Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks How’d you lose your Honour run?

Hi folks! I decided to do a combat-focused Honour run, while the content that I like is fixed. And I have the aspiration, perhaps the unrealistic aspiration, to only do it once. So I’ve got three melee tanks (oath of vengeance paladin, battle master fighter, and berserker barbarian) with a tanky light cleric. I do not want TPK, lol.

Thankfully, I’ve dealt with all of the major Act 1 battles, except for Grym at Grymforge in the Underdark. And boy oh boy, do I have the fear of Grym in me! He was hard enough to beat on balanced mode, and I think he’s the biggest threat to my run at the moment.

So my question is, did any folks here die to Grym? What do you wish you’d done differently? OR, how did you lose your Honour run, like to which battle, and what would you have done differently to avoid that? Spoilers are fine, I just want to keep my party alive, lol. And any story spoilers are fine, because I have beaten the game.

If you died to a frustrating bug, feel free to mention that as well, as I’d like to avoid it.

I have completed one honor run and died in more . . .

** puffs self up ** I like to think I'm an expert in dying now.

I died on Ansur because I too the alert feat instead of the war caster feat. Every time I had the globe of invulnerability up I would lose a concentration check and it would go down. Next time I either use the spidersilk armor or take the feat.

Died at the mountain pass because I lost the initiative roll - badly - and the gith killed us before anyone did anything. (next time I'll take the alert feat I think . . .)

Died at Oliver because I went in without metaknowledge. Was over quickly.

Didn't have much trouble with Grym

I failed every single saving throw against the harpy song in one of my deaths. At least it was early and I didn't have much time invested yet.

The harpies are brutal! They would have TPK’ed me if my paladin didn’t have the shield spell from a sorcerer level. Close call for sure.


Thanks for the tips! Actually the one on using minor illusion REALLY helped with Grym. All of my party members just stood up on the broken stairs far away from him, used minor illusion to lure him, and then shot all of the levers with arrows to kill him with the hammer without the loss of a single hitpoint. Pretty crazy.

Definitely going to brew some necrotic resistance potions for Oliver. (I’ve heard elsewhere that this is good.) And using globe of invulnerability with someone great at concentration checks is a nice tip for Ansur, thanks.

We (2 player, we each have one companion) had gotten through most of the Blighted Village using conversation rather than fighting. We were a handful of exp away from level 4 at this point, so the game was off to a good start. I ran up to the goblins who were torturing the gnome with the windmill and got through the dialog options.

At this point, we got greedy and attacked the goblins for the extra exp. Upon attacking, the entire village joined in on the fight against us!

Two well placed fire arrows put most of our party near death's door.

We managed to call the ogres using the horn, but they only attacked one goblin near the entrance of the village and stood there, not entering the big melee we were involved in.

...and then we died!!!

That’s wild, I almost died there, too. The other goblins in the village didn’t join in though. And they were alive, so I’m not sure why not. But yeah, that horde of goblins almost killed me when I accidentally made them aggressive. I think some potions of speed helped me dispatch them and escape death by the skin of my teeth, lol.

Thanks for creating this thread, Ecc2ca. I'll look forward to hearing folks' stories.

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to move it to the Help, Tips & Tricks subforum.

You have all inspired me to start my own Honour Mode run, almost certainly before I'm anywhere near ready for it as I've only completed two balanced mode playthroughs and most of act 1 with my tactician Durge run. And I'm still not watching streamers play or reading guides as I'm trying to work stuff out myself.

Which is basically me getting my excuses in early for the fact I'm probably going to be here posting about my ignominious demise in the not too distant future

(I nearly came a-cropper very early fighting the gang inside the Underground Ruins at level 2, entirely through my own stupidity, but managed to squeak by.)

I played many times Act 1 in EA but never the Grym fight, I played after release one playthrough in Balanced/Tactician until lvl 10, leaving out the Grym fight. Then I started in Honour mode, after I had watched someone starting Honour mode on Youtube...

My party consisted of Gale, Shadowheart, Astarion and my main, Warlock/Sorceress to be. Act 1 was quite easy because I knew it by heart, but I had to run away from the owlbear fight (mostly because I made the two siblings hostile by carelessly touching them with an aoe spell) and from the Gith patrol fight (I had two dead and one in Hold Person before I could even roll the dice; from then on I knew that the most important Honour mode stat is initiative).

Doing Grym first time in Honour mode was not the best of all ideas. I needed about 1.5 hours for the fight, two times I was near to give up (for example once when I tested wether running through the lava would be that bad), but then in the end I survived even with three on the legs. The most difficult fight I had in the whole game till now.

In the Creche Astarion now was a ranged Fighter/Thief, Gale an Evocation Wizard and Shadowheart a Tempest Cleric, my main a Thunder Sorceress. I was especially in some horror of the Captain fight (one of the rare situations I had had a wipe in my first playthrough), but it was ok.

Act 2 was not that difficult, I did all quests and all bosses to get xp as much as possible and was lvl 9 before Ketheric as far as I remember. Act 2 contains my most hated event in the game, the abduction of Isobel. My plan was to stop playing in case I failed. Wether they toned it down since shortly after release a lot or I was extremely overprepared, it was a breeze this time. Ketheric's fights were not that of a problem, I had however left Jaheira out to not endager her. And it was almost the biggest problem of the hive fight to keep Aylin alive. Beware, the Ketheric encounters allegedly got more difficult with Patch 6.

Act 3 was mostly new for me as I never played it outside Honour mode, but manageable. I ran away from the Ethel fight, without any reason I noticed later, because I thought the shown hp of her billion copies were the real hp. I ran away two times from the Ansur fight; after my ingenious plan for a second attack by superior char placement had failed miserably, I used the I-Win-globe for my third and successful approach. The fight against Raphael went worse than I had hoped and Hope died in it, that's a shame. My group had changed during Act 3 btw, as now Jaheira (skilled as Paladin 8/ Bard 4) was in the place of Astarion. My main had a Warlock 2/ Fighter 4/ Sorceress 6 crit build.

There are two fights left, Orin and the brain. I somehow ran out of steam however (or are frightened too much ...?), parked my run and started a Custom mode one as Dark Urge, important for me with more saves (for better experimenting, was the most fun) and some mods which unlock Honour mode features, make enemies stronger than Tactician/Honour mode, remove Wet's vulnerability effect and randomize the loot. It's also not allowed by house rule to use Haste on a caster. I think Larian should extend the Custom mode area a bit similarly.

Generally I used in the Honour run almost all the bad stuff you should actually avoid, like attacking from stealth, Haste, vulnerability from Wet and even in one rare instance a barrel. I thought if the game has an "unfair" mode, I can use unfair game features. I did not sink low enough however to use a strength potion on strength build chars, except once for getting Phalar Aluve. I also did not metagame, so I made all the dialogs before fights where you don't know wether the talking partner is hostile or not (exception: Giths in the creche because I was on a run to kill all of them after Shadowheart had disemboweled Lae'zel due to unlucky dice rolls). I do not use shove.

As my preliminary result I think Larian got Honour mode in a good place. It is tough but not too tough and not too easy; it's manageable even if you get unlucky sometimes. The friend of you if you get unlucky is the best and most overpowered item in the game, seldomly mentioned, the healing potion.

Gah! That's my first honour mode attempt ended in failure at level three in the Whispering Depths. I accidentally triggered the Spider Matriarch fight when I'd just been sneaking around destroying her eggs and was intending to then go away and rest up before the battle - I thought I'd got away when suddenly she and the two phase spiders came phasing after me and cornered my party in a really inconvenient place, and given their mobility there was no fleeing the combat. I still might have got one of my party away had I realised that her legendary action wouldn't necessarily mummify the same individual who attacked one of her children, but could entomb another of the party instead.

Ah well, I'll know for next time. And I'll probably carry on this run anyway as I do like the character.

(I do wish it was possible to turn off single save mode after failing but continuing an honour mode run, but doesn't look like it is.)

I've died many times in many ways
My unluckiest to date:
- enter Blighted Village from side gate next to half-ogre in the making, and trigger a fight for which I was completely unprepared, as I was expecting dialogue auto success having a Drow Tav ...

My stupidest to date:
- I was preparing barrlemancy to defeat Flind and friends. While I was in the inventory window, doing "drop item", one of the barrels ended up on the burning hyena and KABOOM

Metagaming honor mode:

Harpies:


Grym:

Nere:


Ending the curse:

Kethric:

Orin


Sharrans


Sarevok

Haha definitely a Wylie Coyote moment. Damn those Acme Barrels!