A game as large and complex as Baldur’s Gate 3 is bound to surprise players over and over again. Such is the case with some less-obvious game mechanics that can drastically alter your gameplay. Some mechanics can be downright annoying, like jumping a gap and realizing ten minutes later that the Cleric Shadowheart never made the jump and has been twiddling her thumbs across the map.
The complexity of this game means there are clever ways to manage game tactics you may never have realized.
11 Long Lasting Weapon Coatings
Weapon coatings are extremely useful for beefing up lackluster melee and ranged attacks when you’re out of magic and abilities. Finding toxins and poisons to add to your party’s weapons can be time-consuming and expensive if you’re using them often. To make things last a bit longer, throw a bottle of your preferred toxin, poison, or weapon coating on the ground in your camp and interact with it to dip your weapon and apply the coating.
By coating your weapon this way, the applied coating will last until your next long rest. Even better: the pool of the dropped coating will last for several in-game days, meaning you can use it over and over again without having to sacrifice your stock of toxins.
10 Cancel Concentration Spells
Gone are the days of waiting for your Ice Storm or Cloud Of Daggers to dissipate on its own; you can cancel concentration spells manually instead of standing around and waiting.
If you’re using a mouse and keyboard, you’ll see the icon of the spell you’re concentrating on appear by your character portrait at the bottom of your screen; click on the ‘x’ to cancel this spell. If you’re using a controller simply open the radial menu for spells by pressing RB and hold down the End Concentration button, which is by default set to Y. Alternatively, you can end a concentration spell by casting a different concentration spell.
9 Trading Instead Of Bartering
Wares are a standard game mechanic in Larian Studios’ other game Divinity: Original Sin 2. If you right-click on an item you will see the option to ‘add to wares’, which overlays the item’s icon in your inventory with a coin and hand icon. Wares make selling items en masse extremely easy. When you talk to a trader by default you will open up the Barter screen, where you’ll need to pay for items from a trader by creating an equal value of your own items to sell and your money for their items or money.
There’s no way to really do Bartering in bulk, but it does let you haggle the price a little depending on the approval of the trader NPC. However, if you toggle the switch at the top of the screen to Trade, you’ll be able to sell your items in a more traditional RPG fashion by just right-clicking them. Even better, there’s a button to Sell All Wares, immediately lining your pockets for all that junk you’ve collected.
8 Block Vents With Anything
Vents that continually produce cloud effects like poison and darkness can be extremely dangerous even when playing on lower difficulties. There are several such vents on the path into Auntie Ethel’s secret hideout and jumping around vent clouds isn’t always a safe option. Instead of just sprinting through, gritting your teeth, and taking the damage, you can disable vents without having to actually Disarm them.
Pick your highest-Strength character, like the Barbarian Karlach or Lae’zel the Fighter to throw any old junk onto a vent. Simply choose the Throw action and pick an item, then click the vent. Clothing, barrels, bottles, and even food can be used to stop up a vent and let you pass safely.
7 Use Friendly Spells Maliciously
Some buff spells like Haste are extremely useful in combat when you need to squeeze in some extra attacks to finish a tough fight. Haste temporarily grants a +2 to your AC, advantage on Dexterity saving throws, doubled movement speed, and an additional action per turn. But Haste will leave you Lethargic after the effect ends: you can’t move or take actions, bonus actions, or reactions for an entire turn.
But Haste is a concentration spell, meaning you can cast it on any old NPC or enemy and just end your concentration to make them Lethargic for a turn. While it costs a spell slot to do this, some magic items can grant you the Haste spell, like the Darkfire Shortbow or Gontr Mael.
6 Hop To Regroup
Many times you’ll be wandering through the beautiful landscapes of the Sword Coast only to realize someone in your party didn’t hop over that one gap, and now they’re stranded all the way across the map. Or when you jump a gap you’ll notice one party member just doesn’t seem to get the hint and won’t jump, leading you to select them, hop, and then the rest of the party hops back.
To avoid this, when you jump a gap and someone doesn’t follow simply jump in place. Select the jump action and pick somewhere right next to where you are. The clueless character will get the hint and hop over to stick with the rest of the group.
5 Potion Grenades
Potions are great for fast healing or a quick magical effect, but they’re one-use only and limited to a single character. That is, unless you throw them at several people at once, effectively showering multiple characters with the magical goo. You can make an AoE heal by tossing your healing potion of choice at several folks.
You can also toss a healing potion at a downed enemy if you can’t get close enough to help, and the healing effect will immediately get them back up. Best of all you can drop a potion on the ground around several people and then shoot it with an arrow if you want to trigger its effects later. Throwing the potion is an action, but an offhand attack to break the potion bottle is only a bonus action for some classes, like rogues.
4 Limitless Summons
Summons can really add some beef to your presence in the initiative order, and there’s plenty of summons to be found in Baldur’s Gate 3: Quasits, elementals, undead, planar allies, and more. If you summon a creature you can’t just keep casting the same spell to add more creatures, as recasting will just dismiss the creature.
But you can cast different summoning spells to have some undead, a quasit, a few different elementals, and a familiar. They’ll all stack together. You don’t even need to be a dedicated magic user like a Wizard or Sorcerer to do this either: you can use spells to summon many different types of creature to follow you around.
3 Prepare Spells Anytime
You don’t have to wait until your next level up or spend money at Withers to prepare different spells for your spellcaster. While not in combat, you can hit K on a keyboard or open your inventory and click the Spellbook option to open a list of all the spells your character knows. Prepared spells will appear at the top row by the book symbol.
To swap a prepared spell and replace it, just click on the prepared spell and pick a new one. You won’t see cantrips here, however, as they aren’t technically spells. Some casters only use Known Spells, which are gained by leveling up and can’t be changed outside of leveling up at all. Prepared casters can change their spells anytime with the above method. Clerics, Druids, Paladins, and Wizards can all prepare spells, while Bards, Sorcerers, Eldritch Knight Fighters, Arcane Trickster Rogues, Warlocks, and Rangers cannot prepare spells.
2 Group Up
Grouping up and splitting your party can help when disarming traps, avoiding dangerous terrain, sneaking, or playing the game in any manner of strategy. Instead of dragging and dropping the character portraits and hoping you’re all close enough to regroup once you’ve split, you can press G on a keyboard to quickly group your party if someone didn’t make the jump or was forgotten back when you were disarming traps.
If you’re too far apart to group, travel to a waypoint and then select the missing character’s portrait to play as them. Travel to the same waypoint and you’ll all be happily reunited.
1 No Auto Add
If you love a tidy inventory you will no doubt be frustrated by that pesky panel of potions and grenades and other inventory items constantly being reordered.
Go to your settings for Interface and disable Auto Add Potions, Auto Add Grenades, and so on until you’re happy. You can now have full control of what gets added to your hotbar of abilities and items without having to constantly manage it.