hi! me again. decided I will make another attempt to have a solo honour run with Astarion, albeit not right away, only occasionally and very carefully. love Neil's voice acting, curious to learn all about Astarion's backstory and consider him probably the least weird origin character plus love the buff from his _Vampiric Bite_ . all reasons why he is the first origin character I've ever tried to play. will try to make a successful duo run first before I enter more dangerous territory with Astarion 3.0 and in the meantime watch your videos for clues what to look out for. the build for my Astarion seems solid enough: it's the _Ice Knight_ . I love wizard builds but two levels in another class is alright for me too. so , good luck for your journey. 🤞hope you won't mind if I'll make some remarks along the way or even ask some stupid questions. I'm still learning the game.
I don't mind you asking questions! I'll answer as best I can. I learned a lot of what I know by watching videos myself. And I don't claim to be an expert here. I will say, if I wanted an easier time of this I'd follow the standard stealth archer build that's quite overpowered. I'm TRYING to make this work as a single class Arcane Trickster, which tbh might be a bit more off than I can chew. Buuuuuuuuut I've seen people do MUCH more restrictive Honour Mode runs so I'm sure it's possible! Maybe I need to go watch those again myself for some more ideas on survivability.
40:49 why didn't it work that smoothly when my Astarion did the same with 'unconscious' Shadowheart after crashlanding the nautiloid? she woke up hostile and my Astarion hid too?
A valid question! I can only offer a guess here: Aradin is knocked out until you Interact with him just like Shadowheart is, BUT Shadowheart is a companion with a very specific cutscene in that instance. It may very well just be a developer oversight that Astarion's bite in that circumstance activates the cutscene and/or gets her up and makes her hostile. In my opinion, you should totally be able to sneak a bite from Shadowheart at that time and I'm sorry it didn't work out for you when you tried it.
You don't have to manually choose to use Sneak Attack. In fact, it's on by default unless you manually switch it to asking if you want to do Sneak Attack when available. Actually, I recommend toggling the Ask to on because there are certain circumstances you won't want to use Sneak Attack (such as when you're very likely to finish off a target anyway and you want to use Sneak Attack on another target in the same round, or if you want to try to hold out for a critical attack for certain builds). Edit to add: meaning, essentially, I did in fact use Sneak Attack here even though it doesn't look like I chose that option.
Oh! And while I certainly don't want to discourage watching my videos if you're enjoying them, I feel like I should point out what you're watching right now has been restarted at video 009. The videos leading up to that were... just not feasible to recreate in Honour Mode and I had learned enough to realize I needed to take a different opening sequence.
@@Turantula oh, ok. hope, it wasn't because Barth died and getting the _Ring of Protection_ is now more difficult. thanks for the warning but will watch them anyway. learned some minor details already and hope to learn more.^^
@@embreis2257 Amusing side note: I'm over 20 attempts in, most of which do get at least as far as the goblin raid. Barth.... has a very low survival rate lmao
hi! me again. decided I will make another attempt to have a solo honour run with Astarion, albeit not right away, only occasionally and very carefully. love Neil's voice acting, curious to learn all about Astarion's backstory and consider him probably the least weird origin character plus love the buff from his _Vampiric Bite_ . all reasons why he is the first origin character I've ever tried to play.
will try to make a successful duo run first before I enter more dangerous territory with Astarion 3.0 and in the meantime watch your videos for clues what to look out for.
the build for my Astarion seems solid enough: it's the _Ice Knight_ . I love wizard builds but two levels in another class is alright for me too.
so , good luck for your journey. 🤞hope you won't mind if I'll make some remarks along the way or even ask some stupid questions. I'm still learning the game.
I don't mind you asking questions! I'll answer as best I can. I learned a lot of what I know by watching videos myself. And I don't claim to be an expert here. I will say, if I wanted an easier time of this I'd follow the standard stealth archer build that's quite overpowered. I'm TRYING to make this work as a single class Arcane Trickster, which tbh might be a bit more off than I can chew. Buuuuuuuuut I've seen people do MUCH more restrictive Honour Mode runs so I'm sure it's possible! Maybe I need to go watch those again myself for some more ideas on survivability.
40:49 why didn't it work that smoothly when my Astarion did the same with 'unconscious' Shadowheart after crashlanding the nautiloid? she woke up hostile and my Astarion hid too?
A valid question! I can only offer a guess here: Aradin is knocked out until you Interact with him just like Shadowheart is, BUT Shadowheart is a companion with a very specific cutscene in that instance. It may very well just be a developer oversight that Astarion's bite in that circumstance activates the cutscene and/or gets her up and makes her hostile. In my opinion, you should totally be able to sneak a bite from Shadowheart at that time and I'm sorry it didn't work out for you when you tried it.
33:28 why not use _sneak attack_ when you meet the requirements (having advantage because of being hidden)? 🤔
You don't have to manually choose to use Sneak Attack. In fact, it's on by default unless you manually switch it to asking if you want to do Sneak Attack when available. Actually, I recommend toggling the Ask to on because there are certain circumstances you won't want to use Sneak Attack (such as when you're very likely to finish off a target anyway and you want to use Sneak Attack on another target in the same round, or if you want to try to hold out for a critical attack for certain builds).
Edit to add: meaning, essentially, I did in fact use Sneak Attack here even though it doesn't look like I chose that option.
Oh! And while I certainly don't want to discourage watching my videos if you're enjoying them, I feel like I should point out what you're watching right now has been restarted at video 009. The videos leading up to that were... just not feasible to recreate in Honour Mode and I had learned enough to realize I needed to take a different opening sequence.
@@Turantula oh, ok. hope, it wasn't because Barth died and getting the _Ring of Protection_ is now more difficult.
thanks for the warning but will watch them anyway. learned some minor details already and hope to learn more.^^
@@embreis2257 Amusing side note: I'm over 20 attempts in, most of which do get at least as far as the goblin raid. Barth.... has a very low survival rate lmao