it can't be used as frequently. But it still can be used three times per adventuring day, and personally I don't tend to find myself using it more frequently than that anyway so I was wondering what other people are doing with the spell that they need to use it more often for it to be useful.

There are exceptions where I'd occasionally like to have more use of Mage Hand, and I can envisage that in some circumstances I'll need to ration my use of the cantrip more carefully so I'd agree that it's not as useful as it was. And if the change is intentional, that's presumably because Larian thought it was too useful in some situations for a free use.

I don't know whether I agree with that and will reserve judgement until I've played more of the game, but so far am still finding Mage Hand situationally useful and haven't found the once per short rest restriction nearly enough to make it useless.

The problem with mage hands specifically is the ten turn limit. If you know exactly what you want then ten turns in turn-based mode is enough but otherwise it expires really and that's that. Then you either have to short rest or just find a different solution.

But the once per rest thing is totally in line with Larian's post-release anti-cheese policy of summons. Apparently they were annoyed that people would keep characters out of combat, summon something for free, send it into combat, and then immediately resummon by the character out of combat. Which is indeed cheesy but also a totally obvious approach when Larian designs time the way they do. I believe ranger summons behave in exactly this way also. I haven't gotten around to test Pact of the Chain warlocks yet, but I assume they do too.

It's not an unreasonable fix at face value, but it feels like a pretty big nerf in practice, unless you really, really enjoy resting all the time.

I haven't used it yet in the full version, but does it have the ability to interact with the environment now? I could handle the casting nerf if it could actually perform its primary function.

All of the cantrips should be infinite uses per day, it's kind of the point of them.
Mage hand is useful for doing a couple of things, like being able to disarm traps at range, turning on/off lights or causing a distraction. I had used it at one point to lure some spiders over into a group of goblins to let them fight it out.

I also dislike the change. Its not really OP and the short rest restriction just makes it worse. A lot of people also dislike that change:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/15i8vxu/so_mage_hand_seems_useless_now/

Yep Mage Hand / Mage Hand Legerdemain / Arcane Trickster is indeed or at least seems to be totally screwed:
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=875224#Post875224

While there are some nice mods to improve the cantrips and fix this, using that also disables achievements so I can't use them ... yet.

Mage Hand being 1/day makes the Arcane Trickster's magic legerdemain features a LOT less useful. It's kind of awful.

I still use arcane trickster and eldritch knight on Astarion and Laezel mainly to get the shield reactions. Not sure if they reach level 3 spells for counterspell later on those subclasses.

Also bladeward & truestrike are nice to have.

I just checked on the wiki and both those classes are limited to 4x level 1 and 3x level 2 spells which is a shame, no counterspell. For level 2 spells will likely just be blur and mirror image.

Oh geez... This has me seriously reconsidering my intention to play an Arcane Trickster with my Tuesday/Thursday crew... :U

This seems like a terrible idea. The whole point of cantrips is that they can be cast whenever you want; after all, there's a massive list of other spells that have x/rest restrictions. If you really really want to make it require a rest, just make it a level 1 spell and buff it accordingly (it's far too weak to justify the restriction right now.)

It utterly guts Arcane Tricksters in particular, who are designed and balanced around being able to cast it whenever they want.

I understand why they did it for familiars and such, but mage hand which is utterly useless in 99% of scenarios requiring a short rest doesn't feel good at all.