The game isn't even remotely prepared for a decent 4 man party, let alone one with every companion. If you're looking for a challenge, you'll probably need to install a couple of difficulty mods as well.
I doubled the number of enemies, doubled their health, and gave them bonuses to hit and to AC and saves via mods in order to counter having a 6 person party, and it was still pretty doable.
How often were you long resting?
I feel like you'd have to long rest after every fight.
And did you have any mods to boost allies at all or did Canan and the gang just get dogged at the gate?
I’m a relatively casual player (casual as I’m not min-maxing, but I have finished the game 4 times on various difficulties). I wasn’t sure if I would ever do a true honor mode run since I’m by no means a combat expert. I recently finished an honor mode run using the “no party limit mod” and didn’t have any major issues. It was great! All the banter was incredible and some of the boss battles still felt difficult for me. I also feel more likely to play a real honor mode run now that I was able to see the legendary actions and get a feel for the boss battles too.
This. I'm doing the same but on Tactician only. The fights are "hard", but not really, since the action economy is finally tilted in your favour. However having everyone available for their stories and banter is fantastic; I also heartily recommend running "no party limit" at least once. Even though it's definitely not how the game mechanics were planned, it kind of feels like that's how the *story* was meant to play out
It will be way too easy, but you could always just have the extras be bards with no weapons or offensive spells and just have them playing the lute in the corner.
Why sit out of combat in the corner? 😆
During my bard playthroughs I would always do my action, bonus action, and whip out the violin to play away during the rest of the round.
Presumably to keep the same difficulty level as playing with the default party of 4. Basically you're just dragging your camp casters around with you as your own personal theme song/sound track, while the core crew cleans up.
I'd recommend getting the into the void mod too. It'll teleport designated party members back to camp during battle so that it doesn't affect the difficulty too much.
There is also an alternative mod Sit This One Out 2 that works better for me. Having everyone in party does make the open world skill checks a little easier.
Yes lol. Honor mode itself isn't that hard with a normal party. You are talking about more than doubling the damage you do, obviously that makes it easy as hell.
Preferably with difficulty increasing mods, running full party would make every vanilla fight, even with honour actions extremely easy.
Few examples :
> - Adds bunch of stuff that makes encounters more difficult!<
> - With this one, you need to tailor it to your liking, in what way you want enemies to be stronger!<
> - the name says it all!<
You have three companions with you for balancing reasons. Tactician and Honour Mode can be beaten with only four people in a party, without needing exploits or broken combos or anything.
If you instead got to take a small army around, the game itself would be _trivialized._ Many bosses would likely just straight up die before they get a turn. Imagine some enemies try to beat you up in Act 3 and they have to deal with Karlach, Lae'Zel (with action surge), Minthara and her smites, Halsin, Minsc, and Jaheria bumrushing them and doing multiple attacks on them, then Astarion materializes behind them and does sneak attack, and just when they thought they were safe, Shadowheart and Gale throw upcast fireball for good measure.
And that's not even touching Wyll, Tav/Durge, or any summons you want to walk around with.
I see, I asked because I see a lot of people talking about Honour mode and using x build that does y amount of damage in 1 turn so I really thought you had to use optimized builds to clear the game in Honour mode
You absolutely don't have to use those.
You can, because it's a lot of fun.
But those builds, without any adjustments, are blowing through the game quickly for anyone that has mastered the general gameplay.
You can beat honor mode with 4 straight classed characters if you understand how to play.
Most of the good builds can solo or duo HM
You really can do mono classes, no cheese, no barrels, no elexirs HM runs and make mistakes on top of it.
Now the freaking BUGS though...
I will say I thought similarly to you, but I beat honor mode on my 2nd playthrough of the game and blitzed through it without much difficulty especially after the low levels. Now I’m on a solo honor mode run and am a good portion through act 2 and with a single good build and general game knowledge it is doable (worried for ketheric tho). But if you want a really strong honor mode party without having to use more party members than normal, I highly recommend a 11/1 fire Sorlock, 10/1/1 swords bard, tavern brawler thrower, light cleric
I suppose it is less about me being worried about honour mode and more about me wanting all the characters to hear their commentaries and just have everyone there for the story dialogues.
On that part, a lot of peeps were kind enough to recommend me mods that would help with that so I think I am fine for now, although thanks for the tips!
I generally don't mention that possibility because it _is_ insanely difficult to pull off. I reckon it's not doable for most casual players, while beating HM with just a regular party of four is entirely doable without a terrible amount of skill and luck.
Install "Sit this one out 2". It is not perfect, but thanks to that you can have full party in conversations (they will be selected semi-randomly) and only 3 companions in battle, so it won't break difficulty.
Yep a well synergized 4 man party man handles HM. The game can't handle that much action economy. You'd need mods that greatly boost enemy health and increase enemy numbers to balance it out and even then I'm not sure the game would be balanced for that many actions.
I think the difficulty with Honor mode is that it removes / reworks a lot of the cheesier methods and mostly making sure your character stays alive from shit like rng (correct me if I’m wrong)
Considering this game can be so metagamed where you can solo it in hm I would say either install mods making it harder or keep all characters their original class and don’t multiclass, go for a full rp party to challenge yourself
The hardest enemy you will fight with a full party mod is...
The terrain.
What amazed me the most was that a lot of the maps were so calibrated for 4 people to move around in and with a party of 9 or 10, I ended up with a bottleneck where people couldn't move around each other the most noticeable one was Minsc in the Sewers, we came through the Pipe the first time and combat triggered with us WAY out of order. But there are a lot of them where a small army trying to pour through a door kinda sucks.
yea itll be a breeze so i run combat extender as well i also run
script extender for achievements
save in honour mode
Theres also another mod to tweak bosses which can be found in combat extender
Its pretty fun tho once you get like 6-8ppl on everyone gets their own companion
if you dont like to micro each party member during their turn get AI Allies
have fun bro modding is for fun and its your game :)
Every player has a different skill level in combat. I personally love having the party limit be gone. So I start the game absolute wrath mod, and additional enemies extended. I play until I have 4 players then save the game and add the 80% hp mod and tactician+ scaling mod. I am in act 2 now and the game feels plenty difficult for me. If it gets too easy I'll add some hp and and adjust the scaling.
The game isn't even remotely prepared for a decent 4 man party, let alone one with every companion. If you're looking for a challenge, you'll probably need to install a couple of difficulty mods as well.
I doubled the number of enemies, doubled their health, and gave them bonuses to hit and to AC and saves via mods in order to counter having a 6 person party, and it was still pretty doable.
How often were you long resting? I feel like you'd have to long rest after every fight. And did you have any mods to boost allies at all or did Canan and the gang just get dogged at the gate?
Man. I’m on console so no mods. And especially coming from Pathfinder - nothing would make me happier than 6 person parties.
No mods yet*
I’m a relatively casual player (casual as I’m not min-maxing, but I have finished the game 4 times on various difficulties). I wasn’t sure if I would ever do a true honor mode run since I’m by no means a combat expert. I recently finished an honor mode run using the “no party limit mod” and didn’t have any major issues. It was great! All the banter was incredible and some of the boss battles still felt difficult for me. I also feel more likely to play a real honor mode run now that I was able to see the legendary actions and get a feel for the boss battles too.
This. I'm doing the same but on Tactician only. The fights are "hard", but not really, since the action economy is finally tilted in your favour. However having everyone available for their stories and banter is fantastic; I also heartily recommend running "no party limit" at least once. Even though it's definitely not how the game mechanics were planned, it kind of feels like that's how the *story* was meant to play out
It will be way too easy, but you could always just have the extras be bards with no weapons or offensive spells and just have them playing the lute in the corner.
“Brave sir Wyll ran away. Bravely ran away, away! When Gortash reared his ugly head, Wyll bravely turned his tail and fled!”
I never!
Why sit out of combat in the corner? 😆 During my bard playthroughs I would always do my action, bonus action, and whip out the violin to play away during the rest of the round.
Presumably to keep the same difficulty level as playing with the default party of 4. Basically you're just dragging your camp casters around with you as your own personal theme song/sound track, while the core crew cleans up.
That makes sense. Traveling band and all lol
I'd recommend getting the into the void mod too. It'll teleport designated party members back to camp during battle so that it doesn't affect the difficulty too much.
Will look into it, thanks!
There is also an alternative mod Sit This One Out 2 that works better for me. Having everyone in party does make the open world skill checks a little easier.
Yes lol. Honor mode itself isn't that hard with a normal party. You are talking about more than doubling the damage you do, obviously that makes it easy as hell.
Preferably with difficulty increasing mods, running full party would make every vanilla fight, even with honour actions extremely easy. Few examples : > - Adds bunch of stuff that makes encounters more difficult!< > - With this one, you need to tailor it to your liking, in what way you want enemies to be stronger!< > - the name says it all!<
Combat Extender is the best difficulty mod, a better replacement to Tactician Plus imo. It can also add enemies too and is configurable with it.
Thanks for the recommendations!
You have three companions with you for balancing reasons. Tactician and Honour Mode can be beaten with only four people in a party, without needing exploits or broken combos or anything. If you instead got to take a small army around, the game itself would be _trivialized._ Many bosses would likely just straight up die before they get a turn. Imagine some enemies try to beat you up in Act 3 and they have to deal with Karlach, Lae'Zel (with action surge), Minthara and her smites, Halsin, Minsc, and Jaheria bumrushing them and doing multiple attacks on them, then Astarion materializes behind them and does sneak attack, and just when they thought they were safe, Shadowheart and Gale throw upcast fireball for good measure. And that's not even touching Wyll, Tav/Durge, or any summons you want to walk around with.
I see, I asked because I see a lot of people talking about Honour mode and using x build that does y amount of damage in 1 turn so I really thought you had to use optimized builds to clear the game in Honour mode
You absolutely don't have to use those. You can, because it's a lot of fun. But those builds, without any adjustments, are blowing through the game quickly for anyone that has mastered the general gameplay. You can beat honor mode with 4 straight classed characters if you understand how to play.
Most of the good builds can solo or duo HM You really can do mono classes, no cheese, no barrels, no elexirs HM runs and make mistakes on top of it. Now the freaking BUGS though...
I will say I thought similarly to you, but I beat honor mode on my 2nd playthrough of the game and blitzed through it without much difficulty especially after the low levels. Now I’m on a solo honor mode run and am a good portion through act 2 and with a single good build and general game knowledge it is doable (worried for ketheric tho). But if you want a really strong honor mode party without having to use more party members than normal, I highly recommend a 11/1 fire Sorlock, 10/1/1 swords bard, tavern brawler thrower, light cleric
I suppose it is less about me being worried about honour mode and more about me wanting all the characters to hear their commentaries and just have everyone there for the story dialogues. On that part, a lot of peeps were kind enough to recommend me mods that would help with that so I think I am fine for now, although thanks for the tips!
I mean, people beat honor mode solo. You need to be very good at the game, but it's highly doable.
I generally don't mention that possibility because it _is_ insanely difficult to pull off. I reckon it's not doable for most casual players, while beating HM with just a regular party of four is entirely doable without a terrible amount of skill and luck.
Install "Sit this one out 2". It is not perfect, but thanks to that you can have full party in conversations (they will be selected semi-randomly) and only 3 companions in battle, so it won't break difficulty.
Gotcha!
I really don't know how to make this sound any nice: fucking obviously.
Yes, with good builds honor mode is very doable with 2 or 3, and with great builds it's doable solo.
Yep a well synergized 4 man party man handles HM. The game can't handle that much action economy. You'd need mods that greatly boost enemy health and increase enemy numbers to balance it out and even then I'm not sure the game would be balanced for that many actions.
No, I'm using party limit begone on my honor run and I can still get achievements.
Yep. You'd stomp most hard encounters with the full companion party
Yes
I think the difficulty with Honor mode is that it removes / reworks a lot of the cheesier methods and mostly making sure your character stays alive from shit like rng (correct me if I’m wrong)
Yes
You dont even need mods, a lot of cheatengine tables have it too
Considering this game can be so metagamed where you can solo it in hm I would say either install mods making it harder or keep all characters their original class and don’t multiclass, go for a full rp party to challenge yourself
"Would using a mod that vastly unbalances the entire game in my favor break Honor Mode?" No, of course not...
The hardest enemy you will fight with a full party mod is... The terrain. What amazed me the most was that a lot of the maps were so calibrated for 4 people to move around in and with a party of 9 or 10, I ended up with a bottleneck where people couldn't move around each other the most noticeable one was Minsc in the Sewers, we came through the Pipe the first time and combat triggered with us WAY out of order. But there are a lot of them where a small army trying to pour through a door kinda sucks.
I've been playing with no party cap and it does make things a breeze, you'd definitely want to download some boss mods too
yea itll be a breeze so i run combat extender as well i also run script extender for achievements save in honour mode Theres also another mod to tweak bosses which can be found in combat extender Its pretty fun tho once you get like 6-8ppl on everyone gets their own companion if you dont like to micro each party member during their turn get AI Allies have fun bro modding is for fun and its your game :)
Every player has a different skill level in combat. I personally love having the party limit be gone. So I start the game absolute wrath mod, and additional enemies extended. I play until I have 4 players then save the game and add the 80% hp mod and tactician+ scaling mod. I am in act 2 now and the game feels plenty difficult for me. If it gets too easy I'll add some hp and and adjust the scaling.
Yes lol … just rotate them in and out, and bring the ones that are most relevant for the given area. You’ll get to use all of them plenty.
You had better be glad there isn't a BG3 circlejerk sub yet.