The Honour Mode in Baldur’s Gate 3 can come to a quick end, usually in battles with strong opponents for which one is unprepared. However, it is even more frustrating when the fights are not even the real reason – but a truly avoidable mistake.
What ruins so many Honour runs? A meme in the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit seems to evoke almost 10,000 bad memories for many players. The player and Reddit user AdditionalMess6546 points out that it is essential, for the Honour Mode, to engage with the actual mechanics of the game, as thoughtless small details can cause an immediate end to one’s playthrough after hundreds of hours. And that can be significantly more annoying than losing a fight.
Preparation through a strong build and good equipment only works up to a certain point and cannot compensate for thoughtless mistakes. To prevent these unfortunate “Oopsies” from happening to you, both the author and other community players warn with their own mistakes.
Here you can see the animated short film for Patch 8 of Baldur’s Gate 3:
“If these taverns could read, they would have completed the Honour Mode!”
What fatal small things does the player warn about? The author of the post mentions 5 small things that can ruin the Honour Mode:
- Accidentally using the rune powder barrel instead of the sufficiently smaller amount in the rune powder vial. Even a small amount of rune powder has enough explosive power to clear some paths. If you mistakenly place the large barrel instead of the vial and blow it up, you not only clear the way – but also yourself.
- Not splitting the party while searching for Lathander’s blood. The path to the Legendary Weapon is filled with traps that can catapult everything into the abyss when triggered. A failed disarm attempt can therefore be fatal, but it’s not a big deal if only one person stood in front of the trap, right? … or?
- Attacking Raphael in the House of Hope with a glaring “Divine Intervention”. What initially seems like a sensible attack on the fiend is reflected back to you as double fire damage.
- Casting “Friendship” during the Tiefling party. What initially sounds like a friendly spell turns out to be the opposite after the effect. The Tieflings, like all characters from Baldur’s Gate 3, do not appreciate it when you cast an emotion-altering spell on them to manipulate them. A quick way to make an entire party your enemy.
- Running into a Haste spore cloud during the final fight, even though you are already hasted. The spore cloud wants to give you Haste again, which ends the old effect. And what happens when a Haste effect ends? You are incapacitated for an entire round. In a fight where every round counts or else the end of the world is initiated, that’s rather suboptimal.
What mistakes does the community report? Other players also seem to want to outdo each other with the dumbest mistakes in an Honour Mode:
- kef34 reports: “One of my Honour runs ended when I was sorting my inventory and accidentally clicked on Lumps Horn twice. In the Druid Grove.”
- M4jkelson admits: “My second attempt ended when I forgot that I was playing in Honour Mode and mindlessly insulted Vlaakith.”
- Animegx43 writes: “I once aborted a HM game when I wanted to save Florrick from the fire. I missed the door and accidentally hit a Flaming Fist with my dread beam.”
Players must not forget that there are more fatal moments in an Honour run than just lost battles. And these happen more often than expected. My co-op group and I also almost destroyed our Honour run because our greed for gold was too great: A cursed imp punished my party’s greed for gold in Baldur’s Gate 3 and almost ended our Honour run
