I’m sure that many of you have found the rings True Love’s Caress and True Love’s Embrace around the House of Healing in Act 2. If you’re wearing True Love’s Embrace, you can cast warding bond on the person who is wearing True Love’s Caress. Warding bond gives resistance to several kinds of damage to the recipient, but the one who casts it also takes half damage of whatever the recipient gets hit with.

If you read the note that comes along with True Love’s Embrace, you’ll see that the rings have quite a horrific history. Spoilers of course.

You find out that a Dark Justiciar, who was on the front lines of battle, pretended that she was marrying this guy who was in love with her. She gave him True Love’s Embrace and unbeknownst to him, they perform a little magic ritual under the guise of them getting married, and he casts warding bond on her. Then, when she’s out in battle, he keeps getting sicker and sicker, with holes all over his body, and he doesn’t know why. He eventually dies, as his skeleton attests. So there’s an awful history surrounding the ring, which put me off on using it for quite a while.

But then, I thought, what’s more romantic than an *actually consenting* person wearing True Love’s Embrace, and casting warding bond on their romantic interest? In a combat-filled RPG like this, the only thing more romantic is getting an advantage on a dice roll from the power of someone’s faith in you. So, I thought, let’s do this!

So I got my rings on my Durge and Shadowheart and cast warding bond on her. Now here’s where my suggestion comes in. Why not have a little content there? Just a little conversation. Like the character who you cast warding bond on, or they cast it on you, will have a reaction and a few lines of conversation. And it could be quite funny or quite romantic, depending.

If you cast warding bond on Lae’zel, for example, and she’s your love interest, that would go really well thematically with her act 2 romance scene. If she whomps you, she says something like, “I don’t want to hurt you. I want to protect you. I want you to protect me.” So having her react to warding bond would be a really nice touch.

Or let’s say, with Shadowheart, there could be the consideration of whether the warding bond lessens the pain of her mysterious Sharran wound, as they call it. And you could have a short-lived debuff like Astarion’s Bloodless/Happy. (The workaround being, Remove Curse works on you, but not on Shadowheart.) I think it would be cool! I’m finding so many other little small touches throughout the game that I think this would be a neat touch too.

Last edited by Ecc2ca; 07/02/24 02:05 AM.