Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Companion Circle of Stars Druid staying out of conversations

Sorry about the clunky title, but I wasn't sure how else to describe it..

Had this happen once with Halsin and now again with Jaheira, both of whom I had respec-ed into Stars-Druids.

With Halsin, his automatic lines he'll usually say during the very first encounter with Oliver were missing. During the conversation after the fight against Oliver, things worked as normal.

With Jaheira, it was very similar both in the Guild Hall and then at the Counting House. She did speak with Nine-Fingers as normal but when I then proceeded to talk to Uktar, her contributions to the conversation never came and I had to pass a check with the guy to get him to tell me about Minsc's location. Same thing with the bank clerk where she also wouldn't interject (as she will normally do) after Tav had started the conversation, so Tav had to pass another check with that guy.

Both Jaheira and Halsin were in Star-form when this happened, so I suspect the game is treating these like regular Wildshape-/animal forms. Can't imagine this behavior is as intended, since, well, Star-form will leave the druid in their humanoid form and able to, for example, speak with Tav normally when spoken to.

EDIT: I reloaded a save just before the conversation with the clerk and this time I had Jaheira drop her Star-form before talking to the dude and the dialogue played out as usual.

I also noticed that during conversations where the Druid is still "wildshaped" into Star-form, he/she will not be shown during the scenes showing the party - it's basically as if you had only a party of three in the conversation.

Druids ruining cutscenes by being in wildshape and now in starry form has been a problem since release. Larian really needs to change how it works. Accidentally finishing combat before having the chance to revert from wildshape and missing the next, potentially extremely important cutscene because of it is just a massive design flaw. I play as a druid, and I learned the hard way early on that if there's any chance the combat ends before my character's next turn, I need to exit wildshape even if it means I risk dying.

And that's me as an observant player - imagine all the players who never realize, and just go through the game missing tons of cutscenes because of being in wildshape.

Meanwhile druids have no trouble temporarily shifting out of wildshape to talk to companions at camp. So clearly there's no strict lore reason they can't just exit wildshape for cutscenes.

Yeah... as much as I love that new sub-class, I think I might re-spec Jaheira to the usual Circle of the Land build I've used with her in the past. How do I know she won't mess things up further down the line in situations where the game cuts directly from a fight to an important conversation, giving me no option to manually drop her "wildshape"? Plus it's a bit annoying having to micro this stuff - I mean.. I don't have to switch off other classes special abilities like Monk's radiant damage or take a Barbarian out of rage-mode manually after combat, either.

I do understand why a truly wildshaped Druid wouldn't be able to take part in a conversation (they're an animal in this state), but the starry forms don't seem to be under this restriction under most other circumstances. If it's too hard/complicated to re-design/program how starry forms are handled, they should at least get auto-dropped (much like Barb rage) after combat to prevent this behavior.

Oh is that the reason, why she was invisible (but still talked to) when I had her with me at the counting house recently?

I'm going to guess that it is. It happened to me too at that conversation where the game was treating Jaheira like she wasn't on the team - she didn't show up during the cut-scenes and she didn't call out the clerk being nervous or anything like that. It was as if she wasn't there.

Re-loading to before the start of the conversation, making Jaheira drop out of starry form and then talking to the clerk resulted in the conversation going about as expected, with Jaheira bypassing that first insight-check and doing most of the talking.

I'm also pretty sure that her lines during the conversation with Glitterbeard were missing as well, as I had forgotten to take her out of starry form again after the fight against the Bhaalists. I *think* she should have lines here, but those never came... plus I'm very sure she was again not shown as present during the shots that show the party.

Some of her lines you get from her after those conversations are also slightly different, I think, and probably the versions you would get from her if she truly hadn't been there for the encounters/conversations.

This is so odd because my encounter at the counting house went as you described, otoh when we were saving Minsc she behaved normally even though I am fairly certain she was in starry form then as well. I also don't recall missing interactions with Shadowheart, who is my other starry druid. Weird, but thank you for pointing this out, I'll pay more attention to it in the future.

As I've stated further up, there seems to be a difference between types of conversations and if they will let a star-form Druid participate or not.

- first conversation with Oliver (at his "home") excluded star-form Halsin.
- second conversation with Oliver (after he's been fought/defeated) included star-form Halsin.

- Jaheira in star form could talk just fine during the "where's Minsc?"-conversation with Nine-Fingers
- Jaheira in star form could *not* participate in the conversation with Uktar right after.
- Jaheira in star form could not participate in the conversation with the bank clerk ... and might also have been missing from the conversation with Glitterbeard after the fight in the vault. Not 100% on this but I *think* she should have lines in this one if she's in the party.