Baldur’s Gate 3 players realize they’ve been nerfing themselves for hundreds of hours

Baldur’s Gate 3 players are finally learning how non-lethal attacks actually impact the game and some powerful skills.

Players have the option to turn on non-lethal attacks via a toggle in the combat and skills UI. As the name suggests, it makes it so that foes fall at 1 HP, but stay alive instead of outright dying when defeated.

This can have some story consequences, notably being essential for recruiting Minthara in a non-evil playthrough.

However, players have finally learned just how non-lethal attacks can impact other aspects of gameplay in logical, though non-obvious, ways.

Larian Studios

Responding to a Reddit user who asked about the purpose of turning off non-lethal attacks, players were quick to point out that some abilities and item effects only trigger if you kill an enemy, such as the Fiend Warlock class feature Dark One’s Blessing and Bloodlust Elixirs.

It also impacts another toggleable passive ability: Cull the Weak. This is triggered when lowering a creature’s HP to lower the number of evolved illithid powers the user has, causing the target to die and inflicting 1d4 psychic damage on all nearby enemies.

This powerful illithid power is considered among the best in the entire game and is a crucial part of various character builds and tricks.

Since foes cannot normally die when non-lethal attacks are on, it seems the game toggles off Cull the Weak automatically. This came as a shock to some players, with one saying, “Oh, THATS why COTW randomly switches off for me. 200 hours in the game and have always been so confused why it sometimes disabled itself.”

“Holy s*** same, I thought it was something to do with the control scheme,” said another.

This makes clear that what some may assume is a bug is actually Baldur’s Gate 3 working as intended – and that turning non-lethal attacks off and on has a greater effect than you may think.