Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Death by Pop-Up

2 party members were burning at the end of the fight. Then this popped up and I couldn't click anything. The Hag stuff is so hard now. I had to cheese through every step of this quest. Attacked the sheep to get the redcaps to come out (which they got the surprise round on me for wtf). Reloaded the fight against the masked slaves in the basement a couple dozen times before finally just making Astarion sneak around solo for the whole fight and sneak attack everyone to death. Then had to fight the hag like three times because the illusions can each cast hold person and I literally couldn't do anything but watch everyone die, so I got everyone into the room on the other side and abused vision mechanics to make all the illusions come to me by closing the door. This segment is way too unforgiving for level 3/4. I wish I had some cheats available to spawn some free revifies to deal with this nonsense.

Than level up to level 5.

I had a pretty alright time, though I unintentionally cheesed the hag (when she turned into copy of Melina, I attacks what I think was the illusion using non-lethal strike - illusion dissapeared and unconcious status stransfered to Hag).

Larian needs to figure out a better way to tranfer in and out of combat. I had similar things happen myself.

The first time Auntie Ethel fight was one of the 4 fights I ever lost in the game, and I still see it as one of the most annoying fights, even after more than a dozen runs. But the fight is relatively easy at lvl 4 if you are a bit used to it (so, second run onwards), and such prepared. I would never do it with lvl 3.

Have your chars well rested and fully loaded. At lvl 4 the redcaps are very easy, I ususally kill them just with crossbows and cantrips and perhaps one or two aoe spells. After the more difficult fight against the masks I leave the Hag's house and long rest. I climb down to the cave and short-rest before the fight, to get back the hp I lost in the poison clouds.

I would advice to take Wyll instead of Astarion, except you have an intense relation to the latter. Wyll is much stronger in this fight (and generally). Send Wyll's invisible imp onto the bridge towards the back of the cave. Use Magic Missiles from Gale and the imp (who can fly) to attack/disguise the copies of Ethel as soon as possible. Quite often you can remove all copies the first turn they were created, especially if you are playing with Karmic Dices (the default setting). If you want to back up, take Scorching Ray on Wyll, another multiple ray spell. Take out the fire on the cage soon, best with the Rain spell from Raindancer staff. If Ethel copies Mayrina, attack the copy which shows less hit chance. The rest is history.

It's disappointing that you let such a monster live, but to each his/her own.

The first time I tried the hag fight, I got utterly trounced. It was several patches back and I was clearly losing in the first couple turns with no way to stop the fire. I reloaded and just left. The next time I tried it, I used advice from the forum to just kill her quick before she made it into her lair. The first time after that when I went into her actual lair to fight her, I shoved one of her illusions into the pit and I was lucky enough that it was the real thing. I've never actually enjoyed the fight or really the hag stuff as a whole. That stretch after the masks with all the flame traps? I hate that, it's so tedious and frustrating. The movement mechanics make it so much worse than it already is because it's so much easier to set off any of the traps even if you see a way to avoid them, and if you actually do set off the traps, disarming them is such a pain, if you even can disarm them in the face of the flame traps. I usually just end up powering through some section and use healing potions because the alternative is so boring and tedious. I do not like the hag encounter and much prefer just killing her in the tea shop, even though that requires annoying cheesing and save scumming too.

You can get from top to bottom with just one poison cloud touched. First use jump to avoid the first cloud, then run through a cloud to climb down, climb down again, run a bit, then jump again to get to the bottom. With one short rest you are full hp again. But I concur, it's an annoying parcour.

I never cheese fights or start them other than from dialog, so killing Ethel up in the house is not possible for me. Resting before the last fight is not cheesing for me, I even did it before my very first fight against Ethel (I lost nevertheless) because I expected a harsh encounter, however not that copy stress.

See what I mean? Tedious. Since it sounds like I have to unchain the whole party to go through that rigmarole with each one individually. All together it's enough to make me want to skip this whole section more often than not.

Whole party? Nah. First send everyone else to camp, then have Tav do the parkour down, sneak through Auntie's workshop to the portal to outside, go to camp and bring everyone back. Retrace your steps and lay down the smack.

I always fight Ethel in her lair as I want the hair.
It just takes some planning.

The real big challenge is to keep both the enthralled masks and Mayrina alive during the fight, and also to force the Vettel to surrender. Whoever achieves all three goals can pat themselves on the back, especially with level 4 or lower.

But as I wrote in another thread. If I march into the swamp, and that is now times with level 3-4, then I explore it also to the end and do not go first into the Underdark, so that I become level 5. Of course you can do it that way, but for me it's immersionbreaking. After all, we learn right at the beginning, when we meet Aunthe Ethel in the swamp, that there is "imminent danger" for someone...

That just sounds like another kind of tedium and also entirely anti-roleplay. And also not viable for someone playing the game the first time as they're not going to know there's an exit to go through, just as an aside. And on a non-mechanical point, it's another encounter that suffers from the weird issue where dialogue will initiate and just grab the nearest character instead of your main character for Ethel to talk to, thankfully I never want to let her live at least. The fact you can't seem to save Mayrina's brothers despite (I think, I may not be remembering right) getting a charisma check to try, is also just a drag that feels like the game just wants us to feel bad without really earning it.

Basically I'm on the OPs side, this whole sequence isn't just too hard, since at least you can grind to get to a higher level, but it's also just various flavours of annoying at several points.

She wrote her death sentence when she killed the two brothers for nothing and signed it with her playhouse.

I find the game utterly disappointing especially in the variation when Ethel killed the brothers during the first dialog. There is not the slightest remark by Tav or the other "heroes" about the killing. Compared to the enormous pseudo-moral fuss about the shocking fact that Kagha wants to IMPRISON (!!!!!!!) a CHILD (!!!!!!!!!!) who only stole an unimportant item, that's remarkable.

In fairness to the game about the whole Kagha thing, Arabella tried to steal a sacred, religious artifact. But yeah, the amount of care the game devotes to that, compared to the brothers being killed is quite a divergence, especially considering the hullabaloo was going on before the child died, and there's a whole moral debate about it. And Kagha imprisoning the child would always only have been a temporary measure anyway until the tieflings inevitably left. I agree that death is an overblown punishment for sure, but I think being kept locked up for what realistically would have ended up being a couple days whether our group had come around or not, is actually fairly reasonable.

On a brief tangent from that, I think if they wanted to sell Kagha's eventual possible redemption, they shouldn't have had her be so firmly cold if Arabella died. Have it be that she never intended for her snake to strike but it acted out of instinct. Show her faltering, show that the situation escalated farther than she wanted, but then have her double down to basically save face and present what she thinks is strong leadership. And if Larian really wanted to make her redemption feel more real, then they could have made it so that, if Arabella did die and you've exposed the shadow druid plot, you can use that death to leverage her conscious and make it easier to get her to turn. In general Larian should have shown her armor cracking once or twice to better sell a redemption.

I expressed myself badly, the Inet is no place for irony or sarcasm. I actually meant that Kagha's behavior to imprison Arabella because she stole one of the most important items of the grove (my wording was a bad try of sarcasm) is a minor thing compared to the killing of two innocent people who are concerned about the well-being of her sister.

I always succeeded to save Arabella, in more of a dozen playthroughs, without any reloading, so I never experienced Kagha's behavior on a different ending. Sad to hear that Kagha does not show more empathy.

Yep, it is generally using meta knowledge to do the solo parkour down and bring the whole party through...

Except I'd done this trick several times before and what with all these revivify scrolls + Withers, I play my Tav daringly. Also, potions of Invisibility are always stocked up.

It sounds like rigmarole, but it's pretty time efficient. Last playthrough I used wyvern poison to knock Ethel down in one round, had to ease off to position Wyll closest.

****

In initial playthrough, and full release play, no such hijinks. Aggressive exploring is fun, but with a hag who can do worse than merely kill, it's unwise. Probably will use a mix of summons and being methodical. I'll just use knocking out on her minions.

Haha, stupid peasants got Man-Fridged. Lol.

Honestly I almost want to argue that they aren't even characters enough to qualify for fridging. We get to meet them for one fairly frantic scene at most and then they die. They're really not characters, they're plot devices, ways to make you think Ethel's shady. I think Ethel's tea shop lair is a great set piece, all her victims are cool and interesting, no question. The actual story connected to it though? That feels so anemic. It all passes by too quickly to make an impression. We meet Ethel and she's weird. We run into Ethel and the brothers and pick a side. Either we kill the brothers or they run off and get killed after filling us in about a bit more of Mayrina's story. We arrive at the tea house and only then do we actually see Mayrina, being force-fed pie with no idea her brothers are dead. Then we deal with Ethel one way or another, and if we kill Ethel and save Mayrina, we see her wheel her husband's body home. There's no grounding, no chance to really connect with anyone. It doesn't feel like a tragedy, it feels like the writers are trying to make me sad.

By the way, where the hell does she live that she thinks wheeling his body back is at all something she can physically do? There's no civilization for probably miles. She doesn't go to the druid grove and I think the implication is she doesn't even really know it's there. She doesn't have camping gear or food, so we have to assume she's going to just fend for herself for miles with her husband's corpse in a wheelbarrow.

I think it's in keeping with her character...she's not the sharpest crayon in the box.

Blue car syndrome...First time I ever heard that term was today reading some awful article about poor writing (in their opinion) from male authors.

Now I see it again an hour later on the BG3 forums. Bizarre I tells ya.

Me too! There's a number of feminist literary critiques that invent such jargon and terms; regularly came across it back in university. It's criticizing the male propensity to protect, of all things. I mean sure, such stories can be hackneyed and cliche, but that's true of all clumsy writing.

Anyway, how did these brothers get to the sunlit fens, a ten-day from Baldur's Gate? Not via Moonrise. Either by boat or Risen road (passing before Gith appeared). Probably the latter as by boat they'd have met the redcaps sooner.

Now that I think about it, Ethel has been saving them for us, staying her Redcaps. (Maybe they did come by boat?) She's been monitoring us and let the brothers find her as we approach. They're a couple of idiots who admit as much after dying, if you bother to speak with them. Ethel's purpose is to have their blood on our hands - and presumably we'd feel so ashamed, we'd keep it secret from Mayrina as we passed through, while doing our business with her.

It's all very convoluted, but in keeping with the hag's need to deceive and corrupt. And whenever it fails, she just uses her physical prowess.

Mayrina isnt from BG right? She heads there looking for a cure.

As a Green Lantern fan who was young enough to be deeply disturbed by the issue in question. It's difficult for me to really understand why this trope is considered ‘problematic’. It worked on me, I might have started hating comics because of it, but it worked.

I still agree the meeting with the brothers is one of those encounters that only works well if you play along. Otherwise you’re pretty much railroaded to where the story wants you to be. I think we’ve complained about this particular bit before, especially around the functionality of nonlethal damage in this game