Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Suggestion: Toggle for visual effects from permabuffs (like Armor of Agathys)

When you have Armor of Agathys on, or other buffs like Hellish Rebuke, there's a colorful pulse on your character every 2-5 seconds (example below). Since these buffs are up most of the time, the visual effect becomes a bit annoying in my opinion. Would it be possible to toggle the visual effects from these buffs? Or perhaps just tone down the effect or remove the pulse; Armor of Agathys already has a nice frost aura that is subtle.

Oh look it's my pet peeve. =)

Mage Armor
Arcane Ward
Longstrider
...

Basically all the perma-buffs look really obtrusive and annoying. And there will be more long lasting buffs at higher levels that add to the mess... There are solutions:

- make the VFX more subtle if they are always on!
- only show them during combat
- only show VFX when the spell effect is activated e.g. Mage Armor force field is briefly visible only when it is hit
- at the very least disable them during dialogue

Amen to that.

As a compromise I'd like: "visualize them just in combat".

EDIT- Oh well, 1varagian already said that.

For the record this isn't even a "new problem" to the genre and Bg1 and 2 suffered from this crap a lot. By the end game your party looked like an happy brigade of walking Christmas trees.

The problem with subtle is potentially the visual clues on opponents.
Not to say that one shouldn't strive for a balance.

But visual feedback still works even if it's not on all the time. E.g. someone has Fire Resistance / Protection from Elements or such on (whatever it is in 5e). You hit them with a fire attack and energy flashes and absorbs the fire. That would actually be more clear than having some sparks flying 24/7 that don't even react to fire (like NWN).

But the absolute worst is when you spend a lot of time customizing the look of your Wizard, only for them to be a sparkling pulsating force bubble mess 24/7 and you can't even see the character model anymore.

How come NPC's don't react to that obscuring mess during dialogue?

I'm not sure all magical protections even should be visualized. A big part of the usefulness of a protection spell is that your enemies don't know about it. If they do, they can always choose to target another party member who doesn't have it. And this should work both ways.

Maybe even give Detect Magic a purpose, revealing those auras and protections?

I kinda like that magic that is "permanently active" have "permanent effect" ...
You could call it immersion.

But if that would be adjustable in settings ... w/e.

lmao true

My party before the final fight of ToB (the only reason my CHARNAME didn't look like the rest was because she was a monk)



There's a reason why a lot of players wanted a mod that disabled VFXs of modal abilities in DAO.