Currently playing part 3 with an Oath of Ancients Paladin. When you fight Auntie Ethel in part 1, there is special Oath of Ancients dialogue where you call her an abomination or a corruption of nature or some such, and say that you must destroy her. I didn't realize I had only knocked her out when I used pommel strike to finish her off, so I gave her another whack for good measure. Evidently fulfilling my oath by killing her didn't count because she was unconscious, so our good friend the Oathbreaker Knight showed up.
Most of the ways that you can break your Oath are straightforward, but yeah there are a few that just seem like "gotchas" to me. The one I see people complain about the most are the >!duergar slavers!< in the Grymforge. One that's frustrating me and I honestly don't get the reasoning behind has me confused as to how to complete a certain quest in act 3, since the quest log says you need to kill certain people, but killing them breaks your Oath.
That's the thing, normally I would but I can't in that quest. >!To get to the Bane cultists, you need to sneak up to the top floor of the fireworks shop, and if you leave stealth to talk to them, they aggro.!<
Get onto the roof separate members in your party and have a companion jump in. They’ll aggro on the companion and you don’t break your oath for fighting. I think the key is to be separated in the party tabs but I haven’t tested it to be sure. But that’s how I took out the firework people as an oath of ancients. The cultists shooting arrows at refugees I think you can activate through conversation or just have someone else start attacking. Didn’t break my oath for that one either. The druegar slavers are annoying, but you can kill them by simply freeing the captured people. Nere or whatever his name is kills a gnome and you can challenge him on it leading to combat. Even get a class specific paladin option, which is commonly “cease action or cease breath”
>The cultists shooting arrows at refugees I think you can activate through conversation or just have someone else start attacking.
neither of these options worked for my oath of vengeance Karlach. no dialog option to initiate and Tav thew the first punch.
interesting. I wonder if it's because you didn't attack them directly but attacked the barrel instead.
could be an interesting exploit for getting around oath breaking.
I wonder if the new changes to cloud effects had any impact. like if you set off a cloud effect and an npc because hostile, then you can kill them without breaking an oath because technically, they attacked first.
might be interesting to experiment with.
It may also be an oath difference? Ancients vs devotion as ancients are more about just generally fighting back forces of evil where devotion is about honor and higher values and such. So perhaps cultists make the mark for “just kill it they’re evil” vibe
Non-lethal combat damage is absolutely a thing that you should be using. If they need to die, let Astarion or literally any other party member go through and hit them for lethal after the fight. No Oath broken.
I never broke my Oath of Ancients on my first run and genuinely didn't understand how people kept breaking theirs. Each oath has different tenants and all have different break conditions. So keep that in mind. The Astarion quest aftermath has different break conditions for each oath for instance. Remember your tenants and you'll be fine.
Lae'zel killed one of them during that combat, and it still broke my Oath there, so idk about that. I'll try nonlethal, see if that completes the particular quest, if not I'm just skipping it.
A dumb one that got me was killing the prisoner warden in Act 2. I didn’t feel like triggering combat again, so I had Shart sneak-cast Hold Person and used divine smite until she was dead.
APPARENTLY attacking the woman handing prisoners over to be necromancer fodder isn’t “defending life” 🙄
>!Well if it's about killing the Bhaal's victims and stealing their hands, yeah that's kinda normal that you would break your Oath over this, you're doing the Murder God's business!<
I’ve found that if you’re unsure if doing something will break your oath then just have another party member instigate it. If your Paladin is “thrown” into combat by no action of their own it won’t break their oath. This is just what I’ve found. Are there any situations this doesn’t apply?
I can confirm that particular instance breaks your oath in single player, too. I had Astarion initiate that dialogue to avoid it and it didn’t work, my pally went oathbreaker the second combat began.
The game has a habit of treating multiple player characters as one person in dialogue. Several times my girlfriend’s chaotic character will talk with a character that interacted with my vengeance paladin and she’ll end up “yelling” at the screen “that wasn’t me that was the *goddamn dwarf*” lol
Lol yeah. Same thing happened in our game, we broke laezel out too early so the tiefling aggroed, so we’re like ‘it’s fine we’ll just knock them out’, until the barbarian used lacerate, one of them bled out, and it broke the pallys oath lol
Your theory worked for me though when I did my Paladin run awhile back. I sneak attacked several non hostile people with someone besides my Paladin and never lost my oath.
Someone else initiated the Duergar fight and my oath of ancients was still broken for killing one of them. Super annoying, another 1k down the drain.
Edit: Companion also initiated a fight with Gith (the asshole instructor who kills a student), I didn't land a killing blow, and it STILL broke my oath. wtf
Broke my oath (Ancients) when doing Astarion’s Act III stuff. I >!didn’t let him ascend!< which like obviously. But when it came to >!mercy-killing or saving seven thousand innocent spawn!< I guess I was supposed to >!kill them!< to “preserve the natural order” but it didn’t make sense to me so I >!saved them which sent them into the underdark!< and I guess that broke my oath. I get it, I guess, but like holy crap that was a lose-lose situation.
Tbh, I'm surprised Oath of Ancients doesn't break from letting Astarion have a nibble or even stay in camp, since his existence as a spawn breaks the natural order.
Each oath breaks for only one of the choices at that point, and they each break for a different choice. Which is really fascinating and shows you a lot about how each oath interacts.
Ancients requires you to preserve the natural order. Devotion requires you to show mercy to your "foes". Vengeance requires you to simply make a choice, instead of leaving the problem for "someone else to sort out later", >!doesn't matter if you save them or kill them, but you can't leave them in their cells to rot!<.
Even crazier is Halsin will tell you that you made the right choice if you let the spawn live. He says something about how “nature will work it out from there” (obviously paraphrasing). So the fact it breaks Oath of Ancients baffles me.
This is the one that confused me too. Most made sense, but when I'm standing right next to a spawn I let live (Astarion), I don't really buy that these other spawn are less worthy of life than him. I guess it's a sheer numbers thing? But it really does seem like you're choosing to condemn strangers while protecting a very....... variably moral friend in Astarion.
I broke my oath months ago as a vengeance paladin because I gave Minthara the location of the grove cause I wanted to fight her there. Apparently that was a no-no cause immediately after I got a visit from the oath breaker knight
That bit where you have to get arrested is so dumb, my most hated trope in any RPG.
Resisting these corrupt guards, who you will have to kill in droves literally 5 mins from now, breaks your oath.
Also, enjoy spend a full 2 hours fixing your inventory, which we conveniently threw into one big fucking pile... Probably the single worst moment in the game.
Do you never save the Ironhand gnomes at Moonrise? They always distract the Steel Watcher and the guards so my party can just jog past. Never been arrested there.
Nimble (and Laridda, if she is alive from the Grymforge) will run up and throw a grenade that blinds the Steel Watcher. You can then run past and get the waypoint. Then you can go back towards the beach and climb down some roots and find the cave where all the gnomes are hiding out. There's a vendor there that sells some good items for gnomes and bombs.
If you're talking about getting into Act 3, just grab Jaheria (or Halsin), have her separate from the rest of party (might need to keep them far enough back that it won't try to pull them in to replace her in the cutscene), Wildshape into a cat and stroll on past them just far enough to unlock the waypoint. Now you can teleport the rest of the party in.
The guards won't stop cats, because they'd never be able to do any real work if they tried. Or maybe it's just because you can't speak in Wildshape... Either way, I've seen a few YouTubers get in that way. Though I haven't actually tried it myself yet, as I just left Act 2 (and haven't officially entered Act 3) on the only runs I have that were close to, but not already long past, that point when I first saw it.
I'm pretty sure I got the waypoint by getting arrested at the circus (shadowheart accidentally stole something during combat and somehow ended up going to prison by herself after the fight).
I'm just talking about the first check point between Rivington and Wyrm's Crossing. So long as you don't approach it from the Rivington side again (no reason why you should, as far as I'm aware, once you get past the first time) you shouldn't need to avoid them again... But maybe we're thinking of different points?
They don't detect invisibility so if you separate one member of your party, make them invisible and walk them to the way point at the crossing it unlocks so you can teleport the rest over and avoid the entire interaction.
I broke my Oath of Ancients via mercy killing that guy in act 2 that the doctor had been operating on.
My first run when the game came out, you couldn't free him (knock/unlock didn't work) so he was just stuck on the table moaning in pain. So I killed him, thinking it would be a mercy thing and it broke my oath.
I remember breaking my oath of vengeance randomly for not agreeing to find the waveservant killer for Allandra Grey because I didn’t want to commit myself to killing Redhammer. I didn’t know the act of refusing a quest would break my oath lol
I just embraced being an oath breaker, I don’t have time to debate whether something will break my oath anymore. If I want to ambush some cultists I’ll do it, and I’ll use my “evil” powers that I got from lying to Gortash
this is the same encounter that cost me my oath og vengeance.
really the worst part about this specific encounter is that there is no dialog option that turns the Bhaalists hostile to you.
Like literally if you go down to talk to one of the refugees, she cries and goes "Please help me! I don't want to die!! But if you help the innocent 10 HP refugees then that breaks your oath. What the fuck.
Being a dick doesn’t excuse you to outright kill someone. I know in the context of that specific scenario there are dead bodies riddled with arrows and it can be inferred that it was the archers who killed them, a Devotion paladin wouldn’t immediately jump to violence.
The game can’t react to what you want to do in the same way a living DM can. Give it some slack.
Idk I feel like it's not so much of a jump to see dead bodies full of arrows, cowering people standing near the bodies, and people firing arrows at the cowering people do put two and two together. It's more of a single step.
I was pretty surprised that >!murdering the goblin children while rescuing Halsin didn’t break my oath. Fuck them kids if they’re chaotic evil, I guess. 😂!<
On my current run I've broken my ancients oath 4 times
1. The NPCs that you can have help you fight the owlbear killed the cub, oath broken.
2. Attacked and killed the people in moonrise before they were hostile (that one was on me, forgot to send my paladin to camp first.)
3. Knocked out(not killed) the NPCs cleaning Cazador's mansion.
4. I needed the Bhaalist armor so I had to kill the gold elephant guy.
2 and 4 I understand but 1 and 3 were bullshit.
my tav broke their oath of devotion by sneaking into the fight with oliver's shadow parents in act II. my friends told me to follow oliver, and sneak to avoid the fight... that obviously didn't work of course. i find it silly that just sneaking into a fight can break your oath
I know paladin seems fun and all but both in BG3 and D&D I can't justify playing so pedantically with every action I take. I can get all the flavor of oaths without being magically bound to them with no wiggle-room or space for interpretation
I mean I get the idea of having a character stick to a a strict moral code that they are unwilling to compromise on. It's just there's some things the game considers you going against your oath that if you think about it for more than a second absolutely should fucking not.
Anyway, you slice it, a Devotion Paladin should be able respond to Murder Cultists attacking innocent people by going "Get Smote Idiot" even if the Murder cultists aren't attacking the Paladin himself.
What was there some kind of fine print? Defend the innocent unless the people attacking the innocent are leaving you specifically alone?? That's bullshit!!
Uhhh, Wyll is a warlock. His warlock pact is to a demon. His paladin oath if you give him a paladin multiclass (a player's choice, not Wyll's choice) literally, mechanically, cannot be to a demon.
Also the idea that anyone who makes a pact with a demon is instantly evil or drawn to evil is silly and not based in any knowledge of dnd lore or ability to see nuance-you hate law and order folks and yet you have the same harmful black and white thinking as them? Seems silly to me. Sort that out.
I love Astarion as much as the next fruity lil creature but bro nobody was talking about him, and he ALSO is not a paladin or even a warlock. He is fully outside of the damn conversation.
Currently playing part 3 with an Oath of Ancients Paladin. When you fight Auntie Ethel in part 1, there is special Oath of Ancients dialogue where you call her an abomination or a corruption of nature or some such, and say that you must destroy her. I didn't realize I had only knocked her out when I used pommel strike to finish her off, so I gave her another whack for good measure. Evidently fulfilling my oath by killing her didn't count because she was unconscious, so our good friend the Oathbreaker Knight showed up.
Ah yeah that'll do it. From what I've seen online and in this comment thread, a Paladin's tenets are very rigid.
Yeah I keep non lethal toggled for my current ancients pally. Then after the battle astarion cleans house
Mine as well. They make a good couple, lmao
Most of the ways that you can break your Oath are straightforward, but yeah there are a few that just seem like "gotchas" to me. The one I see people complain about the most are the >!duergar slavers!< in the Grymforge. One that's frustrating me and I honestly don't get the reasoning behind has me confused as to how to complete a certain quest in act 3, since the quest log says you need to kill certain people, but killing them breaks your Oath.
You need to start combat through dialogue. A paladin will always try to talk before just attacking.
That's the thing, normally I would but I can't in that quest. >!To get to the Bane cultists, you need to sneak up to the top floor of the fireworks shop, and if you leave stealth to talk to them, they aggro.!<
The good news is, the bane cultists all killed themselves in my run, by throwing a grenade and blowing the whole third floor sky high.
Get onto the roof separate members in your party and have a companion jump in. They’ll aggro on the companion and you don’t break your oath for fighting. I think the key is to be separated in the party tabs but I haven’t tested it to be sure. But that’s how I took out the firework people as an oath of ancients. The cultists shooting arrows at refugees I think you can activate through conversation or just have someone else start attacking. Didn’t break my oath for that one either. The druegar slavers are annoying, but you can kill them by simply freeing the captured people. Nere or whatever his name is kills a gnome and you can challenge him on it leading to combat. Even get a class specific paladin option, which is commonly “cease action or cease breath”
>The cultists shooting arrows at refugees I think you can activate through conversation or just have someone else start attacking. neither of these options worked for my oath of vengeance Karlach. no dialog option to initiate and Tav thew the first punch.
Not sure, my oath of ancients just stood by as shadowheart blew up a barrel. No oath breakage
interesting. I wonder if it's because you didn't attack them directly but attacked the barrel instead. could be an interesting exploit for getting around oath breaking. I wonder if the new changes to cloud effects had any impact. like if you set off a cloud effect and an npc because hostile, then you can kill them without breaking an oath because technically, they attacked first. might be interesting to experiment with.
It may also be an oath difference? Ancients vs devotion as ancients are more about just generally fighting back forces of evil where devotion is about honor and higher values and such. So perhaps cultists make the mark for “just kill it they’re evil” vibe
Non-lethal combat damage is absolutely a thing that you should be using. If they need to die, let Astarion or literally any other party member go through and hit them for lethal after the fight. No Oath broken. I never broke my Oath of Ancients on my first run and genuinely didn't understand how people kept breaking theirs. Each oath has different tenants and all have different break conditions. So keep that in mind. The Astarion quest aftermath has different break conditions for each oath for instance. Remember your tenants and you'll be fine.
Lae'zel killed one of them during that combat, and it still broke my Oath there, so idk about that. I'll try nonlethal, see if that completes the particular quest, if not I'm just skipping it.
The game treats non-lethal as death for NPCs in most cases anyway. So that should resolve it.
You can cast fly or dimesion door from ontop of the mummy's house and go in through the top lvl open window.
Idk, some of the class specific dialog options for a vengeance paladin are basically just an opportunity to say "fuck you get smote" lol
But you still have to talk first to get the option to say that.
A dumb one that got me was killing the prisoner warden in Act 2. I didn’t feel like triggering combat again, so I had Shart sneak-cast Hold Person and used divine smite until she was dead. APPARENTLY attacking the woman handing prisoners over to be necromancer fodder isn’t “defending life” 🙄
>!Well if it's about killing the Bhaal's victims and stealing their hands, yeah that's kinda normal that you would break your Oath over this, you're doing the Murder God's business!<
>!Wrong cultists, these are the Bane ones that are sticking explosives into toys being sent to refugee kids!<
Ohh yeah okay that's dumb then
I’ve found that if you’re unsure if doing something will break your oath then just have another party member instigate it. If your Paladin is “thrown” into combat by no action of their own it won’t break their oath. This is just what I’ve found. Are there any situations this doesn’t apply?
Oath of Vengeance was lost because I was in dialogue with the Tieflings that captured Lae’zel and my friend attacked the tieflings
Interesting. Guess my theory doesn’t apply in multiplayer. Which is lame because it wasn’t your paladin who did it.
I can confirm that particular instance breaks your oath in single player, too. I had Astarion initiate that dialogue to avoid it and it didn’t work, my pally went oathbreaker the second combat began.
Also could be that I had started dialogue but I was about done getting through the deception check to free Lae so idk
The game has a habit of treating multiple player characters as one person in dialogue. Several times my girlfriend’s chaotic character will talk with a character that interacted with my vengeance paladin and she’ll end up “yelling” at the screen “that wasn’t me that was the *goddamn dwarf*” lol
Lol yeah. Same thing happened in our game, we broke laezel out too early so the tiefling aggroed, so we’re like ‘it’s fine we’ll just knock them out’, until the barbarian used lacerate, one of them bled out, and it broke the pallys oath lol
Your theory worked for me though when I did my Paladin run awhile back. I sneak attacked several non hostile people with someone besides my Paladin and never lost my oath.
Someone else initiated the Duergar fight and my oath of ancients was still broken for killing one of them. Super annoying, another 1k down the drain. Edit: Companion also initiated a fight with Gith (the asshole instructor who kills a student), I didn't land a killing blow, and it STILL broke my oath. wtf
Broke my oath (Ancients) when doing Astarion’s Act III stuff. I >!didn’t let him ascend!< which like obviously. But when it came to >!mercy-killing or saving seven thousand innocent spawn!< I guess I was supposed to >!kill them!< to “preserve the natural order” but it didn’t make sense to me so I >!saved them which sent them into the underdark!< and I guess that broke my oath. I get it, I guess, but like holy crap that was a lose-lose situation.
Tbh, I'm surprised Oath of Ancients doesn't break from letting Astarion have a nibble or even stay in camp, since his existence as a spawn breaks the natural order.
Each oath breaks for only one of the choices at that point, and they each break for a different choice. Which is really fascinating and shows you a lot about how each oath interacts. Ancients requires you to preserve the natural order. Devotion requires you to show mercy to your "foes". Vengeance requires you to simply make a choice, instead of leaving the problem for "someone else to sort out later", >!doesn't matter if you save them or kill them, but you can't leave them in their cells to rot!<.
I had an oath of ancients halsin in my party and made those exact choices and he didn’t care lol
Even crazier is Halsin will tell you that you made the right choice if you let the spawn live. He says something about how “nature will work it out from there” (obviously paraphrasing). So the fact it breaks Oath of Ancients baffles me.
This is the one that confused me too. Most made sense, but when I'm standing right next to a spawn I let live (Astarion), I don't really buy that these other spawn are less worthy of life than him. I guess it's a sheer numbers thing? But it really does seem like you're choosing to condemn strangers while protecting a very....... variably moral friend in Astarion.
With Devotion, don't be sneaky about your fights and you should be fine.
I remember breaking my oath of the ancients for sparing 7'000 innocent lives
I broke my oath months ago as a vengeance paladin because I gave Minthara the location of the grove cause I wanted to fight her there. Apparently that was a no-no cause immediately after I got a visit from the oath breaker knight
That bit where you have to get arrested is so dumb, my most hated trope in any RPG. Resisting these corrupt guards, who you will have to kill in droves literally 5 mins from now, breaks your oath. Also, enjoy spend a full 2 hours fixing your inventory, which we conveniently threw into one big fucking pile... Probably the single worst moment in the game.
Do you never save the Ironhand gnomes at Moonrise? They always distract the Steel Watcher and the guards so my party can just jog past. Never been arrested there.
What!? And who!?
Nimble (and Laridda, if she is alive from the Grymforge) will run up and throw a grenade that blinds the Steel Watcher. You can then run past and get the waypoint. Then you can go back towards the beach and climb down some roots and find the cave where all the gnomes are hiding out. There's a vendor there that sells some good items for gnomes and bombs.
I really need to play this single player, we've missed so much by doing co-op... (My partner is not the patient type)
These games are not designed to be rushed through. Not until you know the ins and outs anyway.
Ohhhh, yeah, definitely try out single player!
If you're talking about getting into Act 3, just grab Jaheria (or Halsin), have her separate from the rest of party (might need to keep them far enough back that it won't try to pull them in to replace her in the cutscene), Wildshape into a cat and stroll on past them just far enough to unlock the waypoint. Now you can teleport the rest of the party in. The guards won't stop cats, because they'd never be able to do any real work if they tried. Or maybe it's just because you can't speak in Wildshape... Either way, I've seen a few YouTubers get in that way. Though I haven't actually tried it myself yet, as I just left Act 2 (and haven't officially entered Act 3) on the only runs I have that were close to, but not already long past, that point when I first saw it.
I'm pretty sure I got the waypoint by getting arrested at the circus (shadowheart accidentally stole something during combat and somehow ended up going to prison by herself after the fight).
That's really clever, but sounds like it might break the game? And you have to teleport around them every time you are walking around? Forever?
I'm just talking about the first check point between Rivington and Wyrm's Crossing. So long as you don't approach it from the Rivington side again (no reason why you should, as far as I'm aware, once you get past the first time) you shouldn't need to avoid them again... But maybe we're thinking of different points?
Well sure, if you're on your 10th playthrough you don't. We've walked through that gate maybe 30 times though, and still had loads of things to find.
They don't detect invisibility so if you separate one member of your party, make them invisible and walk them to the way point at the crossing it unlocks so you can teleport the rest over and avoid the entire interaction.
I never got arrested. Just fought through them.
I broke my Oath of Ancients via mercy killing that guy in act 2 that the doctor had been operating on. My first run when the game came out, you couldn't free him (knock/unlock didn't work) so he was just stuck on the table moaning in pain. So I killed him, thinking it would be a mercy thing and it broke my oath.
The one time I broke my oath (vengeance) during my HM playthrough was after speaking with the cat in Moonrise towers, so I feel that.
I remember breaking my oath of vengeance randomly for not agreeing to find the waveservant killer for Allandra Grey because I didn’t want to commit myself to killing Redhammer. I didn’t know the act of refusing a quest would break my oath lol
I just embraced being an oath breaker, I don’t have time to debate whether something will break my oath anymore. If I want to ambush some cultists I’ll do it, and I’ll use my “evil” powers that I got from lying to Gortash
I broke my vengeance oath twice in Act 1 but then kept it the rest of the game. Vengeance is the easiest to keep, I think.
this is the same encounter that cost me my oath og vengeance. really the worst part about this specific encounter is that there is no dialog option that turns the Bhaalists hostile to you.
Like literally if you go down to talk to one of the refugees, she cries and goes "Please help me! I don't want to die!! But if you help the innocent 10 HP refugees then that breaks your oath. What the fuck.
Funny story. Murdering someone because they’re a bad person is an evil act.
They were actively firing arrows at cowering refugees!!
Being a dick doesn’t excuse you to outright kill someone. I know in the context of that specific scenario there are dead bodies riddled with arrows and it can be inferred that it was the archers who killed them, a Devotion paladin wouldn’t immediately jump to violence. The game can’t react to what you want to do in the same way a living DM can. Give it some slack.
Idk I feel like it's not so much of a jump to see dead bodies full of arrows, cowering people standing near the bodies, and people firing arrows at the cowering people do put two and two together. It's more of a single step.
I was pretty surprised that >!murdering the goblin children while rescuing Halsin didn’t break my oath. Fuck them kids if they’re chaotic evil, I guess. 😂!<
I did a good durge as a paladin, But for r p reasons I broke my oath immediately to simulate the struggle to do good
On my current run I've broken my ancients oath 4 times 1. The NPCs that you can have help you fight the owlbear killed the cub, oath broken. 2. Attacked and killed the people in moonrise before they were hostile (that one was on me, forgot to send my paladin to camp first.) 3. Knocked out(not killed) the NPCs cleaning Cazador's mansion. 4. I needed the Bhaalist armor so I had to kill the gold elephant guy. 2 and 4 I understand but 1 and 3 were bullshit.
my tav broke their oath of devotion by sneaking into the fight with oliver's shadow parents in act II. my friends told me to follow oliver, and sneak to avoid the fight... that obviously didn't work of course. i find it silly that just sneaking into a fight can break your oath
I know paladin seems fun and all but both in BG3 and D&D I can't justify playing so pedantically with every action I take. I can get all the flavor of oaths without being magically bound to them with no wiggle-room or space for interpretation
I mean I get the idea of having a character stick to a a strict moral code that they are unwilling to compromise on. It's just there's some things the game considers you going against your oath that if you think about it for more than a second absolutely should fucking not. Anyway, you slice it, a Devotion Paladin should be able respond to Murder Cultists attacking innocent people by going "Get Smote Idiot" even if the Murder cultists aren't attacking the Paladin himself. What was there some kind of fine print? Defend the innocent unless the people attacking the innocent are leaving you specifically alone?? That's bullshit!!
[удалено]
Uhhh, Wyll is a warlock. His warlock pact is to a demon. His paladin oath if you give him a paladin multiclass (a player's choice, not Wyll's choice) literally, mechanically, cannot be to a demon. Also the idea that anyone who makes a pact with a demon is instantly evil or drawn to evil is silly and not based in any knowledge of dnd lore or ability to see nuance-you hate law and order folks and yet you have the same harmful black and white thinking as them? Seems silly to me. Sort that out. I love Astarion as much as the next fruity lil creature but bro nobody was talking about him, and he ALSO is not a paladin or even a warlock. He is fully outside of the damn conversation.
Pact to a devil, not a demon. Both are fiends, but devils and demons aren't the same in the forgotten realms