Baldur’s Gate 3 – Useful Tips and Hints

I’ve done quite a few playthoughs now and thought I’d jot down my hints and tips (spoiler alert).

Tips and Hints

Initiative is ‘Easy Mode’. If you can get your whole party to have 5+ initiative then they all get to go first each turn. You can apply buffs/debuffs with your casters and then destroy all enemies with your melee characters before the enemies get one hit in. Use the Alert feat, high dex, and items to raise initiative.

Haste over-powers all your characters. The sweet spot is to have a high initiative sorcerer use Twinned-Spell to cast Haste on your two melee characters as the first thing when a fight starts. The melee characters can then slaughter everything, with your two casters mopping up.

Multi-classing is a must to make any character much, much more effective. One of the best dips is into a level of War Cleric, which gives you all armours, shields, buffs to rolls and saving throws, and War Priest. Sorcery’s Metamagic (particularly Quickened and Twinned spells) can double your casters’ power.

A very effective party is two melee characters (e.g. gith straight fighter and paladin/fighter) and two casters (e.g. sorcerer/cleric and cleric/sorcerer).

Respec the characters in your party as soon as you can. The Abilities of the stock characters are sub-optimal, and you should also plan early for multiclassing.

Use Ilithid powers to the max. There is no downside to this. Particularly good are the reaction spells that counter attacks etc. The moment you hit Act 3, you want all your party to take the enhanced Illithid abilities to get Fly for free for all your party. This is the second ‘Easy Mode’.

Make getting and exploiting the items that max out an Ability a priority and then respec a character accordingly. Throughout the game you can be scrambling to get one or two extra ability points, but in comparison a pair of gloves that, say, give 18 dex is really powerful. You can respec your abilities to min that ability and put all the ability points into something else, for instance to support a multi-class.

Make use of the vendors in Moonrise Towers. Both the vendors in the entrance hall sell some key stuff, and another NPC gives a +2 permanent str buff. Some people only use the (also key) vendors at the Last Light Inn.

Pickup and sell everything – except good magic items, as you never know when you’ll need them. If you hit Act 2 and then Act 3 with 10-20K in your pocket then you can go on shopping spree at the new vendors for buffed gear that will help tackle the tougher enemies. Volo is your friend in fencing your purloined items. Rescue him both times so that he’s always in your camp to sell your junk to and to buy from, but you can lose him for a long time if you progress the dialogue with him to try to extract your tadpole, so I prefer not to do that.

Don’t be afraid to back off and escape from a tough fight. You only need to get one of your party out alive, whilst the rest of your party covers their escape. House of Grief and the dragon fight spring to mind here. Even if the area map is red, you can retreat outside the area, go to camp, restore, and then go back at full strength for another go.