Hello!

I've been using this shield for a while now, and it's starting to feel like cheese. There's a few creatures who can compete for the title of apex predator of the Realms, and beholders are one of them.

The shield pacifies them entirely. I've yet to meet a beholder subspecies that can inflict any kind of damage on my PC. The shield works perfectly...but do you think it's *too* perfect?

The thing is, the shield is only useful against that specific type of monster. It, I believe, will lower your strength, making it not particularly useful against most enemies.

Perhaps they should have made the shield cursed so that you would have to cast a spell to remove it.

[Edit to remove reference to psionic] The Shield of Balduran is a gimmicky/'nod to other games' bonus item, as are all of the items sold via the bonus merchants. They are not supposed to be balanced for the base game. By the way, the shield does not confer total protection from beholders. You can still be mazed, petrified etc. It only grants immunity to their rays.

Are they, in fact, psionic? If so, I would expect that potion that makes you immune to psionics to make you immune to those rays. Does it?

Baldur's Gate is not P&P.

Consider my question to be about Baldur's Gate 2. Does the potion that makes you immune to psionics make you immune to beholder rays? If not, than the rays are not psionic in BG2.

(Note: If you are going to test this, make sure to test on an unmodded game; some modders like to make the game more like P&P, sometimes even when the designers deliberately made things work differently.)

I have no idea, though I admit they probably aren't psionic. A bad choice of word on my part. Original post amended to just 'rays'.

I agree that the shield makes a few encounters really easy. Without it, the tunnels with beholders can be quite challenging. But that's pretty much the only place where it makes a difference. Otherwise, there are better shields in the game.

Also, it seem to me that in the original release the shield was more powerful. It was always reflecting back all the attacks and beholders would die almost instantly. In the gog version, it seems to onlynullify most of the attacks. And you still are vulnerable to petrification and maze. But maybe my memory is fuzzy...

Just to check, are you playing with any mods? (Note that even mods like the Fixpack count as mods for this purpose.)

Edit: Also, are you playing the Enhanced Edition or the original?

Beholder rays are ray attacks and that shield is much less useful with scs mods... in vanilla play you can't take a potion to block all ray attacks but I normally just summon a Hakeashar (immune) to tank them in 'clould-kill' mist until they die.

I suspect you might be thinking of the Cloak of Mirroring.

I only play original versions from Gog. It might be that in my memory I confused Balduran's shield wit the cloak of mirroring.

I am tempted to take my original CDs and check if that's the case. The only problem I have them at my parents place which is half a world away :)


Yeah, but you can get Fortress shield which has the same AC bonus + a handy bonus against missile weapons or Sentinel shield which has +4 AC. And none of them reduce strength. So I usually don't use Balduran's shield.

That shield is ridiculously overpowered if you ask me...only used it once and got bored. It's just silly when you can clear an entire cave of Beholders with a single fighter.
I have to admit though that without that shield I find it very difficult to fight groups of beholders...so I've usually tried to avoid them if possible.

IMO, the problem isn't really the shield; it's more the fact that they populated an entire cave with just one enemy type, and that enemy type happens to be weak against that particular shield.

It wouldn't seem so unbalanced if the following changes were made:
1. Beholder caves don't *just* contain beholders. Put other monsters in there.
2. Beholders should have attacks that *aren't* their reflectable rays.
3. The shield's AC bonus be made lower, so you would have to accept a lower AC if you want the shield's protection.
4. The shield made cursed, so you would have to cast a Remove Curse spell to remove it. (Really, the game seems to have a lack of cursed items that are actually worth equipping; contrast this with Wizardry 8, which has many cursed items that are actually rather tempting (and actually worth using).)