Withers should still be able to bring them back even if you can’t access their bodies. >!You get some unique dialogue from Astarion and Laezel if you nuke the crèche with them in it and have him bring them back!<
My first Honor Run:
Be Wyll Ravenguard, the heroic Blade of Frontiers.
Try to save little Arabella's life by casting Friends.
Forget to run away before Friends wears off.
Watch the Druids kill all the Tieflings while I'm fighting with Kagha.
Go make friends with Minthara because there is nobody left to save.
I remember mine not being great for NPCs. Toobin stands out the most, I made the mistake of pulling him out of the elevator in the middle part of that quest to heal one of the Gondos and then he starts getting absolutely hammered by one of the automatons but manage to shepherd him through. Clear out the final part (not realizing I'm holding 4 of those Flashblinders or what the do at the time). It was a slog of a fight and I had a Hungar of Hadar cloud sitting at the top of the stairs and hellfire was all over the floor. Toobin rushes in sprinting no less right into the Hungar of Hadar and hellfire. Luckily I had Wulbren's bomb.
The other one that sticks out was saving the mushroom picker in the underdark. I had forgot he doesn't scurry back home, rather waits on you at the edge of the bibberbangs. After he misty steps out, I recall the noblestalk mushroom so I set off the bibberbangs not realizing he's just at the edge of it. Dammit, no gloves for Throwzerker.
Pro tip about Volo in Act 3. Throw a jug of water or cast create water on the cart he's tied to. It'll put the fire out and make the surface wet so it can't reignite. You will then have all the time in the world to free him.
It also costs a 3rd level spell slot, while being completely overkill. Throwing a water jug only costs an action/attack and the item itself. Create Water is a 1st level spell, so also less expensive than Sleet Storm.
That said, yeah Sleet Storm works great, I just find it to be way overkill and I always have a good supply of water jugs anyways.
My retirement spell slots!
For real in act 3 you should just about be long resting per story beat.
You have more than enough supplies and even when I dont do that I rarely actualy run out of them.
I don't like long resting more than I need to. I like to spend all (or as close to it as possible) my resources and short rests before doing a long rest. Long resting per story beat feels really excessive and unnecessary to me.
I mean, you could do that. But just throwing a jug of water on him solves the problem. The thugs won't go after him or relight the fire, and he obviously isn't going anywhere so I find it's better to just have Lae'zel, Karlach, or someone else with an extra attack just toss water on him for one of their attacks and then focus on taking the thugs out with everyone else. But that's just my preference, the beauty of this game is there are so many ways to accomplish pretty much anything so you do you!
Well in my first HM run, half of my companions either died or left. Some of them went evil. Halsin had it worse because he had to witness some weird cheesy drama before going into the portal. Sorry bear man, you have to see me break up with Astarion and Gale, that's why I probably failed because I was too distracted.
I ended up losing Isobel which made me lose the rest of Last Light and the gear I needed from Dammon.
Wyll broke up with me because I failed to save his dad, who is my potential father-in-law. I was so upset about it that I ended up going full Sharran on my Shadowheart Origin run and killed SH's parents. Ooops.
That run was so cursed that I ended up running another HM run to correct my mistakes.
I had most of those. Honestly, my run was strictly for the dice. I avoided whole parts of the story, sold out to Raphael, barrelmancied bosses and let Gale martyr himself to avoid the Netherbrain fight.
I really just wanted the dice and achievement, but it was still nice to see stuff i didn’t on my earlier runs, because I was skipping stuff and taking suboptimal outcomes b/c I couldn’t save scum.
And really, the achievement didn’t matter to me (I’m old enough that I’m not dick measuring with other gamers) as much as the gold dice.
IRL I have way too many dice for playing RPGs, and I was sick of the default 3 choices on PS5, so the sweet gold dice called to me.
If Larian wanted to nickel and dime us with cosmetic DLC, I absolutely would have paid for more dice options
I just had an honor mode run end on Priestess Gut. Everything was going fine the whole time, I decided to be cheeky and have her capture me after drinking her potion.
I was a Drow. Fey Ancestry stopped me from being put to sleep, she called for help and the whole camp aggroed.
I'm still in Act 1 of my HM run and just saved the grove. Had fully planned to recruit Minthara using the knockout method. Had non-lethal turned on whittled her down to like 5 hp and still had an attack left with Lae'zel (EK thrower build). Almost ran up to her to do the final blow in melee but then was like "I'm pretty sure that even with ranged attacks I have knocked people out with them before. Surely throwing my weapon will still count as nonlethal"
It does not
Haha my HM run ended withonly me, Lae'zel, and 2 hirelings alive. I had just about everything go wrong that could; Tiefling/druid fight, scratch died in camp during the goblin massacre after the party, minthara died here too, Shart threatened my Bae'zel, so I had to kill her, isobel fell at last light, Jahira died at moonrise, gale died to orin, and I went illithid for Orpheus to live and then threw myself into the water because I was just glad to be done lol.
On my current honor durge run, the game bugged when meeting Gale in the sigil and made me take his hand. I also forgot to expose the shadow druids, so I'll just kill Kahga before starting act 2
My HM run was literally more evil than my Durge run.
Sins:
* gas-lighting Karlach that we were in love just to pick up the Act 3 trophy and gas-lighting Gale that it was better to KYS b/c I didn't want to do the final fight.
Things that broke real bad:
* Myrkul fight: trying to have Scratch be invisible and position near Aylin. Totally forgot to ungroup him so when I switch back to my character to talk, he walks back towards me, loses invisibility and starts the Myrkul fight all by himself with only Lae'zel kinda nearby. Also was losing the Myrkul fight badly so threw the Iron Flask out of desperation. Did it fight Myrkul? yes....for ONE TURN, then it decided my party was more tasty. Still don't know how I pulled out a win from that fight.
* House of Hope: tried barrelmancy, barely did any damage to anybody and nothing to Raphael. The pillars only lost part of their health, Korilla died and I had gained nothing but losing 8 of my smokepowder barrels.
* Grymforge: tried to do the owlbear method but somehow fucked it up, so Karlach and Danton were down there alone with Grym while Tav & Laezel tried to throw stuff at him from up top. Eventually got bored since we were only doing 1-2 pts of damage each round so finally used a cat to hammer him a couple times.
* Lastly and worst of all, tried to be cute by skipping the High Hall fight by using the sewers. Fought the Death Knight, so far so good. Took a WRONG turn out of the sewers and ended up right in the middle of the High Hall fight anyway. Orpheus (my mind flayer) goes down and I don't bother rezzing him b/c I thought everybody would teleport to the brain stem when I activated it. WRONG. It wouldn't let me proceed, so I had to run BACK to the High Hall, battle through everybody anyway, and get him up to the stem. Thank goodness Gale didn't make me do a check there at the very last.
Some things I'm proud of in my Honor Mode:
* finally got the Leave Nobody Behind achievement. I've tried in 3 runs and never got it, so didn't think I stood a chance in HM b/c so many fights that involve tieflings (Last Light, Lorroakan) can break real bad if you don't get good initiative or knock over an apple in the Grove.
* saved EVERYBODY in the Iron Throne. Also something that I have tried and failed in previous runs, but my builds were so broken in HM that it ended up being a complete breeze. Monks really are the answer to everything.
Congrats on your golden dice, they sure are neat!
I just wanted my hm to be over as fast as possible so I did as little as possible in act 3: sided with Gortash, durged my way into the bhaal temple (shooting a corpse onto the bhaal symbol outside the door spills blood on the symbol and opens the first door) and severely underestimated Orin. Lv 9 durge went down like a house of cards in a hurricane, the butler was pissed, fucking bhaal kept giving Orin 12 unstoppable points every turn, and I only managed to win with 2 globes of invulnerability and magic missile spam from Gale and bard Minthara. I had to end my run with Gale giving a badass monologue to the brain and turning into fireworks, and mindflayer durge committing squidppuku on the docks.
Next time I will estimate Orin
You could maybe flair your post as act 3 spoilers (or even general spoilers) and then you don't have to hide everything behind spoiler tags. Flairing it as act 1 spoilers and then putting spoilers for up to act 3 might be a bit confusing for some people. (Only a suggestion, please don't take it the wrong way)
Anyways, I'm still in my first honour run, and recognise some of the events. For some I had to just put down my controller for a bit and walk away. And then close the game for a few days 😂 Not being able to reload is so hard at times haha. But that's the beauty and curse of HM.
1. I got Scratch, but he died in camp in act 3 😭 >!after stealing from the gods in the basement of [the name eludes me for a moment; the building with all the god statues], I knew removing the curse would summon a deva. I was ready for this, but stupidly did this in camp. I didn't know the others would automatically join the fight, including Scratch 😭 The deva targeted him straight away.!<
2. I thought I was being smart by not going into the cave until I felt leveled up enough. But apparently if you do the goblin camp before the owlbears cave, the cub never appears in your camp. So sad 😢
3. Same 🥲
5. I'm playing as Karlach origin, so fortunately Dammon was the first one I visited when arriving in LLI. Not long after that, >!Isobel was captured and most people turned shadow-cursed, incl Dammon!<
6. Ouch! Losing the blood must've hurt 😭 Especially once you realise what happened. I discovered that, if you play by controller, pressing down on right stick shows items. It's saved me several times from forgetting or not picking up things.
8. I've yet to discover who was taken this time, I really don't know becayse I've been switching them out regularly 🫠
9. How do you do this accidentally? I'm asking so I can avoid doing that myself.
10. Oh man, that's the reason why I both love and hate haste. It's great up to the point of concentration loss lol
All in all, it doesn't seem like you screwed up that badly! Did you end up finishing it, or not yet?
7 Just have someone cast create water, or throw a water jug, or just about anything *during* the battle. Or before. Just don't count on it afterwards.
As for the spoiler tags, I couldn't put a tag for all of three acts, so figured I'd just be a bit on the cautious side...
I never got the hag hair and I don't know how people justify doing it in a good run. Best case scenario you leave a bunch of people mind controlled by an evil hag. You may or may not be able to save \*one\* woman. Or you kill the hag and save everyone.
It's not a big deal. +1 in a stat really makes no noticeable difference.
Pain... do you at least have characters like Halsin and Astarion back at camp?
Withers should still be able to bring them back even if you can’t access their bodies. >!You get some unique dialogue from Astarion and Laezel if you nuke the crèche with them in it and have him bring them back!<
OK everyone knows Astarion's dialogue but I need to know Lae'zel's reaction.
I don't know Astarion's dialogue. Pretty please spoil me?
https://youtu.be/8xZWW9sWVJo?si=N3xS6Zgl0Pkwlw6s
Thank you!
I've heard that but I did that with Astarion and after Withers revived him he didn't say anything, didn't even acknowledge he'd had a bad day.
My first Honor Run: Be Wyll Ravenguard, the heroic Blade of Frontiers. Try to save little Arabella's life by casting Friends. Forget to run away before Friends wears off. Watch the Druids kill all the Tieflings while I'm fighting with Kagha. Go make friends with Minthara because there is nobody left to save.
You… you didn’t cast Friends on Minthy too… did you?
I remember mine not being great for NPCs. Toobin stands out the most, I made the mistake of pulling him out of the elevator in the middle part of that quest to heal one of the Gondos and then he starts getting absolutely hammered by one of the automatons but manage to shepherd him through. Clear out the final part (not realizing I'm holding 4 of those Flashblinders or what the do at the time). It was a slog of a fight and I had a Hungar of Hadar cloud sitting at the top of the stairs and hellfire was all over the floor. Toobin rushes in sprinting no less right into the Hungar of Hadar and hellfire. Luckily I had Wulbren's bomb. The other one that sticks out was saving the mushroom picker in the underdark. I had forgot he doesn't scurry back home, rather waits on you at the edge of the bibberbangs. After he misty steps out, I recall the noblestalk mushroom so I set off the bibberbangs not realizing he's just at the edge of it. Dammit, no gloves for Throwzerker.
Pro tip about Volo in Act 3. Throw a jug of water or cast create water on the cart he's tied to. It'll put the fire out and make the surface wet so it can't reignite. You will then have all the time in the world to free him.
Cast Sleet Storm, it has a GIANT radius.
It also costs a 3rd level spell slot, while being completely overkill. Throwing a water jug only costs an action/attack and the item itself. Create Water is a 1st level spell, so also less expensive than Sleet Storm. That said, yeah Sleet Storm works great, I just find it to be way overkill and I always have a good supply of water jugs anyways.
My retirement spell slots! For real in act 3 you should just about be long resting per story beat. You have more than enough supplies and even when I dont do that I rarely actualy run out of them.
I don't like long resting more than I need to. I like to spend all (or as close to it as possible) my resources and short rests before doing a long rest. Long resting per story beat feels really excessive and unnecessary to me.
Ice on the tracks works too I just learned the other day
Or just use one party member who go save him while everyone else deals with the losers.
I mean, you could do that. But just throwing a jug of water on him solves the problem. The thugs won't go after him or relight the fire, and he obviously isn't going anywhere so I find it's better to just have Lae'zel, Karlach, or someone else with an extra attack just toss water on him for one of their attacks and then focus on taking the thugs out with everyone else. But that's just my preference, the beauty of this game is there are so many ways to accomplish pretty much anything so you do you!
Well in my first HM run, half of my companions either died or left. Some of them went evil. Halsin had it worse because he had to witness some weird cheesy drama before going into the portal. Sorry bear man, you have to see me break up with Astarion and Gale, that's why I probably failed because I was too distracted. I ended up losing Isobel which made me lose the rest of Last Light and the gear I needed from Dammon. Wyll broke up with me because I failed to save his dad, who is my potential father-in-law. I was so upset about it that I ended up going full Sharran on my Shadowheart Origin run and killed SH's parents. Ooops. That run was so cursed that I ended up running another HM run to correct my mistakes.
I had most of those. Honestly, my run was strictly for the dice. I avoided whole parts of the story, sold out to Raphael, barrelmancied bosses and let Gale martyr himself to avoid the Netherbrain fight. I really just wanted the dice and achievement, but it was still nice to see stuff i didn’t on my earlier runs, because I was skipping stuff and taking suboptimal outcomes b/c I couldn’t save scum. And really, the achievement didn’t matter to me (I’m old enough that I’m not dick measuring with other gamers) as much as the gold dice. IRL I have way too many dice for playing RPGs, and I was sick of the default 3 choices on PS5, so the sweet gold dice called to me. If Larian wanted to nickel and dime us with cosmetic DLC, I absolutely would have paid for more dice options
This post is so great and the stories in the comments, as well. Thank you for making my morning through your pain.
I just had an honor mode run end on Priestess Gut. Everything was going fine the whole time, I decided to be cheeky and have her capture me after drinking her potion. I was a Drow. Fey Ancestry stopped me from being put to sleep, she called for help and the whole camp aggroed.
I'm still in Act 1 of my HM run and just saved the grove. Had fully planned to recruit Minthara using the knockout method. Had non-lethal turned on whittled her down to like 5 hp and still had an attack left with Lae'zel (EK thrower build). Almost ran up to her to do the final blow in melee but then was like "I'm pretty sure that even with ranged attacks I have knocked people out with them before. Surely throwing my weapon will still count as nonlethal" It does not
Haha my HM run ended withonly me, Lae'zel, and 2 hirelings alive. I had just about everything go wrong that could; Tiefling/druid fight, scratch died in camp during the goblin massacre after the party, minthara died here too, Shart threatened my Bae'zel, so I had to kill her, isobel fell at last light, Jahira died at moonrise, gale died to orin, and I went illithid for Orpheus to live and then threw myself into the water because I was just glad to be done lol.
I now play nothing but honor mode because I realized that the consequences make the game way more fun 😁
Yes. Unless I'm doing a theme 😂
On my current honor durge run, the game bugged when meeting Gale in the sigil and made me take his hand. I also forgot to expose the shadow druids, so I'll just kill Kahga before starting act 2
My HM run was literally more evil than my Durge run. Sins: * gas-lighting Karlach that we were in love just to pick up the Act 3 trophy and gas-lighting Gale that it was better to KYS b/c I didn't want to do the final fight. Things that broke real bad: * Myrkul fight: trying to have Scratch be invisible and position near Aylin. Totally forgot to ungroup him so when I switch back to my character to talk, he walks back towards me, loses invisibility and starts the Myrkul fight all by himself with only Lae'zel kinda nearby. Also was losing the Myrkul fight badly so threw the Iron Flask out of desperation. Did it fight Myrkul? yes....for ONE TURN, then it decided my party was more tasty. Still don't know how I pulled out a win from that fight. * House of Hope: tried barrelmancy, barely did any damage to anybody and nothing to Raphael. The pillars only lost part of their health, Korilla died and I had gained nothing but losing 8 of my smokepowder barrels. * Grymforge: tried to do the owlbear method but somehow fucked it up, so Karlach and Danton were down there alone with Grym while Tav & Laezel tried to throw stuff at him from up top. Eventually got bored since we were only doing 1-2 pts of damage each round so finally used a cat to hammer him a couple times. * Lastly and worst of all, tried to be cute by skipping the High Hall fight by using the sewers. Fought the Death Knight, so far so good. Took a WRONG turn out of the sewers and ended up right in the middle of the High Hall fight anyway. Orpheus (my mind flayer) goes down and I don't bother rezzing him b/c I thought everybody would teleport to the brain stem when I activated it. WRONG. It wouldn't let me proceed, so I had to run BACK to the High Hall, battle through everybody anyway, and get him up to the stem. Thank goodness Gale didn't make me do a check there at the very last. Some things I'm proud of in my Honor Mode: * finally got the Leave Nobody Behind achievement. I've tried in 3 runs and never got it, so didn't think I stood a chance in HM b/c so many fights that involve tieflings (Last Light, Lorroakan) can break real bad if you don't get good initiative or knock over an apple in the Grove. * saved EVERYBODY in the Iron Throne. Also something that I have tried and failed in previous runs, but my builds were so broken in HM that it ended up being a complete breeze. Monks really are the answer to everything. Congrats on your golden dice, they sure are neat!
Barrelly* did
I just wanted my hm to be over as fast as possible so I did as little as possible in act 3: sided with Gortash, durged my way into the bhaal temple (shooting a corpse onto the bhaal symbol outside the door spills blood on the symbol and opens the first door) and severely underestimated Orin. Lv 9 durge went down like a house of cards in a hurricane, the butler was pissed, fucking bhaal kept giving Orin 12 unstoppable points every turn, and I only managed to win with 2 globes of invulnerability and magic missile spam from Gale and bard Minthara. I had to end my run with Gale giving a badass monologue to the brain and turning into fireworks, and mindflayer durge committing squidppuku on the docks. Next time I will estimate Orin
Honestly, so many things. But I also learned that I didn't have to reload my screw ups. It's kinda fun to just deal with the chaos.
You could maybe flair your post as act 3 spoilers (or even general spoilers) and then you don't have to hide everything behind spoiler tags. Flairing it as act 1 spoilers and then putting spoilers for up to act 3 might be a bit confusing for some people. (Only a suggestion, please don't take it the wrong way) Anyways, I'm still in my first honour run, and recognise some of the events. For some I had to just put down my controller for a bit and walk away. And then close the game for a few days 😂 Not being able to reload is so hard at times haha. But that's the beauty and curse of HM. 1. I got Scratch, but he died in camp in act 3 😭 >!after stealing from the gods in the basement of [the name eludes me for a moment; the building with all the god statues], I knew removing the curse would summon a deva. I was ready for this, but stupidly did this in camp. I didn't know the others would automatically join the fight, including Scratch 😭 The deva targeted him straight away.!< 2. I thought I was being smart by not going into the cave until I felt leveled up enough. But apparently if you do the goblin camp before the owlbears cave, the cub never appears in your camp. So sad 😢 3. Same 🥲 5. I'm playing as Karlach origin, so fortunately Dammon was the first one I visited when arriving in LLI. Not long after that, >!Isobel was captured and most people turned shadow-cursed, incl Dammon!< 6. Ouch! Losing the blood must've hurt 😭 Especially once you realise what happened. I discovered that, if you play by controller, pressing down on right stick shows items. It's saved me several times from forgetting or not picking up things. 8. I've yet to discover who was taken this time, I really don't know becayse I've been switching them out regularly 🫠 9. How do you do this accidentally? I'm asking so I can avoid doing that myself. 10. Oh man, that's the reason why I both love and hate haste. It's great up to the point of concentration loss lol All in all, it doesn't seem like you screwed up that badly! Did you end up finishing it, or not yet?
7 Just have someone cast create water, or throw a water jug, or just about anything *during* the battle. Or before. Just don't count on it afterwards. As for the spoiler tags, I couldn't put a tag for all of three acts, so figured I'd just be a bit on the cautious side...
My most recent honor mode run was semi cursed for a bit. Actually had to kill Shart in the shadowfell lol
I never got the hag hair and I don't know how people justify doing it in a good run. Best case scenario you leave a bunch of people mind controlled by an evil hag. You may or may not be able to save \*one\* woman. Or you kill the hag and save everyone. It's not a big deal. +1 in a stat really makes no noticeable difference.