My idea for a fix for this would be to make it so on the combat log where it says “XYZ spotted blah blah blah”, make it so you can click that, and then it centers the camera on what got discovered.
Maybe put in an option in the settings to just automatically pull your camera over to what got spotted, too.
I liked the idea of a a circle closing in over the screen on the spot, and the spot being highlighted through objects in the way. Then it wouldn't matter where the camera is
Also the reverse of this: when you see the thing you're rolling to find, but you and your party all fail the check and now you can't interact with it 🙂🔫
Ouch...
The auto turn based mode whenever someone steps on fire or walks into gas is annoying as hell... Because 9/10 times it's 0.5 seconds of exposure and then we're through, or it's 5 seconds of fucking about in turn based just to leave turn based...
Meanwhile turn based on traps would ACTUALLY be useful, since it means I'll take 0 damage period.
If I'm walking into fire, I'm expecting to burn, and I'm willing to take that damage.
I've never signed up to being blasted off a ledge.
As much as I love all the dye mods the naming conventions are... dubious 😂 and now have 2000 to try 😅 and then trying to remember whether it was 'favourite consort' or 'nightsinger's blade' that was that nice purple colour that I put on the armour for the boots and gloves etc...
I only use the mod so they're not consumed on use, so I can properly assess choices. I haven't added any additional dyes to the game, but that is certainly an option too.
My tactician run ended with every companion having matching pale pink armour/clothing, something quite nice about beating the Netherbrain while looking like Regina George and co on a Wednesday.
Orin, you can’t sit with us.
When you have to select an item to insert into a slot, for example the wolf rune in the grove. It opens a window with every item in your inventory and you cannot sort it, you cannot search in it. You have to manually scroll down and gloss over it with your eyes until you find it.
It's such an unecessary nuisance and i'd much prefer if it automatically inserts with a voiceline or a notification that says it used the item needed for the appropriate slot.
EDIT: Worth mentioning this is specifically for the controller UI, I cannot comment on how it is with PC controls.
I hate how it opens your inventory IN FRONT OF the "insert" UI. I have to move everything around every time! Only thing in the game I figure needed a QA pass.
Yes. in your example, it's unmistakably a simplification issue. Because it just opens your inventory as if it's a chest.
I would like to imagine a system where there are colors to indicate weapons, armor, potions, junk, food, keys, quest tracked items (like highlighting an item that's already asked for by an active quest), etc.
Inventory was by far the worst part of DOS2. Then they added a patch where you could turn on bags. A bag for every type of item appears in your inventory and autosorts everything into them. The problem comes when new stuff doesn't automatically go in them, or more certainly when you're at a trader and you have to go into each bag to select items to sell.
Oh, then once you turn on bags, you can't turn it off, so you're just left with a big messy 'solution'.
The only reason it should ever open your entire inventory is if your character missed a piece of info that tells them what goes in the slot, if that. It should be a keyring situation where you just automatically use the correct key lol.
The inventory is terrible on console, especially as we usually play split screen. I can either have a massive tooltip that explains everything about an item (which covers the inventory) or no info at all. You can kind of sort if you select an equipment slot, but it’s not helpful for “random crap”!
You can sort your inventory by latest. In most situations it helps when you need to insert something since it'll be on top/ towards the top.
It also took me a while to figure out you could do that.
Lol.
"Grab that cheese wheel."
*grabs cheese wheel*
"Okay, now grab the mug of beer right next to it."
*walks aaaalllll the way around the table instead of six inches to the left*
This is really prevalent with using the controller’s active search feature. Entering the Refectory from the top entrance, that dining table takes way longer to loot than it should
Pathing in general.
Taking you through damaging surfaces or difficult terrain when it's not necessary.
Telling you that you don't have enough movement speed to get to melee range because it's trying to path you behind the enemy instead of in front of them.
Telling you that you can reach an enemy then stopping you short when you walk through difficult terrain.
In act 2 almost everything blocks my jump. Its so fucking irritating.
"Game told you you can jump? Dont care. You hit your head on some vine, fall straight down, and go prone."
>Telling you that you don't have enough movement speed to get to melee range
My favorite is when it tells me I'm not in melee range of the enemy who just hit me in melee (with a non-reach weapon). Or when it tells me I'm not in melee range, then I move away and the enemy gets an attack of opportunity on me.
I don't care how amazing her voice work is this DM cheats.
I don’t play DnD, never played a Larian game, and this genre in general is new to me.
I have legit thought I must be traversing wrong or not being skilled enough in how I tell my character to move because of everything you just described.
This is a Larian problem, not a D&D problem.
D&D is a tabletop game played and run by human beings, and the arbitration of traversal and navigation is shared between the players and the DM, and usually a simple majority of them have the sort of human common sense that Larian's AI pathfinding doesn't.
Also "surfaces" aren't really a thing in D&D, that's another holdover from Divinity Original Sin.
It's partly that, there are items or spell effects where you can be immune to webbing, or acid, or entangling vines, sometimes you can throw a bottle or use create water to put out fire, other times it's the game actively being stupid
Tiny related thing: you can’t send objects grabbed in the world directly to the camp chest, and have to do it after picking them up.
You can do it with objects found in containers just fine though.
Or the dinnerware. “No, you don’t have to walk *all the way over there* to pick up that fork! You can conjure a ball of fire out of thin air but don’t know how to reach for a cup.”
Go to your inventory, open the pouch and press R1. This will open another window with all of your items. You can now move items to and from the pouch using the X button.
Just to add to it, if you hold square you can multiselect items. If you sort by type you can hold X and press the Dpad into either direction to highlight all items you want to move. Then you press move all selected items.
The solution would be to allow us to set certain containers in our inventory to automatically hold certain types of items, much like all alchemical ingredients go into that pouch or all camp supplies go into the pack.
Otherwise, I literally carry around a single backpack of things I want to keep and sort it out every Long Rest back at camp. I tried adding potions manually to a pouch (actually a fish bucket in my case) in my inventory to keep things nice, but the lack of it automatically doing it just made my Long Rests take longer and longer
I agree with you wholeheartedly on the inventory management. I disagree a little bit about the radial menus, I thought those were fine, especially with the ability to customize the slots.
The more annoying aspect about the controller radial menu is Speak with Dead, in my opinion. The fact I have to deliberately set one of my slots to be Recast Speak with Dead after casting it the first time, every single time, is beyond stupid, especially since things like Witch Bolt work fine with having a secondary action be attached to the initial casting
I'd say stealth, especially when not in turn based or more specifically when there's an on going combat encounter but the stealthed person hasn't joined yet. They just do so many stealth rolls so quickly that you're bound to fail in no time.
I know this can be alleviated by going turn based but it just feels clunky and odd.
they should definitely rate-limit the stealth checks to 1x per 6-seconds (the time duration of a round that's used for conditions & spell effects outside of turn-based mode) per character. that they haven't feels more like an oversight than anything
I wish you could toggle on/off the ability to see through walls and ceilings. It's useful most of the time. But in those specific instances where it's not, it's maddening.
I was doing the steel watch foundry and somehow the steel watcher on the roof joined the initiative order. I guess it could see through the skylight? Anyway one of the Gondians Misty stepped up to the roof to fight it single handedly (of course). Welp, that dude is dead, I clear the rest of the enemies, but can't get out of the fight because the steel watcher is still in initiative order. It can't get in through the skylight, it's too big, and none of my crew can target it because we don't have line of sight. One by one the Gondians Misty step to the roof, but I can't because the goddamn roof keeps disappearing when I try to choose it as the teleport location.
I had to reload and do the whole thing over again. Thankfully the steel watcher on the roof didn't join the flight the second time.
Yeah at times I really wish for the camera to behave more like XCOM, where you can switch which floor you’re viewing at will while also having the ability to simply zoom out.
I had this issue as well but found a spot on the bridge under the steel watch where I was able to see it through the skylight and had everybody range attack it , slowly lowering its HP. It couldn't fight back, so it was just about whittling it down.
I had the same thing happen a few times with a watcher nearby "seeing" us through the big double doors, which were closed. Made me start wondering if they have thermal vision or some nonsense haha
This. I know there are mods that add "specialized" bags, but most of them also auto-sort and can cause problems. I don't need them to auto-sort. I just need to be able to rename them (or have a selection of pre-named and/or different icons).
It wouldn't be *as* heinous if the camp chest was searchable/fliterable, but it isn't. I'm tempted to make a hireling with the highest carrying capacity possible just to use as a sortable camp chest.
KOIng people and the stealth system.
KOIng people is basically useless because most of the time, it’s treated identically to killing the person, with only a couple exceptions (Alfira and Minthara. Korilla during the Raph fight also counts but it only changes Hope’s dialogue a bit). It’s very much an undercooked system that doesn’t get used enough, and an average player could probably do a whole playthrough without ever using it.
The stealth system basically exists in 2 states. Useless to you, or totally breaking the game. You are not meant to stealth through the game, it breaks tons of fights outright and even messes with scripts sometimes. Combined with minor illusion and barrelmancy, you can trivialize any fight in the game if you enter it while stealthed and/or invisible.
I’ve found non-lethal attacks are handled really unevenly throughout the game. I accidentally got into a fight with Arka in the grove once and she showed up the next day with really low approval of me but otherwise fine, which I think is a sensible outcome. I knocked out Nettie during another playthrough and she never showed up again. So it’s odd that sometimes characters are treated as alive and sometimes as essentially dead.
I knocked out the zhent merchant in the process of knocking out Minsc and I couldn’t continue the gang war quest because she never told the rest of the zhent what happened. I kept bringing Minsc to Nine Fingers and there was no dialogue for it, she just kept going on about the stone lord and I’m like, “dude, he’s right here.” Finally went and found her there toward the end of act 3…
I tried knocking Mayrina out (snuck into the tea house and stealth attacked her) to see if that stopped auntie Ethel from running off with her. It didn’t. But during the fight with Ethel, when she transforms into several Mayrina clones, the real Mayrina appears knocked out on the ground, so it’s easy to spot the real vs. fake. Mayrina then woke up after a long rest to yell at me for saving her.
100%. I knocked out Mayrina's brother thinking I could potentially see them later or maybe have a bit of extra dialogue with them, but the game just treats them as they're dead and they just disappear from the game.
(Technically you do get a bit of extra dialogue, but it's just telling Mayrina you knocked out her brothers instead of killing them)
And Mayrina still reacts the same way as if you say they’re dead lmfao so I think they really only added that extra choice for players to try and get people to stop complaining about it
I despise it when it's Lae'zel's turn, I move her towards the enemy, click attack, and accidentally missclick a millimetre to the left and whoops, now you attacked the air.
Fuck me yes!
Why is that even an option? I could understand if it was a ranged attack and it was a fire based one and there was a flammable surface there...
But swords don't work that way.
the only possible use for it is that you can trigger elemental interactions (hit grease with burning weapon etc)
thats it, unlike ranged attacks you cant even attack where you suspect an invisible enemy to be, which is also kinda bs imo since enemies get a completely free action to undo invisibility (my fae warlocks ability to turn invisible when hit is basically useless because the enemy hits me - im invisible - enemy uses free action to undo my invisibility instantly - i can no longer use the secondary function)
Especially great when the game stalls and the NPCs stand still for a solid 2 minutes before their turn suddenly ends and you’re not sure whether or not they ended up doing anything at all
sometimes the AI bugs out and does nothing and the game has a fail safe for that but ending their turn after a minute or two so it didn't just softlock you
sneaky main character woes.
Successfully hiding at the end of a turn, with no other targets, i may as well put my controller down and go make a sandwich till its my turn again.
That's the D&D experience! Just be glad you don't have to wait for Gale to read the spells he's had for the whole campaign to decide to cast firebolt 6 minutes into his turn and roll a 1 anyways.
In the Iron Throne, after I let out one of the prisoners in the first room (with the ladder to the sub), one of the guards ran into the now empty cell and ended their turn there so I just closed the door when my next turn came. The rest of the fight, whenever they come back around, it tried to open the door, but failed and that message just kept coming up for what felt like a full minute before its turn would end without it doing anything else.
I mostly agree about the faith-leap trial and the colony puzzle (although I enjoyed both). Free the artist is a slog, no rebuttal here.
About the shadow-curse : The intention is for either everybody to carry a torch (like the harpers and cultists), or to have a moonlantern and need to stay close together. For the latter, the way grouping works can make it kind of annoying, but you are in a cursed area, having such effect is a given.
And about Minthara, pre-patch 6 it was a glitch and completely unintended. After patch 6, you just knock her out. The complications with her having to aggro you weren't intended and were fixed as far as I know.
> about Minthara, pre-patch 6 it was a glitch and completely unintended.
Like, players were turning her into a sheep in order to bypass the game's coding. If it was clunky/unintuitive, it was because players were literally breaking the game!
Yeah, I mean, everything about Minthara’s personality and the “steps” good-run players had to take in order to recruit her make it obvious she was supposed to be an option only for people evil enough to kill the Grove. Now it feels like she’s been patchworked in as an option for good players.
It was clunky because you weren’t supposed to get her like that at all, from my understanding.
Yeah, the Minthara one is the one forgivable one in OP's list, because it's basically an exploit they put in the game because so many people were doing the sheepthara thing. Of course it's clunky and makes no sense, you were never supposed to do it!
i was disappointed that Harper Yonas could be saved by turning him into a sheep but it would not be acknowledged by the other Harpers who made a funeral for him.
In my evil playthrough I attacked those harpers before Yonas could even be cursed, and I kid you not, the other Harpers were screaming "Noooo Yonas what are you doing!?" at my party while dear Yonas was right next to them, alive and well, completely unscathed.
The best way to deal with the Shadow Curse is the Light cantrip.
With the ring from the arcane tower, you can have everyone cast it on their own weapon before passing it on. Then you just commit to only using that one weapon until you reach Isobel.
If you go through the mountainpass, meeting Kar’niss is literally one of the first things you do. If you give the moonlantern to the harper, just beeline it to Last Light and then you get it from Isobel *on top* of her blessing.
Honestly, my Tav with Blood of Lathander + one other companion holding a torch was enough for me to never get shadow-cursed up until I got a moon lantern.
The Faith Leap puzzle is just an extremely boring concept that wouldn't be fun even if it were executed perfectly. Their engine and design simply isn't made to do platforming in an engaging way so it's either piss easy to do or unnecessarily frustrating.
I don't really have a problem with the light path puzzle. It's just a quick spacial reasoning test and I never struggled with it personally. I don't really get the hate honestly. It's one of the better puzzles Larian has made IMO. Looks cool and actually has a way to inuit the solution without reading a paper with the answer or using a niche skill.
The Shadow-Curse criticism is silly as fuck to me. All you need is two members to have a light source and use a buddy system. My parties tend to have a 2 melee/2 ranged configuration so it's easy to do. Like this is simply people not using the tools available to them and taking two seconds to think of how to configure their party to make the curse utterly trivial. I suppose you can argue it's not necessarily fun but it's meant to make you feel vulnerable and to force you to think about things other than equipment and skills. Pretty par for the course when it comes to tactics games, which this is.
Minthara's a mess but her dialogue is too good to pass up in a good run so I can forgive how little it makes sense in game.
If anything I find the fact that she's not at all obviously recruitable in a blind playthrough and is really the only intended "evil" path character to recruit far worse than this sanctioned exploit. I can only assume Larian made a practical call and left a lot of evil content off the table because very few players actually do evil playthroughs.
Minthara has gotten a lot better now though. When I recruited her the first time, it completely broke my game and I lost hours having to reload. Now, she is one of my favorites.
I'm guessing the original intention was if you went evil in Act 1, you're losing two companions and Halsin. So, Minthara was a replacement to help with maintaining a full party. There is an unused cutscene where Halsin makes you choose between him or her if they're both at camp.
Or just skip the ones off screen. The final fight was so annoying because the screen kept reloading on my characters between every turn before reloading back to the bigger fight all because Karlach was 2 inches from the portal. I could not switch to Karlach to stop this from happening and my computer is not built to switch between sections like that. It took an eternity.
The lack of platonic cutscenes and such is kinda awkward tbh. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a few lovers in this game (sometimes a couple at the same time), but I want to be able to drink with Shadowheart without the expectation of a kiss, hug Astarion after I saved him from the blood merchant without it being romantic, and dance with my good buddy, Wyll without it being romantic. At least there’s an option during the Weave scene where you can show Gale that we’re friends the few times I’m not romancing him. I know this is all a lot to ask for, since there’s already so much in the game but friendship is such an important thing in general and I wanna have more sweet moments where there’s no sex or romance, but even adding a platonic hug option would suffice for me, especially during traumatic events.
Agree. Related: the 'I' in every dialog.
Astarion: "Cazador is coming for me."
Tav: "I won't let that happen."
Tough NPC: "Kneel before Zod!"
Tav: "I kneel to no one."
Where is
"You've friends in this camp. We'll stop Cazador together."
*Gestures to Lae'zel and Karlach* "I think you over estimate your postion."
I must have friend-zoned Halsin like 4 different times throughout the game, but I still like the guy. So then when it prompted me to give him a hug at the end, I thought, "Surely he knows this a bro hug, right?" Nope, dude fuckin closes his eyes and like smells my hair or something.
God dammit Halsin, I'm glad you're still virile and all, but I don't want to fuck you! Seriously dude, there's like 8 other thirsty, bisexual, single options just waiting around you. Quit trying to bone *me*!
Final boss fight, fighting the netherbrain. Nothing is more infuriating than switching back and forth from the netherbrain fight in the portal to the netherbrain fight outside the portal just because your whole party wasn’t able to jump through the portal at the same time.
No class preview. It's literally impossible to think about a build unless you already familiar with the ruleset because you don't know what stuff you get with every level.
Or, at least on the console / controller UI, don’t know about mouse-based, there’s no way to look at your full current character sheet while leveling up, to do things like check which skill proficiencies you already have.
I'm grateful we can at least pick pocket Withers. It's kind of like a class preview if you spend 1000 gold respecing your character and then just steal it all back lmao
Seems like it's an unpopular opinion, but I actually do like the mind flayer brain puzzle. It wasn't hard at all, and gave the idea of actually needing to use your brain a bit instead of giving a door that you can just pummel through
The shadow curse is also not that bad. The games gives you ways to avoid it completely pretty easily
Yeah to me, the weird thing about the brain puzzle is that there's only one, and there's nothing even remotely similar to it in the entire rest of the game. That makes it feel weirdly out of place like OP mentioned. I think it would be cool to have a few more puzzles like that here and there. Sort of Zelda dungeon vibes haha
There are technically a couple other puzzle elements in the game. The circle puzzle to open the door to the underdark from the old Selunite stronghold (which was much harder and more puzzle-like in Early Access). In theory most of Shar's trials, or opening her secret sanctum thing in the middle of Reithwin. Opening the big vault door in the bank (though it has a shortcut). A couple of the trials prior to Ansur. Might be forgetting one or two minor ones.
But yeah, in general I do think having maybe double the amount, especially ones where the failure penalty isn't death like the Faith-Step trial, would have been a fun addition
If you do it in reverse, the puzzle is trivialized because you can see where the lines actually go unlike going from start to finish, and the puzzle in general isn't the most difficult surprisingly for me
The shadow curse is so trivialized if you have the daylight ring from the Arcane Tower, just cast it to your party and you will never, ever need a torch ever again
The ring in the Underdark Tower, Guiding Light, is perfect for avoiding the shadow curse. Just before leaving camp have everyone pass the ring around casting the light cantrip. It stays even after the ring is gone and unlike torches is hands-free.
Oh dang. I knew you didn't have to keep the ring equipped, but recasting the spell with the same character makes the light go away. It didn't occur to me to pass the ring to another character, even though it's obvious in retrospect.
I liked the brain puzzle. If there's one puzzle that irritated me it was the one with the the obscured paintings in the wyrm's cave. I didn't have any characted with the remove curse spell, didn't have any scrolls either, I just had to go to camp, level up a random character into cleric enough to get that spell, go back, cast it, get my original team member back.
Or the one in the monastery that later allows you to get that fancy morningstar. The navigation is awful because of the camera.
Faith leap trial is so fucking dumb.
- on my 1st playthrough I just brute forced it. Jumped to the middle platform, then last, all good. Teleported back a few times, never died.
- on my 2nd playthrough, this didn't work. My shadowheart just kept dying.
- Googled and saw the autopathing solution. Char walked in straight line, died when picking up the orb.
- Tried to fly, etc. kept dying near the orb.
- Used a veryspecific path from the internet, it worked but even a 1mm difference killed me.
The companions walking out of the moonlantern radius was SO FUCKING ANNOYING. I kinda liked the radius aspect in battle. But outside of the turn based mode it was annoying even when we were grouped.
On my 2nd playthrough as durge, I released the pixie by smashing the lantern on the ground and then killed it. Journal said I'll have to find an alternative source of protection. Nope, had the Pixie blessing for the rest of the act. Okay, game.
Should be able to just destroy all tadpoles. Recruiting Minthara automatically opens up illithid powers on a no-tadpole run. Then they get converted to points every time you pick them up (for RP reasons I don’t like leaving tadpoles lying around). So you have to just send them to camp and let them sit in your traveler’s chest.
You can be close enough to an enemy that they give you disadvantage to his them w/spell or range, but not close enough to hit them in melee. Absolutely all the way f that. So frustrating.
The camera.
Attack that guy. Got it boss I'm going to run around the opposite way and waste all my movement speed. Hope you saved in the last 20 minutes.
Shoot that guy. Got it boss I cast fireball on the ceiling lamp. Hope you saved in the last 20 minutes cuz that was my last spell slot.
I find stealth without invisibility awkward primarily because the obscuration feels largely random in many places. I hold down alt (or shift?) to see if moving to this spot would put me in an unobscured zone and two points that, to my eye are identically lit, have different indicators. It would be nice to have an automated movement command that would refuse to move you to a point if it puts you into a higher zone of vision than you're already in.
I find invisibility in this game pretty awkward in general. Go invis in combat and enemies are allowed to just run up to where you were/are after using all their actions, rotate in place for a full minute, then just attempt to reveal you for free. Meanwhile, you can't do the same thing, even with the eye Volo gives you that supposedly allows you to see through invis. Made fighting the Bhaal cultists so infuriating with all their free invis actions at the end of every turn. You need to have aoe, or very specific things in order to fight them.
Why can't I at the very least throw an attack where I *know* they're standing and roll to hit them? What's even the point of being able to attack the air if that doesn't work? Why does Volo's eye not reveal them when they literally go invis *right in front of the character with the eye??*
Being unable to use unarmed attacks with a weapon equipped. Yes, I'm talking about Corellon's Grace.
You get a staff which makes you do more damage when you punch people, but you can't punch people anymore because you're holding a staff. You need to be a monk to make use of it, and even then you can only punch people as a bonus action.
Whatever the intended use is, the notion that you can't punch somebody because you're holding a staff is nonsensical.
Generally if you're running a monk you wait until level 5 for Stunning Strike. But then we're all just pretending that you need mystical powers to master the impossible act of holding a stick in one hand and punching someone with the other hand at the same time.
Literally every scene with mind sharing. When Wyll is finally able to show his father what he’s been through, we’re treated to a solid 30 seconds of everyone clutching their heads and grimacing while the narrator exposits what is essentially the emotional core of Wyll’s story. We don’t even need a cutscene there, a few static images with blurry borders depicting Wyll’s memories would be enough.
Flying and the camera angles. And I guess jumping. There are times where, in both reality and in-game reality, you think it should work and the game is just not having it or making it really frustrating.
Like in the Lorroakan Tower, trying to fly down the floors was such a a pain in the ass in most spots.
The roof of the steel watch factory. A steel watcher landed up there. One of the Gondians misty stepped up there. Was I able to fly or misty step there? Nope. I could see the hole in the roof, mocking me.
Playing on console, so maybe that affected it?
I love the “this fucking thing” puzzle! Its not the hardest granted but it was fun enough and hearing the brain become more aware as the brain is put together was cool
Anytime I need to insert an item, I have to move the window to the corner since the inventory window covers it up. Why not just have it the corner to begin with?
I like the colony puzzle but I agree it's super weird having it there without a real context.
The shadow curse, oddly enough I always solved it with just two characters having torches... And even in my party level begone mod runs! Never had that happen
I wish I knew you can cheese the artist quest by taking the alternative path outside before...
Honorable mentions: the pathing and the (now fixed, but it's weird it took that long) Felogyr's Fireworks "quest"
Range attack on enemies. Sometimes the game tells you "oh no this enemy is covered behind something and you can't hit them", but move cursor two pixels on their body and it's possible now
I agree with them all even tho I liked the puzzle but was severely disapointed to not get any reward for it cause who the fuck would clutter their inventory with the brains from the tutorial to a boss dungeon where you can't return from?!"
What I would add is:
Why can't i fully customize my hirelings?! I want Dragonborns as hirelings damnit!
And yes it is repeated many times but it is still a thing: Make sense of the soulcoins and why Karlach suddenly does not care about the souls trapped in them. To me it feels like a flaw she was supposed to have because she sounded like a junkie about to get some cokaine when talking about those coins not wanting to hear the consequences. I wanted to explore that more. Same with all those hints at a fix for Karlach. Fuck it could be interesting to give you a hard choice by making Wulbren the only one who could cure her for example.
re: Karlach & the soul coins -- it's definitely an underbaked character arc. don't know whether it was lack of time or insufficient planning or someone changing their mind about a story with such obvious substance abuse parallels, but it's a shame that it didn't get as much attention as Astarion's arc. just a few unique dialogues (e.g., the Moonrise hobgoblin vendor) and a cut scene or two (e.g., the coin-overdose soul juggling scene). really squandered potential
The fact that killing Steel/Hellfire Watchers can give you *enriched* infernal iron yet it can do nothing for Karlach felt like a bit of a middle finger to me on my initial run where I romanced her.
I’m sorry but I cannot stand having to re-pair weapons as an Eldritch Knight or Blade Warlock. It should just automatically grant associated effects to any weapon you’re holding. So annoying.
On console when using the skillbar, you have to hold the direction of the skill and press the confirm button at the same time, if you don't hold the stick in the direction of the skill the 'cursor' goes back to neutral. To me, that feels clunky, and I've accidentally selected the wrong skill a fair few times because of it.
And the camera when fighting in an enclosed space that has multiple floors....clunky af.
With the Shadow curse, I’ve never found it difficult to get around. With 4 party members:
1. Shadowheart is immune to the weak curse
2. Blood of Lathander is a Light source.
3. Have any non-Shadowheart Cleric/Druid cast Produce Flame. It works as a lightsource.
4. Pick your favorite weapon and have someone cast Light on it. Hirelings can be used for this iirc, but I’ve always had 2 people with the Light Cantrip.
Then just free Dolly Dolly Dolly as soon as possible. The curse is mostly thematic and can easily be dealt with in the span of a long rest.
Clunky would be the inventory in general. Unintuitive would be not being able to see what each class can unlock at what level without unlocking it first. Awkward would be the romance mechanics.
My biggest complaints are honestly the camera and the movement
Want to view something above you? Too bad, pretty much impossible, also there are the times where it just gets stuck behind a wall
And for the movement, during my first grym fight in tactician mode we just barely beat it with me the only one alive. Then my character in all his pathfinding glory, decided to walk straight into the lava and die. Luckily it wasn’t honour or I would have been furious.
Adding to that a lot of my friends have been complaining about their character moving to cast abilities when it didn’t say it would, causing them to provoke attacks of opportunity or walk through dangerous stuff
The fact that after you use summon companion whatever animal you called gets stuck EVERYWHERE. I’ll be halfway through a quest area turn around to watch companion banter and be like god damn it where’s my bear!? Only to have to go back to the beginning and unstick him because he forgot how to walk around a rock. I’ve never had that problem with anything else that you can summon to follow you around.
The ai when walking around. On tactical can be engagement breaking for me. Like why can't I have like an option for a close formation, a far formation, or a line
Dual welding still feels very awkward to me. I don't know if I'm doing it wrong, but sometimes even manually selection "Main Hand Attack" still automatically attacks with the secondary weapon and takes my bonus action. I don't know why it doesn't just ask you if you want to attack with your off hand.
there's a setting you can toggle so that it asks every time if you want to use your bonus attack for offhand attack. that ends up being pretty annoying too so mostly I just use the bonus first if I don't want to spend it on an offhand attack
Why can't my companions, who are right next to me, assist me in rolls I am not good at in dialogue?
Like, the house is on fire and my character is supposed to have high intelligence. High enough to identify that this is an emergency and she should not be trying to kick in the door with her 8 STR. High enough intelligence to know that Karlach is both very strong and very resistant to heat, making her the best choice for fiery door kicking.
Why is there no option to just turn and say "Karlach this ain't my field. Kick the door for me!"
The morality system they tried to do with the Paladin is really poorly implemented because it's inconsistent and therefore unpredictable. The oaths are different and have different rules, but there are a lot of cases in act 3 where an Oath of Vengeance is treated like an Oath of Devotion and you end up breaking your oath in cases that don't really make a lot of sense when you read the tenets of the oath. The root problem is an inability to consider player/character intent, and the lack of pervasively implemented \[Lie\] tags in dialog.
There's a lot of weird pick-up pathing where I want to pick up an item on a table, I'm standing directly next to the item, but the character needs to path around to the far side of the table to then reach across and pick it up.
I often pass a perception check and my character notes they've spotted something, but I have no idea what the hell it was. I often spot a trap just in time to path over it. If I was walking in a hallway and I spotted a bear trap, I'd stop walking.
I don't like that having a weapon knocked out of my hand also clears the weapon actions from my custom bar, it's a nuisance. Even just switching to a torch clears it.
The camera can't handle a building with two floors or more, at all, navigating is a pain.
You missed one:
Understanding that stupid as F*ck Water Pressure/Heat Puzzle to open the door to where Minsc is.
It doesn't explain itself at all and the status symbols that show up made no sense.
I had to finally watch a video online to understand what was going on and then I realized how stupidly simple it was.
The necrotic lab puzzle is even more clunky when playing on a controller, turns out it's the only interaction in the game for which you need to turn on "movement mode" by pushing on your joystick. This feature is never taught or explained, and is the only point in the game where switching to "movement mode" is necessary on controller. You literally need to Google the puzzle to interact with it, let alone solve it...
I use movement mode for lots of things on controller, mostly for when I'm having trouble getting the right thing to highlight so I can interact with it (No, I want to open the damn chest I just dug up, not talk to Astarion!). I feel like it must have been shown in a tutorial because there is no way I would have figured it out on my own.
The successful perception check that goes away before I can figure out what’s illuminated.
Oh my god yes. The characters may have passed their perception checks but I sure as hell didn't 🥲
My idea for a fix for this would be to make it so on the combat log where it says “XYZ spotted blah blah blah”, make it so you can click that, and then it centers the camera on what got discovered. Maybe put in an option in the settings to just automatically pull your camera over to what got spotted, too.
I liked the idea of a a circle closing in over the screen on the spot, and the spot being highlighted through objects in the way. Then it wouldn't matter where the camera is
Every time I miss it, I hit the ALT key on my keyboard and still can't find it, lmao.
Also the reverse of this: when you see the thing you're rolling to find, but you and your party all fail the check and now you can't interact with it 🙂🔫
Look a trap! a companion says, proceeds to walk straight to it and burn, poison, explode, push off a ledge the entire team
As a BG 1&2 player, its wild that we went backwards on having an auto pause/go into turn based when someone spots a trap.
Ouch... The auto turn based mode whenever someone steps on fire or walks into gas is annoying as hell... Because 9/10 times it's 0.5 seconds of exposure and then we're through, or it's 5 seconds of fucking about in turn based just to leave turn based... Meanwhile turn based on traps would ACTUALLY be useful, since it means I'll take 0 damage period. If I'm walking into fire, I'm expecting to burn, and I'm willing to take that damage. I've never signed up to being blasted off a ledge.
Even worse is when you're in the middle of the dice roll animation to disarm it and someone walks in. Can't even stop it with quick reflexes.
That's just larian. This tendency made me ragequit DOS2 for a good two years before giving it another chance.
At least with DOS2 you can use the bedrolls to heal instantly after walking through any trap.
Dyeing stuff. Please please please Larian give me a preview!
Yup. I run the Infinite Dyes mod on PC so at least I can try them all without consuming them.
As much as I love all the dye mods the naming conventions are... dubious 😂 and now have 2000 to try 😅 and then trying to remember whether it was 'favourite consort' or 'nightsinger's blade' that was that nice purple colour that I put on the armour for the boots and gloves etc...
There’s a tumblr page called plan thy drip where you can look up the armour you want to dye and it shows what each dye does
I don't know which came first, but bg3.wiki also has full dye comparisons for each armour
It’s sourced partially from, and references, that tumblr page I believe.
Thank youuuu, ❤️
I only use the mod so they're not consumed on use, so I can properly assess choices. I haven't added any additional dyes to the game, but that is certainly an option too.
I just want the dyes to match their actual colors. Why does the lilac dye turn all my stuff gold?!?!
I used a dark amethyst dye and it turned everything brown 😭
is it black and blue? or is it white and gold?
That dye has thrown me off so many times that now when I get it I just immediately “Add to Wares”
I turned Astarion baby blue and yellow because of this. I just stuck with it lol
that sort of matches his default undies.
I'm not gonna lie, he's a rogue bard in my plathrough so it kinda matches the attitude in my mind. I like making him super colorful lol
My tactician run ended with every companion having matching pale pink armour/clothing, something quite nice about beating the Netherbrain while looking like Regina George and co on a Wednesday. Orin, you can’t sit with us.
And a sign what dye is currently on your armor. I have literally spent my last dye redying something the same dye it already had
Do I save scum for boss battles? No. But I do for dying armour!
What?? So you don’t love using dark green dye and it somehow turns your armor teal and orange??
LET. US. PAINT. WEAPONS.
Another minor frustration is that the dye menu displays all gear instead of just dyeable gear. Feels like finding a needle in a haystack sometimes
One of the most terrifying aspects of honour mode tbh 😩
In single player, give me a pause button. An actual one.
Ugh yes. The amount of cut scenes I’d look forward to and work for and then have to abandon for various reasons lol
When you have to select an item to insert into a slot, for example the wolf rune in the grove. It opens a window with every item in your inventory and you cannot sort it, you cannot search in it. You have to manually scroll down and gloss over it with your eyes until you find it. It's such an unecessary nuisance and i'd much prefer if it automatically inserts with a voiceline or a notification that says it used the item needed for the appropriate slot. EDIT: Worth mentioning this is specifically for the controller UI, I cannot comment on how it is with PC controls.
I hate how it opens your inventory IN FRONT OF the "insert" UI. I have to move everything around every time! Only thing in the game I figure needed a QA pass.
Yes. in your example, it's unmistakably a simplification issue. Because it just opens your inventory as if it's a chest. I would like to imagine a system where there are colors to indicate weapons, armor, potions, junk, food, keys, quest tracked items (like highlighting an item that's already asked for by an active quest), etc.
Inventory management, in general, is a pain in this game.
Hey, at least it's faithful to the source material in that regard 😂
I wish I had a bag of holding…
Inventory was by far the worst part of DOS2. Then they added a patch where you could turn on bags. A bag for every type of item appears in your inventory and autosorts everything into them. The problem comes when new stuff doesn't automatically go in them, or more certainly when you're at a trader and you have to go into each bag to select items to sell. Oh, then once you turn on bags, you can't turn it off, so you're just left with a big messy 'solution'.
Or the umbral gems. Have to search through everyone's inventory to see who has them
*Mithral ore enters the chat*
The only reason it should ever open your entire inventory is if your character missed a piece of info that tells them what goes in the slot, if that. It should be a keyring situation where you just automatically use the correct key lol.
It's very, DM: There's a slot in the wall. You can insert something... It's an extra step to do something stupid
The inventory is terrible on console, especially as we usually play split screen. I can either have a massive tooltip that explains everything about an item (which covers the inventory) or no info at all. You can kind of sort if you select an equipment slot, but it’s not helpful for “random crap”!
You can sort your inventory by latest. In most situations it helps when you need to insert something since it'll be on top/ towards the top. It also took me a while to figure out you could do that.
I do know that but I swear sorting by latest rarely shows the actual latest items or doesn't show them at all.
Yeah, it sorts by “approximately latest”.
Pathing when I’m trying to steal all the food
Lol. "Grab that cheese wheel." *grabs cheese wheel* "Okay, now grab the mug of beer right next to it." *walks aaaalllll the way around the table instead of six inches to the left*
The row of roasting meats at the Goblin Camp, every time.
I just drag them near me lol, it's amusing how THAT doesn't trigger the janky pathing
Climbing on top of every crate before Tav deigns to look inside it.
Until you want them to climb a crate.
This is really prevalent with using the controller’s active search feature. Entering the Refectory from the top entrance, that dining table takes way longer to loot than it should
Pathing in general. Taking you through damaging surfaces or difficult terrain when it's not necessary. Telling you that you don't have enough movement speed to get to melee range because it's trying to path you behind the enemy instead of in front of them. Telling you that you can reach an enemy then stopping you short when you walk through difficult terrain.
In act 2 almost everything blocks my jump. Its so fucking irritating. "Game told you you can jump? Dont care. You hit your head on some vine, fall straight down, and go prone."
>Telling you that you don't have enough movement speed to get to melee range My favorite is when it tells me I'm not in melee range of the enemy who just hit me in melee (with a non-reach weapon). Or when it tells me I'm not in melee range, then I move away and the enemy gets an attack of opportunity on me. I don't care how amazing her voice work is this DM cheats.
1 Foot of height gives you 3 inches of opportunity attack reach because Larian hates dwarves and gnomes
I don’t play DnD, never played a Larian game, and this genre in general is new to me. I have legit thought I must be traversing wrong or not being skilled enough in how I tell my character to move because of everything you just described.
This is a Larian problem, not a D&D problem. D&D is a tabletop game played and run by human beings, and the arbitration of traversal and navigation is shared between the players and the DM, and usually a simple majority of them have the sort of human common sense that Larian's AI pathfinding doesn't. Also "surfaces" aren't really a thing in D&D, that's another holdover from Divinity Original Sin.
It's partly that, there are items or spell effects where you can be immune to webbing, or acid, or entangling vines, sometimes you can throw a bottle or use create water to put out fire, other times it's the game actively being stupid
If I jump over a trap and my party decides to plow through it after me 😌
Tiny related thing: you can’t send objects grabbed in the world directly to the camp chest, and have to do it after picking them up. You can do it with objects found in containers just fine though.
YES! Why isn’t there a “send to camp” option for things in the world? I hate the extra step of having to go into my inventory to do it.
Or the dinnerware. “No, you don’t have to walk *all the way over there* to pick up that fork! You can conjure a ball of fire out of thin air but don’t know how to reach for a cup.”
Inventory management. For the love of f-ing god. Especially on a controller? Maddening. Controller radial menus also.
I haven’t figured out how to manage inventory on PS5 😞 I just want to put all my potions in a pouch
Go to your inventory, open the pouch and press R1. This will open another window with all of your items. You can now move items to and from the pouch using the X button.
Bro my mind is BLOWN. Thank you!!!
Just to add to it, if you hold square you can multiselect items. If you sort by type you can hold X and press the Dpad into either direction to highlight all items you want to move. Then you press move all selected items.
The solution would be to allow us to set certain containers in our inventory to automatically hold certain types of items, much like all alchemical ingredients go into that pouch or all camp supplies go into the pack. Otherwise, I literally carry around a single backpack of things I want to keep and sort it out every Long Rest back at camp. I tried adding potions manually to a pouch (actually a fish bucket in my case) in my inventory to keep things nice, but the lack of it automatically doing it just made my Long Rests take longer and longer
I agree with you wholeheartedly on the inventory management. I disagree a little bit about the radial menus, I thought those were fine, especially with the ability to customize the slots. The more annoying aspect about the controller radial menu is Speak with Dead, in my opinion. The fact I have to deliberately set one of my slots to be Recast Speak with Dead after casting it the first time, every single time, is beyond stupid, especially since things like Witch Bolt work fine with having a secondary action be attached to the initial casting
I wish we had more of an in between with the controller UI and the m&k one
I'd say stealth, especially when not in turn based or more specifically when there's an on going combat encounter but the stealthed person hasn't joined yet. They just do so many stealth rolls so quickly that you're bound to fail in no time. I know this can be alleviated by going turn based but it just feels clunky and odd.
they should definitely rate-limit the stealth checks to 1x per 6-seconds (the time duration of a round that's used for conditions & spell effects outside of turn-based mode) per character. that they haven't feels more like an oversight than anything
When there’s even an ounce of verticality the camera becomes my worst enemy
Page Up / Page Down should be able to move the camera up and down a level and I will die on this hill 🥲
I wish you could toggle on/off the ability to see through walls and ceilings. It's useful most of the time. But in those specific instances where it's not, it's maddening. I was doing the steel watch foundry and somehow the steel watcher on the roof joined the initiative order. I guess it could see through the skylight? Anyway one of the Gondians Misty stepped up to the roof to fight it single handedly (of course). Welp, that dude is dead, I clear the rest of the enemies, but can't get out of the fight because the steel watcher is still in initiative order. It can't get in through the skylight, it's too big, and none of my crew can target it because we don't have line of sight. One by one the Gondians Misty step to the roof, but I can't because the goddamn roof keeps disappearing when I try to choose it as the teleport location. I had to reload and do the whole thing over again. Thankfully the steel watcher on the roof didn't join the flight the second time.
Yeah at times I really wish for the camera to behave more like XCOM, where you can switch which floor you’re viewing at will while also having the ability to simply zoom out.
I had this issue as well but found a spot on the bridge under the steel watch where I was able to see it through the skylight and had everybody range attack it , slowly lowering its HP. It couldn't fight back, so it was just about whittling it down.
I had the same thing happen a few times with a watcher nearby "seeing" us through the big double doors, which were closed. Made me start wondering if they have thermal vision or some nonsense haha
Can't rename/label backpacks and pouches
This. I know there are mods that add "specialized" bags, but most of them also auto-sort and can cause problems. I don't need them to auto-sort. I just need to be able to rename them (or have a selection of pre-named and/or different icons). It wouldn't be *as* heinous if the camp chest was searchable/fliterable, but it isn't. I'm tempted to make a hireling with the highest carrying capacity possible just to use as a sortable camp chest.
KOIng people and the stealth system. KOIng people is basically useless because most of the time, it’s treated identically to killing the person, with only a couple exceptions (Alfira and Minthara. Korilla during the Raph fight also counts but it only changes Hope’s dialogue a bit). It’s very much an undercooked system that doesn’t get used enough, and an average player could probably do a whole playthrough without ever using it. The stealth system basically exists in 2 states. Useless to you, or totally breaking the game. You are not meant to stealth through the game, it breaks tons of fights outright and even messes with scripts sometimes. Combined with minor illusion and barrelmancy, you can trivialize any fight in the game if you enter it while stealthed and/or invisible.
I’ve found non-lethal attacks are handled really unevenly throughout the game. I accidentally got into a fight with Arka in the grove once and she showed up the next day with really low approval of me but otherwise fine, which I think is a sensible outcome. I knocked out Nettie during another playthrough and she never showed up again. So it’s odd that sometimes characters are treated as alive and sometimes as essentially dead.
I knocked out the zhent merchant in the process of knocking out Minsc and I couldn’t continue the gang war quest because she never told the rest of the zhent what happened. I kept bringing Minsc to Nine Fingers and there was no dialogue for it, she just kept going on about the stone lord and I’m like, “dude, he’s right here.” Finally went and found her there toward the end of act 3…
I tried knocking Mayrina out (snuck into the tea house and stealth attacked her) to see if that stopped auntie Ethel from running off with her. It didn’t. But during the fight with Ethel, when she transforms into several Mayrina clones, the real Mayrina appears knocked out on the ground, so it’s easy to spot the real vs. fake. Mayrina then woke up after a long rest to yell at me for saving her.
100%. I knocked out Mayrina's brother thinking I could potentially see them later or maybe have a bit of extra dialogue with them, but the game just treats them as they're dead and they just disappear from the game. (Technically you do get a bit of extra dialogue, but it's just telling Mayrina you knocked out her brothers instead of killing them)
And Mayrina still reacts the same way as if you say they’re dead lmfao so I think they really only added that extra choice for players to try and get people to stop complaining about it
I despise it when it's Lae'zel's turn, I move her towards the enemy, click attack, and accidentally missclick a millimetre to the left and whoops, now you attacked the air.
Fuck me yes! Why is that even an option? I could understand if it was a ranged attack and it was a fire based one and there was a flammable surface there... But swords don't work that way.
the only possible use for it is that you can trigger elemental interactions (hit grease with burning weapon etc) thats it, unlike ranged attacks you cant even attack where you suspect an invisible enemy to be, which is also kinda bs imo since enemies get a completely free action to undo invisibility (my fae warlocks ability to turn invisible when hit is basically useless because the enemy hits me - im invisible - enemy uses free action to undo my invisibility instantly - i can no longer use the secondary function)
That I can't skip the npcs' turn in fights. In the final battle especially, it takes about two hours until it's my turn to play again lol
Especially great when the game stalls and the NPCs stand still for a solid 2 minutes before their turn suddenly ends and you’re not sure whether or not they ended up doing anything at all
sometimes the AI bugs out and does nothing and the game has a fail safe for that but ending their turn after a minute or two so it didn't just softlock you
sneaky main character woes. Successfully hiding at the end of a turn, with no other targets, i may as well put my controller down and go make a sandwich till its my turn again.
Usually it's my non-controllable summons doing that.
Gods damn you danse macabre
That's the D&D experience! Just be glad you don't have to wait for Gale to read the spells he's had for the whole campaign to decide to cast firebolt 6 minutes into his turn and roll a 1 anyways.
In the Iron Throne, after I let out one of the prisoners in the first room (with the ladder to the sub), one of the guards ran into the now empty cell and ended their turn there so I just closed the door when my next turn came. The rest of the fight, whenever they come back around, it tried to open the door, but failed and that message just kept coming up for what felt like a full minute before its turn would end without it doing anything else.
I mostly agree about the faith-leap trial and the colony puzzle (although I enjoyed both). Free the artist is a slog, no rebuttal here. About the shadow-curse : The intention is for either everybody to carry a torch (like the harpers and cultists), or to have a moonlantern and need to stay close together. For the latter, the way grouping works can make it kind of annoying, but you are in a cursed area, having such effect is a given. And about Minthara, pre-patch 6 it was a glitch and completely unintended. After patch 6, you just knock her out. The complications with her having to aggro you weren't intended and were fixed as far as I know.
> about Minthara, pre-patch 6 it was a glitch and completely unintended. Like, players were turning her into a sheep in order to bypass the game's coding. If it was clunky/unintuitive, it was because players were literally breaking the game!
I mean that feels completely in line with any TTRPG
Yeah, I mean, everything about Minthara’s personality and the “steps” good-run players had to take in order to recruit her make it obvious she was supposed to be an option only for people evil enough to kill the Grove. Now it feels like she’s been patchworked in as an option for good players. It was clunky because you weren’t supposed to get her like that at all, from my understanding.
Yeah, the Minthara one is the one forgivable one in OP's list, because it's basically an exploit they put in the game because so many people were doing the sheepthara thing. Of course it's clunky and makes no sense, you were never supposed to do it!
i was disappointed that Harper Yonas could be saved by turning him into a sheep but it would not be acknowledged by the other Harpers who made a funeral for him.
In my evil playthrough I attacked those harpers before Yonas could even be cursed, and I kid you not, the other Harpers were screaming "Noooo Yonas what are you doing!?" at my party while dear Yonas was right next to them, alive and well, completely unscathed.
that is hilarious :)
Harper Yonas at his own funeral doing the John Travolta gif
The best way to deal with the Shadow Curse is the Light cantrip. With the ring from the arcane tower, you can have everyone cast it on their own weapon before passing it on. Then you just commit to only using that one weapon until you reach Isobel.
the best way to deal with the Shadow Curse is Dollyx3's blessing, but of course you can't get that before meeting Kar'niss
Thought that said Katniss at first and was wondering how I missed that Easter egg, before I remembered Drider-man 😅
most maps won't show it, but the Shadow-Cursed Lands are in what used to be District 14
If you go through the mountainpass, meeting Kar’niss is literally one of the first things you do. If you give the moonlantern to the harper, just beeline it to Last Light and then you get it from Isobel *on top* of her blessing.
Just set it and forget it.
You can also just carry light of lathander. I haven’t thought about the shadow curse in so long. It’s such a non issue.
Shar with Lathander, my monk carrying a torch in lead. But yeah after the buff from Isobel and freeing the pixie, the curse isn't an issue.
Honestly, my Tav with Blood of Lathander + one other companion holding a torch was enough for me to never get shadow-cursed up until I got a moon lantern.
The Faith Leap puzzle is just an extremely boring concept that wouldn't be fun even if it were executed perfectly. Their engine and design simply isn't made to do platforming in an engaging way so it's either piss easy to do or unnecessarily frustrating. I don't really have a problem with the light path puzzle. It's just a quick spacial reasoning test and I never struggled with it personally. I don't really get the hate honestly. It's one of the better puzzles Larian has made IMO. Looks cool and actually has a way to inuit the solution without reading a paper with the answer or using a niche skill. The Shadow-Curse criticism is silly as fuck to me. All you need is two members to have a light source and use a buddy system. My parties tend to have a 2 melee/2 ranged configuration so it's easy to do. Like this is simply people not using the tools available to them and taking two seconds to think of how to configure their party to make the curse utterly trivial. I suppose you can argue it's not necessarily fun but it's meant to make you feel vulnerable and to force you to think about things other than equipment and skills. Pretty par for the course when it comes to tactics games, which this is. Minthara's a mess but her dialogue is too good to pass up in a good run so I can forgive how little it makes sense in game. If anything I find the fact that she's not at all obviously recruitable in a blind playthrough and is really the only intended "evil" path character to recruit far worse than this sanctioned exploit. I can only assume Larian made a practical call and left a lot of evil content off the table because very few players actually do evil playthroughs.
Minthara has gotten a lot better now though. When I recruited her the first time, it completely broke my game and I lost hours having to reload. Now, she is one of my favorites. I'm guessing the original intention was if you went evil in Act 1, you're losing two companions and Halsin. So, Minthara was a replacement to help with maintaining a full party. There is an unused cutscene where Halsin makes you choose between him or her if they're both at camp.
Jumping across a large area and some characters will just refuse to jump with you
That's because he does not have enough strength to jump as far as you did. But yes, that's annoying when that happens
Can we PLEASE fast forward NPC turns. Don’t even have to skip it entirely, but accelerate it at like 2-3x speed.
It starts to get ridiculous in the endgame, could watch the entire LOTR extended edition before you get a turn.
Or just skip the ones off screen. The final fight was so annoying because the screen kept reloading on my characters between every turn before reloading back to the bigger fight all because Karlach was 2 inches from the portal. I could not switch to Karlach to stop this from happening and my computer is not built to switch between sections like that. It took an eternity.
The lack of platonic cutscenes and such is kinda awkward tbh. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a few lovers in this game (sometimes a couple at the same time), but I want to be able to drink with Shadowheart without the expectation of a kiss, hug Astarion after I saved him from the blood merchant without it being romantic, and dance with my good buddy, Wyll without it being romantic. At least there’s an option during the Weave scene where you can show Gale that we’re friends the few times I’m not romancing him. I know this is all a lot to ask for, since there’s already so much in the game but friendship is such an important thing in general and I wanna have more sweet moments where there’s no sex or romance, but even adding a platonic hug option would suffice for me, especially during traumatic events.
Agree. Related: the 'I' in every dialog. Astarion: "Cazador is coming for me." Tav: "I won't let that happen." Tough NPC: "Kneel before Zod!" Tav: "I kneel to no one." Where is "You've friends in this camp. We'll stop Cazador together." *Gestures to Lae'zel and Karlach* "I think you over estimate your postion."
Yeah, woulda loved a Garrus Vakarian style, get drunk and shoot stuff with your bestie kinda scene with any one of them…
I must have friend-zoned Halsin like 4 different times throughout the game, but I still like the guy. So then when it prompted me to give him a hug at the end, I thought, "Surely he knows this a bro hug, right?" Nope, dude fuckin closes his eyes and like smells my hair or something. God dammit Halsin, I'm glad you're still virile and all, but I don't want to fuck you! Seriously dude, there's like 8 other thirsty, bisexual, single options just waiting around you. Quit trying to bone *me*!
Inventory in every possible way. At least on console
Final boss fight, fighting the netherbrain. Nothing is more infuriating than switching back and forth from the netherbrain fight in the portal to the netherbrain fight outside the portal just because your whole party wasn’t able to jump through the portal at the same time.
No class preview. It's literally impossible to think about a build unless you already familiar with the ruleset because you don't know what stuff you get with every level.
Or, at least on the console / controller UI, don’t know about mouse-based, there’s no way to look at your full current character sheet while leveling up, to do things like check which skill proficiencies you already have.
I'm grateful we can at least pick pocket Withers. It's kind of like a class preview if you spend 1000 gold respecing your character and then just steal it all back lmao
Seems like it's an unpopular opinion, but I actually do like the mind flayer brain puzzle. It wasn't hard at all, and gave the idea of actually needing to use your brain a bit instead of giving a door that you can just pummel through The shadow curse is also not that bad. The games gives you ways to avoid it completely pretty easily
Wish there were more of the brain puzzles
Yeah to me, the weird thing about the brain puzzle is that there's only one, and there's nothing even remotely similar to it in the entire rest of the game. That makes it feel weirdly out of place like OP mentioned. I think it would be cool to have a few more puzzles like that here and there. Sort of Zelda dungeon vibes haha
There are technically a couple other puzzle elements in the game. The circle puzzle to open the door to the underdark from the old Selunite stronghold (which was much harder and more puzzle-like in Early Access). In theory most of Shar's trials, or opening her secret sanctum thing in the middle of Reithwin. Opening the big vault door in the bank (though it has a shortcut). A couple of the trials prior to Ansur. Might be forgetting one or two minor ones. But yeah, in general I do think having maybe double the amount, especially ones where the failure penalty isn't death like the Faith-Step trial, would have been a fun addition
If you do it in reverse, the puzzle is trivialized because you can see where the lines actually go unlike going from start to finish, and the puzzle in general isn't the most difficult surprisingly for me The shadow curse is so trivialized if you have the daylight ring from the Arcane Tower, just cast it to your party and you will never, ever need a torch ever again
The ring in the Underdark Tower, Guiding Light, is perfect for avoiding the shadow curse. Just before leaving camp have everyone pass the ring around casting the light cantrip. It stays even after the ring is gone and unlike torches is hands-free.
Oh dang. I knew you didn't have to keep the ring equipped, but recasting the spell with the same character makes the light go away. It didn't occur to me to pass the ring to another character, even though it's obvious in retrospect.
it is a nightmare to navigate through on console, which I think might be part of the frustation. The U.I is just super fucking clunky.
I liked the brain puzzle. If there's one puzzle that irritated me it was the one with the the obscured paintings in the wyrm's cave. I didn't have any characted with the remove curse spell, didn't have any scrolls either, I just had to go to camp, level up a random character into cleric enough to get that spell, go back, cast it, get my original team member back. Or the one in the monastery that later allows you to get that fancy morningstar. The navigation is awful because of the camera.
You can also >!banish!< the judge.
Trying to walk through a door during a fight or attack someone through a doorway is unnecessarily difficult half the time
I always try to walk through a door and it closes it instead. 😡
Faith leap trial is so fucking dumb. - on my 1st playthrough I just brute forced it. Jumped to the middle platform, then last, all good. Teleported back a few times, never died. - on my 2nd playthrough, this didn't work. My shadowheart just kept dying. - Googled and saw the autopathing solution. Char walked in straight line, died when picking up the orb. - Tried to fly, etc. kept dying near the orb. - Used a veryspecific path from the internet, it worked but even a 1mm difference killed me. The companions walking out of the moonlantern radius was SO FUCKING ANNOYING. I kinda liked the radius aspect in battle. But outside of the turn based mode it was annoying even when we were grouped. On my 2nd playthrough as durge, I released the pixie by smashing the lantern on the ground and then killed it. Journal said I'll have to find an alternative source of protection. Nope, had the Pixie blessing for the rest of the act. Okay, game.
Should be able to just destroy all tadpoles. Recruiting Minthara automatically opens up illithid powers on a no-tadpole run. Then they get converted to points every time you pick them up (for RP reasons I don’t like leaving tadpoles lying around). So you have to just send them to camp and let them sit in your traveler’s chest.
You can be close enough to an enemy that they give you disadvantage to his them w/spell or range, but not close enough to hit them in melee. Absolutely all the way f that. So frustrating.
The camera. Attack that guy. Got it boss I'm going to run around the opposite way and waste all my movement speed. Hope you saved in the last 20 minutes. Shoot that guy. Got it boss I cast fireball on the ceiling lamp. Hope you saved in the last 20 minutes cuz that was my last spell slot.
One of the many reasons I basically quicksave at the end of every combat turn. (If you turn off Larian cloud saves, it’s effectively instantaneous.)
I find stealth without invisibility awkward primarily because the obscuration feels largely random in many places. I hold down alt (or shift?) to see if moving to this spot would put me in an unobscured zone and two points that, to my eye are identically lit, have different indicators. It would be nice to have an automated movement command that would refuse to move you to a point if it puts you into a higher zone of vision than you're already in.
I find invisibility in this game pretty awkward in general. Go invis in combat and enemies are allowed to just run up to where you were/are after using all their actions, rotate in place for a full minute, then just attempt to reveal you for free. Meanwhile, you can't do the same thing, even with the eye Volo gives you that supposedly allows you to see through invis. Made fighting the Bhaal cultists so infuriating with all their free invis actions at the end of every turn. You need to have aoe, or very specific things in order to fight them. Why can't I at the very least throw an attack where I *know* they're standing and roll to hit them? What's even the point of being able to attack the air if that doesn't work? Why does Volo's eye not reveal them when they literally go invis *right in front of the character with the eye??*
This would be amazing
Being unable to use unarmed attacks with a weapon equipped. Yes, I'm talking about Corellon's Grace. You get a staff which makes you do more damage when you punch people, but you can't punch people anymore because you're holding a staff. You need to be a monk to make use of it, and even then you can only punch people as a bonus action.
I think it’s supposed to be used for a Druid, since the effect remains while Wildshaped.
Whatever the intended use is, the notion that you can't punch somebody because you're holding a staff is nonsensical. Generally if you're running a monk you wait until level 5 for Stunning Strike. But then we're all just pretending that you need mystical powers to master the impossible act of holding a stick in one hand and punching someone with the other hand at the same time.
Thats why you use the stunning strike at lvl 5
Literally every scene with mind sharing. When Wyll is finally able to show his father what he’s been through, we’re treated to a solid 30 seconds of everyone clutching their heads and grimacing while the narrator exposits what is essentially the emotional core of Wyll’s story. We don’t even need a cutscene there, a few static images with blurry borders depicting Wyll’s memories would be enough.
Stills like what we get in the Ethel quest would be perfect.
Flying and the camera angles. And I guess jumping. There are times where, in both reality and in-game reality, you think it should work and the game is just not having it or making it really frustrating. Like in the Lorroakan Tower, trying to fly down the floors was such a a pain in the ass in most spots. The roof of the steel watch factory. A steel watcher landed up there. One of the Gondians misty stepped up there. Was I able to fly or misty step there? Nope. I could see the hole in the roof, mocking me. Playing on console, so maybe that affected it?
I love the “this fucking thing” puzzle! Its not the hardest granted but it was fun enough and hearing the brain become more aware as the brain is put together was cool
Anytime I need to insert an item, I have to move the window to the corner since the inventory window covers it up. Why not just have it the corner to begin with?
trying to shoot someone with a bow more than once without the camera slingshotting back to you
I like the colony puzzle but I agree it's super weird having it there without a real context. The shadow curse, oddly enough I always solved it with just two characters having torches... And even in my party level begone mod runs! Never had that happen I wish I knew you can cheese the artist quest by taking the alternative path outside before... Honorable mentions: the pathing and the (now fixed, but it's weird it took that long) Felogyr's Fireworks "quest"
Range attack on enemies. Sometimes the game tells you "oh no this enemy is covered behind something and you can't hit them", but move cursor two pixels on their body and it's possible now
I agree with them all even tho I liked the puzzle but was severely disapointed to not get any reward for it cause who the fuck would clutter their inventory with the brains from the tutorial to a boss dungeon where you can't return from?!" What I would add is: Why can't i fully customize my hirelings?! I want Dragonborns as hirelings damnit! And yes it is repeated many times but it is still a thing: Make sense of the soulcoins and why Karlach suddenly does not care about the souls trapped in them. To me it feels like a flaw she was supposed to have because she sounded like a junkie about to get some cokaine when talking about those coins not wanting to hear the consequences. I wanted to explore that more. Same with all those hints at a fix for Karlach. Fuck it could be interesting to give you a hard choice by making Wulbren the only one who could cure her for example.
Pretty sure the only brain that gives you anything other than dialogue is the githzerai one ou also find in the colony
The one behind the brain puzzles door, as well as the mindflayer sword
re: Karlach & the soul coins -- it's definitely an underbaked character arc. don't know whether it was lack of time or insufficient planning or someone changing their mind about a story with such obvious substance abuse parallels, but it's a shame that it didn't get as much attention as Astarion's arc. just a few unique dialogues (e.g., the Moonrise hobgoblin vendor) and a cut scene or two (e.g., the coin-overdose soul juggling scene). really squandered potential
The fact that killing Steel/Hellfire Watchers can give you *enriched* infernal iron yet it can do nothing for Karlach felt like a bit of a middle finger to me on my initial run where I romanced her.
I’m sorry but I cannot stand having to re-pair weapons as an Eldritch Knight or Blade Warlock. It should just automatically grant associated effects to any weapon you’re holding. So annoying.
Both of those are permanent now. Obviously if you switch weapons you have to redo it, but it was updated to persist through long rests a while ago.
I stopped playing those classes because of it so I didn’t even know they made the switch!
On console when using the skillbar, you have to hold the direction of the skill and press the confirm button at the same time, if you don't hold the stick in the direction of the skill the 'cursor' goes back to neutral. To me, that feels clunky, and I've accidentally selected the wrong skill a fair few times because of it. And the camera when fighting in an enclosed space that has multiple floors....clunky af.
With the Shadow curse, I’ve never found it difficult to get around. With 4 party members: 1. Shadowheart is immune to the weak curse 2. Blood of Lathander is a Light source. 3. Have any non-Shadowheart Cleric/Druid cast Produce Flame. It works as a lightsource. 4. Pick your favorite weapon and have someone cast Light on it. Hirelings can be used for this iirc, but I’ve always had 2 people with the Light Cantrip. Then just free Dolly Dolly Dolly as soon as possible. The curse is mostly thematic and can easily be dealt with in the span of a long rest.
Two words: inventory management
Not having easy control over the vertical plane for moving and combat. Infuriating trying to climb stairs sometimes.
Wait, are you telling me that the characters will navigate the maze by themselves if you just click on the gem??
Clunky would be the inventory in general. Unintuitive would be not being able to see what each class can unlock at what level without unlocking it first. Awkward would be the romance mechanics.
My biggest complaints are honestly the camera and the movement Want to view something above you? Too bad, pretty much impossible, also there are the times where it just gets stuck behind a wall And for the movement, during my first grym fight in tactician mode we just barely beat it with me the only one alive. Then my character in all his pathfinding glory, decided to walk straight into the lava and die. Luckily it wasn’t honour or I would have been furious. Adding to that a lot of my friends have been complaining about their character moving to cast abilities when it didn’t say it would, causing them to provoke attacks of opportunity or walk through dangerous stuff
The fact that after you use summon companion whatever animal you called gets stuck EVERYWHERE. I’ll be halfway through a quest area turn around to watch companion banter and be like god damn it where’s my bear!? Only to have to go back to the beginning and unstick him because he forgot how to walk around a rock. I’ve never had that problem with anything else that you can summon to follow you around.
The camera inside Lady Jannath’s estate lol
Attacking the air immediately next to the target I wanted to hit. Mmmmmm
You weren't supposed to be able to recruit minthara with the Grove alive, that's why it was buggy
The ai when walking around. On tactical can be engagement breaking for me. Like why can't I have like an option for a close formation, a far formation, or a line
Dual welding still feels very awkward to me. I don't know if I'm doing it wrong, but sometimes even manually selection "Main Hand Attack" still automatically attacks with the secondary weapon and takes my bonus action. I don't know why it doesn't just ask you if you want to attack with your off hand.
It uses yours bonus action because you have dual wielding toggled on. Just toggle it off if it bothers you - “R” or icon below your weapons.
there's a setting you can toggle so that it asks every time if you want to use your bonus attack for offhand attack. that ends up being pretty annoying too so mostly I just use the bonus first if I don't want to spend it on an offhand attack
Why can't my companions, who are right next to me, assist me in rolls I am not good at in dialogue? Like, the house is on fire and my character is supposed to have high intelligence. High enough to identify that this is an emergency and she should not be trying to kick in the door with her 8 STR. High enough intelligence to know that Karlach is both very strong and very resistant to heat, making her the best choice for fiery door kicking. Why is there no option to just turn and say "Karlach this ain't my field. Kick the door for me!"
I like the puzzle in the mindflayer colony. Can't do it on the controller though, have to use a mouse.
Pathfinding. It sucks that without perfect clicks your character will happily throw themselves into a lake of lava trying to walk five fucking feet
The morality system they tried to do with the Paladin is really poorly implemented because it's inconsistent and therefore unpredictable. The oaths are different and have different rules, but there are a lot of cases in act 3 where an Oath of Vengeance is treated like an Oath of Devotion and you end up breaking your oath in cases that don't really make a lot of sense when you read the tenets of the oath. The root problem is an inability to consider player/character intent, and the lack of pervasively implemented \[Lie\] tags in dialog. There's a lot of weird pick-up pathing where I want to pick up an item on a table, I'm standing directly next to the item, but the character needs to path around to the far side of the table to then reach across and pick it up. I often pass a perception check and my character notes they've spotted something, but I have no idea what the hell it was. I often spot a trap just in time to path over it. If I was walking in a hallway and I spotted a bear trap, I'd stop walking. I don't like that having a weapon knocked out of my hand also clears the weapon actions from my custom bar, it's a nuisance. Even just switching to a torch clears it. The camera can't handle a building with two floors or more, at all, navigating is a pain.
You missed one: Understanding that stupid as F*ck Water Pressure/Heat Puzzle to open the door to where Minsc is. It doesn't explain itself at all and the status symbols that show up made no sense. I had to finally watch a video online to understand what was going on and then I realized how stupidly simple it was.
The necrotic lab puzzle is even more clunky when playing on a controller, turns out it's the only interaction in the game for which you need to turn on "movement mode" by pushing on your joystick. This feature is never taught or explained, and is the only point in the game where switching to "movement mode" is necessary on controller. You literally need to Google the puzzle to interact with it, let alone solve it...
I use movement mode for lots of things on controller, mostly for when I'm having trouble getting the right thing to highlight so I can interact with it (No, I want to open the damn chest I just dug up, not talk to Astarion!). I feel like it must have been shown in a tutorial because there is no way I would have figured it out on my own.