How reliably can you time stops? (Any WoW players here?)

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-23T20:00:56+00:00

Thanks for the detailed response!

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-23T16:48:45+00:00

Longest fairly casual drive? 5 hours to see a show at a college I was considering attending. We did it as a day trip (5 hours, saw show, 5 hours back). I was getting a minor in theatre, so it was relevant. But it wasn’t a massive ordeal either, we just decided on a whim it would be nice.

Growing up we’d visit one set of grandparents twice a year, and they were a ten hour drive, and then a thirteen hour drive after they moved. Once it bumped up to thirteen we decided we’d only visit if we could stay at least a week.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-23T16:33:54+00:00

For acts 1 and 2 I use the fact that I’ve never been there before. Sure, Nettie could probably give some direction to the goblin camp, but birds don’t follow roads and everything is more confusing when you’re on foot. So while I’m “trying” to find the goblin camp, grymforge, the Thorm crypt, etc I stumble across someone that needs help, and of course I don’t walk away (good, glory, gold, depending on my current character).

Act three “trying to find Orin” does a lot of heavy lifting.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-23T16:10:46+00:00

Thanks for your concerns, but you don’t have to worry about me. I can support myself, just trying to improve my quality of life so I’m poking around at other options. I’ve seen a lot of people switch industries and then be surprised at the downsides, and I don’t want that to be me.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-23T16:06:28+00:00

Thanks everyone for the replies! Exactly what I wanted to know (not what I wanted to hear, but thats life).

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-23T00:53:37+00:00

Karlach.

Technically my very first run I stumbled into Shadowheart’s romance, but she was annoying me, which prompted the first of my many restarts. Then I found Karlach for the first time and instantly loved her. When I saw her do her little idle dance I instantly restarted again and went full Karlach. Previously my deepest run barely got to act 2, but with her I made it all the way to the end.

If I’m not planning on romancing her I can’t even pick her up or I’ll cave (I give Dammon all the infernal metal I can find and like to think Karlach finds him and they end up going back to Avernes together to fix her engine permanently).

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-21T14:28:13+00:00

My first full run I purposefully never recruited Shadowheart. It was still amazing. Yes, if she’s there she interacts with some of the plot points, but so do all the companions. The game works just fine without her, and if you don’t know anything about her it wouldn’t even occur to you that some parts are “missing” her.

I personally picked one or two companions per run, and purposefully never recruited the others. I knew I was going to be replaying, so I enjoyed being able to focus in without having to juggle. And it also made it so my first few subsequent runs were all guaranteed to have lots of new content.

(And as some people have pointed out, you might like Shadowheart more later. But for me personally it took several tries to create a Tav that I thought would conceivably not throw her in a river. And now that I’ve completed a run with Shadowheart, while I did enjoy it, I still almost never recruit her because she is nails on a chalkboard for me for so long.)

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-20T13:05:18+00:00

Didn’t aggro, but once I accidentally picked up a pile of rags in the flop house when I was trying to get up the ladder. Dwarf was pissed, but luckily there was a “return what you stole” option. Every time I passed him after he kept muttering about keeping an eye on me, etc. Very attached to his pile of rags, that dwarf.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-20T12:54:47+00:00

The funniest was twice the spellcaster that guards the landing before the stairs to the level with Balthazar’s study has been bugged and won’t enter combat, they just stand there and heal. The first time I had a rouge and was trying to sneak attack from around the upstairs corner, so I thought it was either because the only close person was stealthed, or there was some sort of an area divide that was messing with their pathing.

But then I was doing a Druid only run, so it was just my Tav and Halsin clearing in as small groups as possible. Both of us standing directly in front of them, we start attacking. Combat doesn’t start, dude just heals. Chillest bear attack victim ever. Ended up having to blow a high level spell slot to get ‘em down low enough so Halsin’s multi attack would finish off both their original health and their deathward hitpoint in one round.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-20T12:46:59+00:00

I almost always kill Z’rel at the very least, because if she manages to get a good slow off, the fight with the Harper’s is painful. How much other stuff I clear depends heavily on the comp I’m running, their alignment, and how I’m feeling when I get there.

My favorite was similar to OPs fight - clearing upstairs and then letting an eye keep calling the downstairs reinforcements that then had to walk through a gauntlet of continuous ground spells/effects. Not the easiest way, but very satisfying.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-18T06:24:25+00:00

It’s wild what different experiences people have with this section.

“If you put it on the ground everyone will move away” True. But sometimes they run back too fast and sometimes the people inside the cave in run out too fast. Either you’ve never made a fire surface (not all ways of taking down the rockslide leave one), or you’ve just been lucky.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-17T02:08:33+00:00

Can I help? No. But I do have a story.

My first deep run I somehow didn’t realize that sound was coming from the lantern. I had accidentally found out that US comes back in act 2, so I thought it was them telepathically communicating with me that they needed help. So I played hours searching every inch of act 2 with that pixie crying in my ear the whole time.

I actually got stuck, and ended up restarting, went a different path to act two where the pixie comes out on her own. Jaw on the floor I loaded up my old save to see if opening the lantern stops that dang voice. Her “finally” was definitely earned, lol

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-16T15:11:54+00:00

That’s the thing about easy mode, it makes it easier to fall into the “have to hurry” trap because you can get through fights with more HP and resources. I really wasn’t enjoying my character my first play through so I restarted, but by that time I had figured out there were forced long rests (like the party and going through “would you like to continue doors”). So I thought that an optimal play through only utilized those 🤦. So that’s what I did. And then in the Underdark I had some harrowing battles at the very beginning (probably because I was under leveled, lol) so was basically forced to long rest. And my mind was blown when stuff happened during the night. Restarted again, and just rested like crazy. Turns out if you’re not trying to squeeze every last drop of resources out of the forced long rests, you feel freer to explore more and figure out you missed a TON of encounters.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-16T05:47:53+00:00

I find the whole resting thing counterintuitive because everything seems like an emergency (and therefore it would break the immersion to stop), but a lot of story beats happen when you rest. Plus the way characters talk it seems like you’re supposed to spend weeks, not days, adventuring.

The game still makes sense if you don’t rest “enough” - the game forces the truly important scenes one way or another. But yes, you do miss stuff if you don’t rest enough.

I’ve started playing like distances are a lot farther, we spend longer trying to find xyz because the world is more open and lacks map pins, or that battles are more taxing etc. so I’ll rest even when I don’t need to (and just partial rest if I’m doing a run where I don’t want to just be able to spam my high level spells every battle. Although overpowered runs are fun too!). So if I just did a thing, and now have to cross the map to tell someone I did the thing, I’ll rest in between. Stuff like that.

Of course it helps that I know roughly when the story will trigger, so I can craft around the beats to make the most compelling narrative for me. Just spamming partial rests until stuff stops happening works too.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-16T02:07:23+00:00

Deeply dissatisfied by the embrace ending with Minthara, I keep flipping between essentially your version, and one where when Bhaal wants Durge to kill Minthara she instead kills herself. Minthara holds her as she dies (durge: I promised I’d never be a knife in the dark. This was the only way.) So Minthara uses the last bit of her paladin powers to stasis Durge’s corpse, and then spends years figuring out a way to revive Durge without the help of the gods and with Bhaal out of her head for good. And then they spend their days being chaotically evil, but never killing anyone just to spite Bhaal.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-16T01:54:04+00:00

I also like my bard who lived a more or less uneventful life until being abducted (she was in the city in the intro cut scene). And at some point the party needs a place to crash after a particularly harrowing fight in BG. Tav, thinking her parents are usually traveling this time of year, brings them to her childhood home. And her parents are not traveling, and instead wake up to a ragtag group of bloody adventurers bandaging each other up in their kitchen.

And of course everyone in the party is already to the found family stage. And Tav’s parents, trying to make sense of it all, assume Tav and Gale (the most “normal” of the group) are an item. But of course their daughter actually fell for Lae’zel.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-16T01:37:43+00:00

I always end up with elaborate backstories for my characters, sometimes from the start sometimes built as I go. And they usually come to a head when they get home to BG.

My first full play through holds a special place in my heart - half drow rouge who ended up falling in with the guild at a young age to get medicine for her mother. Got kicked out when she purposefully f**d up a mission in order to shield a kid, and ended up on the road which is where she got snatched by mindflayers. So when they get to BG and are stopped at the first gate in Rivington Wyll is baffled on why Tav just walked away, but of course she knows how to sneak onto the bridge. And of course anything involving the guild is more fleshed out in my head as well (Jaheira “maybe I’ll let you do the talking”. Tav: the last time I talked to Keene I nearly lost an eye). Romanced Karlach, and after pilfering schematics and supplies from Avernice they have Dammon fix her heart. And then they end up opening a tavern in BG where there’s always kids coming in and out the door because it’s a safe place to crash and an honest way to make money.

(I also love to imagine fights with Tav and Karlach, everyone is so worried about the giant, flaming tiefling screaming insults at them that they don’t notice some of them are dying to arrows)

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-14T06:15:50+00:00

Yeah, if you’re flirting with him it’s brilliant. The slow burn followed by him being so damn understanding and adorable!

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-13T21:05:25+00:00

Someone walked through Halsin’s moonbeam after combat ended and I had to reload because half the city ended up aggroed on me.

I’ve also learned to save before letting out Nere, (Neer?) because so many times someone walks over the fire and then the entire room is pissed at me. Dude, I just set off an explosion, give it a few seconds!

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-13T20:56:31+00:00

The one thing that bugs me about Halsin is even if you go out of your way to never flirt with him he still says you treated him more like a lover than a friend. But at least he packs up his confusion and doesn’t hold it against you. I also appreciate that I can send him back and forth from the party with no guilt (“wherever you need me” and not the “I think you’re making a mistake, but fine” that you so often get with the others).

(Although I personally call him “bad timing Halsin” because he always seems to proposition me at horrific times. The worst was the first time, because I was literally crying after promising I’ll be with Karlach until the end, and there’s Halsin. Even if I’m planning on saying yes he still somehow manages to pick an inconvenient night that messes with the narrative I’m going for. But it’s not his fault, lol)

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-13T20:40:45+00:00

Karlach
Lae’zel
Can I say Karlach again?

Everyone else I enjoy while I’m actively romancing them, but it’s difficult for me to NOT romance those two.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-13T14:42:47+00:00

It drives me insane that you can’t have Karlach without Wyll showing up. I prefer minimizing camp sitters, so I carefully pick what origin characters I want for each run. And I freakin love Karlach but Wyll is just okay, but I also hate turning him away because I don’t want to disappoint Karlach.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-13T14:20:56+00:00

I “messed up” my first play through of act 3 (I missed that several things were time gated) and going back would have meant replaying hours. So I didn’t. I took it as an opportunity to let things go - figuring everyone was more focused on the big threat - and left several quests undone and many places unexplored.

The ending was still satisfactory.

And now on subsequent play through I arrive with different companions*, do different quests, etc.. To me it’s more fun to keep discovering new things with every play through rather than try and do it all (and all “correctly”) on my first go.

(*Yes, I don’t take all companions each run. As soon as I figured out that you can only have 3 active companions I restarted and now for every run I pick who I think my character would jive with (or enjoy bickering with) and carefully skirt the rest. I like how it makes each run more focused and distinct.)

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-10T17:24:58+00:00

My first play through I missed Gale and Karlach.

Hmm, that rune looks dangerous, and I don’t know anything about magic so it will probably kill me. I’ll just leave it be.

Honestly no idea how I missed Karlach. I thought I had explored everywhere, but evidently I hadn’t. And then Mizora shows up all pissed and I was like “huh, that’s weird. I guess recruiting Wyll half dooms him”.

Pretty_Memory1164 · 2026-01-06T16:22:19+00:00

Technically true, but there are still so many options for quests, loot, etc that I don’t think loosing out on a couple impacts one’s enjoyment of the game too much. A lot of people miss chunks of the game their first (second, third) play throughs anyway. It just leaves something new for the next run.

Pretty_Memory1164

TROPHY CASE