Baldur's Gate 3: Honour Mode Initial Impressions

[Music] what's going on everybody morm here this time bringing you my initial impressions of balers gate 3's honor mode as we move into New Year's Eve and the New Year I'm taking a quick break from pushing out reviews to check out this honor mode that I have had to put off for a little while because after 500 hours with the game 11 playthroughs all for my 100% review which was an hour and a half long only for them to 2 weeks later finally add honor mode which is something I very much so wanted a harder difficulty that is at the time it was announced I simply did not have it in me to do another playthrough so I took a bit of a break reviewed some other things but now it is time to finally dive into this and check it out so I have been deliberately avoiding as much information about this as I can as I want to go into it fresh and deal with it for myself I want to say that towards the beginning here because while I am actively playing through this I would appreciate it if people kept things like specific details about what was added to certain bosses or encounters to themselves so I can experience them for myself but with that said put simply honor mode is tactician plus you have a single save file that will occasionally autosave or save when you exit the game but you cannot load saves while you're playing you can only load into it from the main menu and if you happen to be tpk or completely wiped out it isn't necessarily game over you can continue that playthrough from a custom difficulty it simply won't count for Honor mode in addition to that however one of the big things is that several enemies throughout the game particularly bosses have been given legendary actions that is to say extra things they can do to interrupt your turn with their own action in response to something you did they can do this once per turn usually and it's meant to shake up some of the encounters now completing this mode grants you a golden dice set to use for all the roles that you'll make in game in subsequent playthroughs which is a pretty neat reward and that in addition to the achievement is what I'm after now with all of that stuff said my current playthrough is coming up towards the end of act one I've currently cleared everything in the Grove I'm in the under dark about to head towards Grim Forge and I still need to do the mountain pass so a handful of hours left in act one which is enough time to give a general impression of how this is going to work and I want to kick that off by saying that I am a tiny bit underwhelmed with honor mode so far and this might be a little bit of my own fault but one of my previous 11 playthroughs was actually a solo tactician run where I went through tactician mode with a single character and that was incredibly difficult often requiring me to do strange things like run a build that just didn't need to rest really ever so I could stack Buffs from specific locations and carry them through most of the game before you're forced to rest in act two and that with all sorts of crazy techniques let's say aimed to decimate certain bosses I learned a lot about the game that other playthroughs didn't quite teach me and and doing that and playing through the game that way regular tactician mode where I have four characters available to me which is for the most part what honor mode is is subsequently very very easy with the only real difference being that I can't reload which is something I did do a lot on solo tacti of course but having all these other characters available to me makes that much more manageable I would say that said I want to run you guys a little bit through my party comp before we start talking about things that surprised me a little bit now I'm going to save a lot of this for a video I plan on making afterwards talking about what worked what didn't some tips tricks my full-blown party composition and builds and everything but for right now I am playing a half work Ranger who's going to be mixed with assassin and a little bit to take advantage of the very popular gloomstalker Ranger and Assassin Rogue combo that combined with this game's approach to invisibility can let you do a lot of crazy things but I went with a half or specifically for their racial passive that allows them to go down to one hit point instead of going into a down state which in a mode where you only have one save file seems important and I'm also playing it as the dark urge this is purely for a cloak they get an act one that lets you turn invisible upon killing something which again just lets you take advantage of those mechanics now the rest of my party is pretty straightforward I'm using my Bard build that I made for aarian and a very basic evocation Wizard and Battlemaster Fighter for Gail and lasel respectively nothing special there just the regular old classes they're very strong by themselves you don't need to do anything with them and my main character however is the exact build I used for solo tactician so I already know it's very very strong and that's already paying off now I did kind of hilariously lose one early run to a fight at the very beginning of the game with the intellect devourers right after you get off the ship I just got some bad RNG there and got deleted and the first few levels are always a struggle but now that I'm coming up towards the end of act one here and got gear and everything under my belt things are going a lot better so that stuff aside I said honor mode was a little underwhelming so what's that about well basically it's mostly just tactician mode with some of the fights having extra mechanics but the problem I've run into so far is that throughout act one only one of those mechanics actually threw me for a loop whereas the rest I was basically just able to out DPS the problem because in addition to our single save file these monsters have their extra abilities first of all there are a lot fewer of these than I thought there would be not everything actually gets the legendary actions in what I've experienced so far it's just been the owl bear the hag and the spider matriarch meaning that I went into some fights a little overprepared expecting there to be more to it where it was actually just the regular fight on tactician basically such as the fight with the goblin leader drawer raslin or something like that or the fight with The Spectator in the underd dark and because of that so far only three fights have actually been something new and unique two of those I was able to just kind of outdamage my way through starting with the owl bear so the owl bear now on their turn will summon their mate to join the fight which means you effectively have to fight two Al Bears it's possible to bring some help to you with this fight via the true Souls you can meet sort of along the way you can force them to come help you the woman that can come with you will actually cast command halt on these Al Bears which allowed to just destroy them with some already pretty well optimized builds for that level so it really wasn't that big of a deal and then there was anti ethyl I thought she was going to be a little bit harder initially but it wound up actually being pretty easy her legendary action allows her to after a spell is cast make even more duplicates of herself but I was able to just kill her so fast that she never actually had a chance to use this and I waited till I had some tadpull Powers which let me knock out her duplicates anyway that she did manage to summon so that fight went pretty quick and I was able to get the hag hair from her even which was necessary for my optimized build for my main character so again just a fight I was expecting to be harder than it was but that leads me to the one curveball I did get thrown and the one that's giving me a little bit of hope to be honest which is the spider matriarch the spider matriarch's legendary action allows them to interrupt anything you did when you attack one of the other spiders in the room but that interrupt will encase that character in webs that also damage you every turn and if another character tries to break them they also then get webbed so the only way to get rid of it is to set that character on fire which is actually a really strong ability and it almost got me however thankfully I was able to recover from this one due to the fact that that's line of sight based she can't actually hit you if there's like a wall in the way for instance and I was able to drop her down from the spider webs she likes to rest on down below where she couldn't hit me with the ability where I was then able to just clear everything out combined with a surprise round where I was was able to almost take her out to begin with and everything worked out pretty well but that fight is giving me a little bit of Hope as I move forward because as it stands I'm pretty confident I wouldn't have too much trouble with this if there weren't more fights like that so I think what determines whether or not I really enjoy honor mode in the long run is how much more frequent these abilities get for instance I'm very interested in how the fight with the Avatar at the end of act two plans out alongside a handful of others especially ones you can actually talk your way out of I'm curious if they bothered adding a legendary action for that and those are things I want to discover for myself so again please don't answer that but so far it seems like if you know how to play through the game on tactician mode already and you know how to optimize and prepare for an upcoming fight you're likely going to be okay here with maybe I would say the biggest potential Hazard simply being bad RNG for instance but with the abuse of some of those uh Buffs and abilities like I mentioned by just not resting for a long long time until you get to the end of act two it's even possible to iron out some of the RNG in your favor outside of just purely rolling that ones because you're buffed so much so all in all I would say that we'll see how it pans out for the most part I would say I'm still a little underwhelmed right now I was hoping more encounters would have these legendary actions to play around but the single save file in and of itself does add a certain high stakes pressure to the experience and moving forward as I go to finish out this run which depending on whether or not I die multiple times Etc may or may not take me a little while the main thing I want to see though is simply how varied and interesting do these legendary actions get and will they all be simply easily overpowered through Brute Force like a few of them I've encountered or will more of them be like the spider matriarch that actually add an interesting Dynamic to the fight that wasn't previously there so over the course of this playthrough I am hoping to answer all of that and more and once I finish it up I'll be making a video of course showing off the Golden dice but also going through my party comp things I used General strategies Etc like I mentioned towards the beginning so hopefully you're looking forward to that video but I did want to share some of my initial thoughts on this which is why this video exists so I certainly hope you enjoyed it always tough to see how well videos like this will do they can be a little rambly on my end so if you enjoyed it don't forget to like comment subscribe all that YouTube jazz it really does help but regardless of any of that truly just thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have have an amazing [Music] day

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 91,199

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, Baldurs Gate, BG3, BG2, BG1, Baldur's Gate, baldurs gate 3, bg3 gameplay, bg3 multiclassing, baldurs gate 3 multiclassing, bg3 classes, bg3 review, baldurs gate 3 review, baldur's gate 3 combat, baldur's gate 3 review, baldur's gate 3 new reviews, bg3 multiplayer, bg3 release showcase, bg3 monk overview, bg3 class overview, bg3 best classes, baldurs gate 3 best classes, bg3 best subclasses, honour mode, bg3 honour mode

Id: m0rI_gglRbw

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023