BG3 first time on Honor Mode - what do I need to know

[Che]

I’m thinking of starting BG3 on Honor Mode.

To raise the stakes, make the game more interesting, and avoid save scumming. But it’s a bit daunting for the first playthrough since I’ve specifically avoided tutorials and spoilers.

I’ve only played DND once, but I did complete Divinity Original Sin 3 on the highest difficulty (though it was quite challenging). Also, my experience on Iron Man in Battle Brothers changed game dramatically.

What important things should I know and consider? Have enough bugs been fixed to not worry about save file integrity?

Thanks for the answers without spoilers!

[Tax evasion]

What important things should I know and consider?

Completely blind ? Good luck.

Respec your companions early to fix their uneffective base stats.
Loot. Everything. You'll need the gold.

If you're going in blind, I'd suggest looking into high burst damage (sorcerer, barbarian, rogues, etc.). The best offense is killing before it hits you.

And remember : F*ck Around, Find Out. You only have one save, and stupid decisions can kill you quickly.

Oh and, stay away from ledges. Enemies can and absolutely will push you off of them.

[Oonayah]

No spoilers here, only mechanics, and it's possible you already know some of this so... GOOD LUCK!

At the risk of sounding obvious, learn all of the keyboard shortcuts. Left Alt highlights most lootables, C toggles stealth (shift-C stealths the whole party), K opens the spellbook, etc.

Consumables are much more effective when used as opposed to sitting in your pack. You can make them go further by huddling your party up into a pile and throwing the vial at everyone's feet.

The Sanctuary spell is enormously helpful.

LONG REST OFTEN. There are very few things in the game which are truly time-sensitive and if you miss them it won't break your game, it simply alters the story. Long rests will trigger lots of companion dialogue, particularly in act 1. If you're worried about camp supplies (you shouldn't need to if you're looting everything), take partial rests without using food.

Talk. To. Everyone. Then talk a second time. The amount of dialogue is insane and well worth savoring. Talk to your companions frequently. Sometimes they won't have anything but it's worth clicking on them for the bits of commentary they occasionally offer. Speak with Dead and Speak with Animals are also amazingly fun.

The barter menu with vendors can be used to increase your standing with them for better prices. Open it up, dump all the junk into the pane, and hit Barter without demanding any gold for your items. This took me far longer to figure out than I care to admit.

Turn-based mode can also be activated by you, the player, and can be very useful for... reasons other than combat.

Remember, you can resurrect the other three party members (including the player-character) as long as one character survives a combat encounter, so don't hesitate if you need to flee.

Use high ground to your advantage but, as someone else mentioned, be cautious as enemies will push you off. However, you can also push them off; just know that pushing any of them into a chasm will render their loot inaccessible.

Okay, this one is a teeny bit spoiler-y but you can pickpocket your gold back from the NPC who resurrects and respecs, he doesn't care.

[LeFrench]

firstly, great challenge to give oneself. i commend you.

honor mode was not around when i started, but i've only done act 1 a bunch of times with friends and solo, so once honor mode landed, i have restarted and intend to have my "first" playthru (barring act 1) to be a blind honor mode.

i've learned the following in act 1.

the MOST important thing, in my opinion, i've learned is STORY:
-DO NOT think that you must minimise your long resting to challenge yourself. it will ruin the story. the story plays out best with numerous long rests. if you skip long rests, you skip story content, and the companion character behavior and dialogue sounds more forced and they simp too hard. with enough long rests, not only will you see more cutscene development of their characters but the actual passage of time matches up better with the dialogue.
- you can longrest without food, its called a partial longrest. adding in the food simply is a way to restore your spells slots, etc, so save your food when you've used up your spells. at some point you will have so much food this won't matter anymore.
- longresting more will not only give you a better story experience (which i think is far more important), but will help you manage the fights better, so you never have to "save your spells" provided you have enough food, of which there is plenty in the game.
- short rests, you can therefore use liberally, as often as you need to. never try to conserve it.

- to experience the best character/story experience make a darkurge character (you can make it whatever race and class you want, only your background is set). And now i'm going to give you an example of the opening of the game frequency of longrests. i consider this only a minor spoiler:
- After the prologue, once you 'land', you immediately get your first companion. longrest.
- then there will be an obvious first encounter. treat it seriously since this is honor mode, but it is easy. then longrest again.
- then you will likely get a 3rd companion, and a minor threat (which might turn into a major threat depending on dice). then a 4th companion. then longrest.

in the above example, you've had three longrests whilsts only moving around 5 screens worth of distance. this will feel like an unatural amount of longresting.... but i promise you the story will improve significantly. just pretend the distances in the map are abstract, and there is actually a days worth of hiking you have to do across each wilderness screen area.
from here on, keep longresting after each major 'thing' that happens. you can try to be intuitive, but sometime intuition will reasonably tell you to do far more than you should. don't listen to it. longrest after every 2-3 'encounters' just to check in on character development.

SURVIVAL GAMEPLAY
- TPKs in honor mode will not take effect until your entire team has died, this means, as long as someone can escape, you have a chance to recover everyone. grab companions for a full team as fast as possible. they will come with 1 revivify scroll each, which can bring a dead character back.

- after that third longrest i described above you can find a 5th companion slightly north, or you may run into the ruins cliffs. i'm mentioning the ruins above the cliff because that leads you to an important camp npc that can resurrect characters at a significant cost, and also respec at a smaller cost. Getting him as soon as possible is useful if you find yourself struggling and losing companions. in terms of surviving honor mode, he will be useful, but not essential. (i've never needed to use his resurrect services so far in honor mode, but thats because i know act 1 so well, that even honor mode can't slow me down).

- incapacitated characters (but not dead) can be revived without healing, but it costs you a characters action. an incapacitated character who is revived is limited to only a single bonus action on their turn to represent them staggering to their feet. you will tend to use this bonus action to either try to run to cover or drink a heal potion.

- thrown heal potions are better way to revive, and often (but not always) you can heal two characters off a single potion throw. ie. a damaged character runs next to a incapacitated character so their circles touch and throws a heal potion on the ground, directly on a point before circles touch. aim this carefully and most times you will get a double heal. this is a better use of your action since 'reviving' someone with the revive action will only bring them back to their feet on 1hp.

- throwing is a single attack, so once you hit level five and have two attacks on your fighters, they are excellent for support heals, so load them up with heal potions after lvl 5.

- you also use the throw action to throw javelins, axes or daggers, this is usually only for str based characters, others will just use their xbow or bow. in general it is pretty useful to throw grease, acid or alchemist fire. try not to walk into your own conflagerations.

- shove is great. but only your str/athletic based characters will usually have frequent success. be careful of your own position. they will shove you too.

OPENING prologue hidden item:
- during the prologue you get upto two party members and a minor follower. one of them is a cleric. when you get to the point where the other companion says 'when we enter in listen to me' or something like that, select your cleric and change her spell selection to include the COMMAND spell. then enter the chamber for the prologue end sequence.

- during this sequence, save your two cleric spell slots, to use command DROP on the big bad (technically there are two big bads squaring off on each other, but the red marked is the target).

- with a bit of luck one of your command spells will work and he will drop his greatsword. use another character, probably your main, standing at the ready to run in and pick it up. on the next turn they can safely disengage. then finish the goal of the sequence.

- that greatsword is a really cool, strong weapon and will serve one of your two handed weapon fighters well (two of the companion characters prefer such weapons), all the way up to lvl 5, before you find something its equal or slightly better.

[DanLikesCats]

I just beat honor mode. a swords bard archer makes it incredibly easier because it does a ton of damage as a main character and also has charisma for dialogue. An open hand monk will stun and do a lot of damage to enemies. Keep three clerics at your base to buff your team with death ward, warding bond, protection from poison, light, aid, and heroes feast every long rest.

You can keep one team mate hidden in camp if you think things will go south. Cheese vendors by selling them a bag then putting all their stock in it and killing them so you can loot all of it to buy any item you want later in the game.

[FunkyMonkey]

Originally posted by DanLikesCats:

I just beat honor mode. a swords bard archer makes it incredibly easier because it does a ton of damage as a main character and also has charisma for dialogue. An open hand monk will stun and do a lot of damage to enemies. Keep three clerics at your base to buff your team with death ward, warding bond, protection from poison, light, aid, and heroes feast every long rest.

You can keep one team mate hidden in camp if you think things will go south. Cheese vendors by selling them a bag then putting all their stock in it and killing them so you can loot all of it to buy any item you want later in the game.

Congrats on beating honour mode. For the OP I have to say that all this is not necessary, the camp casters, cheesing vendors etc.

[Che]

Thank you for the tips! It feels more manageable now!

A lot of useful things to implement

[Nordil(Hun)]

Back up your saves. There are many ways you can break your saves and your game.
And if you encounter such either Larian can help or it is restart:P

[anachoret]

Be very careful of where you click

[LeFrench]

oh, just recalled one last fun thing which helps with combat.

when you approach a dangerous encounter... but you don't want to initiate conversation because your characters are all clumped like noobs in a single spot, but you do want to initiate conversation, because you don't want to be a gamey murder hobo by never talking and just sneak attacking every group, you can do the following which is quite realistic:

put your entire group into sneak, turn off grouping, then position one, two, or even three in advantageous positions. Then your 4th character (i often have two walking in), normally the tank, can engage openly. conversation will start, and once combat kicks off after a satisfying taunt or whatever from the conversation, when it comes to your characters turn in the combat, you will notice your other characters are NOT in the combat. Then you can select each of them and initiate an attack off each, a surprise fireball, or grease, or sneak rogue archer attack. as each of them initiate from advantage, they get inserted in the initiative. Then go back to your first character that initiated the conversation and play combat as normal.

not only is this realistic, but you can hit pretty hard with the sneaked characters putting the encounters in your favour. the drawback is, if your conversation initiating character has bad dex, he might go only after the others enemies have gone, which means he will get targeted by everyone. if you are a tank, you can usually tank this.

anyway, its fun setting up encounters like this. you can also STEP out of the conversation, by selecting a different character on the bottom left of the screen. this kindof freezes the conversation, while you can initiate the fight with another character which ends the conversation. i usually don't like this because you might miss out on some fun closing/initiating dialogue, but when a stealthed character initiates like this, sometimes all the enemy are caught by surprise and lose a turn.

[Thunder]

I just beat honor mode for the first time, and aside from a few major boss fights you should be ok if you play carefully. The ones that have ended my runs before are (major spoilers ahead):
Auntie Ethel. DO NOT fight her until at least level 5.
I would highly recommend you avoid fighting the shambling mound in act 2. I have never fought it and not lost at least 2 party members and its resistances/immunities make it difficult to handle.
Myrkul. My favorite strategy for this fight is to send an invisible scratch to free the nightsong, and have a fire elemental take care of the summoned skeletons while the rest of my party rips ketheric to shreds.
Depending on what type of build your running and how much of the game you want to complete, there are some other difficult fights in act 3 but as long as you understand what their legendary actions do they are very manageable.
When you get to the very end of the game and are inside the netherbrains psyche, it is very easy to not understand what the orbs of negation do. research them beforehand, or you could lose your run very very quickly.
My best bit of advice is to ALWAYS keep at least one invisibility potion on you. If a fight turns against you it can save your run.

[LeFrench]

ah. i got one last note.

pressing the highlight object button only highlights some main chests (and herbs) but will not highlight many other things.... sometimes many useful things, and even high value things.

So when examining a room, zoom in with the camera to behind your character. switch to a torch, or light source and really light up the area. then look carefully at the tables, etc. ink and quill feathers, paintings, incense are good trade value goods and you can only ever spot them by visually seeing them or skimming the mouse over everything, but that can sometimes miss when done from zoomed-out.

if you spot a rock with perception (if you fail the roll, you won't spot it and you cannot interact with it), ofttimes you have to move the rock (by select and drag) with a strong enough character depending on the rock size. and under it will be your loot.

And finally sometimes a skeleton is shoved under a bush. skeletons don't highlight. dead bodies do, but not old skeletons. and there will often be some value items on the skeletons. There is one particular skeleton under a bush that has a smugglers ring which gives +2 sleight hand and stealth. its very good for rogues (lockpick, disarm, or pickpocket).

point is, when exploring zoom right in behind your character, and enjoy the scenery with your eyeballs a bit. you will be rewarded with a sense of immersion and from time to time, some loot that normally you will miss by relying only on the object highlight button.

additionally.... on the point of perception, when dungeon crawling/exploring and you enter a new room, go in solo with your rogue who hopefully has expert on perception, and who got a guidance cast on them just before they entered. that's the safest way make sure you spot and clear traps, without accidentally triggering something that kills you entire party because they are all clumped up.

[Oonayah]

One thing I forgot... READ ALL THE BOOKS! Also notes, messages, and letters.

[ez game ez life]

Just try it out, because like you said, it's a good way to restrict yourself from save scumming, which is the way this game is meant to be played.

If you have little experience with DND and this is your first playthrough of BG3 you will most likely fail but that's not the worst thing because you can still continue your playthrough (you just wouldn't get the achievement and the golden dice).


From my experience with the honor mode, I just want to give you one tip:

Rest often; the camp supplies are plentiful (I had just under 10,000 left at the end...)

Loot everything and always keep a stock for 4-5 long rests and you'll be fine.