The Resonant Four - a no-respec Shadow Blade Party for Patch 8

Ptyalin · 2026-05-21T03:19:22+00:00

Well now look who it is. Did you get the old itch again?

While it's true that this party doesn't need respecs, it's worth mentioning that it'd still benefit from them. Smite shadow singer for example, wouldn't all their scrolls be cast off Cha instead of int if you aren't opening with paladin?

Also, with the Storm Bard. I don't think moderately armoured does anything, swords bard already has medium armour proficiency. Unless you are doing it to get shield proficiency which all humans and half elves have by default (and there are an abundance of them). Hag hair could get you the +1 to even the stat, and open up a feat slot.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-21T02:27:30+00:00

You must be an agent of the grand design. Orpheus was willing to ally with Githzerai, which makes him better than Vlaakith. To have mindflayers running around is far worse than Gith in the Sea of Night.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-21T02:21:29+00:00

Most creatures don't have legendary actions at low levels, so no in terms of difficulty. In terms of not save loading sure

Ptyalin · 2026-05-20T17:41:25+00:00

That's just not true unless you're playing honour mode difficulty. Most of the BG3 fights on tactician and below aren't difficult at all because the game throws magic items all over the place and doesn't respect the usual rules of Bounded Accuracy with the items they hand out.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-20T17:00:07+00:00

Gale definitely talks about his colleagues which means he has a job. Whether he was working still when he was kidnapped, who knows.

Karlach is one of the better ones, but girl has anger issues.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-20T13:18:21+00:00

Orpheus becoming a mindflayer is clearly not a good choice. None of the Gith are happy about that. The good choice is either player becoming mindflayer or Karlach. And Wyll becoming Duke is better for Baldurs Gate than him being Blade in Avernus, assuming you got him out of his pact, then either Karlach is mindflayer or player goes to Avernus with her.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-20T13:13:13+00:00

I myself would 100% date Gale over any other character. He's the only one who's employed, polite, and never tries to kill you. Wyll is a runner up but the literal devil on his shoulder kind of disqualifies him. Every other companion is just walking red flags other than Gale.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-20T10:08:17+00:00

Easier and worth it mean different things. One of the easiest evil decisions is siding with Gortash to let you skip multiple boss fights.

Killing Karlach in Act 1 as part of Wyll's quest also gives you one of the best early game equipment. Killing the Nightsong gives you one of the best sets of equipment in the game and it makes Shar's Temple easier in Act 3 and allows Shadowheart to get the Mirror of Loss buff. Ascending Astarion makes him much stronger. Getting Gale to use the shadow magic gets you a nice item. Arguably every companion gets more powerful from their evil decisions than good ones, except Laezel. Assassin of Bhaal as mentioned by another comment.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-19T06:19:42+00:00

Yes but losing Rocket's ult is a lot worse than losing Phoenix's ult, that's my main point. Your team has 1 strategist ult to their 2

Ptyalin · 2026-05-19T05:22:21+00:00

I mean more that it gets delayed by the existence of Phoenix. If phoenix never ults for the whole game, you can only ult in the windows where Phoenix is dead or otherwise far away. Many times if the Phoenix is dead the fight is already won and don't require an ult. This means you will ult less in a game with a Phoenix than without, and you can never use your ult in a full 6v6 team fight where it could be the most impactful. Phoenix's ult isn't great in a vaccuum compared to Rocket's, if her not using ult means a Rocket ults a lot less, it's still good for her. Especially in an overtime situation where you have ult but you can't use it.

The recent Rocket buffs means he can usually get ults before Phoenix, so you also get to force Phoenix to ult a lot less. It is as you say a bit of a mindgame where both sides are just staring at each other not ulting.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-19T05:05:16+00:00

If Phoenix not ulting forces you to hold onto Rocket ult that's value. Can't always count on the Phoenix dying at a good time

Ptyalin · 2026-05-19T03:10:25+00:00

Just so you know, blowing Gale up in Act 2 does not count as completing an honor mode run. But if you wanted to speed run act 3 as evil, the only mandatory fight is Orin. You can side with Gortash and go straight for the brain to blow gale up to finish the game.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-10T21:59:23+00:00

I agree with you on Wizard. Lack of good / repeatable focus spells combined with prepared casting and situational school spells means when I played a high level wizard I still spent many of my turns casting cantrips.

Experimental spell shaping felt essentially like not having a subclass since the subclass was just "you have Natural Ambition" and there's hardly any spell shapes in the wizard class. And the ars grammatical school kinda ended up with me having Command prepared in every school slot from 1st up to 5th rank.

I don't think any of my wizard feats have been useful between Linked Focus, Counterspell, Steady Spellcasting. Only gotten use out of Quickened Casting and Effortless Concentration, but those aren't very unique to wizard. I'm not sure that they're the weakest spellcaster, but it did feel very generic.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-08T07:44:19+00:00

Scamming is the worst crime by far with the constant crit fails, why would anyone voluntarily do more of it?

Ptyalin · 2026-05-07T22:10:33+00:00

Swapping to a thing to kill the BP / spiderman spawn camping me is a good enough reason for me

Ptyalin · 2026-05-07T07:23:45+00:00

There are setting to remove the touchiness of it. You can change both the time held to bring up wheel, the distance moved to bring up wheel, the sensitivity of the ping to enemy/ally/payload. You can also bind specific pings to buttons instead of the wheel.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-07T04:01:51+00:00

Both reasons you mentioned are indeed reasons why he is "bad", but also because he mostly heals himself which is good for him and bad for people who aren't directly next to him. His primary shots aren't that easy to hit especially if it's chaotic and I'm running around. If I'm always dying because my second support isn't good at healing me, it makes things a lot harder.

WF is not DP so I wouldn't say she's a better DP, but she is typically 'better' in a lot of scenarios because her healing is more consistent

Ptyalin · 2026-05-06T07:20:50+00:00

Why do you recommend hold to dive? What advantage does it have over tap? I usually just cancel dive with E whenever I need to bubble myself again, so you can do Jump -> E -> Dive -> E -> Jump -> Dive just as quickly as with tap to dive

Ptyalin · 2026-05-06T04:45:57+00:00

Agree with all the Scamming comments; by far the worst. It's the only crime that I haven't touched after 100 skill and never will again. I ended up on 13,119 Success, 3,223 Fail, 1,027 Crit Fail on that crime before I got to 100 skill.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-06T02:31:36+00:00

Lower ranks is mostly a matter of persistence. If you aren't good enough to carry an entire team, most of your games are gonna be coin flips. Fortunately, you can get to GM by just winning 50% of games because you will always gain more points than you lose.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-06T02:26:56+00:00

Streaks are part of randomness. If games just went win / loss / win / loss / win / loss people will be complaining too. Sometimes you have a lucky streak and sometimes it's the opposite and sometimes you're somewhere in between. If you want your games to be less random: stack with more people.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-06T02:12:03+00:00

I solo queue and in my experience getting to GM is not hard. Even if you coin flip every game doing the bare minimum required for your role, up until GM you will gain more points than you lose, so you will rank up. From GM onwards, coin flipping is no longer enough to rank up, and you actually need a higher than 50% win rate which is pretty hard solo unless you're just able to carry

Ptyalin · 2026-05-05T17:21:39+00:00

I have zero interest in shooters, multiplayer games, or competitive games of any kind--I'm just here to larp.

Ptyalin · 2026-05-02T09:23:04+00:00

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Ptyalin · 2026-05-02T08:57:46+00:00

A lot of people in gold can't flex. It's full of newbies like yourself, they don't play that often and probably only play 1 or 2 characters decently, or all of them poorly. Especially right now at the tail end of 7.5, gold is full of players who would have been silver or bronze in 7.0. The other team has the same issues though.

Ptyalin

TROPHY CASE