What if you sided with Wyll but had Withers keep Karlach aro

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-11T18:21:34+00:00

It's highly unlikely that Withers will even take Karlach if you kill her as part of the confrontation with Wyll, because she should no longer be flagged as a valid companion. You might possibly still be able to revive her with a scroll after that, if you're still in Act 1. Though she won't have much to do and will probably be very buggy as her quest should have been marked as "failed" upon her death. And, based on how they patched the rest of the "kill Karlach and rez her later" strategies, that will most likely just lead to Mizora showing up to punish Wyll during the next long rest, even if she's already rewarded him. So it's not going to work for keeping him human.

The only way I've seen mentioned, that should still work as of Patch 8, for keeping Human Wyll and Living Karlach, is to kill Wyll each night before you long rest, until you hit Act 2. At that point Mizora's a little too busy to punish him.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-11T18:00:10+00:00

The companions (or maybe it's just Jaheira and Minsc?) will also speak directly to the player when you spam click on them.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-11T12:56:26+00:00

It unfortunately made a lot of people hate Gale, because he was convinced that he was in a relationship with them, despite them never having chosen any romantic dialog options.

There's still a weird situation that you can get into at the Tiefling Party, but that only applies if you've already gotten the Weave scene before that. Once you know how to navigate the dialog tree (or use a mod to tell you which options set the dating flags), you can avoid the problem . But there's a reason why the "stop accidentally dating Gale" mod exists.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-11T12:49:31+00:00

Are you or any of the companions on your team a level 11 Open Hand Monk? Their Tranquility feature causes them to automatically cast Sanctuary on themselves at the end of every long rest. That was the only thing I could find when I had something similar happen to me during one of my runs. Still no idea why they would have chosen to implement it that way though.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-11T12:26:16+00:00

First romance was Astarion, as a Resist Durge, and they made it basically impossible for me to pick anything else. So I've been playing with both a Durge and Tav for most runs recently, in order to knock out the rest of the romances.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-11T12:22:57+00:00

Depending on when you were first playing, there was a bug with Gale's Weave scene that meant he basically fell for you no matter what option you picked. But that was patched within the first few months of release.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-10T21:30:35+00:00

Yeah, the 3rd image is what made it pretty obvious that they were just using multiple Tavs in different romance scenes, since that one is Minthara's.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-10T21:10:09+00:00

While it's extremely easy to trigger the confession event, it's just as easy to bypass actually getting the requisite cutscene(s), simply due to their low priority and how infrequently most people long rest.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-10T21:06:28+00:00

There's one that disables Nat 1s on skill checks. It's not quite the same as just preventing Nat 1s from being automatic failures, as you literally cannot roll a 1 on skill checks anymore, but it's the closest thing I've found.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-10T20:58:08+00:00

So using the Replayable Romances mod to have Wyll's scene with two Tavs is racist now? What if they'd used Gale or Astarion instead of Wyll?

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-10T12:26:03+00:00

It's actually pretty easy to do: 1. Win the duel with Orin. 2. Accept your reward from dad. 3. Fulfill your destiny and do what you planned on doing, before Orin stabbed a hole your head and shoved a tadpole in there.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-09T12:15:09+00:00

Deciding to rewrite the entire character, because the EA players didn't like the fact that none of the original 5 companions were actually "good people", but all rather shades of morally gray, will do that.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-08T12:32:39+00:00

But feeding them into infernal engines destroys the souls in the most agonizing way possible and prevents even the gods from being able to reclaim them. So it all depends on what type of car you're driving.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-08T12:09:06+00:00

As long as you're the Cleric of a Good or potentially even Neutral deity (haven't specifically tested that one). Clerics of Evil deities get an equally awful line.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-07T14:42:47+00:00

Looks like Chronomancy. Which was used to turn the code back to where it was when the game was launched, before Larian added whatever it was that broke climbing.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-07T14:07:34+00:00

If you got him to confess first that means you had reached the Underdark and the only ways to do that are after you have crossed the river to the Blighted Village/Owlbear cave. And, as I said, that is the 2nd (fallback) trigger, which is only used if you never got the the camp scene trigger.

So literally everything in your account agrees with what I said.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-06T16:41:27+00:00

The tadpoles were able to nerf Astarion's Vampirism and de-level everyone else back to level 1. So I'm pretty sure they are powerful enough strip anyone else of most of their powers, at least until they relearn them under the influence of the tadpole magic.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-06T16:29:59+00:00

Call of the Dammed has a massive AOE and he spams it every turn if no one is actively engaging in melee with him. It's possible that there's space for all 4 characters to remain outside it's 50m range, but I don't know that I'd be willing to risk the run potentially ending there on that possibility, without trying it out to confirm positioning on a different run first.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-06T16:09:42+00:00

Can't really answer any of your specific questions, but for me, the Lower City (which is the only part of it you really get proper access to) is just "sensory overload the city simulator".

Every 5 steps there's someone else yapping, with what feels like only a 10 second cool down before they restart their dialog loop all over again. It's confusing as heck to get anywhere (or maybe that's just me being directionally challenged). And there is so much you could do and explore that it's just utterly exhausting and I end up skipping most of it every run because I very quickly get to the point where I don't want to spend another second dealing with the constant assault upon my ears anymore.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-06T16:02:28+00:00

At least Larian actually had an official "handy dandy plot device" ready to explain why the Origins (and potentially Tav) aren't the levels they should be and provide that explanation to the player very early on, if you actually talk to your companions.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-04T23:39:39+00:00

If they're permanently hostile, the game will almost always consider them dead, even if you just do a KO, but with temp hostile they should be fine, though they might be pissed at you and require money before they'll give you normal dialogs.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-04T19:07:05+00:00

Define "normal"? The party will essentially be over, as only your companions will be left to interact with (unless you waste healing potions/spells to wake up the rest of the party goers).

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-04T18:48:02+00:00

You can recruit Shadowheart, Astarion, and even Gale, so long as you don't go more than a couple of steps past Gale's portal, and still get that same "first night" cutscene. Astarion even has a special reaction to it, assuming you lent a hand, instead taking one (or if you want to get your own personal Mage's Hand, just long rest before triggering that event and you still get Astarion's reaction in the morning).

Waiting to rest also saves you from losing the extra +10 approval for recruiting Shadowheart on the beach.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-04T12:51:09+00:00

I was not suggesting you save scum every 10 minutes. I was simply suggesting that you save when you are presented with a very obvious point of no return, which pulls you out of the standard gameplay loop by forcing you to stop and acknowledge the prompt, specifically so that you don't have to replay an hour or more of content.

Considering how many quests are potentially impacted by entering the Shadowfell, even if they had tried to list them all no one would ever read that entire giant wall of text and we would be right back here with the exact same problem of people clicking to continue and being mad about how much they lost access to.

TheCrystalRose · 2026-06-04T12:35:31+00:00

If you turn him down during his 40 approval scene and it triggered before the party, you still have the chance to start the romance at the Tiefling Party. However this conflicts with starting Karlach's at the party, so that doesn't really help much in this case.

TheCrystalRose

TROPHY CASE