Baldur's Gate 3: Illithid/Tadpole Powers Guide

[Music] foreign what's going on everybody mortum here this time bringing you a guide to the illicit powers in Baldur's Gate 3. I want to say right here at the beginning of the video some of this is very difficult to talk about without spoilers of some fashion so I'm going to give a quick rundown of what you need to know non-spoiler Wise and then the rest of it is just gonna have to be with spoilers because ultimately this is too intrinsic to the story to really separate it without giving you an overview so devoid of detail it's useless so with that in mind the non-spoiler version of this is likely what you already know over the course of the game you're going to find other mind flayer parasites you can consume them to Grant you access to illicit powers and then when the story progresses at two points you will be offered some extra stuff that takes this a bit farther you do not have to take up the illicit Powers at all you can refuse them every step of the way but the options to actually use them are unmissable because even on a playthrough where I deliberately made every choice not to use the them which was my main review playthrough they still give you the option once you reach certain points that's as much as I can say without spoilers so again rest of this is spoiler City now from here let's dive into the rest of this when it comes to using illithid powers it's pretty straightforward throughout the First Act or so of the game you're going to be getting illithid options in conversation that make use of your parasites telepathic abilities if you would like to gain access to the illithid powers use these as often as possible and you will get access to the powers a little bit earlier however regardless you will eventually gain access to the ability to consume the extra parasites you find regardless of whether or not you are using the illithid powers this moment comes at the urging of the Guardian character that we make as part of character creation who will essentially push you into using them more with the obvious setup here that being filled to the brim with mind flare parasites in your brain might not be the best idea nonetheless though this initial actual batch of powers is the inner Rings here that make up 15 distinct powers that we can use and I'll be honest most of these aren't amazing but a few of them are really good however they are not specific to your class or anything they simply are what they are and this is our sort of first round with these Powers now it is possible to get your companions to use them as well which is a little bit trickier and it varies by companion for instance if you take some evil options and get mintara as a party member she's already got some of these in her head and thus getting her to use more of them is not a big deal however somebody like Lazelle who is ideologically opposed to everything mind flare is very difficult to convince but nonetheless it can be done and once you have gotten access to this first portion and thus unlock the sub menu for it you can see this for every character you currently have in your party and some of the origin characters will be fine with using them right away such as Gail or astarian but if that party member has not decided to use them you'll get this hesitating screen it is possible to convince these party members to do so but it involves passing a difficult persuasion check if they are resistant to the idea you will get more than one chance at that persuasion check but failing it repeatedly will ruin your reputation with them so more than just you can use this however you are all using the same pool if you will of illicit Powers so giving them all to one person isn't the best idea as they usually require actions or things like that so giving a character a power they're never going to use isn't useful especially if you've already decided to use these for yourself now let's talk about these first couple tiers of powers if you will my favorite by far are favorable beginnings and luck of the far Realms these are universally useful no matter what that character is doing these will help favorable Beginnings gives us a bonus on our first attack or ability check against a Target that can be pretty substantial and then it's follow-up luck of the far Realms allows you to guarantee a critical once per day which is an integral extra ability that I'm making part of my tactician build that I'm currently working on and it is devastating so getting to pick and choose exactly when you're going to crit makes luck of the far Realms incredibly good the rest of these early ones though are less so some of them certainly can be such as Force tunnel and Repulsor which allows you to forcibly move enemies in anything that gives you Battlefield control or helps you knock something off a ledge to one hit KOA potentially by knocking it into a Chasm can certainly help out the rest of them though tend to be much more situational like concentrated blast gives you a big hit if you're already concentrating on a spell but usually less than other spells would already give you so I don't really like that one too much Sonic backlash is nice though because anytime an enemy casts a spell around you you can as a reaction hit them with sidekick damage and if you take this on multiple characters you can have all of them do it at the same time to cause massive damn damage to one enemy other powers here such as Shield of thralls can give you temporary hit points perilous Stakes gives someone the ability to heal when they attack but makes them vulnerable stage fright gives your enemies disadvantage on attack rolls and causes psychic damage when they miss so there's a lot of good ones here the main thing is to really just keep in mind what is going to be useful for that particular character which is why something like luck of the far Realms is the best because it is useful for everyone but nonetheless a lot of cool stuff these just get added to your character as class actions though which is something to keep in mind here's where things start to get really spoilery in order to unlock the last outer ring of our tadpole Powers we have to advance the story quite a ways you're pretty much going to be towards the last Act of the game before this happens because we have to meet our guardian and discover what they actually are so they can give us an item which is an astral tadpole this astral tadpole is going to make us a half illith it or potentially a party member if you can talk them into it this is what unlocks the last ring of abilities this is where we get the really good stuff like turning into a displacer beast the ability to lower armor classes on enemies gaining expertise in our Charisma based checks a free passive ability called psionic dominance that lets you counterspell for basically free you get the fly ability by default which allows you to move a little easier black hole will pull enemies in and group them up for you to make a nice AOE out of them mind Sanctuary is probably the most interesting here as it allows you to use bonus actions and actions interchangeably free cast allows you to once per short rest just freely cast something without costing a resource for it so as you can see these are some of the best abilities in terms of the illithib powers and many of them are quite strong but we are not done yet because towards the very end of the game we get one last extra bit and this is the Supreme tadpole also given to us by our Guardian in that we chose the Supreme tadpole is the final transformation if you couldn't guess by the second tier making us half illithid the Supreme tadpole will turn you fully into a mind flayer however you will become a mind player with free will exactly like the guardian that has been helping us from the get-go by shielding our mind from the true threat which I won't mention here because it's not relevant so basically right before the end of the game you can choose if you want to to become a full-on mind flayer this is very very strong but does obviously have implications doing this will basically give you all of the Power straight away and you get an even stronger version of them anyways for instance you get permanent mind Sanctuary which means you can just use your action and bonus action interchangeably regardless of whether or not you've activated mind Sanctuary it's just permanent now many of the abilities also get a damage boost and are just generally more useful if you take this transformation however this doesn't overwrite your your class at all you still have access to all of your class abilities it also affects your ability scores I don't have the exact differences here but you can see on screen where they're all kind of skewed so it might not be the best thing in terms of your class but you do get altered ability scores as well so how well those new ability scores work with your class stuff is hard to say now if you want to go full mind flare and then use those powers to your heart's content here at the end of the game for the last few battles you'll be able to partake in you can have a lot of fun with it or you can again refuse these Powers the entire way you don't need to use them at all you can definitely beat the game without them and to be clear you're becoming a mind player with free will as opposed to one that is normally attached to a hive colony of them that said in terms of role playing obviously this is a big deal because mind players are shunned for a reason people do not like them you would basically be living in hiding or seclusion for the rest of your character's life which makes this one of several of the major determining factors for the ending but there are several more that said that is going to do it for this video pretty much that's kind of everything to know about the illicit powers in the game as a personal opinion I kind of like that they subverted the expectations here because everything about these illicit Powers kind of warns you off using them but in reality both the person providing you to them or giving you access to them and then ultimately turning you into a mind flare isn't actually trying to make you evil or lead you down a bad path it's simply a helpful thing you can choose to do it's power you can Embrace and it's more about what you choose to do with this power and whether or not that is evil then the power itself being evil because the outcome here will not necessarily ideal isn't actually that bad even if you choose to use them that said there's still plenty of reasons not to want to be a mind flare but it's certainly an interesting option that's going to do it for this video I hope you enjoyed it hope you learned something if you did like comment subscribe all that YouTube Jazz 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 an amazing day [Music] foreign

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 262,687

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, Baldurs Gate, BG3, BG2, BG1, Baldur's Gate, baldur's gate 3 story, baldurs gate 3, bg3 story, 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, bg3 tadpole powers, bg3 mindflayers, bg3 illithid powers, bg3 turn into a mindflayer, bg3 mindflayer powers, bg3 tadpole powers guide, bg3 abilities

Id: ZIBkzbKuv80

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023