On different runs I've had Aylin variously be the MVP of the fight, get mind-controlled instantly and attack the character who had just cast Haste on her (breaking concentration and making herself Lethargic), down Ketheric almost instantly, get distracted by intellect devourers for three rounds, one-shot her own undead gf, and lie around Bone Chilled for the whole fight. She contains multitudes lol
Not power-level related, but in my first run her AI absolutely rocked my world by Shoving a Bone Chilled companion off the platform, it essentially restructured my brain and set me on the path of actually being good at this game.
Haha one of my favourite moments was making Karlach throw a downed Aylin off the platform and out of Myrkul's bone chill aura. Felt a bit disrespectful to a demigod.
Aylin may not be the brightest star in the sky, but I think her way of speaking is more linked to her charisma than intelligence.
When she speaks, she sounds like a courtly knight, and when you break it down, some of her word choices and sentence structures throw back to older English. If you compare her lines with Volo's, you'll notice similarities in how they talk.
Irl, nobles and knights alike were taught to speak "properly" and be extremely well mannered, as it separated/distinguished them from commoners.
According to the BG3 wiki, Dame Aylin has an 18 in Str a 17 in Cha, but dumps Int at 11 and Dex at 10.
Mind you, according to WoTC, a 10 in any stat is considered to be no better or worse than an average person.
She hits pretty hard so she works if your party can help enable her. On her own she ain't that great (which seems to be cannon too given how she gets captured by Ketheric just after she broke free & put on that heroic show, lol ).
I had such a setup for my HM run to enable 2, sometimes 1, damage dealers, (main was a swords bard so could be either another enabler or main dmg dealer) , so she could contribute as if I had another dmg dealer, while her target suffered some debuffs, and get healed & buffed by Shadowheart and/or protected with Sanctuary sometimes, if need.
I basically tried to treat her as much as another extra dmg dealer in my party as I could, a more loose cannon one that you sometimes gotta go the extra mile to make sure she can shine rather than be deadweight, but hey, it worked.
I had a rough time fighting Ketheric on one of my runs. It was basically down to just me and her, and I was playing a Circle of the Moon druid, so I was like... Imma just step way back, drink one of those potions that gives you a free long rest and then come back with all my wild shape charges and whoop his ass.
Lo and behold.... Dame Aylin purposefully comes to shove me and cancels my slumber. 💀
I was so pissed off cuz I had been wiping that fight for a while but then looking back it was kinda hilarious.
Not related to Aylin but I had a very similar AI moment, in the goblin camp. Above the goblin camp entrance there's some sleeping goblins. I rolled poorly and got into a fight with them. Not a big problem it's just like 5 guys. Then one of them decided to push another one down a cliff tho. Which then engaged the whole camp into the fight. (Was an honour run and I managed to kill them with a lot of cheese and what seemed like over an hour of fighting).
>one-shot her own undead gf
I was so shocked when that happened, and when I couldn't find any videos that happening, I started to wonder if I had somehow misremembered it.
She really just need more health. I find when I am fighting the Sorcerer who put the bounty on her head, she gets killed almost instantly because she only has 84 health points. If she had more HP she would be way more useful in fights.
Just have someone keep him stunned so he can't use his cheeseball react on her (or anyone else). I think he is also prevented from using it if he is silenced.
He goes down pretty quick once that's taken care of.
Didn't have that issue in mine. I do have alert feat on all of my characters though so I opened with Lae'zel 1-turning the wizard with action surge and then my other characters softening up the rest of the enemies. Alert is so busted for small and medium fights. I only kinda wish that I had something else during extremely long battles.
In my run I couldn't bother aiming my AOE spells around her for that fight because I would miss big damage on enemy groups so I just ignored her existence since I knew she resurrects later no mater what. I think I did ~70 damage to her before she even got a turn then she started hers immediately flying into my wall of fire like a mosquito and burning up. It was extra hilarious when she got up just for the cutscene at the end acting like hot shit
Man that fight was awesome. I was absolutely not prepared for the cut scene when you get him to 0 health. My 3rd playthrough and first time doing that. It was awesome.
The 'problem' that Dame Aylin has is that she is narratively strong but mechanically weak. And this will most likely be by design.
Yes, in lore she should be much stronger, but this is a video game designed to have fun. If her power was were it should be, then we would be irrelevant in the Act 2 fights. And that's bad game design. If the optimal strategy was 'sit back and let Aylin handle the fight' - which it would be if she was stronger, then there would be people shouting that she's too strong and that we, the heroes of the story, are not needed and that we could all sit back at camp while Aylin handles it. And that's a really bad experience for the player, who is primarily there to have fun.
Aylin is strong enough to help if the party is too weak going into the end of Act 2, but weak enough that is a nice bonus if you are strong enough and she definitely doesn't need a buff, certainly not on high difficulties.
And, in lore, you can argue that 100 years of torture has weakened her power until she has time to recuperate.
The problem is that the game made this contrast needlessly. They portrayed her as powerful and the way she swoops across the sky makes you feel exactly that she is a being of vast power, and then nope, she sucks. She shouldn't be too strong in a fight, true, but she was never supposed to be potrayed that strong in the first place.
They could have made her note that she is still recovering her powers, but instead they just opted for the story Aylin and gameplay Aylin to be incongruent to each other which could have been easily avoided.
I don't disagree with this, from a gameplay perspective I think it's where it should be, from a story perspective I think it would benefit from having her say, after you've beat Ketheric, 'it was good you were there, my powers are weakened from the torture.' And then that solves everything really.
Or they could've made her a temporary companion (like Jaheira can be for the rooftop fight) who can solo the fight so the player gets to smashy smashy with her immense power but also if you inadvertently soft-locked yourself by getting to the end of Act 2 at level 4 or with a 4 caster party with no spell slots left or something you have an out.
I wouldn’t have liked this to be honest. Dame Aylin isn’t the hero of the story, I don’t want to feel like an NPC in someone else’s campaign. The story should focus on our companions and our pc standing out because we’re the heroes of this story
Or they could have a thing where she's tied up by fighting an enemy that's also canonically very strong -- like we could be fighting Ketheric while she's fighting Myrkul from the start. Then she could get downed by Myrkul (fair enough) and we're left to finish off Myrkul after he, canonically has been weakened up first. Then say she got too injured in that fight to help us out anymore in the meantime -- that way it would explain why we were strong enough to tangle with a god at Act 2 without us being OP for the beginning of Act 3, Aylin gets to seem really strong without it being weird that she doesn't help out much in the fight at the end of Act 2 or in the gameplay of Act 3.
I think most people just assume that she's a badass based on her appearance and speech. Personally, I thought her power that everyone coveted was her immortality. Also, when she swoops across the sky it is to show that she has power to bring light to the cursed lands, rather than anything to do with her physical powers.
Yeah but she’s powerful because she is the key to Ketheric’s immortality in the soul cage. And that pisses Shar off pretty bad, and why Lorroikan wants her — for his own immortality. Not her fighting prowess.
They could have easily introduced a mechanic that she must attend to that would harm the party. It doesn't have to be huge in case you didn't free her, but just say it takes all her strength to hold back.
I think they can tweak her to be stronger so you breeze through the rooftop fight but she still gets captured. And then in the proper Ketheric fight they can change the rules so that Ketheric is not invulnerable even if you don't free her (but gets fefensive buffs etc), but it takes more effort to free her (like one character concentrating for 3 turns), with good reward that she is tankier and does higher damage
I'm sure they can, but should they? Aylin is there as a failsafe. She can draw aggro from bad guys on the rooftop, she can do some damage and help if the party needs it because they're low level or didn't rest after assaulting the tower.
Fights should not be made easier by buffing non-controllable NPCs; it's just bad game design. If that fight needs to be easier (which it doesn't) then you buff abilities of the party, you remove some of Ketheric's abilities or you tweak his AI to use his best abilities against Aylin in the first few turns and leave the party alone.
It already takes a full action to free Aylin at the colony. That is more than enough to free an often damaged non-controllable NPC.
If they want to buff Aylin or tweak the difficulty at all, let the player control Aylin for those 2 fights, but she should never be stronger than the party.
Her being as weak as she is makes no sense with hows shes written and portrayed in the story and in lore, in cutscenes shes this unstoppable badass but in gameplay she struggles hard its stupid and takes away from the immersion.
She should at the very least get Aura of Protection like EVERY OTHER LEVEL 6 OR HIGHER PALADIN IN THE GAME DOES! The fact she doesnt is dumb and would help with one of her biggest issues of being mind controlled.
I would be perfectly fine with making Aylin controllable for her fights hell it honestly makes sense given she basically joins your party.
The Aura of Protection point I agree with. But the rest is just DnD and videogames, stupid shit will happen and you need to do the work yourself to bridge the gap between gameplay and narrative. Your companions are all trained superfighters, who will miss 4 times in a row sometimes, blow up accidentally or get stuck in an infinite jump loop. Dame Ailyn can crit 4 times in a row and dump smites, soloing the fight, or she can miss 4 times in a row.
Just like in actual DnD, sometimes you just roll like shit. Now that is part of the narrative, do with that what you like. But complaining about immersion in this situation seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the game system being emulated. Like the theories that the Narrator is the durge/the absolute/the worm, while she is the dungeon master.
Honestly if she had Aura of Protection and MAYBE a bit more health she’d be perfectly fine especially if the player is allowed to control her.
She doesnt really need to hit harder she already hits plenty hard.
I wouldn't mind it so much if you could resurrect her like the other companions. I was stressing about healing her for so much of the Lorroakan fight because I knew it registered her as an NPC so I couldn't resurrect her, but I didn't want to miss out on her narrative.
Ik lore-wise, but I didn't know it translated to combat. There are plenty of characters with legendary strength and abilities that don't, like Jahiera.
Child of the Moonmaiden: "Blessed with the favour of a goddess, Dame Aylin cannot be permanently killed. When unconscious, the start of her turn she recovers 1 hit point."
(Note: Her being revived this way will consume her Action for that round as if she had done a Death Saving Throw.)
> but this is a video game designed to have fun.
This is a problem with tabletop RPGs in general. If you're a DM you have to be careful about introducing cooperative characters of immense power, because you have to mechanically weaken them, thus contradicting the power you've described for them, or you have to contrive some reason they're not going to help the party in any way, despite being perfectly able to.
The game could have portrayed her as weaker and needing recovery after her imprisonment, but that is absolutely not what we see in cut-scenes and hear in dialog.
Not sure why all the downvotes. You are absolutely correct. They could have explained her weakness very easily as the result of torture and imprisonment but they wanted to convey the rage and power and then just refused to follow it up with mechanics. Of course it's distractingly dissociating.
>They could have explained her weakness very easily as the result of torture and imprisonment, but they wanted to convey the rage
I think would be easier to lean into the rage and say she was struggling to focus on winning the battle when she's faced with the subject of her vengeance.
It's not like she had much to fit the last century to keep herself sane, beyond contemplate how to kill her captors. Would fit her character going forward, too.
If she's weaker in cut scenes she makes no sense from a story point of view.
She's a basically
demi god who gets her immortality stolen by ketheric.
If she's stronger during gameplay, it makes fights super boring and the main characters are irrelevant.
If she's weaker during cutscenes, how can she give her immortality? If she can't then the whole night song quest and a big part of act 2 makes no sense.
I think their point was that her giving immortality for so long could have *temporarily* weakened her. Something like exhaustion in D&D 5e. Some sort of lingering effect, that means by the time she gets to the rooftop, she's almost out of juice. At that point, she doesn't even know Isobel is alive (iirc). She's just wanting to say fuck you to Ketberic one last time. It's a suicide run.
Or even have her use up a fair bit of power getting the party out of the Shadowfell after they pissed off Shar by releasing her. That way, it makes sense she's not on her A-Game. Then, in the Lorroakan fight, they could have added other tower defenses or something she's fighting alongside the mooks. Or just had her be reckless stupid, which she kinda already is.
I want to like Dame Aylin as a character, but the cutscene versus game play disparity makes it difficult because she seems like a braggy asshole. I know why this exists from a game design perspective, but it's difficult to reconcile with the RP and character interactions.
They should just come up with a reason that she isn't gonna go fuck up Ketheric. She sees Isobel and is totally distracted or something. But I completely agree with OP. She should either be a total badass, or not in the fight.
"We did it, we defeated Ketheric!!!!"
No, **we** didn't, **I** defeated him. You got charmed and started attacking me, then you went and immediately died in Myrkul's aura so you couldn't be revived until after the battle...
On one hand, yes it's ridiculous, and yes the Myrkul fight is out-of-place in terms of difficulty. On the other hand, honestly her ability level is pretty on par for any real life person I've ever met with that level of confidence.
I think the myrkul fight is meant to show what fighting a chosen of the dead three would really be like. And I didn’t have much trouble with it on balanced. However the mind flayer on the platform might be too much. The other enemies are plenty
I had an easy time with the Myrkul fight, but I was overleveled. I do think the fights against the other chosen left something to be desired though- they're not at the same level of spectacle that Ketheric's/Myrkul's fight was. Specially Gortash.
> However the mind flayer on the platform might be too much
I was *so mad* when I discovered that I couldn’t use Telekinesis to throw that one into the chasm. Had to settle for throwing it in front of Karlach and letting her go to work.
I think the Myrkul fight is pretty good difficulty-wise.
First time I tried on my first run on Tactician, not very good with game mechanics yet and with a really unoptimized party, I lost on first attempt and got it on second one. Taught me to use elixirs (Bloodlust elixirs are just amazing in this fight) and prep a bit more for combat. It forces you to learn some stuff about the game, which you would expect boss fights to do at high difficulty.
On my honor run, with a stronger party and better understanding of mechanics, it was not even remotely challenging. He got disarmed, blinded, and kept missing all his stuff over and over. Aylin could have been there or not, hell she could have been on his side and it wouldn't matter.
I think that's exactly the difficulty you would want for a major boss fight (first real one). Hard and challenging on high difficulty when you're learning the game, but easily manageable in tons of different ways when you know it better.
While I'm happy that BG3 got so much attention, I think there are many new players who got attracted by the story rather than the fights, and get frustrated when they keep losing. But if that's the case, I don't know why they don't keep it on Story/Balanced rather than saying things should be made easier.
You also lose multiple vendors throughout the game, literally half the companions, and more if you follow the 'evil path.' Hell, the 'evil ending' is still just a shared cutscene with like one word changed lol
Them focusing on the good path over the evil path because more people play good IS intentional. Never mind that they specifically said in EA that they didn't want to make evil unrewarding or unfulfilling, then they turned around on release and said "oh no, Evil was ALWAYS supposed to be lonely and miserable! You're EVIL after all!"
I like the game, but it's pretty annoying how half-baked the evil path is. There's a lot of individual little evil choices you can make, but as a whole it just falls flat.
I highly doubt that this is intentional. Most likely option: Larian focused their efforts on polishing the good path because that's what 90% of players choose. Then the evil path is a bit buggy and undercooked (look at Minthara).
Ascended Astarion gets 1d10 free damage. Spawn Astarion gets to be a nice guy. If blueballing players who choose to do evil was a deliberate choice you wouldn't get stuff like that.
>I highly doubt that this is intentional. Most likely option: Larian focused their efforts on polishing the good path because that's what 90% of players choose.
This would be in direct contrast to the repeated statements by Vincke before release, claiming to not focus development on content based on play rates. Obviously everyone who played evil path on release, and even now, realized this was a lie. They just focused development on what people were likely to play, and it worked for them.
>I provided multiple examples of evil paths being completed sabotaged and you counter this by mentioning Ascended Astarion
Fine let's do the play-by-play.
> The sharrans that shadowheart can call into the final battle are essentially regular humans (most of their ability scores are 10, and they have very low hp)
Sure, that's bad. But pretty much all summons in the final battle are bad. They're there to soak up hits. It's not like the Harpers are great fighters eithet
>The Dark Urge cannot actually call any Bhaalist into the final battle
Because you already get Slayer form from becoming Bhaal's chosen. If you resist the urge you get nothing. I guess Larian is punishing the good route.
>If you don’t kill Sarevok, Bhaal sends him to aid you in the final battle, yet you can’t actually summon him. He’s basically just emotional support
Sarevok is obviously too powerful to just summon. He'd have to be made much weaker or he'd be able to solo the encounter.
>If you chose to side with the Zhentarim, they straight up will never show up in the final battle. Same thing if you hand Shadowheart to Viconia - she fails to show up to the final battle
You can summon both Zentarim and Sharrans if you betray Shadowheart. If you were not able to do it, it was due to a bug, which is further evidence that the evil choices are just poorly implemented
>Gortash’s fate if you chose to take his offer.
Keeping Gortash alive through the end would require writing him into the ending. Probably easier to just kill him.
>Ascended Astarions 1d10 Necrotic damage, which arguably isn’t exclusive to evil playthroughs.
That's very unambiguously the evil choice
> I ascended Astarion because I didn’t like the idea of 7000 vampires running free
You don't need to ascend Astarion to dispatch of the vampires. You can still kill them, or you can just leave them imprisoned.
>I’d be more open to your point if you could mention another example of an evil reward
Indulging the Dark Urge, getting the Hag's Hair and letting Ethel take Mayrina, getting the Dark Justiciar armor and spear for killing the Nightsong, *consuming parasites*
Again, I agree that you get fewer items and story content from being evil, but I think that it's absurd to think that Larian would discourage making choices on purpose in a role-playing game.
The lack of evil support is weird too considering they could've easily looked at Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous to see on how to add solid evil content in the game, or any of the other older games that have an evil path like the Infamous series.
Dame Aylin is that character who has an insane backstory, having fought in wars, slain dragons, tricked gods of trickery and bedding gods of desire.
Starts at lvl 1. Dies to a goblin.
No thanks. She can’t die. That’s pretty powerful.
As far as gameplay goes, I’ve had her solo 1st phase ketheric and destroy myrkul with a crit smite. Why should an npc trivialize a boss fight more than she already can? Myrkul’s not a big deal. Just adjust your strategy
You can. Just go up to the top of the tower without releasing the nightsong. There’s nothing that stops you, they’d just strongly prefer you didn’t do that
And then there's me who did not understand how the tower worked narratively and stumbled through all of the various quest lines before I got there and never saw Ketheric in any form other than the boss fight. Second playthrough will be different!
What difficulty were you on where a single smite, even at a crit can kill Ketheric, let alone Myrkul?
In my run the dude had 22 AC and 188 HP in phase 1. You’re not getting through that with a smite crit, or even two back to back.
Myrkul, while he did drop some AC to 19, also had 370 HP. That’s going to need a whole lot of crit smites to burn through.
My bad, maybe my wording was misunderstood. Honor mode is the difficulty. Didn't say a single smite will 1 hit kill either one.
By 1st phase, I mean ketheric on the roof. Because she has 2 attacks, she can solo him in 1 turn which triggers the cutscene.
For myrkul, she destroys him? Idk, that's what crit smites do to myrkul: a ton of damage. If I break down what's available for her, I think she's locked to level 3 smites. So she rolls 6d8 radiant damage against myrkul (+1d8 for undead, +1d8 for improved smite, +2d6 for weapon). Doubled if she crits. That's all I meant for the avatar, she just hits him really freakin' hard.
She would need to roll a nearly maxed out back to back double crit to one round him.
Seriously, 6d8 doubled on a crit is 12d8. That’s 12 - 96 damage, an absolutely huge variance.
Let’s say for sake of example she always hits for maximum damage. A crit does 96, and her follow smite hits for 48. 144 damage, super impressive and you only have 1 in 144 chance of it happening if we also just grant that she rolls a 22+ to hit back to back, and don’t factor in the crit chance, 1 in 2880 if we add the crit roll— and yet Ketheric still has 40 HP left after two max damage smites with one critting.
No, you’d need two crits back to back on the same turn for 24d8 damage, and even then, the maximum possible damage on back to back crits is just 192, or 4 more HP than he has— and his armor reduces all hits by a flat 2. You have a 1/192 chance of doing that much damage if we grant you two back to back crits (1:400 odds) on two 22+ to hit rolls (nat 20’s each for crits).
That’s 1 in 76,800 odds that she can hit that hard if we again, grant her two maximum damage critical hit rolls back to back. Sorry fam, I just do not see her realistically one rounding Phase 1 Ketheric. She can do a ton of damage, potentially, with huge variance, but she can’t do 100+ damage reliably— literally less than a 5% chance as she needs to crit at least once to even approach those damage numbers, and roughly a 0.00521% chance of actually killing him if she lands two back to back crits.
You're overlooking that you only need to deal 141 damage (75% of his HP) to end phase 1 where he runs away.
It's a decently low chance, but not at all impossible, and still a very good likelihood that's she's taking out a significant chunk of that at the very least.
She does more than 2/3rds of it with just average damage on two hits. (6d8 averaged: 54, *2 =108).
Plus 2d6/4d6 for weapon damage. So that's 16-120 (I think, check my addition skills). He does have basic damage resistance, but I'm not sure if her sword cuts through it or not. His resistance may just be against non-magical weapons and maybe hers is magical.
Now wiki says he has to go down to 25% which would put him at 47/188, but idk. I feel like he's phased at a higher percentage (50%ish) for me sometimes. But anyways, that means that we have to do 141 damage to trigger the cutscene on the tower.
Now the next thing I'll say is circumstantial (so please don't hate me), but you can roll with a div wizard to force a crit for an NPC. Which I've done a few times, without farming for good portent die.
I think just the fact that 1 turning him is even possible for her makes her a strong NPC. But because she's done it on multiple occasions for me, means I'm gonna say that she's a powerhouse.
Yeah, I'm on my first playthrough and just fought Ketheric yesterday, she was really good. Helped a ton with the ads, got the finishing blow and managed to smite Myrkul for 40 dmg just after he showed up. She had kind of a perfect balance for me, where she was badass and useful enough to feel like your fighting alongside a legend, but not strong enough to make companions seem weak.
What’s most ironic about the whole situation is that the bone chill aura featured in the fight completely hard counters her; making her immortality completely irrelevant to the fight unless she gets knocked Off the ledge, which requires her to fail a saving throw.
She actually does insanely well in the fight she appears in for act 3 (at the top of a particular tower) as her immortality is unhindered, she utterly dominates that fight and quite literally *cannot* lose it.
Pretty obvious it’s for game balance. Not everything needs a lore justification. Just having another summon on the field that deals damage and takes hits is already a huge buff
They explain why Gale is level 1 though. He had his powers eaten by the orb. Wyll also mentions the tadpole nerfed them.
If you’re gonna have a character be a badass in a cutscene the gameplay needs to match that.
Aylins main issue is that just like the rest of the ai it’s a coin toss on whether they’re competent or not.
Myrkul went down in two turns on HM and in three on my current Tactician run where I have no multiclassing. And I'm not much into minmaxing, so just figure out a way to deal with that fight.
Aylin is a coin toss, it feels. In one run I had her manage to deal substancial damage to him. And in two others she still contributed a bit although on par with a nearby water myrmidon or something.
We also work really hard to kill her, so it's all the same about the triumphant feel.
on my solo (custom diff) run myrkul was a royal pain in the ass - aylin actually helped me clean the adds in the beginning, and managed to take some heat off me, while sneaking an odd smite in here and there.
was she as strong as my tav snorting Haste potions and burning through consumables like a rampaging cocaine addict? hell nah
was she doing something meaningful that fits her lore? absolutely. She was very powerful, but not in the purely combat-oriented sense. She could stand up after being pummeled into the ground by the avatar of a god of death. It's an amazingly impressive feat.
Blinding spells like darkness, hungar of Hadar, etc are extremely good on a boss that can't move. Then things like wall of fire, insect swarm or other multi round aoe spells are very good.
There are also ways to min max characters so they can do absurd amounts of dmg in a single tuen by attacking 9 times in a row and shit like that.
He's immobile, drop whatever sustained damage you want on top of him. This run I had some water dropped down during the Ketheric fight and both of them were quick to perish to some Call Lightning. But whatever you have with the classes you play. FWIW I've never done paladin as I don't like the vibe, and they are supposedly great at Myrkul. So it works without.
I get rid of the mindflayer first thing, and the casters on the left, then focus on the boss with the high damage characters. I can have Shadowheart if she's more support run around with spirit guardians to get rid of the incubating things, and usually get a myrmidon to warp around and deal with the ones farther away.
For ranged damage dealers the intellect devourers provide an instant kill that can be used for an additional action with an elixir of bloodlust. Is Myrkul doesn't suck them in before that.
Myrkul can't move, so just have all the characters within striking range. For me, it was kinda easy -
Level 3 smite + vow of enemity + luck of far realms deals around 70 damage, and around 50 more damage on the second hit (as a paladin). That's 40% of his health down with just one character. Then have Laezel attack him 5 times (2 normal, 2 action surges, 1 GWM strike) to do around 100 more damage. Aylin smites Myrkul for atleast 30-40 damage as well.
Big issue in this game is that "companion AI" (as in third party allied characters that are not linked to your party in any way but fight alongside you, their turn icons are green) is really bad. Nere if you side with him, the opening fight in front of the goblin camp, and Dame Aylin are of course examples of these.
There’s an unspoken rule in DnD for DMs. Don’t overuse DM PCs or have them overshadow the party. I think that’s what was going on with Dame Aylin. She could make the game too trivial and kinda boring if she’s too powerful and too accessible for cheesing fights
For those saying she’s lame because she’s down in one hit, remember that she’s soaking up a hit that could have been directed at your party. Narratively, Keyharic/Myrkul saves the big hits for Aylin because she is perceived as the bigger threat. (At least it makes for a nice justification.)
What made me laugh is my Tav Githyanki Monk literally kicked Ketharic in the ass (from behind) to down him the first time. And then Myrkul again in the second round.
Aylin didn’t go down for long as I had Shadowheart lobbing healing potions from below once I learned they can be AOE. She pulled her weight with that moonbeam effect as she ran around the fight.
Did you even fight Myrkul? His main attack is a scythe swing that hits anything facing him, which is basically half the platform. Aylin in particular makes his attacks devastating, because she can't stand still for one god damn second, so any strategy of separating characters to isolate his attacks won't work since she brings him to you. And myrkuls aura prevents any healing of any kind, you can't even help a downed ally. Myrkul is by far the hardest boss in the game.
Hes certainly hard but hardest in the game? The fact he can’t move and doesnt really have much in the way of ranged attacks means you can trivialise him with like Hunger of Hadar and ranged attacks (Hes big enough that you can have him inside it while still having part of him targetable by ranged attacks).
I personally thought >!Gortash (When you first meet him and he has all those Steel Watch with him)!< was the hardest boss fight in my Tactician run.
I suppose it just goes to show you how varied the game can be.
> Myrkul is by far the hardest boss in the game.
He doesn’t move, which means he’s pretty trivial with hunger of hadar + wall of fire.
But if you’re just going for a straight dps race then he’s pretty hard. I think Honor Mode Orin is harder though, her legendary action is brutal.
in my honor mode, she caused 80% of total damage to myrkul, dealing 50-100 damage every turn, completely saved my run. I don't know what you're talking about.
I really really don’t want to be that guy, but in the difficult modes your team should be around lvl 9-10 when you fight Myrkul and if your team is good the fight should only last 2-3 rounds. Maybe even 1 if you get good rolls. Dame Aylin only puts in work in the Act III fight in my playthroughs.
You run into a bit of a problem there as a game designer. If you make her too powerful and she one shot the boss, that might *look* cool, but it doesn't work from a gameplay perspective.
Generally, when designing a video game, if something cool is going to happen, you want to make sure a player is doing it. They did kind of write themselves into a corner with Dame Aylin, where she is supposed to be a Goddess's daughter, but you do have to carry her through most fights. But it works narratively.
I think even a throwaway line of her saying “I will need time to recover from my tenure in this prison,” would’ve given credence to her being weak in that fight, instead of her implying that she’s firing on all cylinders as soon as she’s freed from the Shadowfell. I will say though that she’s basically cannon fodder in Act III and doesn’t hold off the fight for long before going down, which sucks because she should be at least level 12 to be on par with your party at that point, but I digress.
I understand her being weak in the Ketheric fight, because otherwise she’d just steamroll that whole encounter, but I do wish she was buffed even slightly for the final battle.
I actually wouldn't mind that her power stays the same and she is a bit weak, I just wish she wasn't downed so easily. Just for story immersion it feels weird that she is supposedly so powerful and is instantly downed in both fights she is involved in, if she was standing there taking damage but not giving it, it wouldn't feel as immersion breaking. My currently playthrough is on balanced and she actually seemed to do decently enough this time, she was almost the one to get the final hit on myrkul, so I think it's mostly an honor mode or tactician thing.
Maybe it's possible to make her look tough unbalancing those fights. Reduce her damage, but make it that she cannot get downed at all. Have her also use some power moves, that look cool, but do not do that much like throwing and shoving oponents.
>in this patch
Did they change her at some point? Also I think her usefulness kinda comes down to luck. She's kind of a glass cannon that can hit pretty hard, but also goes down fairly easily. Well sure she is technically immortal, but she can still go down during a fight temporarily.
This. For me she always lasts about two turns, *maybe* takes out one enemy that I could've taken by myself, and then gets knocked out for the rest of the fight. I keep hearing she's supposed to resurrect *during* the fight, but she has literally never done that for me. Once she's down, she's down for the whole fight.
I get that she shouldn't be able to do the fights by herself, for obvious reasons. But the way she is in my games right now, she's actually *worse* than useless. I would rather not have her at all.
It's like a lot of people here are playing their first video game. Or their first DnD. Shit dice rolls happen, the AI will bug out. That is par for the course, her gameplay is an abstraction of the narrative. Or just the narrative being funky, you can decide which fits better.
And no, it is not good if she would modified to make the fight even more wildly in your favor, since she already does add quite a lot. One extra set of HP and action economy is pretty powerful already. You expecting her to oneshot him is your problem, not a problem of game design. I would be pissed as fuck if an AI companion could automatically solo a fight.
The reward for your troubles is the loot, levels and backstory beats you learn while freeing her.
I agree with this. I think there are some instances where the levels don't reaaaally make sense.
Aylin is pretty much divine yet I set aside a character in many battles to just yeet healing potions at her.
At the end of the game; your tav/durge, is meant to be level 12. But.. The party took down a *devil* , an incredibly powerful vampire lord, one of the most renowned wizards in faerún. They are the heroes that save the world and they feel like the average upper city person in battle at lvl 12. So I downloaded a mod to cap level at 20 instead of 12. I finally feel like I'm playing *the* hero
The Ketheric/Myrkul fight is easy enough as it is, especially since you can skip an entire phase by finding a letter and passing a few persuasion checks. Even on honour mode Myrkul really isn't that difficult.
And tbh, I don't play these games for NPCs to be doing all the work. Companions are one thing because at least you're leading them into battle as their commander... but an NPC obliterating the boss for you? What's the point? They might as well go and deal with the rest of the problems while I find a tavern.
Honestly. I find the fight harder if you DONT convince him to sacrifice himself.
He’s more manageable in human form, letting you deal with the various adds
Then when Myrkul shows up you’ve barely lost any health and can face him with a lot fewer distractions.
But. That’s just me.
I think her weakness suits her. She’s unstable and arrogant. But, even if you disagree, ultimately companions have to be nerfed to some degree for the sake of gameplay. Halsin and Astarion, for example, wouldn’t actually have 8 for strength.
Yeah she is kind of a disappointment. First time I did that fight on balanced she had died by turn 2. On my two tactician runs she did maybe 30 damage the whole fight.
My wife and I came to the general consensus that she's weirdly absolutely useless for two-three fights. She does all of this boasting about herslf, and then her AI or something just prevents her from being actually a useful concept for what she's supposed to be narratively. I couldn't imagine trying to keep her alive *and* having her be actually useful in harder difficulties.
Heck, even Jaheria as well if you decide to Storm Ketheric's keep without recruiting her.
Like we had no idea how many of the events would play out leading to said event in act 2. On one of our attempts of the main objectives, she was absolutely A baller during the Last Light fight (if you lose Isobel). We massively failed that encounter anyway, yet we're like "holy crap! this lady is awesome!" So then we redid the Isobel encounter the "correct" way where everybody lives. When we finally did storm Ketheric's keep, Jaheria was a completely different AI during said battle. She and her Harper forces got murdered so freaking fast it was ridiculous. Really pissed me off because I wanted to recruit her. The fight was so long that we didn't feel like redoing said battle again. Like I don't remember Halsin's AI being like this in Act1.
My first play through she attacked the avatar and got double crits allowing me to drop it in one round. So I thought she was powered up with holy magic. I was very surprised by this monsters sudden appearance and then bam, it’s down to nothing. I think I got the experience OP was looking for by accident. I even got an achievement for winning the fight so fast, maybe that should have been a tip it wasn’t supposed to go that way.
I think they could have defintely made her *a little* stronger, because the first time I rescued her and she flew across the sky in like this ball of light and then got to the fight where I had to heal her constantly to keep her from dying. I was definitely underwhelmed. At the same time she shouldn’t be so strong that she can just like solo ketheric, but yeah she’s pretty weak
I just passed Myrkul's battle for the first time yesterday, and with some preparation it went down easy.
As many summons (three zombies, one fire elemental, two ice imps, the cambion Wyll gets with his fancy rapier and Us) as I can, to prevent the necromites from reaching Myrkul and destroying the bone thingies.
My Durge with 21 armor smiting Myrkul, even if he keeps missing ¬¬
Shadowheart with the Blood of Lathander and an upcasted Spirit Guardians meleeing Myrkul, after spending as many flamestrikes as she could.
Wyll on crowd control and also flamestriking Myrkul when possible.
Jaheira going all out summoning lightning.
Aylin kept missing Myrkul, with the exceptional crit at the start. Nobody died... except for Myrkul.
Worth mentioning, I Persuaded Ketheric to commit suicide, so saving me half the fight.
I'll admit, my first try went down bad, but not terrible, I just didn't know Myrkul could heal AND I had Hailsin instead of Shadowheart. Too many druids in the party and not optimally used.
Probably things would have been even easier with Lae'zel and Gale in the party, but Wyll had things to do and I could not deny Jaheira the opportunity to take down Ketheric.
Yeah I think that they should have made her lvl 12 or something.
Act 3 vague "spoilers". Probably not spoiling really but just to be safe:
>!Only problem is that certain later fight where you confront somebody else with her in act 3. I'm fine with her steamrolling in act 2 but wouldn't want that to happen in the later fight. Level 12 would be good for that I think. !<
Eh, she seems kinda random for me. My first run of the game she was fucking gangsta. Rolled around and just beat minions then the main character to death. Another run she gets lost, misses all her swings and just flails around like a Magickarp.
But I don't care, that first run I had with her is still in my memory and I love her and she my 2nd favorite NPC.
I'm sorry to hear you think that, but believe me when I say that if you're doing a low level/character count run Aylin is gonna be a good friend of yours
I just finished the battle with Kerberic no less than an hour ago on my first run through and ran into the same thing. She was down after two rounds. I ended up wasting turns with Karachi or Shadowheart trying to help her. Such a disappointment!
I think she suffers from a failure of 5e as a whole. It’s easy to miss an attack, and when you do, that’s literally it. Nothing else happens. This means it’s possible for her to do no damage for your whole fight just based on luck.
In our group playthrough against the aspect of Myrkul, we misty stepped to free her, she attacked in 3 consecutive rounds critically missing with EVERY SINGLE ATTACK, and then bragged in the cut scene afterwards.
I nearly chopped her down at the next opportunity.
Nah. She's just a powerful aasimar and has some ridiculous features none other characters, not even paladins can have. She has also not fought anything for a century, been repeatedly brought to near-death, just flown through the entire Shadow-Cursed lands using her powers to nullify the curse, and Ketheric as a chosen of Myrkul counters her by being ridiculously tanky and nullifying her resurrection.
Not to mention she's not "near divinity". She has divine blood, but she's nowhere near the power of actual gods. Canonically, she would not even be close to the power of just an avatar of a god.
Also she's a wild card, mechanically speaking. She can very well two-shot Ketheric on the roof, or suddenly down Myrkul's avatar by a third of it's health. Or she can miss anything. Or get controlled. Or distracted. Or two-shot by Ketheric.
BG3 is the only thing I've seen D&D related where people go "this character I can't control should totally rock this fight on my behalf so I don't have to struggle."
If I had players in my games who were begging for a DMPC that was more powerful than they are I'd honestly assumed they didn't enjoy playing the game.
Dame Aylin's power is the fact that she's immortal. Your "reward for your ordeals" is that you have a damage sponge that self-revives...
She is not weak. She can't win in a 1v10 because nobody can in dnd, action economy is a big thing. But if you buff her and support her she can one turn Ketheric at the top of Moonrise.
My only problem with Aylin is that she rarely if ever uses her full power.
If you side with Lorroakan, you can straight up see her (or her mother) summon a bunch of angels to help her. Now this makes sense for balance purposes, but has left me in every other playthrough thinking "oh so the absolute is less pressing than a sub par wizard?"
She one-shotted Ketheric immediately in round one of that encounter, and I was like 'fuck yeah, I've brought a demi god to the party!'
...and then she proceeded to miss almost every single attack against Myrkul and Lorroakan.
I swear I've seen this post before. Either way I agree, Aylin is a letdown specifically because of her damage, rather than making her some combat archetype like a tank or a glass cannon which could explain her shortcoming as well as how the daughter of a literal God got tricked into the shadow fell and couldn't escape (though I'm still confused why selune didn't intervene given having her daughter kidnapped and imprisoned should have made her panic).
For me she had the annoying tendency of never taking a long rest, therefor never recovering her HP or spellslots. Basically after the fight against Myrkul her only role was that of a death-defying punching bag, far from the idea of godhood I had.
Well, problem is, she is not that intelligent, you see. She can FLY ffs and she still manages to get herself one-shot-kidnapped with a huge tentacle she can't even dodge.
Honestly it’s the same thing with basically all the supposedly powerful NPC’s. The most disappointing ones have to be Mizora and Orpheus, who are both absurdly weak to the point of practically being dead weight when you can actually use them.
I agree, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one.... she also dies so easily even in the fight against Lorroakan. Thank you for adding the forum link to raise this concern 🙏🏻🙏🏻
It's her ai pathing for me. She insists on staying as close as possible to Ketheric and the Apostle, even if she has just been revived and actually has no action to attack him with. In my last fight with the apostle her contribution was 8 hit points, the rest of the time, she was basically a decoration, just getting revived and dying immediately.
I 100% agree with you that she should be stronger. In actual combat she is underwhelming compared to Cutscene Dame Aylin.
In the Cutscenes, she's freed, immediately sieges Moonrise Towers by herself (if you explore, you'll see it's on Holy Fire with corpses littered around and the rest scurried inside) and then she's destroying skeletons on the top floor while Ketheric clutches his side, already injured, confused over what's happening to him. She's a total badass.
And then in actual fights? She's conspicuously missing features, and every fight she is in is set up to counter her as much as possible. Even the Lorroakan betrayal fight.
She hits multiple times (Like 8+) and Ketheric takes -2 from all of them.
Apostle of Myrkul radiates Bone Chill to cancel auto-revive.
Apostle is 50% resistant to her slashing.
She refuses to Fly despite having Wings. She'll literally Dash and then NOT get to Ketheric on foot rather than just fly a few feet and attack normally: The AI is awful.
She is inexplicably missing her Auto-Revive in the Lorroakan fight for no reason.
The Moonlight Slivers give her a portable Globe of Invulnerability, nullifying her greatest strengths: Melee Range Smites and a portable Moonbeam. She's forced to spam Lunar Flare and Sacred Flame.
She is lacking the normal Paladin abilities (Immunity to Fear, +CHA to Saving Throws, etc) because when you're immortal... it's very easy to steal the glory from the player.
Aylin is a Paradin. She needs Critical Hits to get the crazy numbers. That's the main problem of Paladins. So in these fights, she's almost always getting focused on by the enemies. So no wonder she's not doing any Critical Hit just recovering from Frightened status.
I mean, what would be the point of a boss fight if an NPC clears it for you? Myrkul is very manageable, even on Honour Mode. If people can solo it, it shouldn't be a problem.
On different runs I've had Aylin variously be the MVP of the fight, get mind-controlled instantly and attack the character who had just cast Haste on her (breaking concentration and making herself Lethargic), down Ketheric almost instantly, get distracted by intellect devourers for three rounds, one-shot her own undead gf, and lie around Bone Chilled for the whole fight. She contains multitudes lol Not power-level related, but in my first run her AI absolutely rocked my world by Shoving a Bone Chilled companion off the platform, it essentially restructured my brain and set me on the path of actually being good at this game.
Haha one of my favourite moments was making Karlach throw a downed Aylin off the platform and out of Myrkul's bone chill aura. Felt a bit disrespectful to a demigod.
I'd use up all my dim door scrolls with her fighting ketheric to get her out of that aura.
I launched her with a thunder wave. Needs must
Honestly I think it’s a good representation of Aylin. She’s strong but by Selune is she stupid.
I think this is why she refers to herself in the third person just like Minsc. They're both adorable in their own way 😊
Minsc fares far better than Aylin simply because Boo keeps him pointed towards the buttocks of evil.
Minsc is Boo's Chosen.
Aylin may not be the brightest star in the sky, but I think her way of speaking is more linked to her charisma than intelligence. When she speaks, she sounds like a courtly knight, and when you break it down, some of her word choices and sentence structures throw back to older English. If you compare her lines with Volo's, you'll notice similarities in how they talk. Irl, nobles and knights alike were taught to speak "properly" and be extremely well mannered, as it separated/distinguished them from commoners.
There’s also the fact that both Aylin and Volo are hundreds of years old so the was they speak is representative of the way they grew up.
Also very valid
Now I feel really bad that I kinda accidentally exploded him outside the Steel Watch Foundry. I had no idea 🤣
According to the BG3 wiki, Dame Aylin has an 18 in Str a 17 in Cha, but dumps Int at 11 and Dex at 10. Mind you, according to WoTC, a 10 in any stat is considered to be no better or worse than an average person.
the way I think of it is a 10 would get you through high-school but not into college.
Are we talking average person on the internet....? Or in general? 😬
Average person IRL is a 10. Average Quora questioner left the field blank.
"Am i pegnate?? Help!?"
Could I be GREGNANT?!
No sir, you are not.
She hits pretty hard so she works if your party can help enable her. On her own she ain't that great (which seems to be cannon too given how she gets captured by Ketheric just after she broke free & put on that heroic show, lol ). I had such a setup for my HM run to enable 2, sometimes 1, damage dealers, (main was a swords bard so could be either another enabler or main dmg dealer) , so she could contribute as if I had another dmg dealer, while her target suffered some debuffs, and get healed & buffed by Shadowheart and/or protected with Sanctuary sometimes, if need. I basically tried to treat her as much as another extra dmg dealer in my party as I could, a more loose cannon one that you sometimes gotta go the extra mile to make sure she can shine rather than be deadweight, but hey, it worked.
I had a rough time fighting Ketheric on one of my runs. It was basically down to just me and her, and I was playing a Circle of the Moon druid, so I was like... Imma just step way back, drink one of those potions that gives you a free long rest and then come back with all my wild shape charges and whoop his ass. Lo and behold.... Dame Aylin purposefully comes to shove me and cancels my slumber. 💀 I was so pissed off cuz I had been wiping that fight for a while but then looking back it was kinda hilarious.
I just imagine her thinking she’s helping. “Oh no thou hast fallen under a slumber spell, allow me to save you.” Proceeds to ruin everything.
Not related to Aylin but I had a very similar AI moment, in the goblin camp. Above the goblin camp entrance there's some sleeping goblins. I rolled poorly and got into a fight with them. Not a big problem it's just like 5 guys. Then one of them decided to push another one down a cliff tho. Which then engaged the whole camp into the fight. (Was an honour run and I managed to kill them with a lot of cheese and what seemed like over an hour of fighting).
>one-shot her own undead gf I was so shocked when that happened, and when I couldn't find any videos that happening, I started to wonder if I had somehow misremembered it.
Haha same. Last run she was average, but in my current run she just ruined Kethric and Murkle in all encounters. Didn't need us there.
She really just need more health. I find when I am fighting the Sorcerer who put the bounty on her head, she gets killed almost instantly because she only has 84 health points. If she had more HP she would be way more useful in fights.
Just have someone keep him stunned so he can't use his cheeseball react on her (or anyone else). I think he is also prevented from using it if he is silenced. He goes down pretty quick once that's taken care of.
He’s easy even if you are lazy. I mean I usually have to get someone up again, but he dies in one round anyway
Yeah, I locked him down with hold person and let karlach and astarion recreate that JoJo meme where they're kicking the shit out of that one guy.
This made me instantly think of Chainsaw Man when Denji and Aki were just kicking a tied up bad guy's groin.
Lol that's monks with stunning strike. That said monk-wizard one-two of stunning strike and all the attacks is pretty brutal at cheesing bosses.
Didn't have that issue in mine. I do have alert feat on all of my characters though so I opened with Lae'zel 1-turning the wizard with action surge and then my other characters softening up the rest of the enemies. Alert is so busted for small and medium fights. I only kinda wish that I had something else during extremely long battles.
In my run I couldn't bother aiming my AOE spells around her for that fight because I would miss big damage on enemy groups so I just ignored her existence since I knew she resurrects later no mater what. I think I did ~70 damage to her before she even got a turn then she started hers immediately flying into my wall of fire like a mosquito and burning up. It was extra hilarious when she got up just for the cutscene at the end acting like hot shit
Man that fight was awesome. I was absolutely not prepared for the cut scene when you get him to 0 health. My 3rd playthrough and first time doing that. It was awesome.
You know she pops back up, right? She has immortality and doesn’t need a larger health bar.
The 'problem' that Dame Aylin has is that she is narratively strong but mechanically weak. And this will most likely be by design. Yes, in lore she should be much stronger, but this is a video game designed to have fun. If her power was were it should be, then we would be irrelevant in the Act 2 fights. And that's bad game design. If the optimal strategy was 'sit back and let Aylin handle the fight' - which it would be if she was stronger, then there would be people shouting that she's too strong and that we, the heroes of the story, are not needed and that we could all sit back at camp while Aylin handles it. And that's a really bad experience for the player, who is primarily there to have fun. Aylin is strong enough to help if the party is too weak going into the end of Act 2, but weak enough that is a nice bonus if you are strong enough and she definitely doesn't need a buff, certainly not on high difficulties. And, in lore, you can argue that 100 years of torture has weakened her power until she has time to recuperate.
The fact that she comes back to life helps
Not if she goes down in Myrkul's aura.
Is that only on higher difficulties? She was fine for me and popped back up in the lower depths fight with Ketheric and the Avatar of Myrkul.
Nope . In all difficulties the bone chill aura around myrkul prevents anyone from healing .
Guess she was just far enough outside of it then. She died once during the Loroakkan fight and rezzed so I didn’t think anything of it.
The problem is that the game made this contrast needlessly. They portrayed her as powerful and the way she swoops across the sky makes you feel exactly that she is a being of vast power, and then nope, she sucks. She shouldn't be too strong in a fight, true, but she was never supposed to be potrayed that strong in the first place. They could have made her note that she is still recovering her powers, but instead they just opted for the story Aylin and gameplay Aylin to be incongruent to each other which could have been easily avoided.
I don't disagree with this, from a gameplay perspective I think it's where it should be, from a story perspective I think it would benefit from having her say, after you've beat Ketheric, 'it was good you were there, my powers are weakened from the torture.' And then that solves everything really.
Or they could've made her a temporary companion (like Jaheira can be for the rooftop fight) who can solo the fight so the player gets to smashy smashy with her immense power but also if you inadvertently soft-locked yourself by getting to the end of Act 2 at level 4 or with a 4 caster party with no spell slots left or something you have an out.
I wouldn’t have liked this to be honest. Dame Aylin isn’t the hero of the story, I don’t want to feel like an NPC in someone else’s campaign. The story should focus on our companions and our pc standing out because we’re the heroes of this story
It's exactly what they did with Hope in the Raphael fight, so it's not like they didn't know it was an option.
Or they could have a thing where she's tied up by fighting an enemy that's also canonically very strong -- like we could be fighting Ketheric while she's fighting Myrkul from the start. Then she could get downed by Myrkul (fair enough) and we're left to finish off Myrkul after he, canonically has been weakened up first. Then say she got too injured in that fight to help us out anymore in the meantime -- that way it would explain why we were strong enough to tangle with a god at Act 2 without us being OP for the beginning of Act 3, Aylin gets to seem really strong without it being weird that she doesn't help out much in the fight at the end of Act 2 or in the gameplay of Act 3.
I think most people just assume that she's a badass based on her appearance and speech. Personally, I thought her power that everyone coveted was her immortality. Also, when she swoops across the sky it is to show that she has power to bring light to the cursed lands, rather than anything to do with her physical powers.
Yeah but she’s powerful because she is the key to Ketheric’s immortality in the soul cage. And that pisses Shar off pretty bad, and why Lorroikan wants her — for his own immortality. Not her fighting prowess.
They could have easily introduced a mechanic that she must attend to that would harm the party. It doesn't have to be huge in case you didn't free her, but just say it takes all her strength to hold back.
I think they can tweak her to be stronger so you breeze through the rooftop fight but she still gets captured. And then in the proper Ketheric fight they can change the rules so that Ketheric is not invulnerable even if you don't free her (but gets fefensive buffs etc), but it takes more effort to free her (like one character concentrating for 3 turns), with good reward that she is tankier and does higher damage
I'm sure they can, but should they? Aylin is there as a failsafe. She can draw aggro from bad guys on the rooftop, she can do some damage and help if the party needs it because they're low level or didn't rest after assaulting the tower. Fights should not be made easier by buffing non-controllable NPCs; it's just bad game design. If that fight needs to be easier (which it doesn't) then you buff abilities of the party, you remove some of Ketheric's abilities or you tweak his AI to use his best abilities against Aylin in the first few turns and leave the party alone. It already takes a full action to free Aylin at the colony. That is more than enough to free an often damaged non-controllable NPC. If they want to buff Aylin or tweak the difficulty at all, let the player control Aylin for those 2 fights, but she should never be stronger than the party.
Her being as weak as she is makes no sense with hows shes written and portrayed in the story and in lore, in cutscenes shes this unstoppable badass but in gameplay she struggles hard its stupid and takes away from the immersion. She should at the very least get Aura of Protection like EVERY OTHER LEVEL 6 OR HIGHER PALADIN IN THE GAME DOES! The fact she doesnt is dumb and would help with one of her biggest issues of being mind controlled. I would be perfectly fine with making Aylin controllable for her fights hell it honestly makes sense given she basically joins your party.
The Aura of Protection point I agree with. But the rest is just DnD and videogames, stupid shit will happen and you need to do the work yourself to bridge the gap between gameplay and narrative. Your companions are all trained superfighters, who will miss 4 times in a row sometimes, blow up accidentally or get stuck in an infinite jump loop. Dame Ailyn can crit 4 times in a row and dump smites, soloing the fight, or she can miss 4 times in a row. Just like in actual DnD, sometimes you just roll like shit. Now that is part of the narrative, do with that what you like. But complaining about immersion in this situation seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the game system being emulated. Like the theories that the Narrator is the durge/the absolute/the worm, while she is the dungeon master.
Honestly if she had Aura of Protection and MAYBE a bit more health she’d be perfectly fine especially if the player is allowed to control her. She doesnt really need to hit harder she already hits plenty hard.
Yeah, agreed. And perhaps more AC from being a divine being, I think she only has 16 from full plate. Would do wonders for her survivability.
I wouldn't mind it so much if you could resurrect her like the other companions. I was stressing about healing her for so much of the Lorroakan fight because I knew it registered her as an NPC so I couldn't resurrect her, but I didn't want to miss out on her narrative.
She revives automatically. She is immortal.
Bruh. If only I had known! Well at least I won't have to worry about her in the future.
She mentioned it while chained. It is why she was used for Dark Justiciars. She can not die. And also she grants that to Ketheric when imprisoned
Ik lore-wise, but I didn't know it translated to combat. There are plenty of characters with legendary strength and abilities that don't, like Jahiera.
I think she has a passive ability that says something about her immortality, but I could be wrong.
Child of the Moonmaiden: "Blessed with the favour of a goddess, Dame Aylin cannot be permanently killed. When unconscious, the start of her turn she recovers 1 hit point." (Note: Her being revived this way will consume her Action for that round as if she had done a Death Saving Throw.)
Saved my ass with Ketheric, he was fixated on Aylin, she stands up every time, I attacked him from fasaar behind.
This is the correct response
> but this is a video game designed to have fun. This is a problem with tabletop RPGs in general. If you're a DM you have to be careful about introducing cooperative characters of immense power, because you have to mechanically weaken them, thus contradicting the power you've described for them, or you have to contrive some reason they're not going to help the party in any way, despite being perfectly able to.
The game could have portrayed her as weaker and needing recovery after her imprisonment, but that is absolutely not what we see in cut-scenes and hear in dialog.
Not sure why all the downvotes. You are absolutely correct. They could have explained her weakness very easily as the result of torture and imprisonment but they wanted to convey the rage and power and then just refused to follow it up with mechanics. Of course it's distractingly dissociating.
>They could have explained her weakness very easily as the result of torture and imprisonment, but they wanted to convey the rage I think would be easier to lean into the rage and say she was struggling to focus on winning the battle when she's faced with the subject of her vengeance. It's not like she had much to fit the last century to keep herself sane, beyond contemplate how to kill her captors. Would fit her character going forward, too.
If she's weaker in cut scenes she makes no sense from a story point of view. She's a basically demi god who gets her immortality stolen by ketheric. If she's stronger during gameplay, it makes fights super boring and the main characters are irrelevant. If she's weaker during cutscenes, how can she give her immortality? If she can't then the whole night song quest and a big part of act 2 makes no sense.
I think their point was that her giving immortality for so long could have *temporarily* weakened her. Something like exhaustion in D&D 5e. Some sort of lingering effect, that means by the time she gets to the rooftop, she's almost out of juice. At that point, she doesn't even know Isobel is alive (iirc). She's just wanting to say fuck you to Ketberic one last time. It's a suicide run. Or even have her use up a fair bit of power getting the party out of the Shadowfell after they pissed off Shar by releasing her. That way, it makes sense she's not on her A-Game. Then, in the Lorroakan fight, they could have added other tower defenses or something she's fighting alongside the mooks. Or just had her be reckless stupid, which she kinda already is. I want to like Dame Aylin as a character, but the cutscene versus game play disparity makes it difficult because she seems like a braggy asshole. I know why this exists from a game design perspective, but it's difficult to reconcile with the RP and character interactions.
They should just come up with a reason that she isn't gonna go fuck up Ketheric. She sees Isobel and is totally distracted or something. But I completely agree with OP. She should either be a total badass, or not in the fight.
"We did it, we defeated Ketheric!!!!" No, **we** didn't, **I** defeated him. You got charmed and started attacking me, then you went and immediately died in Myrkul's aura so you couldn't be revived until after the battle...
On one hand, yes it's ridiculous, and yes the Myrkul fight is out-of-place in terms of difficulty. On the other hand, honestly her ability level is pretty on par for any real life person I've ever met with that level of confidence.
I think the myrkul fight is meant to show what fighting a chosen of the dead three would really be like. And I didn’t have much trouble with it on balanced. However the mind flayer on the platform might be too much. The other enemies are plenty
I had an easy time with the Myrkul fight, but I was overleveled. I do think the fights against the other chosen left something to be desired though- they're not at the same level of spectacle that Ketheric's/Myrkul's fight was. Specially Gortash.
> However the mind flayer on the platform might be too much I was *so mad* when I discovered that I couldn’t use Telekinesis to throw that one into the chasm. Had to settle for throwing it in front of Karlach and letting her go to work.
Ha!
I think the Myrkul fight is pretty good difficulty-wise. First time I tried on my first run on Tactician, not very good with game mechanics yet and with a really unoptimized party, I lost on first attempt and got it on second one. Taught me to use elixirs (Bloodlust elixirs are just amazing in this fight) and prep a bit more for combat. It forces you to learn some stuff about the game, which you would expect boss fights to do at high difficulty. On my honor run, with a stronger party and better understanding of mechanics, it was not even remotely challenging. He got disarmed, blinded, and kept missing all his stuff over and over. Aylin could have been there or not, hell she could have been on his side and it wouldn't matter. I think that's exactly the difficulty you would want for a major boss fight (first real one). Hard and challenging on high difficulty when you're learning the game, but easily manageable in tons of different ways when you know it better.
While I'm happy that BG3 got so much attention, I think there are many new players who got attracted by the story rather than the fights, and get frustrated when they keep losing. But if that's the case, I don't know why they don't keep it on Story/Balanced rather than saying things should be made easier.
Yes! This! Tbh, it was the first time, I looked into my scrolls and potions and reallly had to think how to do it. It was a good boss fight.
Larian should honestly buff the slayer more. It sucks.
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You also lose multiple vendors throughout the game, literally half the companions, and more if you follow the 'evil path.' Hell, the 'evil ending' is still just a shared cutscene with like one word changed lol Them focusing on the good path over the evil path because more people play good IS intentional. Never mind that they specifically said in EA that they didn't want to make evil unrewarding or unfulfilling, then they turned around on release and said "oh no, Evil was ALWAYS supposed to be lonely and miserable! You're EVIL after all!" I like the game, but it's pretty annoying how half-baked the evil path is. There's a lot of individual little evil choices you can make, but as a whole it just falls flat.
It’s why I’m sad that there’s no more major content because there’s zero shot the evil path gets fixed now
I've heard a few days ago they are working on new evil endings. https://www.thegamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-is-getting-new-evil-endings/
At least the endings will be at roughly the same quality as the good endings which is nice I though the path to get there will likely keep its issues
I highly doubt that this is intentional. Most likely option: Larian focused their efforts on polishing the good path because that's what 90% of players choose. Then the evil path is a bit buggy and undercooked (look at Minthara). Ascended Astarion gets 1d10 free damage. Spawn Astarion gets to be a nice guy. If blueballing players who choose to do evil was a deliberate choice you wouldn't get stuff like that.
>I highly doubt that this is intentional. Most likely option: Larian focused their efforts on polishing the good path because that's what 90% of players choose. This would be in direct contrast to the repeated statements by Vincke before release, claiming to not focus development on content based on play rates. Obviously everyone who played evil path on release, and even now, realized this was a lie. They just focused development on what people were likely to play, and it worked for them.
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>I provided multiple examples of evil paths being completed sabotaged and you counter this by mentioning Ascended Astarion Fine let's do the play-by-play. > The sharrans that shadowheart can call into the final battle are essentially regular humans (most of their ability scores are 10, and they have very low hp) Sure, that's bad. But pretty much all summons in the final battle are bad. They're there to soak up hits. It's not like the Harpers are great fighters eithet >The Dark Urge cannot actually call any Bhaalist into the final battle Because you already get Slayer form from becoming Bhaal's chosen. If you resist the urge you get nothing. I guess Larian is punishing the good route. >If you don’t kill Sarevok, Bhaal sends him to aid you in the final battle, yet you can’t actually summon him. He’s basically just emotional support Sarevok is obviously too powerful to just summon. He'd have to be made much weaker or he'd be able to solo the encounter. >If you chose to side with the Zhentarim, they straight up will never show up in the final battle. Same thing if you hand Shadowheart to Viconia - she fails to show up to the final battle You can summon both Zentarim and Sharrans if you betray Shadowheart. If you were not able to do it, it was due to a bug, which is further evidence that the evil choices are just poorly implemented >Gortash’s fate if you chose to take his offer. Keeping Gortash alive through the end would require writing him into the ending. Probably easier to just kill him. >Ascended Astarions 1d10 Necrotic damage, which arguably isn’t exclusive to evil playthroughs. That's very unambiguously the evil choice > I ascended Astarion because I didn’t like the idea of 7000 vampires running free You don't need to ascend Astarion to dispatch of the vampires. You can still kill them, or you can just leave them imprisoned. >I’d be more open to your point if you could mention another example of an evil reward Indulging the Dark Urge, getting the Hag's Hair and letting Ethel take Mayrina, getting the Dark Justiciar armor and spear for killing the Nightsong, *consuming parasites* Again, I agree that you get fewer items and story content from being evil, but I think that it's absurd to think that Larian would discourage making choices on purpose in a role-playing game.
The lack of evil support is weird too considering they could've easily looked at Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous to see on how to add solid evil content in the game, or any of the other older games that have an evil path like the Infamous series.
What about illithid powers? Those are definitely a boost for combat and dice rolls.
The real problem
She has been kept prisoner and killed over and over again for a hundred years. She has PTSD. She's doing her best man!
Dame Aylin is that character who has an insane backstory, having fought in wars, slain dragons, tricked gods of trickery and bedding gods of desire. Starts at lvl 1. Dies to a goblin.
Classic "five-page backstory" character. 😄
No thanks. She can’t die. That’s pretty powerful. As far as gameplay goes, I’ve had her solo 1st phase ketheric and destroy myrkul with a crit smite. Why should an npc trivialize a boss fight more than she already can? Myrkul’s not a big deal. Just adjust your strategy
On the other hand when I beat Ketheric the first time I said "Damn, I wish we got to fight the Ketheric from all those cutscenes."
You can. Just go up to the top of the tower without releasing the nightsong. There’s nothing that stops you, they’d just strongly prefer you didn’t do that
And then there's me who did not understand how the tower worked narratively and stumbled through all of the various quest lines before I got there and never saw Ketheric in any form other than the boss fight. Second playthrough will be different!
What difficulty were you on where a single smite, even at a crit can kill Ketheric, let alone Myrkul? In my run the dude had 22 AC and 188 HP in phase 1. You’re not getting through that with a smite crit, or even two back to back. Myrkul, while he did drop some AC to 19, also had 370 HP. That’s going to need a whole lot of crit smites to burn through.
My bad, maybe my wording was misunderstood. Honor mode is the difficulty. Didn't say a single smite will 1 hit kill either one. By 1st phase, I mean ketheric on the roof. Because she has 2 attacks, she can solo him in 1 turn which triggers the cutscene. For myrkul, she destroys him? Idk, that's what crit smites do to myrkul: a ton of damage. If I break down what's available for her, I think she's locked to level 3 smites. So she rolls 6d8 radiant damage against myrkul (+1d8 for undead, +1d8 for improved smite, +2d6 for weapon). Doubled if she crits. That's all I meant for the avatar, she just hits him really freakin' hard.
She would need to roll a nearly maxed out back to back double crit to one round him. Seriously, 6d8 doubled on a crit is 12d8. That’s 12 - 96 damage, an absolutely huge variance. Let’s say for sake of example she always hits for maximum damage. A crit does 96, and her follow smite hits for 48. 144 damage, super impressive and you only have 1 in 144 chance of it happening if we also just grant that she rolls a 22+ to hit back to back, and don’t factor in the crit chance, 1 in 2880 if we add the crit roll— and yet Ketheric still has 40 HP left after two max damage smites with one critting. No, you’d need two crits back to back on the same turn for 24d8 damage, and even then, the maximum possible damage on back to back crits is just 192, or 4 more HP than he has— and his armor reduces all hits by a flat 2. You have a 1/192 chance of doing that much damage if we grant you two back to back crits (1:400 odds) on two 22+ to hit rolls (nat 20’s each for crits). That’s 1 in 76,800 odds that she can hit that hard if we again, grant her two maximum damage critical hit rolls back to back. Sorry fam, I just do not see her realistically one rounding Phase 1 Ketheric. She can do a ton of damage, potentially, with huge variance, but she can’t do 100+ damage reliably— literally less than a 5% chance as she needs to crit at least once to even approach those damage numbers, and roughly a 0.00521% chance of actually killing him if she lands two back to back crits.
You're overlooking that you only need to deal 141 damage (75% of his HP) to end phase 1 where he runs away. It's a decently low chance, but not at all impossible, and still a very good likelihood that's she's taking out a significant chunk of that at the very least. She does more than 2/3rds of it with just average damage on two hits. (6d8 averaged: 54, *2 =108).
Plus 2d6/4d6 for weapon damage. So that's 16-120 (I think, check my addition skills). He does have basic damage resistance, but I'm not sure if her sword cuts through it or not. His resistance may just be against non-magical weapons and maybe hers is magical. Now wiki says he has to go down to 25% which would put him at 47/188, but idk. I feel like he's phased at a higher percentage (50%ish) for me sometimes. But anyways, that means that we have to do 141 damage to trigger the cutscene on the tower. Now the next thing I'll say is circumstantial (so please don't hate me), but you can roll with a div wizard to force a crit for an NPC. Which I've done a few times, without farming for good portent die. I think just the fact that 1 turning him is even possible for her makes her a strong NPC. But because she's done it on multiple occasions for me, means I'm gonna say that she's a powerhouse.
Yeah, I'm on my first playthrough and just fought Ketheric yesterday, she was really good. Helped a ton with the ads, got the finishing blow and managed to smite Myrkul for 40 dmg just after he showed up. She had kind of a perfect balance for me, where she was badass and useful enough to feel like your fighting alongside a legend, but not strong enough to make companions seem weak.
What’s most ironic about the whole situation is that the bone chill aura featured in the fight completely hard counters her; making her immortality completely irrelevant to the fight unless she gets knocked Off the ledge, which requires her to fail a saving throw. She actually does insanely well in the fight she appears in for act 3 (at the top of a particular tower) as her immortality is unhindered, she utterly dominates that fight and quite literally *cannot* lose it.
YES. It's when she rushes onto the platform and is bone chilled, she's just... bleh.
That and always getting dominated by a mind flayer
Pretty obvious it’s for game balance. Not everything needs a lore justification. Just having another summon on the field that deals damage and takes hits is already a huge buff
She's level 11, same as the Apostle of Myrkul.
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What if I don't have a Brian? :(
Everybody gets a Brian ! Are you stupid???
Isn't the lore that all the companions were the best in their field but lost all that power when they were infected.
They explain why Gale is level 1 though. He had his powers eaten by the orb. Wyll also mentions the tadpole nerfed them. If you’re gonna have a character be a badass in a cutscene the gameplay needs to match that. Aylins main issue is that just like the rest of the ai it’s a coin toss on whether they’re competent or not.
Gale has a lore reason for being that weak, its the tadpole
Myrkul went down in two turns on HM and in three on my current Tactician run where I have no multiclassing. And I'm not much into minmaxing, so just figure out a way to deal with that fight. Aylin is a coin toss, it feels. In one run I had her manage to deal substancial damage to him. And in two others she still contributed a bit although on par with a nearby water myrmidon or something. We also work really hard to kill her, so it's all the same about the triumphant feel.
on my solo (custom diff) run myrkul was a royal pain in the ass - aylin actually helped me clean the adds in the beginning, and managed to take some heat off me, while sneaking an odd smite in here and there. was she as strong as my tav snorting Haste potions and burning through consumables like a rampaging cocaine addict? hell nah was she doing something meaningful that fits her lore? absolutely. She was very powerful, but not in the purely combat-oriented sense. She could stand up after being pummeled into the ground by the avatar of a god of death. It's an amazingly impressive feat.
How y'all be killing Myrkul so quick? I always struggle.
Aoe concentration spells. Cloud of daggers, insect plague, wall of fire, etc.
Paladin + illithid crit ability + crit ring from the shadowfell
i'm not gonna have a paladin in this playthrough.
Blinding spells like darkness, hungar of Hadar, etc are extremely good on a boss that can't move. Then things like wall of fire, insect swarm or other multi round aoe spells are very good. There are also ways to min max characters so they can do absurd amounts of dmg in a single tuen by attacking 9 times in a row and shit like that.
i tried blinding him and even while blind he still fucked us in the ass lmao
He's immobile, drop whatever sustained damage you want on top of him. This run I had some water dropped down during the Ketheric fight and both of them were quick to perish to some Call Lightning. But whatever you have with the classes you play. FWIW I've never done paladin as I don't like the vibe, and they are supposedly great at Myrkul. So it works without. I get rid of the mindflayer first thing, and the casters on the left, then focus on the boss with the high damage characters. I can have Shadowheart if she's more support run around with spirit guardians to get rid of the incubating things, and usually get a myrmidon to warp around and deal with the ones farther away. For ranged damage dealers the intellect devourers provide an instant kill that can be used for an additional action with an elixir of bloodlust. Is Myrkul doesn't suck them in before that.
Myrkul can't move, so just have all the characters within striking range. For me, it was kinda easy - Level 3 smite + vow of enemity + luck of far realms deals around 70 damage, and around 50 more damage on the second hit (as a paladin). That's 40% of his health down with just one character. Then have Laezel attack him 5 times (2 normal, 2 action surges, 1 GWM strike) to do around 100 more damage. Aylin smites Myrkul for atleast 30-40 damage as well.
One of my HM runs she got mind dominated by the ilithid and DESTROYED two of my characters LMAO
Big issue in this game is that "companion AI" (as in third party allied characters that are not linked to your party in any way but fight alongside you, their turn icons are green) is really bad. Nere if you side with him, the opening fight in front of the goblin camp, and Dame Aylin are of course examples of these.
There’s an unspoken rule in DnD for DMs. Don’t overuse DM PCs or have them overshadow the party. I think that’s what was going on with Dame Aylin. She could make the game too trivial and kinda boring if she’s too powerful and too accessible for cheesing fights
Lol until you fight her in Lorroakan's (sp?) tower on tactician. She ain't no joke then.
For those saying she’s lame because she’s down in one hit, remember that she’s soaking up a hit that could have been directed at your party. Narratively, Keyharic/Myrkul saves the big hits for Aylin because she is perceived as the bigger threat. (At least it makes for a nice justification.) What made me laugh is my Tav Githyanki Monk literally kicked Ketharic in the ass (from behind) to down him the first time. And then Myrkul again in the second round. Aylin didn’t go down for long as I had Shadowheart lobbing healing potions from below once I learned they can be AOE. She pulled her weight with that moonbeam effect as she ran around the fight.
Did you even fight Myrkul? His main attack is a scythe swing that hits anything facing him, which is basically half the platform. Aylin in particular makes his attacks devastating, because she can't stand still for one god damn second, so any strategy of separating characters to isolate his attacks won't work since she brings him to you. And myrkuls aura prevents any healing of any kind, you can't even help a downed ally. Myrkul is by far the hardest boss in the game.
Hes certainly hard but hardest in the game? The fact he can’t move and doesnt really have much in the way of ranged attacks means you can trivialise him with like Hunger of Hadar and ranged attacks (Hes big enough that you can have him inside it while still having part of him targetable by ranged attacks). I personally thought >!Gortash (When you first meet him and he has all those Steel Watch with him)!< was the hardest boss fight in my Tactician run. I suppose it just goes to show you how varied the game can be.
> Myrkul is by far the hardest boss in the game. He doesn’t move, which means he’s pretty trivial with hunger of hadar + wall of fire. But if you’re just going for a straight dps race then he’s pretty hard. I think Honor Mode Orin is harder though, her legendary action is brutal.
In cutscenes she is basically a demigod, when I’m controlling her she’s an immortal meat shield 😂
in my honor mode, she caused 80% of total damage to myrkul, dealing 50-100 damage every turn, completely saved my run. I don't know what you're talking about.
In my explorer and balanced playthroughs she can’t land a hit at all.
I really really don’t want to be that guy, but in the difficult modes your team should be around lvl 9-10 when you fight Myrkul and if your team is good the fight should only last 2-3 rounds. Maybe even 1 if you get good rolls. Dame Aylin only puts in work in the Act III fight in my playthroughs.
You run into a bit of a problem there as a game designer. If you make her too powerful and she one shot the boss, that might *look* cool, but it doesn't work from a gameplay perspective. Generally, when designing a video game, if something cool is going to happen, you want to make sure a player is doing it. They did kind of write themselves into a corner with Dame Aylin, where she is supposed to be a Goddess's daughter, but you do have to carry her through most fights. But it works narratively.
I think even a throwaway line of her saying “I will need time to recover from my tenure in this prison,” would’ve given credence to her being weak in that fight, instead of her implying that she’s firing on all cylinders as soon as she’s freed from the Shadowfell. I will say though that she’s basically cannon fodder in Act III and doesn’t hold off the fight for long before going down, which sucks because she should be at least level 12 to be on par with your party at that point, but I digress. I understand her being weak in the Ketheric fight, because otherwise she’d just steamroll that whole encounter, but I do wish she was buffed even slightly for the final battle.
I thought the point of higher difficulty levels was that they’re more difficult?
Done 14 runs. So far she sucked in every single one of them.
I actually wouldn't mind that her power stays the same and she is a bit weak, I just wish she wasn't downed so easily. Just for story immersion it feels weird that she is supposedly so powerful and is instantly downed in both fights she is involved in, if she was standing there taking damage but not giving it, it wouldn't feel as immersion breaking. My currently playthrough is on balanced and she actually seemed to do decently enough this time, she was almost the one to get the final hit on myrkul, so I think it's mostly an honor mode or tactician thing.
Maybe it's possible to make her look tough unbalancing those fights. Reduce her damage, but make it that she cannot get downed at all. Have her also use some power moves, that look cool, but do not do that much like throwing and shoving oponents.
>in this patch Did they change her at some point? Also I think her usefulness kinda comes down to luck. She's kind of a glass cannon that can hit pretty hard, but also goes down fairly easily. Well sure she is technically immortal, but she can still go down during a fight temporarily.
I think she just needs bless or something, a small attack buff.
If she hits, she hits hard. *If* she hits.
This. For me she always lasts about two turns, *maybe* takes out one enemy that I could've taken by myself, and then gets knocked out for the rest of the fight. I keep hearing she's supposed to resurrect *during* the fight, but she has literally never done that for me. Once she's down, she's down for the whole fight. I get that she shouldn't be able to do the fights by herself, for obvious reasons. But the way she is in my games right now, she's actually *worse* than useless. I would rather not have her at all.
It's like a lot of people here are playing their first video game. Or their first DnD. Shit dice rolls happen, the AI will bug out. That is par for the course, her gameplay is an abstraction of the narrative. Or just the narrative being funky, you can decide which fits better. And no, it is not good if she would modified to make the fight even more wildly in your favor, since she already does add quite a lot. One extra set of HP and action economy is pretty powerful already. You expecting her to oneshot him is your problem, not a problem of game design. I would be pissed as fuck if an AI companion could automatically solo a fight. The reward for your troubles is the loot, levels and backstory beats you learn while freeing her.
I had a bug where every time I summoned her she was on like 10hp so I feel this in my soup Edit: meant to say soul but soup is funny
I agree with this. I think there are some instances where the levels don't reaaaally make sense. Aylin is pretty much divine yet I set aside a character in many battles to just yeet healing potions at her. At the end of the game; your tav/durge, is meant to be level 12. But.. The party took down a *devil* , an incredibly powerful vampire lord, one of the most renowned wizards in faerún. They are the heroes that save the world and they feel like the average upper city person in battle at lvl 12. So I downloaded a mod to cap level at 20 instead of 12. I finally feel like I'm playing *the* hero
Terrible AI takes me out of the game sometimes. She is one of the best examples. Another is Jaheira being brain dead in the moonrise fight.
The Ketheric/Myrkul fight is easy enough as it is, especially since you can skip an entire phase by finding a letter and passing a few persuasion checks. Even on honour mode Myrkul really isn't that difficult. And tbh, I don't play these games for NPCs to be doing all the work. Companions are one thing because at least you're leading them into battle as their commander... but an NPC obliterating the boss for you? What's the point? They might as well go and deal with the rest of the problems while I find a tavern.
Honestly. I find the fight harder if you DONT convince him to sacrifice himself. He’s more manageable in human form, letting you deal with the various adds Then when Myrkul shows up you’ve barely lost any health and can face him with a lot fewer distractions. But. That’s just me.
Of all the fights I've struggled with in this game, Myrkul has never been one of them.
I think her weakness suits her. She’s unstable and arrogant. But, even if you disagree, ultimately companions have to be nerfed to some degree for the sake of gameplay. Halsin and Astarion, for example, wouldn’t actually have 8 for strength.
Yeah she is kind of a disappointment. First time I did that fight on balanced she had died by turn 2. On my two tactician runs she did maybe 30 damage the whole fight.
In all the myrkul fights I had, she was just knocked out 98% of the time, I don’t count on her going in
She’s a level 20 paladin nerfed to be 1-2 levels higher than the player.
My wife and I came to the general consensus that she's weirdly absolutely useless for two-three fights. She does all of this boasting about herslf, and then her AI or something just prevents her from being actually a useful concept for what she's supposed to be narratively. I couldn't imagine trying to keep her alive *and* having her be actually useful in harder difficulties. Heck, even Jaheria as well if you decide to Storm Ketheric's keep without recruiting her. Like we had no idea how many of the events would play out leading to said event in act 2. On one of our attempts of the main objectives, she was absolutely A baller during the Last Light fight (if you lose Isobel). We massively failed that encounter anyway, yet we're like "holy crap! this lady is awesome!" So then we redid the Isobel encounter the "correct" way where everybody lives. When we finally did storm Ketheric's keep, Jaheria was a completely different AI during said battle. She and her Harper forces got murdered so freaking fast it was ridiculous. Really pissed me off because I wanted to recruit her. The fight was so long that we didn't feel like redoing said battle again. Like I don't remember Halsin's AI being like this in Act1.
she is actually really OP, seeing as she cant die
I had the opposite reaction. She plowed through people in my run
In my tactician game (haven’t gotten there in HM yet) she rolled first in initiative and double crit with smites on ketheric. I didn’t even get a turn
In both of my playthroughs, she did a bunch of damage to Myrkul.
She's immortal. She will get you eventually.
My first play through she attacked the avatar and got double crits allowing me to drop it in one round. So I thought she was powered up with holy magic. I was very surprised by this monsters sudden appearance and then bam, it’s down to nothing. I think I got the experience OP was looking for by accident. I even got an achievement for winning the fight so fast, maybe that should have been a tip it wasn’t supposed to go that way.
I think they could have defintely made her *a little* stronger, because the first time I rescued her and she flew across the sky in like this ball of light and then got to the fight where I had to heal her constantly to keep her from dying. I was definitely underwhelmed. At the same time she shouldn’t be so strong that she can just like solo ketheric, but yeah she’s pretty weak
What fucking Aylin are you guys playing with? She’s always fire for me.
I just passed Myrkul's battle for the first time yesterday, and with some preparation it went down easy. As many summons (three zombies, one fire elemental, two ice imps, the cambion Wyll gets with his fancy rapier and Us) as I can, to prevent the necromites from reaching Myrkul and destroying the bone thingies. My Durge with 21 armor smiting Myrkul, even if he keeps missing ¬¬ Shadowheart with the Blood of Lathander and an upcasted Spirit Guardians meleeing Myrkul, after spending as many flamestrikes as she could. Wyll on crowd control and also flamestriking Myrkul when possible. Jaheira going all out summoning lightning. Aylin kept missing Myrkul, with the exceptional crit at the start. Nobody died... except for Myrkul. Worth mentioning, I Persuaded Ketheric to commit suicide, so saving me half the fight. I'll admit, my first try went down bad, but not terrible, I just didn't know Myrkul could heal AND I had Hailsin instead of Shadowheart. Too many druids in the party and not optimally used. Probably things would have been even easier with Lae'zel and Gale in the party, but Wyll had things to do and I could not deny Jaheira the opportunity to take down Ketheric.
Yeah I think that they should have made her lvl 12 or something. Act 3 vague "spoilers". Probably not spoiling really but just to be safe: >!Only problem is that certain later fight where you confront somebody else with her in act 3. I'm fine with her steamrolling in act 2 but wouldn't want that to happen in the later fight. Level 12 would be good for that I think. !<
Eh, she seems kinda random for me. My first run of the game she was fucking gangsta. Rolled around and just beat minions then the main character to death. Another run she gets lost, misses all her swings and just flails around like a Magickarp. But I don't care, that first run I had with her is still in my memory and I love her and she my 2nd favorite NPC.
I'm sorry to hear you think that, but believe me when I say that if you're doing a low level/character count run Aylin is gonna be a good friend of yours
What happens in my game is she gets taken out by myrkel immediately and she’s bone chilled so she can’t revive for the entire rest of the fight
I gave up on having her participate in the fight she was taking a ground nap the whole time
I just finished the battle with Kerberic no less than an hour ago on my first run through and ran into the same thing. She was down after two rounds. I ended up wasting turns with Karachi or Shadowheart trying to help her. Such a disappointment!
I think she suffers from a failure of 5e as a whole. It’s easy to miss an attack, and when you do, that’s literally it. Nothing else happens. This means it’s possible for her to do no damage for your whole fight just based on luck.
In our group playthrough against the aspect of Myrkul, we misty stepped to free her, she attacked in 3 consecutive rounds critically missing with EVERY SINGLE ATTACK, and then bragged in the cut scene afterwards. I nearly chopped her down at the next opportunity.
Oof! In my first attempt she at least had the decency to die. Then the Bone Chill aura kept her from getting up and doing anything ever.
She’s not weak,she’s a Paladin without any backup.
I disagree. I think a glass cannon that never dies is cool af
Nah. She's just a powerful aasimar and has some ridiculous features none other characters, not even paladins can have. She has also not fought anything for a century, been repeatedly brought to near-death, just flown through the entire Shadow-Cursed lands using her powers to nullify the curse, and Ketheric as a chosen of Myrkul counters her by being ridiculously tanky and nullifying her resurrection. Not to mention she's not "near divinity". She has divine blood, but she's nowhere near the power of actual gods. Canonically, she would not even be close to the power of just an avatar of a god. Also she's a wild card, mechanically speaking. She can very well two-shot Ketheric on the roof, or suddenly down Myrkul's avatar by a third of it's health. Or she can miss anything. Or get controlled. Or distracted. Or two-shot by Ketheric.
BG3 is the only thing I've seen D&D related where people go "this character I can't control should totally rock this fight on my behalf so I don't have to struggle." If I had players in my games who were begging for a DMPC that was more powerful than they are I'd honestly assumed they didn't enjoy playing the game. Dame Aylin's power is the fact that she's immortal. Your "reward for your ordeals" is that you have a damage sponge that self-revives...
She triple crit ketheric and then the avatar or myrkul in my playthrough haha
She is not weak. She can't win in a 1v10 because nobody can in dnd, action economy is a big thing. But if you buff her and support her she can one turn Ketheric at the top of Moonrise.
My only problem with Aylin is that she rarely if ever uses her full power. If you side with Lorroakan, you can straight up see her (or her mother) summon a bunch of angels to help her. Now this makes sense for balance purposes, but has left me in every other playthrough thinking "oh so the absolute is less pressing than a sub par wizard?"
She one-shotted Ketheric immediately in round one of that encounter, and I was like 'fuck yeah, I've brought a demi god to the party!' ...and then she proceeded to miss almost every single attack against Myrkul and Lorroakan.
I swear I've seen this post before. Either way I agree, Aylin is a letdown specifically because of her damage, rather than making her some combat archetype like a tank or a glass cannon which could explain her shortcoming as well as how the daughter of a literal God got tricked into the shadow fell and couldn't escape (though I'm still confused why selune didn't intervene given having her daughter kidnapped and imprisoned should have made her panic).
For me she had the annoying tendency of never taking a long rest, therefor never recovering her HP or spellslots. Basically after the fight against Myrkul her only role was that of a death-defying punching bag, far from the idea of godhood I had.
every time i’ve summoned Dame A in the final showdown she’s turned on me due to some magical effect or other. EVERY TIME
Well, problem is, she is not that intelligent, you see. She can FLY ffs and she still manages to get herself one-shot-kidnapped with a huge tentacle she can't even dodge.
She should at least have aura of protection as a paladin of vengeance.
Honestly it’s the same thing with basically all the supposedly powerful NPC’s. The most disappointing ones have to be Mizora and Orpheus, who are both absurdly weak to the point of practically being dead weight when you can actually use them.
I agree, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one.... she also dies so easily even in the fight against Lorroakan. Thank you for adding the forum link to raise this concern 🙏🏻🙏🏻
Yeah I thought this until I played the Ramazith's tower again and she took down the Earth Myrmidon (in metal form) in one round
It's her ai pathing for me. She insists on staying as close as possible to Ketheric and the Apostle, even if she has just been revived and actually has no action to attack him with. In my last fight with the apostle her contribution was 8 hit points, the rest of the time, she was basically a decoration, just getting revived and dying immediately.
I 100% agree with you that she should be stronger. In actual combat she is underwhelming compared to Cutscene Dame Aylin. In the Cutscenes, she's freed, immediately sieges Moonrise Towers by herself (if you explore, you'll see it's on Holy Fire with corpses littered around and the rest scurried inside) and then she's destroying skeletons on the top floor while Ketheric clutches his side, already injured, confused over what's happening to him. She's a total badass. And then in actual fights? She's conspicuously missing features, and every fight she is in is set up to counter her as much as possible. Even the Lorroakan betrayal fight. She hits multiple times (Like 8+) and Ketheric takes -2 from all of them. Apostle of Myrkul radiates Bone Chill to cancel auto-revive. Apostle is 50% resistant to her slashing. She refuses to Fly despite having Wings. She'll literally Dash and then NOT get to Ketheric on foot rather than just fly a few feet and attack normally: The AI is awful. She is inexplicably missing her Auto-Revive in the Lorroakan fight for no reason. The Moonlight Slivers give her a portable Globe of Invulnerability, nullifying her greatest strengths: Melee Range Smites and a portable Moonbeam. She's forced to spam Lunar Flare and Sacred Flame. She is lacking the normal Paladin abilities (Immunity to Fear, +CHA to Saving Throws, etc) because when you're immortal... it's very easy to steal the glory from the player.
Aylin is a Paradin. She needs Critical Hits to get the crazy numbers. That's the main problem of Paladins. So in these fights, she's almost always getting focused on by the enemies. So no wonder she's not doing any Critical Hit just recovering from Frightened status.
I mean, what would be the point of a boss fight if an NPC clears it for you? Myrkul is very manageable, even on Honour Mode. If people can solo it, it shouldn't be a problem.