Now I know I'm not the only person that enjoys Minthara, but one criticism I have for this companion is the sheer amount of sacrifices that must be made to get her, and how much content is lost going this route.
It'd be different if there was enough content to replace it, but as it stands the only reward you get going this route is one companion (that you don't even fully get until the end of Act 2) and a shorter story at the cost of all the Tieflings and their questlines, three companions (potentially 4), and it just seems unbalanced and unnecessary to make this one cool character locked behind this route.
There's just not a lot going for this route nor is there content replacing this decision. There's no new more dark aligned companions to replace the ones lost, nor new questlines to replace the ones you just locked yourself out of. I get wanting to make your decisions have consequences but normally there would be content that'd showcase those consequences instead of lots of cuts to the story.
What I propose is a reward for craftiness. During Part 1, in the event you don't go and save the Goblin Sazza, talking to Minthara makes her seek information from your mind, and there's an option that allows you to cloud your mind with various locations to obscure the location of the grove. But why not take this a step further, and fool her by having your character think of a completely seperate location from the grove, where she'd be fooled into taking her troops, and leaving the camp with confidence, only to be led to a dead end and humiliated, which works very well for her part in Act 2 during a certain scene in a certain tower if she's still alive.
It can be a high skill check to fool her but nonetheless an option for players to avoid killing her without killing the everyone in the Grove and losing out on so much content and works better for her story arc. A confident commander humiliated and abandoned later for her overconfidence and subsequent failures, convinced to join our cause. We can still miss out on Halsin since we technically didn't kill all the leaders of the camp (and in this proposed arc we only killed the two that remained) and miss out on that potential follower for Minthara later, but without the sheer losses that today's arc offers (3 or 4 Companions, several questlines and a huge chunk of the story, all for one individual Companion we get late game). It's an equal sacrifice in my proposed arc.
I dunno, I'm no writer, but I'm sure there's plenty of us that'd enjoy this route.
Last edited by Paledrake; 07/10/23 10:43 AM.
