Baldur's Gate 3 by Larian Games

ALSO one more thing about shadowheart and cantrips. well, any cleric that has access to other cantrips than base cleric cantrips. high half elves get firebolt for free, some feats give you more cantrips, multiclassing, whatever... specifically sacred flame and another attack cantrip like firebolt or chill touch, etc. those cantrips are spell attacks, so you roll a d20 and add your proficiency + your spell modifier. so a lvl 1 caster with 16 spellcasting stat will have a +2 proficiency and +3 from their spell casting stat, so d20+5. HOWEVER sacred flame is a spell SAVE, not an attack. your spell save is 8 + proficiency +spell casting modifier. so a lvl 1 caster with 16 spellcasting stat will have an 8+2(proficiency)+3 (spellcasting modifier)=13 spell save.

so what that means is, specifically with sacred flame, your target has to make a DC 13 dex save. there are times when a creature might have a high armor class but low dexterity modifier. you may have a hard time hitting with firebolt, but an easier time hitting with sacred flame. or vice versa. point is, with shadowheart, don't just hit a ranged target with firebolt, check to see sacred flame has a higher chance to hit. often times it'll be similar chances, but one of them will almost always be easier to hit than the other.

Burns said:

Weird, I remember her firebolt having a lower hit chance than guiding bolt, so never used it. Then Sacred Flame rolls against a dex saving throw, so never really used it either, just ran into melee, which she was decent at, when respeced tempest.

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interesting, i'm not sure what would cause that, outside of just misremembering or misclicking or something, not that i want to just assume user error on your part. but i can confirm that shadowheart and gale have the same chance to hit with firebolt

ha... uh.. maybe scratch that. i just realized i gave shadowheart the circlet of intelligence...

j00t said:

interesting, i'm not sure what would cause that, outside of just misremembering or misclicking or something, not that i want to just assume user error on your part. but i can confirm that shadowheart and gale have the same chance to hit with firebolt

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Maybe I was comparing Firebolt and Sacred Flame after all (I wrote firebolt off fairly early, then used mostly guiding bolt mid to late game for filler). For the vast majority of the game, she had the highest AC, so would have her midline, in order to melee and tie up enemies when possible. Once she got the mace from the Monastery, I hardly ever tried to use a cantrip with her, but she couldn't jump far, so she usually lagged behind actually getting to an enemy. To counteract her slowness, I often used her to initiate combat, which had one or two mobs charge her right off, then sneak the rest of the party into position (Lae'zel could leap from one side of the screen to the other).

Burns said:

Maybe I was comparing Firebolt and Sacred Flame after all (I wrote firebolt off fairly early, then used mostly guiding bolt mid to late game for filler). For the vast majority of the game, she had the highest AC, so would have her midline, in order to melee and tie up enemies when possible. Once she got the mace from the Monastery, I hardly ever tried to use a cantrip with her, but she couldn't jump far, so she usually lagged behind actually getting to an enemy. To counteract her slowness, I often used her to initiate combat, which had one or two mobs charge her right off, then sneak the rest of the party into position (Lae'zel could leap from one side of the screen to the other).

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yeah, my character is a paladin and then i alternate using laezel, karlach and wyll as the 2nd melee depending on character quest, though i primarily use karlach, so i use shadowheart and gale as my ranged characters

slippery said:

You really shouldn't be healing in combat outside of extreme emergencies. Prayer or Healing outside of combat is nuts. You can also apparently throw potions on the ground and the splash heals everyone as if they drank it, though I haven't had a need to try this

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A fighter at high level can throw 3 max tier heal potions a round. Like 30hp each in an area, then do it again with the bonus action thing. Best healer fighter.

slippery said:

You really shouldn't be healing in combat outside of extreme emergencies. Prayer or Healing outside of combat is nuts. You can also apparently throw potions on the ground and the splash heals everyone as if they drank it, though I haven't had a need to try this

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I've tried this a couple times, and I only see one characters HP go up when I target the ground. It's usually the first person (that I've seen) who moves gets the HP mist.

k^M said:

I've tried this a couple times, and I only see one characters HP go up when I target the ground. It's usually the first person (that I've seen) who moves gets the HP mist.

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It certainly used to be possible - I did it with haste potions a lot early on, but I have seen the behavior you mention recently, possibly they changed how that works in one of the patches ?

something is janky about it. i forget the specifics but its something like the aoe is tiny. and you'd have to use some precise placement to get more than 2 people side by side. i couldn't get the 'aoe' to light up people correctly when i was using ultimate healer (fighter) to refresh the party once.

Tuco said:

If you stacked gear that improves Spell Cast DC, I wonder if you'd be basically unresistable. Especially with this dagger.

https://baldursgate3.wiki.fextralife.com/Rhapsody

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i don't know how that dagger works specifically, but yeah, dm's have to be VERY careful giving out those kinds of items. in our first 5e campaign the dm made some mistakes in regard to power creep and we all had rediculous stats. the paladin had a defender sword that brought his ac up to 34 for several turns, the wizard had like, 33 ac, and i the cleric had a 27 ac. it's a weird feeling being the only character in full plate with a shield and still having the lowest AC. but i was also rocking the highest spell save DC with 23, the dm had to seriously tweak all the creatures we fought just to not get perma cc'd with hold person or banish or whatever.

Seananigans said:

You're going to have to elaborate on how you got 33-34 AC in 5e. Even 27 is a big ask from my experience.

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yeah i know. it was pretty insane. for me i had +3 plate armor and +3 shield, and i multiclassed 18 cleric/2 fighter, so i got the defense fighting style, which ends up at 27 ac. the paladin had some similar gear but he specifically had a defender sword which he was able to transfer some of his attack to ac, i don't quite remember his gear though, it was 5+ years ago.

the wizard was just straight up broken. he played a sorcerer up to lvl 9 or 10, but was playing a revenant. the first "act" of that campaign was curse of strahd so when we completed that module it completed the revenant's quest and he died. we weren't sure if how much further we were going after strahd, so it was a nice campaign wrapping up moment but we wanted to keep playing so he made a wizard. the dm let him pick a couple pieces of magic gear because the rest of us had some good magical gear so he didn't want him to come into the campaign with nothing. unfortunately the wizard totally took advantage of that and asked for the robe of the archmagi (ac becomes 15 +dex, he also had a 22 dex, which is silly, he had higher dex than int) and the staff of power (+2 ac, among other things). at lvl 18 wizards can pick a lvl 1 and lvl 2 spell that they can cast at that level without using a spellslot, so he picked shield, so he just basically had a permanent +5 ac from that. so we're up to 28 ac. i want to say he had a cloak of protection +3 as well? i also know there was some contention with him using mage armor and i cannot remember what the deal with that was, because it shouldn't stack with the robe of the archmagi, but he got another 3 ac from somewhere and i can't remember where...

unless i'm just misremembering and he had an ac of 31 and the paladin had an ac of 34 whenever he used his defender weapon's ability... that might be what it was. again, this was 5+ years ago.

but yeah, he asked specifically for the robe of the archmagi and the staff of power and the dm looked it over and was like, yeah sure, without really paying much attention to what it would mean. that's what i meant by the dm making some mistakes, which he immediately owned up to once the first combat situation came up after the wizard joined. but he was like, this is my mistake, not the player's so i don't want to take the items away from him now. so he had to give me and the paladin some op items so we were relatively on the same playing field. he said towards the end of the campaign that that was another mistake he made. the wizard said pretty early on that he would be totally fine having his items "break" and become unusable just to cause less issues, but the dm was like, naw, it'll be fine.

j00t said:

yeah i know. it was pretty insane. for me i had +3 plate armor and +3 shield, and i multiclassed 18 cleric/2 fighter, so i got the defense fighting style, which ends up at 27 ac. the paladin had some similar gear but he specifically had a defender sword which he was able to transfer some of his attack to ac, i don't quite remember his gear though, it was 5+ years ago.

the wizard was just straight up broken. he played a sorcerer up to lvl 9 or 10, but was playing a revenant. the first "act" of that campaign was curse of strahd so when we completed that module it completed the revenant's quest and he died. we weren't sure if how much further we were going after strahd, so it was a nice campaign wrapping up moment but we wanted to keep playing so he made a wizard. the dm let him pick a couple pieces of magic gear because the rest of us had some good magical gear so he didn't want him to come into the campaign with nothing. unfortunately the wizard totally took advantage of that and asked for the robe of the archmagi (ac becomes 15 +dex, he also had a 22 dex, which is silly, he had higher dex than int) and the staff of power (+2 ac, among other things). at lvl 18 wizards can pick a lvl 1 and lvl 2 spell that they can cast at that level without using a spellslot, so he picked shield, so he just basically had a permanent +5 ac from that. so we're up to 28 ac. i want to say he had a cloak of protection +3 as well? i also know there was some contention with him using mage armor and i cannot remember what the deal with that was, because it shouldn't stack with the robe of the archmagi, but he got another 3 ac from somewhere and i can't remember where...

unless i'm just misremembering and he had an ac of 31 and the paladin had an ac of 34 whenever he used his defender weapon's ability... that might be what it was. again, this was 5+ years ago.

but yeah, he asked specifically for the robe of the archmagi and the staff of power and the dm looked it over and was like, yeah sure, without really paying much attention to what it would mean. that's what i meant by the dm making some mistakes, which he immediately owned up to once the first combat situation came up after the wizard joined. but he was like, this is my mistake, not the player's so i don't want to take the items away from him now. so he had to give me and the paladin some op items so we were relatively on the same playing field. he said towards the end of the campaign that that was another mistake he made. the wizard said pretty early on that he would be totally fine having his items "break" and become unusable just to cause less issues, but the dm was like, naw, it'll be fine.

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since then, our dm hasn't gone above +2 items i don't think, and even then they come exceedingly rare and have quite the cost. in our CURRENT campaign (granted we are lvl 11) i'm the only one with a +2 item and it's cursed. there is a book somewhere, i can't remember what it's called, but it's for old god stuff in 5e, and one of the things it talks about is the more powerful the item, the more adverse effects it has for the players. so needless to say there are a lot of cursed items in that campaign.

Seananigans said:

Ok yeah I guess if your DM gives out +3 items like candy then silly shit can happen. Cool!

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yeah, it was his first time REALLY dm'ing for 5e. he did a couple one shots for some friends here and there with 4e and 5e, but most of his experience was dm'ing in add and 3.5, and 3.5 has powerful magic items raining from the sky. 5e is a huge tonal shift as far as magic items goes and he didn't fully grasp that until it was too late