It's over. Honour Mode cleared 8 times in 2026. Time to give it a rest; I was playing it less in August anyway but had to finish off this run. Managed to clear it in one final 8 hour session.
The party
Karlach Barbarian Giant 12
Shared-MVP with Lae'zel, probably edged her out overall. Had 25 AC in the end thanks to high Dex, Graceful Cloth, no armour and 23 Con from the Amulet and other sources. Just throw and kick stuff!
Lae'zel Barbarian Berserker 12
Solid, just wallop stuff with Sword. Writing this I realise I forgot to grab Silver Sword off Voss after HoH, oh well. Soulbreaker is just fine. Started to run out of strength elixirs by the end.
Shadowheart Barbarian Wild Magic 12
Nothing spectacular, I moved around her gear dropping armour in favour of Barbarian Clothes and she performed a bit better. Solid but unremarkable, the Wild Magic features are benign but fairly weak.
Jaheira Barbarian Wildheart 12
I didn't bother doing her personal quest and acquiring Minsc. I was very boring and just had Bear aspect so when I did rage, lots of resistance. Dual-wielding menace.
Timeline
21st August 2026 - cleared the House of Hope; looted everything I could and managed to free Hope relatively painlessly, then kill Raphael et al. Quickly took care of Ethel next but was probably a waste of time; then Orin I believe who managed to almost wipe me out. Jaheira ran away and revived everyone. I blame rustiness on my part. 1 Long rest in act 3 after all this.
Went back and killed Orin then charged the Gortash coronation yelling objection. Giant clusterfuck! Painful waiting for a small army of enemies to resolve their turns. Had to retreat and come back. Gortash didn't heal from the barrel pile I left at his feet so was not too hard, I just kept going up and down the stairs. Not very forward barbarian of me but would have been wiped. So Karlach kicked Gortash to death and took all his stuff, then had to go back to grab his corpse and bring it to camp to resolve her personal quest, dodging small army. Sigh.
Anyway was done so went to Morphic Pool after buying as many vendors stuff as I could; squid Karlach (messed up my stats a bit as usual) ; final fight was GRAND good use of haste spores and Globe of Invulnerability wiped out the Emperor's Dream Squad (had freed Orpheus), could not finish off the dragon so ran around and took out the Illithid artillery arcanists and into Brain. 4 rounds, 3 rounds dealing damage. Fin.
Assessment
43 hours to do this; it was fun and saw some different stuff but time to give Bg3 a rest. I want to do a Shadowheart All-Cleric run and a Durge III pure evil run but they can wait. In a better place atm so don't need my new comfort game as much BUT 2026 has certainly been the year of Bg3.
What's next
I had started a Challenging Run on Kingmaker for the first time so will try to finish that, am in Act 3 and its relatively smooth.
I was not too into DayZ for DayZ Szn in August but then my May holdover character died and suddenly all was fresh again. So that's kind of my chill mid-week game.
Need to play something completely new to mix things up, not sure yet what that is.
