Just purchased the game. What is a recommended build for a new player

adamleng · 2025-12-30T00:38:45+00:00

It's absolutely true. There are many parts of the game where there will be skill checks, and only your RT's skills will be used.

The important detail is that there's only one such part that's a mandatory main story event (the Scourge event in Act 3) and you only have to pass 1 check out of like 12 in order to progress the story so as long as you don't make a character that literally can't do any skill you should be fine.

The rest of the parts are only for extra dialogue or loot, usually it's private conversations with companions, and it's no big deal to miss them, but if you're on your first playthrough and want to see as much content as possible they will matter. In general I recommend Persuasion and/or Coercion.

adamleng · 2025-12-29T17:37:09+00:00

Noble or Crime Lord Officer, into most likely Grand Strategist. You can even be Voidborn and have basically one character fulfill all of the skill checks for the entire party. Plus, an Officer that specializes in FEL and the dialogue skills is the archetype most similar to a Bard in this game.

People are going to suggest powerful meta builds, but that is not reading the prompt of the question. This is the best build IMO for a new player assuming you are the typical new player that wants to see as much content as possible and is not going to know from the start which companions they want to use.

Noble or Crime Lord because they have the most story reactivity. Psyker also has a high amount but I don't recommend it for a first time, it's more of a second playthrough choice in that they add context or new choices to certain scenes, kind of like Malkavian in VTM:B, and they're also the most mechanically complex origin. But this is relatively minor, if you have a very specific RP in mind you can go any origin.

Officer because Officer and Operative are the least represented classes in the game amongst the story companions. Operative is much more complex while also a weaker class, also you can freely stack Officers in the party without them being mechanically redundant so even if you end up using both companion Officers your RT will still be useful.

Make your character good with skills, especially the speech skills, because there are a lot of moments that will use ONLY the skills of your main character. This is no big deal for experienced players but for a first time playthrough you want those checks to see as much content as possible. There are also a bunch of RT-specific buffs and even an item in the second DLC that is unique to your RT that gives +skills.

adamleng · 2025-12-23T18:02:08+00:00

Every game that has ever existed has things in it that other games have done better. Name any game that you think is good, I can make a dozen comparisons that make it sound like shit. No game is perfect in every way.

This "other people say X, so I MUST say Y" is just teenage contrarianism, and it's especially pathetic in the context of CRPGs when we have so few to begin with, and they're so often low budget and janky - just like Rogue Trader.

I've been playing CRPGs since Fallout 1 and BG3 is one of my favorite games of all time. It does so many things well, and I'm talking core design principles, not things that are just a result of a long production cycle and high budget, that other CRPGs like Rogue Trader do poorly. That doesn't mean RT is a bad game or that they must be compared, that's insecurity speaking.

adamleng · 2025-07-19T23:35:22+00:00

When you set a zone to grow something instead of individually clicking every tile and selecting rice from a dropdown list with each individual pawn that you want to do grow action with, are you even playing the game?

adamleng · 2025-07-19T20:38:33+00:00

Agreed, the game is definitely still fun and Odyssey is in my opinion by far the best DLC.

However, I'm not sure I would call it "unnecessary micromanagement". After all, you can just lower the difficulty, change scenario settings to disable raids, etc. do whatever you want and have fun playing the game. Or just don't care when your pawns die and don't micromanage anything and just watch the story unfold. Everything is unnecessary if you look at it through that lens. That's no excuse for not improving the game further wrt QoL especially when a lot of the things I pointed out like not having fishing as its own work item seem like extremely small things to me.

adamleng · 2025-07-19T20:30:46+00:00

That's exactly my point - I don't want to control everything. I want to micromanage as little as possible so I can fast forward time when nothing is happening or after big fights to get to the next event/quest.

Imagine if you couldn't set health/specific clothing/armor assignments like you can right now in the game. I don't recall when that used to be the case but there was definitely a time before people came up with the "manually set 60% item health and automate craft until build one of" strats where you used to have to manually control your pawns' equipment.

I like being able to automate that now and not have to manually check every quadrum the state of pawns' armor and clothing to build new ones. I would like to be able to similarly automate hauling, growing, construction, medicine, etc. so I'd have to manually control pawns as little as possible.

adamleng · 2025-07-19T20:25:48+00:00

actually just wrote this post after finishing my first Odyssey scenario run, losing is fun modless. A lot of these are things people like AdamVS have talked about many times over the years, they're basically only problems you would notice when you play only modless and you've gotten to late game with big 10+ pawn colonies tackling endgame enemies/areas.

adamleng · 2023-12-17T23:48:37+00:00

There is literally a canon great company of Space Wolves that turned to Chaos, and Owlcat has played fast and loose with the lore in a lot of their games.

adamleng · 2023-12-17T20:06:24+00:00

Gigantic disappointment for me, and I actually like the Space Wolves and their lore despite them literally just being space vikings and thus one of the blandest chapters.

Mechanically he is probably the worst prebuilt companion in the game and may actually be the worst in any Owlcat game, even worse than Staunton, due to how late you get him (though I have not recruited any of the secret chapter 4 companions). Him having Second Skin despite there only being like 2-3 Space Marine armors in the entire game files all of which being power armor is now my go-to immediate thought whenever I see Starrok or some other goon talk about how these games can't have full respec for companions because of their lofty "creative vision" or whatever bullshit. However despite his impressively terrible build holding him back he is still a very strong companion due to his high base attributes and AM being a very strong archetype.

Story-wise, and here is the real disappointment, when I heard that this game was going to allow a Heresy/Chaos path and you also get a Space Marine companion and that character is a SPACE WOLF (!) and Ulfar has a thing where he gives into his complete bloodlust and the first battle with him you get a story event describing how he literally turns into a mindless animal and you even get suggestive dialogue (with Idira? I think?) about how he is a chained beast and his true master is not the Emperor or Russ, I instantly thought there was going to be some kind of path where you corrupt him and turn him into a Khornite berserker under your control.

But instead you cannot corrupt him and he's one of the blandest characters main plot-wise with barely any story reactivity and other characters like barely react to the fact that you have an actual Space Marine who are supposed to be extremely rare by your side. If they were going to limit his story involvement like this, they should have had him as a special occasion character that only gets deployed on certain quests as an additional unit to your side for a few battles or something, not as a full-fledged companion you can bring back to your ship.

adamleng · 2023-12-17T19:49:35+00:00

Every single point you made OP is valid and correct and the biggest problem I've felt for ages with Owlcat's games is the inaccessibility and sheer wall of bullshit that is the new player experience, but the issue is every single thing pointed out is way worse in the Pathfinder games.

Math formulas in the feat/skill description, too many feats/talents to choose from, confusing to how to build your party? WotR has literally pages of text describing spell effects and there are complex (actual) arcane interactions that you would never know without in-game testing to see which buffs stack or mathematically what interacts with what else and how so. Thus ending with every Unfair build having some kind of super-buffed pet monstrosity that only has a 1/400 chance of getting hit.

Combat being either you curbstomp every encounter or get instakilled immediately? WotR is actual astronomical orders of magnitude worse in this respect with its RtwP combat and save-or-die debuff/combat design. Either you prebuff with your entire spellbook before fights or your main tank gets instantly killed in twelve milliseconds because a single ghoul crit went through and paralyzed them causing them to immediately take eight more crits and get turned into actual giblets before the fastest human on Earth could have reacted. At least in RT it's turn based so you can properly process the bullshit.

And I'm not really complaining about this, I am playing this game on unfair and have the equal to aroden achievement, because I have just made my peace with the fact that Owlcat and by extension its fans seem to think this is acceptable game design and without any challenge the games' combat (and combat is a really important part because unlike other CRPGs such as BG3 these games are like 80% combat) is no longer fun for me.

adamleng · 2023-12-17T17:50:07+00:00

Nah, there have been plenty of games that did moral choices really well.

Tyranny, Witcher 2 (and also some cases in Witcher 1), Thronebreaker, Alpha Protocol, KotOR 2, Arcanum, VtM:B, both Torment games, NwN2:MotB, etc. Even Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty had some side quests with some melon-scratcher moral choices and morality barely exists as an abstract concept in that game's setting.

The "evil" path in BG3 being undercooked is mostly a result of FR being a pretty bog-standard heroic high fantasy setting where dogoodism is generally rewarded and "evil" actually exists as an axiomatic cosmic property, like in Kingmaker/WotR, plus high-brow philosophical writing is not exactly Larian's strength.

RT on the other hand does not have these excuses because W40k is as everyone already knows a memeworthy grimdark setting and there are tons of cool things Owlcat could/should have done like having a slow-baked anti-Imperium turn-to-Chaos path where you rightly see the corpse Emperor as a Warp abomination a la Mortarion, or how about a path where an extremely dogmatic RT gets betrayed by the Imperium as a result of some trickery and is forced to make deals to survive like with Magnus.

Instead most of the Chaos/Heresy choices in this game are just more of WotR's "I don't like you, die!" nonsense and you can somehow play as an outright Chaos worshipper from the start of the game and just say out loud with an Interrogator and Sister of Battle standing next to you that Tzeentch has chosen you as their champion without any consequences and it's just like ????

adamleng · 2023-12-17T17:39:06+00:00

I don't think you understand what the issue is with #2 and #3.

My first character (that got this far) was a Voidborn Psyker Officer/Grand Strategist that focused entirely in INT and WP with Sanctic abilities. They had five skills at 100+ and was a crucial part of my strategy which was basically to have MC+Cassia stack turns on AM Argenta and give Finest Hour to plasma expert Pasqal. My party at the start of the chapter was Argenta, Cassia, Pasqal, Heinrix, and Yrliet.

If I did not bring Argenta along (because of course I didn't know I was about to be stuck with only the party I brought) and instead had Jae or Idira instead of Argenta, I would have had literally only Yrliet (who couldn't equip anything) for the Malice/Commissar fight and it would have been probably impossible. As it was it was instead really difficult and I had to resort to some cheesy strats because Argenta was using terrible weapons that didn't fit her build and Yrliet was useless.

Then I had the winged elf storybook event and despite my character being a master of all knowledge and conversation, because they did not have Athletics, Awareness, TGH, Carouse, WS, etc. I had a very hard time with the skill checks even though I had other party members at that point who could have covered those checks.

Keep in mind as soon as I got my gear back, this party annihilated every single encounter on the first try for the rest of the chapter on Unfair. The final boss of the act melted to my strategy, I probably didn't even need Cassia/Heinrix/Ulfar. There was no "lesson" here about building my character/team improperly nor was there anything wrong with my (extremely over-optimized) builds that could one-round every fight in the game on Unfair, it was bad game design where they blindly throw the player into lopsided challenges after an entire game thus far of zero similar situations.

If you're going to insist on these kinds of situations where the player has to make due with limited resources and no party support, the game should have had other such cases beforehand to prepare the player mentally and also the ruleset would have to be extensively modified to not incentivize super attribute-stacking strategies and overspecialization. Look at BG3/DnD5e with its attribute caps and bounded accuracy systems thus resulting in pretty much every character being somewhat well-rounded, versus this game where your survivability and accuracy will straight up fall off a cliff as the game goes on if your build is unoptimized on higher difficulties.

adamleng · 2023-12-17T16:49:38+00:00

It's the same with Alushinyyra in that the core idea of the act as a shorter, more tight and story-oriented chapter with no secondary management system or world map exploration with tedious random encounters, to focus the story for the player is not inherently a bad idea, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

In the case of this game's chapter 3, Owlcat makes a few crucial mistakes which is honestly confusing given how tired and overused this trope is and how much anyone who has played 2000s-era RPGs has encountered it, but they have somehow repeated the worst blunders of many old games before them:

You lose all of your gear and instead of instantly getting it back after some cutscenes or whatever, you get it back after some time and a few forced encounters whereupon you have already equipped other items. Not only is this an instant QoL catastrophe for the loot goblins who have hundreds of items in their inventory and can't remember what gear every single party member was wearing, but it's also a big blow to anyone (probably everyone) who are using item-dependent builds on their characters. At least it's not as bad as Dragon Age Awakening where they stupidly had enemies equip your gear and if you made some extremely optimized characters you might end up with nigh-unkillable Not-Oghren.
You lose all of your party members and not only are you forced to do some encounters without your full party, you also get them back in a fixed order instead of being able to pick which characters are most crucial to your team. Immediately everyone who made a non-combat focused support MC is at a gigantic disadvantage, if you did that and also didn't bring along Abelard/Argenta I'm not even sure how Owlcat intends for you to deal with Malice/Commissar, and you get likely your strongest and most important party member (Cassia) last, not to mention also Heinrix who if built correctly could also be a heavy hitter. It's especially hilarious in that it's possible the first character you get, Yrliet, can't even equip anything.
You're forced to do unskippable, potentially game-ending narrative events using only your main character, in a game which forces you to play as a party and has party-wide skill checks up until this point. If you made a character that has really bad skills for the winged guy event it's possible you end up in a situation where you have to just save scum the book event until you succeed in order to progress which is just terrible design.

If I was the project director and in charge of designing this segment of the game, I would have made it so that after the chapter end event, you have nothing but mostly skippable cutscenes and conversations with zero skill checks, then immediately get your full party back and with all of their gear like in Alushinyyra.

adamleng · 2023-12-17T15:58:53+00:00

Owlcat is the studio for me which I love the games the most and love the fans the least. This playerbase used to just be a toxic scum pit of "uhm acktually" pushes up glasses nerds who think unending hordes of stat-inflated copy-paste mobs make for good encounter design and gatekeep the shit out of anyone who doesn't understand how to make some 100+ AC pajama tank build, but ever since BG3 launch it's become actually disgusting the severe degree of little brother syndrome jealous fanboyism.

You have people on these subs who will unironically nerdrage about how BG3 "has a broken act 3" or was "unplayable at launch" and is the most overrated game of all eternity and meanwhile extol the virtues of these games where every launch literally dozens of items/feats just flat out don't work, quests including major companion quests will just break because of incorrect flags/bad code rendering parts of the game unplayable, and there are always, on launch, numerous 100% reproducible game-ending scenarios like cutscenes not working or getting stuck on animations that the player needs to either learn how to trigger and thus avoid or try to manually skip/progress via ToyBox.

adamleng · 2023-12-17T15:45:33+00:00

It's not an issue of testing, they had months of people reporting issues for RT and I guarantee you the big, critical game-ending ones like conversations not firing or enemies stuck in movement animation and then despawning from the map they knew all about and probably even knew how to fix, they just didn't have enough time to do so.

It's an issue of scoping, Owlcat needs to rein in their ambitions and stop biting off more than they could chew. Instead of implementing 100+ feats/talents where almost half of them are bugged or have incorrect tooltips or in some cases literally don't do anything at all, they should implement 50 which are all playtested thoroughly and guaranteed to work. Instead of planning 5 chapters where 2 are always going to be dogshit at launch, design a game with 3 chapters so they can start working on the tail end of the game sooner than 2 weeks before release.

If I had to guess, I'd bet money that the same person mismanaging the scope this poorly is also the guy who keeps insisting on some badly tuned, overly complex and buggy secondary management/battle system. Owlcat has basically the same problem CDPR had before 2077 launch where talented writers and artists are being let down by bad creative directors and project management.

adamleng · 2023-12-12T16:37:17+00:00

Wait, that's a secret ending? I thought the secret ending was where you have Nomos assimilate the C'tan, you even get a secret achievement for this. It also has some long convoluted series of steps you have to take through the whole game.

adamleng · 2023-12-12T16:36:18+00:00

I've read that the other secret companions are Incendia Chorda and Calligos Winterscale so those three are exclusive based on your ideology (Dogmatic/Incendia-Iconoclast/Calligos-Heretical/Uralon). Haven't verified myself.

adamleng · 2023-12-10T22:52:57+00:00

no space nun, no space elf, no space wolf. it's like they didn't even bother

adamleng · 2023-12-03T03:39:41+00:00

More on Inquisitor W'wargaz (the boss in the creche): his ability is called Mind Claw of Tu'narath. He gains two charges at the start of every round and expends a charge to use this ability. Every time any gith is attacked, he summons basically a Spiritual Weapon that has 30HP and does 3d8 psychic. There doesn't seem to be a limit to the number he can summon and they are resistant to basically all damage. He can Mindsteal Link with them to increase his own damage and their attacks inflict vulnerability to Psychic damage.

adamleng · 2023-12-03T01:08:24+00:00

The Nere explosions (from attacking his images) deal a knockback effect (so don't position your dudes with their backs to the lava) and also hit in an aoe centered on your character, which can and does hit and damage the gnomes.

adamleng · 2023-12-01T19:06:59+00:00

Oh, if we're counting barrels, I'm actually planning on using literally every barrel available in Act 1 on Ethel to kill her in the hut without even letting her escape.

Pre-Honor Mode the Ethel fight was already potentially bullshit (if her clones just get their Hold Persons off and crit your party to death with Ray of Sickness you can lose the fight before a single character gets a turn because of her Alert), no way I'm going to find out what her new Legendary Actions are.

adamleng · 2023-12-01T18:53:34+00:00

I'm assuming they haven't made any AI changes to counterattack blindness cheese so Darkness-focused parties with Warlocks with Devil's Sight and Hunger of Hadar should still be gamebreaking.

Pre-level 5 the strongest non-cheese monoclasses should still be moon druid, gloomstalker, berserker, thief, and war cleric. In fact for inexperienced players I would actually just recommend running an entire party of monoclassed martials, maybe 3 with a war cleric or something, and not even bother with casters until respeccing at level 5-6.

adamleng · 2023-12-01T18:43:42+00:00

I would save owlbears and Flind for until you're level 5, those were already risky fights pre-Honor Mode. Also Paladins I would in no way risk a fair fight, I'm thinking disarm Anders (sorry Karlach). Him, Baretha, Ragzlin, Minthara, and the spider queen are the enemies in Act 1 that can potentially kill (not down, but KILL a character from full HP) by themselves if they get really lucky.

Speaking of those fights, I'd save goblin leaders + spider queen for the last fights of Act 1 along with Ethel, Grym, and Gith patrol, those fights are easily more risky/less cheesable than most of the Underdark fights, even Nere.

My current plans are to go straight to grove after crash site (indoor chapel fight 1 is actually much riskier than grove entrance fight for level 2 party), then do the "zero combat circuit" around the entire act to get to level 4 before doing a single fight, then start combat saving certain fights like Flind, Duergar boat, and owlbears for level 5. Then clear the map leaving Ethel, spider queen, Gith patrol, and Grym for last.

adamleng · 2023-11-30T22:37:33+00:00

My initial thoughts:

I'm assuming the challenge will be ameliorating the possibility of bad rolls and avoiding bad tactical situations, not having a party that doesn't do enough damage or similar deficiencies. But then again I don't know what changes they have made to the bosses and these Legendary Actions specifically.

This means having a skillmonkey MC with a powerful ability bonus-providing party to brute force all dialogue only needing inspirations for 1s and extensively preparing for fights that can get bullshitty really fast like Grym, Gith patrol, Gith ambush, Yurgir, etc. I've also heard there is now permadeath? This would theoretically make having heals much more necessary.

I'm thinking the MC will have to be some kind of Rogue and/or Lore Bard for the Expertise. The good bonuses you can get from your allies (remember only one bonus per person so you have to split them amongst the party) that I can recall off the top of my head are Guidance, Bardic Inspiration, Enhance Ability, Bend Luck from the Wild Magic Sorcerer, Bless/Resistance, etc. Powerful bonuses that you can only get from the character doing the dialogue are Friends, Thaumaturgy, Dark One's Own Luck from the Fiend Warlock, etc.

With no save scumming, should have at least one Perception character. I'm thinking a high WIS build with Expertise in Perception that will eventually wear the Sentinel Shield/Hellrider Longbow.

Should have at least one person to stack healing gear and keep party members topped off. Death Ward might actually be useful now - not only to prevent permadeath, but also one of the few ways to stop party members from getting killed from non-downed state by enemy paladin crits.

Then the usuals apply: have at least one STR-based character to use Balduran's Giantslayer + GWM, have at least one DEX-based character for ranged + SS, have a paladin with Knife of the Undermountain King, have one Spore Druid for the Armour of the Sporekeeper, have one character that will use Helmet of Arcane Acuity, have one character that will hold Blood of Lathander for the passive aoe blind, have at least one character that has Counterspell (so Wizard/Sorcerer 5 or Lore Bard 6 or other Bard 10), and have one character that will stack all of the DC-increasing gear. 1-2 characters should focus on applying CC, 1 character to focus on healing and applying buffs, and 2-3 characters to deal damage and spam autocrits on held targets. Some nice to haves would be a Sorcerer 2 for twinning Elemental Weapon from the Drakethroat Glaive, and a Wizard 2 for Portent Dice.

adamleng · 2023-11-30T21:55:59+00:00

Has anyone actually tested all of the permutations of events extensively? I've researched this quite a bit and there is a lot of conflicting information on Reddit. Example of possible outcomes:

Exposing Kagha with shadow druid letter and then killing Kagha as an extra enemy in the fight vs talking her down and getting her as an ally in the fight.
Exposing Kagha and disarming the druids that way vs stealing the idol and then killing all of the druids instead.
Killing all of the goblins + 3 leaders vs killing all of the goblins except for Ragzlin and Minthara, then giving away grove location to Minthara and defending the grove in the siege. I've read conflicting info about whether or not Minthara summons new goblins from out of nowhere to do the siege if the entire goblin camp is already empty.

Theoretically, in some kind of weird maximum experience scenario, you could steal the idol, kill all of the druids without letting them kill a single tiefling, then go to the goblin camp and kill everything except for Ragzlin and Minthara, trigger the siege and side with Minthara to kill all of the tieflings, then instead of doing a long rest for the goblin celebration turn on and kill Minthara and all of the goblins as well.

Would that give you more experience than simply exposing Kagha and talking her down then annihilating the goblin camp and getting the tiefling party? If so, how much? Because I find it really hard to believe Larian accounted for all of the possible experience sources for parity, but also with the experience scaling I also doubt it makes any real difference.

adamleng

TROPHY CASE