Monday Bits

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Spoilers for the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 2, beyond the Mountain Pass, below.

08:00 # I have the week off work leading into Labor Day weekend, so I have a lot of time to kill coming up. Technically it’s day 3 of vacation since I counted Saturday as the first day. #vacation

10:10 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Oh man I hate the Death Shepherds so, so much. One would be bad enough, but there’s two of them. This is the first combat encounter in Baldur’s Gate 3 that I actively hate and feel is over a line of too unfair on Tactician difficulty. And it didn’t help that a presumed game bug prevented me from using one of Karlach’s big damage actions that would have helped me win the fight. Maybe the third time will be the charm. #baldursgate3

11:58 # Baldur’s Gate 3. The third time was the charm against the two Death Shepherds, barely. It took an hour and a half and almost every spell slot I had and some scrolls. It was almost another certain TPK because I accidentally had Gale do an opportunity attack, which used up his reaction, so he wasn’t able to Counterspell one of the Death Shepherds raising the other Death Shepherd. Only a clutch Polymorph scroll, a clutch Banish scroll, and a clutch Ice Storm scroll at the end got both Death Shepherds killed at the same time, preventing them from resurrecting themselves and every paralyzing-and-naseua-inducing undead enemy back to full health. Feel the pulse-pounding adrenaline rush of tactical turn-based combat! #baldursgate3

12:03 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Incidentally it wasn’t a bug that I mentioned earlier, it was intentional. It’s just that the game never tells you why you can’t do actions, so I have to assume it’s a bug. But it turns out Karlach can’t use spells like those Legacy of Avernus spell-like abilities while she’s raging, which was buried in the fine print of the Rage ability tooltip. It would be a massive quality-of- life improvement to expand on the little messages that say “you can’t do that” with some additional information. #baldursgate3

20:28 # On my 3rd day of vacation I wrote a nearly 5,500 word blog post. I don’t recommend it. It takes a long time to write. I mean, a day, which isn’t that long, really, but that’s a big chunk of a day I’ll never get back. #blog