Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks A Bit More Than Honour Mode?

After a long pause (starting before patch 7) I want to play the game again and need some proposals/hints. I stopped my first playthrough at the start of Act 3 (because I didn't like some quest designs), than played the second time on Honour Mode till after the successful fight against Rafael, then lost interest. Playing the third act first time in Honour Mode was perhaps not the best idea of all times, but interesting. Because of the use of Honour Mode I could not experiment much and consider myself more as an inexperienced player.

Honour Mode did/does not interest me because of the dice but because of the neccessary nerf of Haste, the boss abilities and the restriction of no save spamming. I plan to play it again, but with some mods/rules/changes which I partly used before, and some new ones:

- Wet Nerf (no vulnerability)
- No multi-classing except for Astarion (Sword Bard/Thief)
- No tadpole abilities except for Astarion
- No elixirs as cheat for Strength etc.
- No Thrower in the group


I consider to use also these mods in addition:

- Absolute Wrath
- Random Spawns

As balance for the presumably stronger enemies I would play with 5 party members (by the mod Adjustable Party Limit). The party will be, if the dice allows it, Shadowheart (perhaps as the new Death Cleric, does it fit her?), Gale (probably Abjuration), Astarion (Sword Bard/Thief) and Lae'zel (EK). I played most often as Sorcerer till now and want my char Alicia this time as Warlock (Hex Blade?); or perhaps Bladesinger Wizard, but I'm a bit hesitating to have two Wizards in the group.

What do you think? What is the experience with Absolute Wrath and Random Spawns? Decent or overdone? Random Spawns could possibly be more of a help for the party because we get more xp? Are there better mods for a mildly more difficult gameplay? Should I use "Smarter AI" mod in addition or would that be too much? Would the party have the urgent need of other classes?

Answering to this overwhelming amount of reactions ... , I list the mods which made for me the most satisfying concoction, without the need to go to such huge mod lists like Listonomicon. I found it better to play in Custom Mode with Honour Mode ruleset and the rest put to Tactician, because there are one or two situations in the game were events can really ruin your playthrough (for me above all first appearance of Gale and abduction of Isobel), so I like to be able to have more than one save.

Mods used:

- Wet Nerf
- Absolute Wrath
- PixellBytes' Tactician Enhanced
- Valkrana's Undead Encounters
- Extra Encounters and Mini Bosses

You do realize that you can do many of these things without mods, right ?

Like, nobody multiclass but Astarion, easy.

You can also add challenges like using only melee weapons or not using any heavier than light armor or whatever else you want to come up with.

Only melee weapons or only light armor for all chars would be too artificial for me. What's the reason in a DnD world to use only such restricted ingame stuff? Without mods it would be very difficult to have a decent run if you take more than 4 party members. I recognized that even with mods it's more or less impossible to have a relatively balanced experience with a bigger party. I therefore removed all party mods and I'm only playing with 4 party members, but with the rest of the setting I planned and tried with 5 party members.

My only mods (except the absolutely mandatory visual mods to battle the utter ugliness of the game's items and effects):

- Absolute Wrath
- Wet Nerf
- Enemy Scaling mod (not advisable till the end of Act 2 in my opinion)
- Extra Encounters and Mini Bosses (I had bad experiences to use several spawn mods together)

Then there are some rules:
- no Sorcerer, no Sword Bard (reason: not available among the captives)
- only one char with multi-classing (reason: pride in the own prior training, don't see this for Astarion however)
- no Arcane Acuity other than for the Arcane Archer (Astarion) (Arcane Acuity creates pimples and increases danger for dementia, sure)

I have still some problems to justify using other game cheasers like Hexblade Warlock, Radiating Orb or Reverberation, which I don't want to miss.