Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Give companions auto-level up option + do not allow changing class for companions

Auto level-up:
i don't wanna necessarily micromanage the growth for every single companion, first of all im stuck in level up screen for 20 minutes since they all level up together, and second it takes the novelty out of playing other classes in subsequent playthroughs.
i understand that it's a strategy game and you still need to know what the characters do since you play as them in combat, but it's one thing to choose if they should do action a or action b in their turn, and another to choose if they should even have those actions available to them in the first place, rather than actions b and c, or x and y, or any of the other infinite combinations possible.

i would also like this for immersion purposes, so they have a canon build and canon abilities. i think it would be more fun to play around their abilities and limitations, rather than growing them all up manually since that leads to the player making them perfectly in sinergy with the rest of the party, because of course, why handicap yourself for no reason? i would much prefer having to strategize my gameplay and what companion i bring along based on the unique strength and weaknesses of each of them, not mould them to my desire. this would be optional anyway, so no reason not to implement it. most other crpgs do this already.

it should also be available to you when you play as an origin yourself.

Limited respeccing for origins/companions:
When you choose an origin, say shadowheart, you can only specifically be a trickery domain cleric of shar. the game doesn't let you change this.
and what's the point of this if 10 minutes later you can meet withers and make her a wizard?
either allow the change to be made in character select too (which is extremely dumb since it breaks the narrative, and goes against the concept of an origin character itself) or do the more intelligent thing: prevent them from respeccing certain things about them, mostly class, subclass, deity, or other stuff that is relevant to the character. anything that you can't change during origin select, you shouldn't be able to change by respeccing with withers.

literally seems like common sense. and don't give me any crap about "muh limiting player choice". if you want to play as an altruistic flamboyant bard, you can literally just do that instead of picking laezel? if you want to bring a warlock with you, take wyll instead of making halsin one. you can always mod this anyway.

Agree - this defines them.
IMO first Class, Background, Attributes of the Origins should be set in stone.

And if you don't want to have Shadowheart become an actually useful or more thematic Domain...

Then don't change her class?

Why take away the option for other people when you can literally have what you want?

The starting attribute distribution of all companions is horrible because of all the uneven numbers, they might also not be extremely efficient if you like to try harder difficulties and have problems to keep characters alive.

As someone who only plays with Origins I would also be very limited if the game skilled them for me and I had no or limited say in what to do with them. While all the examples above talk about skilling characters against their original concepts, trying out different builds can also help you find builds that suite the characters better. For example, I like two levels of Wild Magic on Origin Gale because it's fun but also because it gives me the chat options to threaten people with explosion now and again. It's a thing Companion Gale likes to do when annoyed but unfortunately his Origin doesn't have chat options for it. Or maybe you give him levels in fighter because he became good friends with Lae'zel and took her up on the offer to train him after all. Many of the Bard chat options also feel very on brand for Astarion, as does casually mocking enemies from the side lines. I red a yt comment of someone who started Shart as a war cleric (because trickery just is useless) then switched to light when she turned from Shar and then changed to Nature at the end when Shart makes up her mind about what she would like her life to be like. I thought that was nice reasoning.

And yep it's a strategy game, people like fun characters but also want to try out fun builds.

I like the flexibility, and I don’t think that they should change it. Not least because there are extremely good narrative reasons to change Shadowheart’s subclass at the end of act two. If they go about trying to restrict her respec, it could end up bugged, which would be awful for roleplay.

And that would require the devs making judgments about which classes are essential to an origin character and which are not. It’s pretty clear that Astarion is not narratively hard-locked as a Rogue, for example. So he could be respecced but other origins couldn’t? I feel like there would be a lot of resentment if the devs made this kind of judgment for the players.

Besides which, you can work fun/useful multiclasses into Shadowheart’s cleric build, and I wouldn’t want that to get messed up either. On the whole, not a fan of the idea of preventing her from being respecced.

And I also like being able to pick out my abilities/skills? Isn’t that part of the fun of the game, seeing everything that the classes can do, sorting out what you like best, and working that into your party?

If that was the case, then Durge or the Dark Urge would be stuck as a White Dragonborn Storm Sorcerer (literally their Canon Class and Race combo),

I'd rather you don't mess up my Playstation game, a Better idea is how about make a mod that prevents multiclassing, prevents respeccing and auto levels companions, if you want what you're asking for you can just mod it in, there's literally no point in limiting the choices of BG3 players, who can't mod their games, if Larian did what you just asked, all of BG3's console players would be demanding refunds.

I want it the way it is now, so the people who want experimenting with builds can do what they want, and the people who don't want to respecc can also do what they want, namely not change builds.

uh, i can only assume you guys skip most of the dialogue in the game since it doesn't look like you bothered to read my post... maybe that's why you don't care about the consistency of the characters.
please show me where i said multiclassing shouldn't be allowed. i just said that you shouldn't be able to change SOME things about the characters. you understand that if wyll isn't a warlock his entire storyline is null, right?
you can literally just multiclass into whatever you want. but if you get wyll, he NEEDS to be at least 1 level into warlock. simple as. after that, do what you want. you could go 1 warlock 11 druid if that's really your thing.
it's not like a single multiclass level breaks the game. but a single missed level *does* break the narrative of that character.

but anyway, you understand what im suggesting is literally what the devs intended right? why do you suppose during character select you cannot change class and subclass of origins? the literal point of origins is that they are premade characters. and if you don't like to use a premade character, you can create your own from scratch, and build him however you want.
the fact that withers lets you respec origin characters looks more like an engine quirk that they haven't bothered to fix, than anything.

sigh. what's the point in participating in forum discussions if you're not even gonna bother to read the thread you're replying to? did you just skim through it? i made it more clear than necessary that it should just be an option precisely to avoid misunderstandings like this but i guess it was inevitable.

the auto level-up *OPTION* would be for people that don't care to minmax their companions. in order to let them go their own predetermined/canon path without thinking.
you guys never played dragon age? neverwinter nights? or literally any other rpg other than baldurs gate 3? including -ironically- baldur's gate 1 and 2? lmfao (although in the case of bg1 and 2, companions were only autolevelled up to the level you were when you met them.)
they could still do that, just with one level less which isn't a big deal.

as for shadowheart's case, the game should automatically change her domain based on certain choices you make during the story. again, i don't believe this wasn't just an engine limitation because it doesn't make any sense.
as for the abilities: they are just numbers and hardly matter. it's not important if you respec lae'zel into having 8 str and the game does let you change that already in origin select. what you cannot change is:

1)appearance (therefore race + subrace)
2)class + subclass
3)deity
4)background

which is only logical. you should have these things locked for their first level.
let me put it another way: shadowheart having 0 levels of cleric makes as much sense as lae'zel not being a githyanki.
in fact, all the points you guys are making could be applied to appearance too.
"the option should be as it is!! if you don't like it just dont respec them!!"
okay, then give us the option to change the appearance of origins. if you don't like that, then just don't change it.
let us change lae'zel into a male dwarf, and have the game still treat her as a female githyanki, which is literally not different from the game treating shadowheart with 0 levels of cleric as a cleric of shar.
or the game treating a wyll with 0 levels of warlock as having made a pact with mizora.
see how stupid that is?

anyway, i urge everyone to please read my post more carefully and understand that im requesting two separate things and not just one.

Do you know what else is intended? Being able to respec at Withers.

Hence it's in the game.

The option to NOT DO SO is still there for those that wish to play the pre-selected stuff.


Nothing about Shadowheart explicitly requires her to be a Cleric. Her only schtick is being devoted to a goddess, not necessarily being a Cleric of one.

Not to mention, I'm fond of using Archfey Warlock on her with headcanon of it being a Sharran as Archfey Warlock provides skills more fitting for the theme of a Sharran (Namely; Darkness, Hunger of Hadar, Devil Sight and the ability to go for a Gish build with Pact of the Blade to utilize all the Shar equipment that is melee focused)


Sure. Except, such a suggestion would be about adding something into the game as opposed to taking something away. If such a capacity existed already and someone tried to make the same argument about "Locking Origins appearances" then I'd pull out exactly the same argument of "Don't want to change them? Then don't"

Not to mention there's a plethora of ways to make "Lore friendly" off-class Origins characters.

From little things like Gale not being locked into Evocation subclass (Which he has no basis for preferring one school over another). To more significant things like Shadowheart as mentioned above can use Warlock with a dash of headcanon for a great Sharran build.

Astarion and Lae'zel have literally nothing dictating what class they are (I'm fond of making Lae'zel a Monk similar to Orpheus' elite guards) with Karlach only being suggestive of Barbarian (Though, Fighter can suit her too and even Paladin given her ideologies).

Some things are more difficult to play around, like Wyll not being a Warlock (Though you can headcanon that you forcibly ended the pact after Act 2 instead of having to wait that 6 month timeframe) or Gale not having something Arcane related.

But those are problems for players to decide how relevant they are.

Larian implemented things in a way where there was a lot of freedom for players. Thus allowing respecs of Origin characters (Including full respecs, unlike many other CRPG's that will hamstring companions, only respecing down to the level you met them at so in games like WotR you're stuck with companions with attrocious stats and questionable feats or you have to go and use hirelings and miss out on story quests and dialogue)

With this freedom, there's also the freedom to NOT do that if one wishes. Allowing everyone to be happy. Those that want to respec Origin characters can do so and those that want to keep them with their original classes with their original (Garbage) stats can do so.

Removing freedoms, by restricting Origin character respecs, helps no-one. People who already are keeping the Origin characters unchanged don't get anything from the restriction. While it needlessly upsets everyone who DID want to change the characters.

Then don't? Why do you care?
Don't be the worst part of the Fandom/community.


Oh, and maybe Google false equivalence fallacy.

Choosing how and in what direction a character develops their skills is an essential component of DnD. Removing that ability would akin to removing controlling them in combat, and both contribute to understanding how those characters even work.

I don't have an issue per se with auto-leveling as an option (although it seems like a waste of dev resources to me). But not allowing you to make Gale a divination wizard instead of evocation or Laezel a Gith-friendly monk takes away from the experience for others.

Don't want to respec? Then don't do it, and everyone gets what they want.

Maybe take your own advice. Leveling up has also nothing to do with minmaxing. While the option for a auto level-up sounds horrible to me, I just didn't engage with the idea further because it sounds useless on the whole. Often the level-up menu only informs you of your new abilities, and for some classes there isn't much to select at all apart from feats, which you should probably better pick yourself to be aware of what you end up with. Otherwise the complaints about a character missing their attacks will be great because someone was unaware of having been given Great Weapon Master and people choosing automatic options are exactly the ones who don't bother reading what their abilities do. The classic: Shadowheart misses all her attacks!

Edit: Your optional request is also only optional on first glance, as you simultaneously request this auto-build to be the "canon" in other words the right way to play the game - as opposed to being a simple default. While I don't like this pattern of thought to begin with, it gets especially odd when you assume that the characters themselves wouldn't choose abilities that compliment each other but rather pick them as if they'd exist in a vacuum and weren't a team that depended on each other. Especially for a team-player like Lae'zel (she has a couple of dialogues on the subject, the ones after Elminster's visit and the Cazador fight come to mind) this sounds very wrong.

The point of an origin is having a character with a backstory, Taril explained the rest. Maybe from a gameplay perspective one could add that some people like to start characters as Paladins/Fighters because they want the starting stats from those classes, so they'd prefer to make Wyll 2Fighter/10Warlock instead of 10Warlock/2Fighter. Looking at Wyll's upbringing that would make perfect sense too, since he frequently talks about having learned things from his father before meeting Mizora. Again, if you don't like it, just don't do it, but asking for others to follow the same auctorial vision you'd like to have impressed on you, is a bit much.