Oak father preserve you,

"you will cease your spellcasting and come with us"
- cowled wizard

If you're like me and lost Gale in the beginning (I rolled two 1's in a row trying to pull him out) you don't need to worry about replacing him. You can get through the game just fine without an arcane caster.

Edit: formatting.

The ideal group is something of the sort:

- Fighter
- Rogue
- Wizard
- Cleric

This is the traditional four classes, which of course can be substituted and multiclasses around in all kinds of ways.

Namely with Wizard you can go for example with:

- Bard11/Wizard1
- Warlock11/Wizard 1
- Cleric11/Wizard 1
- Druid11/Wizard 1

and all four characters can cast wizard spells up to the highest level, provided you find scrolls for these spells and teach them to the character in question.

However even with the traditional group BG3 isnt easy, and you can of course try all sorts of other setups, including for example playing with four Clerics, or four Fighters, or playing solo. Four Clerics specifically is very strong, simply because its probably the strongest single class overall and has many strong subclasses with different strengths.

Which difficulty were you playing on?

I've managed a playthrough on normal with Monk, Karlach, Lae'zel, Astarion... though I still recruited everyone and did all the questlines because that's the kind of OCD I am, so I had to swap some of the others in on occasion.

But for all the big battles, etc, that was the lineup. No healer, no caster. Pretty much pure DPS and it worked pretty well.

Normal mode is pretty forgiving in that respect, which makes it all kinds of fun. I haven't tried the same on the higher difficulties.

I played on balanced. Something I should have mentioned before is I did have divine casters for healing.

Some people even solo honor mode. Um, yes, but why did you feel the need to point that out ?

There are enough potions and mechanisms for self-healing in the game that I think it's possible to get through without even a divine caster for healing.

Like I said - I just crank up the DPS and armor and try to kill everything before it has a chance to kill me. However, certain combat-easing game choices help quite a bit in this.

Well the factors are:

- Be the first to act - Alert feat, high Dexterity, Initiative gear. Comes with the added bonus that if you win initiative on everyone in your group, you can freely coordinate the actions of your group. For example people can move out of the way to allow access to a spot that allows a ranged attack, etc.

- Have high amounts of spike damage - thats damage you can only deal once per battle, but in the first round, such as Action Surge on a Fighter, certain Gloomstalker Ranger and Assassin Rogue features, Paladin Smites, etc

- Have high damage in general - feats like Sharpshooter and Grand Weapon Master help with this, also Strength elixiers for melee attackers (or a certain bow).

- Have a lot of attacks, too. Haste effect (for spellcasters this gives a second spell per round even on Honor mode), Dualwielding weapons (Hand Crossbow), Extra Attack from Fighter 5/Ranger 5/Paladin 5/Monk 5/Warlock 5/non-Lore Bard 6/etc, two extra attacks for Fighter 11 or any shapeshifted Druid 10, second bonus action from Thief Rogue 3/Open Hand Monk 6 (Wholeness of Body), extra action from Elixier of Bloodlust after killing an opponent

- Inflict conditions that improve damage on the victim, such as Blindness or a full stun (automatic critical hits for attacks from close range)

- Having high crowd control, which means various spells, and effects like Radiant Orbs

- Have as high armor class as possible on all of your characters in case you cannot kill your opponents before they can get an action

- Be careful how you move around; try to get the high ground for higher attack accuracy; try to attack out of hiding; try to inflict a surprise round on opponents who dont have the Alert feat

- Oh I totally forgot: more mobility on the battlefield is also very helpful

OK the longer I write on this the more details pop up, but this is about the idea.

To summarize: Act first, deal enormous spike damage on dangerous single targets, crowd control anything you cannot kill before it has time to act

So if you need healing, you did something wrong, and now your OPPONENT can now do all the nasty stuff to YOU. Namely spike damage and crowd control.

i play on honour mode where the most important thing is a plan

Arcane casters are much less of a necessity in BG3 due to the fact that any character can cast spells from Scrolls. I'm not sure if this is a 5E change or a BG3 change, but it's one that I actually disapprove of. :P

Why, thats a BG3/Larian change of course. Like many other things, such as physics, or Radiant Orbs, or Arcane Acuity, etc etc etc.

In D&D3 Rogues could attempt to use a magical device, such as a spell scroll, and depending upon a skill, forgot its name, they had a chance to succeed. I dont think this idea was continued in D&D5 though.

In D&D5 only a spellcaster of the appropiate kind can cast a spell from a scroll. Thats it.

I dont see how its that important though. Sure, you can get endless scrolls through theft, and, if you use a level 11+ halfling rogue with the appropiate buff items, you are basically guaranteed to succeed. However that takes ages.

skill = use magic item

Although I recall that there was a bug in... dang can't remember which version of which D&D game(s) where there was confusion between cleric and druid spells. There was an exploit giving rangers access to both, I think.

-edit- no it was clerics, I think. You could allow them to fill all their cleric slots with druid spells by giving them one level of ranger.

This is a *very well written summary* of what to look for to shape BG3's combat to our hearts' desire!

Here is an example of how I followed those rules/advice as summarized here by @Geromino:

Location: House of Grief, Act 3
Opponents: Boss + 19 minions => a total of 20

Advice [1] Act First:

Three of my party members, who went down for the conversation, took action prior to Boss at the start of the combat.

Advice [2] Deal spike damage:

After conservation with Boss ended in combat, me (Durge) broke Boss' protection, Lae'zel dropped her health down to 40, Shadowheart finished her off. After that, Shadowheart killed 5 opponents, Lae'zel killed 3, Minsc later killed 1, our summons worked together and managed to kill 2 => Total kills in round 1 = 12

Advice [3] Crowd control everything you can't kill:

There were 1+19 opponents, way too many for us to kill in a single round. So, we crowd controlled everyone we couldn't kill. Minsc frightened 1, our summons managed to frighten 1 and stun 1. At the end of round 1, 5 more opponents dashed across the battlefield but couldn't actually get close enough to mount a single attack (because we kept our distance!).

Net result: in less than 2 rounds, we eliminated a total of 20 opponents without giving them any chance to fight us back. Total kills = 20, time = 2 rounds, total hits taken by my party = 0.

Cool, right?

That was in Honor mode, part of my first Honor mode playthrough.

I have been following the same rules/advice/strategies (however you call them), as summarized by @Geromino here, all the time.

In my opinion, @Geromino nailed them.

They are extremely useful, helpful, invaluable advice to follow. In my opinion, any player who follows @Geromino's advice (or whatever is equivalent), tries to fully understand them, and tries to improvise them based on their specific party composition and personal preferences will find every fight in this game just a fun challenge. It will be much less likely to have to make a desperate struggle for survival from time to time, even if playing in Honor mode.


Have fun and enjoy!

True, you can supplement your party with arcane magics by making Lae'zel an EK and Astarion an AT.