I noticed this too. I guess you actually need the enemy to be able to see you immediately after the hit lands to trigger the surprise effect and initiate combat. This would definitely qualify as a bug. Certainly it should be better to ambush an enemy and remain unseen.
Like stated in the video, if they get surprised, they engage you instantly, preventing you from striking from hiding and avoid detection. So there is two options -Attack and get locked in combat instantly with surprised enemies. -Attack, mayb kill out of sight and the enemy starts to investigate, but leaving you able to sneak away like an assassin. The way the game works I don't think those two can overlap. If they are searching, they won't be surprised when they find their mark, but will be surprised by an enemy suddenly showing up and attacking them directly.
@@frederiksd A common problem i've run into is one where I shoot an enemy from a place they can't see or investigate. Then they take the damage, (sometimes even get surprised), and heal it back up as if they pop a short rest or something. There have been multiple times in my current playthrough where i just barrage them from spots like this and out-dps their healing so to speak. It's really really jank and i feel like damaging any enemy from any stealth position should just start combat with suprise and have them try to find you as if you're invis or hiding.
@@frederiksd I think the reasonable assumption is that the surprise effect could just delay their reaction for a moment, and that's what gives you the time to get away.
For all the things BG3 did right, they really failed with stealth/surprise. You either cheese the game completely with invisible shenanigans or stealth proficiency just doesn't matter.
Making sure they see who attacked them in order to get the drop on them seems a little counterintuitive, but from an under-the-hood mechanical point of view I see how it makes sense. Thank you for sharing - had a lot of similarly confusing situations in my playthroughs.
I think suprise attacks only trigger when you are hidden in line of sight or attacking an enemy while their back is facing you. If you attack an enemy while invisible or hidden in line of sight, you should get a successful surprise attack I learned this after my second playthrough on tactician and remembering on many occasions where I soloed mobs as an assasin gloomstalker
@@GamingBirchAs someone else who has beaten Honour mode several times, surprise rounds are completely unnecessary on all difficulties, no fight is hard enough to warrant them.
I mostly stopped trying to get surprise because it causes so many annoying bugs. For example it prevents using multi-attack for any character who entered combat using an attack, at least in about 99% of cases. Also if you initiate combat by throwing a returning weapon, the weapon will actually not return. And if the entire team is in stealth a surprise attack will usually leave 3 of the party members still out of combat but disable turn-based mode for them, so if you don't switch to them quickly their buffs will run out. I'm starting to understand why people are doing those solo honor mode runs - they avoid all the annoying micromanagement to avoid all the weird stuff in the game.
Excellent! Nonsensical combat mechanics, but excellent you figured it out. I do feel like I don't get surprise in Moonrise and in the Adamantine forge area on the Duergar there. I feel like something about the "you've attacked someone" cutscene/dialogue glitches surprise... sometimes, especially in those two areas. I've gotten that dialogue and surprise, but usually don't. Even when not killing the enemy and having line of sight, and of course being stealthed.
Wow i'm glad I found this thought I was going crazy. I've seen so many videos explaining how to do surprise rounds and most have stated to just make sure turn based is on then you're good to go. I knew something else was up as I've been getting inconsistencies. Well done brother. The only other problem now is when you attack an enemy with a yellow outline and the narrator goes "YoU WeRe SeEn AtTaCkInG SoMeOnE." Yes Ma'am! I did please lordy gimme my surprise round.
For this, the easiest way is to use spoon or fork or whatever it’s name is, the quasit familiar. It can go invisible and doesn’t trigger dialogues I believe.
Okay so it wasnt just me. Everybody remember the first "big" fight with the goblin in front of the druid groves yeah? So i ungrouped the crew, and just let Astareon sneaking in front and kill one of the goblin. Because the goblin was instantly killed, Astareon was not being seen immediately. After that, the rest of the enemy were "looking" for the attacker and spotted Astareon which instantly started the fight without surprised. Weird thing is, the rest of the crew, which were far away from the area and SNEAKING as well, also got spotted
Now that you know, hopefully you will be more successful :) Check out the original video as well if you haven't. It has more info on what may not work.
No need to apologize, I am happy someone finally mentioned this :D I wanted to make him look mean, since he was a Dark Urge Barb (so I guess the most angry thing you can make).
The most reliably way to get it, is to get a summon [Basketshovelfork is excellent at this], make it invisible and have that one attack someone. It'll die, but you can now sneak everyone into position and use the surprise round.
Yep this is what I found out last week, I was testing an Assassin build and decided to try it on Aylin at camp, I realised something was up immediately when I attacked from behind a rock and didn’t get surprise. First thing I thought of was sight.
Maybe I'm missing something due to no D&D experience but it is annoying when this happens. I can sneak up on an enemy, attack them, and be killed before I get to finish that character's turn and walk away. Or, if I do survive, I've lost the action for that turn. You might as well walk into the encounter normally if you can't surprise them & benefit from more knowledge about the enemy's actions.
I surprised duergars in the underworld ambush cause i didn't go straight down, instead i went on the second path to the right, went inside the cabin which made them surprised
Sooo, if you do it from turn based mode, you technically ARE surprising them, if they don’t see you. It’s not actual surprise tho, but enemies are spending their turn searching for you. The issue is that if they find you before spending all their resources, they will engage you with their remaining actions. Have you tried to attack with one character that has no LoS, while another character remains hidden in shadows but WITH LoS? I’m curious what the outcome would be.
Is the case with mephit on 1:16 with line of sight? It might work that way because your character succeded a stealth check. In that case you never surprise enemies, 'cause they don't know you're there yet. They just investigate where the attack came from, then they see a character and a fight begins without surprise.
@@GamingBirch In case of such attacks - I doubt it. Played bg3 for around 500 hours, remember many occasions where losing line of sight on bow/arbalest or cantrip attacks didn't interfere with surprise mechanic. What did is this obnoxious stealth check. Characters with high stealth stat usually help ruin ambushes if you don't use turn-based and have someone to back them up. The part for AOE spells and line of sight seem true though.
Stealth and surprise can be really janky in this game. This is a thing in the game, becausd hitting people from long range without initiating combat is actually benedicial for stealth archers. It is a clash of different systems. Additionally, hitting a neutral or friendly npc will never have them surprised, because after hitting them you will be put into the dialogue screen briefly for the announcer to say that combat will be initiated. Pretty stupid and inconsistent, its so annoying and especially dangerous for honor mode.
I wash I saw this 110 hours of playing ago, before I started gloom assassin playthrough on honor and was angry because of this thought-to-be-random-or-predefined-for-a-battle situation. Or like if the opponent is initially yellow I only once managed to get surprise round. I thought game is just worse than my DM :D
Just use an invisible attacker to make sure you always get surprise you can get it pretty easy by going five levels into a druigar character or scroll of invisibility or an elixir of invisibility or a quozot or a packed of the chain familiar, The best option is a Duggar character because it’s just a cantrip for druigar Which means it’s the one that you can use most consistently, because as long as you remember to go invisible before you start the fight, you’ll Always get surprise, and you don’t have to rely on finding more scrolls or elixirs both the quazit and the the chain familiar as well have this going for them they’re still slightly worse because neither one of them are a relatively strong summon So while you’ll get surprised you won’t deal a lot of damage so the best thing for consistent surprised is a Duggar or in late game a more powerful consistent summon, which I don’t know a great example of right now I’m actually not sure if there is a summon that you can get consistently that is both good combatively and has invisibility if someone does know one let me know because that would then be a better strategy than Druigar
I've been playing a duergar with invis cantrip and I found that I don't get surprise if I initiate with a ranged weapon AND I'm in the red area when you hold down shift., even when invisible! I found that surprise works when I'm invisible if I initiate with a melee weapon.
@@cathalmoloney4929 swords bard, but I doubt class matters. I forgot to add one more thing. When using ranged weapon, you have to crouch to get the surprise, which means that invis means nothing when you're trying to get surprise with ranged attacked because you would have gotten it anyway without it.
@DarwinsGreatestHits no I don't imagine class has anything to do with it myself I was just wondering if you had access to spells because ranged spells work
@@DarwinsGreatestHits it feels like you shouldn't need to hide or Crouch if you're invisible that might be a bug with like how they decide if a ranged attack should be considered as a surprise attack
I think i accidentally found out how to trigger surprise on non-hostile npc, set sneak attack as reaction then attack them while hiding or invisible, then once the dialogue triggers swap to another character and click accept on the sneak attack reaction window. This will trigger combat and surprise round. (All the rules in this video and the first video applies such as having to not one shot the npc & be in line of sight). May need more testing on this…
@@GamingBirch hi, I’m addicted to the assassin class and its gameplay hence I’ve been trying to surprise as much as possible & here are some of my findings. 1. If the target is yellow (non hostile) you need to attack normally with sneak attack as reaction, then click ok to sneak attack once the initial hit lands (needs to be fast enough then you can bypass the conversation). I’ve been getting consistent surprise round with npc that are not red / hostile with this method, like the paladin of tyr, nere after siding with him, and random npcs that have yellow border. 2. Invisibility is a bit weird, sometimes you will get surprise but normally it works when you are invisible and you need to be standing right inside their red sight cone. 3. Normal hiding and just standing at the edge of enemy’s sight cone will normally generate a surprise round once you attack an npc that is red. 4. If the npc is red or an enemy, recommend to open with sneak attack as assassin, then once the action is refunded you can have another sneak attack in. If you open with normal attack and sneak attack as a reaction, I found out that the surprise round will initiate immediately and you will only get one sneak attack instead of 2. Hope this helps! I’ve been watching your video explanation alot because I’m addicted to the sneak gameplay in this game. I can’t do much testing because I don’t play a lot and I only have 1 playthrough which is on honor mode now 😅
"A magic missile hit me out of the blue, no biggie"
"It's just the wind"
Reminds me of Skyrim NPCS "Must have been the wind.." while an arrow flies 1 cm from their face.
I noticed this too. I guess you actually need the enemy to be able to see you immediately after the hit lands to trigger the surprise effect and initiate combat. This would definitely qualify as a bug. Certainly it should be better to ambush an enemy and remain unseen.
Like stated in the video, if they get surprised, they engage you instantly, preventing you from striking from hiding and avoid detection.
So there is two options
-Attack and get locked in combat instantly with surprised enemies.
-Attack, mayb kill out of sight and the enemy starts to investigate, but leaving you able to sneak away like an assassin.
The way the game works I don't think those two can overlap. If they are searching, they won't be surprised when they find their mark, but will be surprised by an enemy suddenly showing up and attacking them directly.
@@frederiksd A common problem i've run into is one where I shoot an enemy from a place they can't see or investigate.
Then they take the damage, (sometimes even get surprised), and heal it back up as if they pop a short rest or something.
There have been multiple times in my current playthrough where i just barrage them from spots like this and out-dps their healing so to speak.
It's really really jank and i feel like damaging any enemy from any stealth position should just start combat with suprise and have them try to find you as if you're invis or hiding.
@@frederiksd I think the reasonable assumption is that the surprise effect could just delay their reaction for a moment, and that's what gives you the time to get away.
For all the things BG3 did right, they really failed with stealth/surprise. You either cheese the game completely with invisible shenanigans or stealth proficiency just doesn't matter.
Making sure they see who attacked them in order to get the drop on them seems a little counterintuitive, but from an under-the-hood mechanical point of view I see how it makes sense. Thank you for sharing - had a lot of similarly confusing situations in my playthroughs.
i don't even try to surprise the enemies in bg3. Which is sad because it is one of the main components of planning a fight in DnD games
In my first game on Balanced, I didn't bother either. But on Tactician and now in Honour mode, it became much more important part of my game.
I think suprise attacks only trigger when you are hidden in line of sight or attacking an enemy while their back is facing you.
If you attack an enemy while invisible or hidden in line of sight, you should get a successful surprise attack
I learned this after my second playthrough on tactician and remembering on many occasions where I soloed mobs as an assasin gloomstalker
@@GamingBirchAs someone else who has beaten Honour mode several times, surprise rounds are completely unnecessary on all difficulties, no fight is hard enough to warrant them.
I mostly stopped trying to get surprise because it causes so many annoying bugs. For example it prevents using multi-attack for any character who entered combat using an attack, at least in about 99% of cases. Also if you initiate combat by throwing a returning weapon, the weapon will actually not return. And if the entire team is in stealth a surprise attack will usually leave 3 of the party members still out of combat but disable turn-based mode for them, so if you don't switch to them quickly their buffs will run out.
I'm starting to understand why people are doing those solo honor mode runs - they avoid all the annoying micromanagement to avoid all the weird stuff in the game.
Science at work - observing what happens, making hypothesis, testing them out and uosating them based on new findings - goid going!
Thanks :) I really hope there is not much more to this topic. I would feel a bit foolish if I found something new with update #17 already posted :D
Excellent! Nonsensical combat mechanics, but excellent you figured it out. I do feel like I don't get surprise in Moonrise and in the Adamantine forge area on the Duergar there. I feel like something about the "you've attacked someone" cutscene/dialogue glitches surprise... sometimes, especially in those two areas. I've gotten that dialogue and surprise, but usually don't. Even when not killing the enemy and having line of sight, and of course being stealthed.
Wow i'm glad I found this thought I was going crazy. I've seen so many videos explaining how to do surprise rounds and most have stated to just make sure turn based is on then you're good to go. I knew something else was up as I've been getting inconsistencies. Well done brother.
The only other problem now is when you attack an enemy with a yellow outline and the narrator goes "YoU WeRe SeEn AtTaCkInG SoMeOnE." Yes Ma'am! I did please lordy gimme my surprise round.
For this, the easiest way is to use spoon or fork or whatever it’s name is, the quasit familiar. It can go invisible and doesn’t trigger dialogues I believe.
Or Basket :)@@chi7818
Okay so it wasnt just me.
Everybody remember the first "big" fight with the goblin in front of the druid groves yeah?
So i ungrouped the crew, and just let Astareon sneaking in front and kill one of the goblin. Because the goblin was instantly killed, Astareon was not being seen immediately. After that, the rest of the enemy were "looking" for the attacker and spotted Astareon which instantly started the fight without surprised.
Weird thing is, the rest of the crew, which were far away from the area and SNEAKING as well, also got spotted
So important. Thank you so much!
this is super interesting, was wondering why it wasn't working
thanks for the information :)
Now that you know, hopefully you will be more successful :) Check out the original video as well if you haven't. It has more info on what may not work.
Dude, your Dragonborn looks awesome! Sorry, I just like to see how people customize them. The best looking race, in my opinion.
No need to apologize, I am happy someone finally mentioned this :D
I wanted to make him look mean, since he was a Dark Urge Barb (so I guess the most angry thing you can make).
Thanks for making this useful video!
You're welcome :) I was hoping it would help someone. Or ideally lead to this being fixed if any part of it is not intentional.
The most reliably way to get it, is to get a summon [Basketshovelfork is excellent at this], make it invisible and have that one attack someone. It'll die, but you can now sneak everyone into position and use the surprise round.
Yep this is what I found out last week, I was testing an Assassin build and decided to try it on Aylin at camp, I realised something was up immediately when I attacked from behind a rock and didn’t get surprise. First thing I thought of was sight.
Maybe I'm missing something due to no D&D experience but it is annoying when this happens. I can sneak up on an enemy, attack them, and be killed before I get to finish that character's turn and walk away. Or, if I do survive, I've lost the action for that turn. You might as well walk into the encounter normally if you can't surprise them & benefit from more knowledge about the enemy's actions.
Good stuff man!
interesting
also I love shatter animation now (from watching the slowmo of 1:30)
Thank you!
Thanks for testing
Makes so much sense now 😆
I was wondering wtf was happening. I thought it was a hidden initiative check of something 🎲
I surprised duergars in the underworld ambush cause i didn't go straight down, instead i went on the second path to the right, went inside the cabin which made them surprised
This is very helpful, thatk you 😬
this is good
Aww cheers, I can finally get consistent surprise rounds now :D
Enjoy :)
Just learn the cheeky quasit spell to a wizard and have free guaranteed suprise rounds on every combat you initiate.
Thank you
Happy to help :)
hello, are you czech or slovak? your accent seems so
Ano, jsem soused :D Do teď jsem si myslel, že mám nějaký zpackaný mix přízvuků, tak jsem rád, že nás nezapřu.
okaaay uhádol som lets goo 😹@@GamingBirch
Sooo, if you do it from turn based mode, you technically ARE surprising them, if they don’t see you. It’s not actual surprise tho, but enemies are spending their turn searching for you. The issue is that if they find you before spending all their resources, they will engage you with their remaining actions.
Have you tried to attack with one character that has no LoS, while another character remains hidden in shadows but WITH LoS? I’m curious what the outcome would be.
Is the case with mephit on 1:16 with line of sight? It might work that way because your character succeded a stealth check. In that case you never surprise enemies, 'cause they don't know you're there yet. They just investigate where the attack came from, then they see a character and a fight begins without surprise.
Hm, possible. But technically, wouldn't that still be a question of line of sight?
@@GamingBirch In case of such attacks - I doubt it. Played bg3 for around 500 hours, remember many occasions where losing line of sight on bow/arbalest or cantrip attacks didn't interfere with surprise mechanic. What did is this obnoxious stealth check. Characters with high stealth stat usually help ruin ambushes if you don't use turn-based and have someone to back them up.
The part for AOE spells and line of sight seem true though.
This is so stupid. Thanks for letting us know!
I guess it's just a clash of multiple systems. I doubt everything is intentional like this.
Can you surprise bosses? You're able to sneak around even the most major big bosses before combat so I wonder?
I think most, if not all bosses have Alert or some other effect that prevents them from being surprised.
Stealth and surprise can be really janky in this game. This is a thing in the game, becausd hitting people from long range without initiating combat is actually benedicial for stealth archers. It is a clash of different systems.
Additionally, hitting a neutral or friendly npc will never have them surprised, because after hitting them you will be put into the dialogue screen briefly for the announcer to say that combat will be initiated. Pretty stupid and inconsistent, its so annoying and especially dangerous for honor mode.
I wash I saw this 110 hours of playing ago, before I started gloom assassin playthrough on honor and was angry because of this thought-to-be-random-or-predefined-for-a-battle situation. Or like if the opponent is initially yellow I only once managed to get surprise round. I thought game is just worse than my DM :D
Now you can enjoy another 220 hours when you know about it ;)
Just use an invisible attacker to make sure you always get surprise you can get it pretty easy by going five levels into a druigar character or scroll of invisibility or an elixir of invisibility or a quozot or a packed of the chain familiar, The best option is a Duggar character because it’s just a cantrip for druigar Which means it’s the one that you can use most consistently, because as long as you remember to go invisible before you start the fight, you’ll Always get surprise, and you don’t have to rely on finding more scrolls or elixirs both the quazit and the the chain familiar as well have this going for them they’re still slightly worse because neither one of them are a relatively strong summon So while you’ll get surprised you won’t deal a lot of damage so the best thing for consistent surprised is a Duggar or in late game a more powerful consistent summon, which I don’t know a great example of right now I’m actually not sure if there is a summon that you can get consistently that is both good combatively and has invisibility if someone does know one let me know because that would then be a better strategy than Druigar
I've been playing a duergar with invis cantrip and I found that I don't get surprise if I initiate with a ranged weapon AND I'm in the red area when you hold down shift., even when invisible! I found that surprise works when I'm invisible if I initiate with a melee weapon.
@@DarwinsGreatestHits I never realised that what class are you playing
@@cathalmoloney4929 swords bard, but I doubt class matters. I forgot to add one more thing. When using ranged weapon, you have to crouch to get the surprise, which means that invis means nothing when you're trying to get surprise with ranged attacked because you would have gotten it anyway without it.
@DarwinsGreatestHits no I don't imagine class has anything to do with it myself I was just wondering if you had access to spells because ranged spells work
@@DarwinsGreatestHits it feels like you shouldn't need to hide or Crouch if you're invisible that might be a bug with like how they decide if a ranged attack should be considered as a surprise attack
I think i accidentally found out how to trigger surprise on non-hostile npc, set sneak attack as reaction then attack them while hiding or invisible, then once the dialogue triggers swap to another character and click accept on the sneak attack reaction window. This will trigger combat and surprise round. (All the rules in this video and the first video applies such as having to not one shot the npc & be in line of sight). May need more testing on this…
Great find! Will definitely try that.
@@GamingBirch i did that on nere & i’m using a controller to play if that helps
@@GamingBirch hi, I’m addicted to the assassin class and its gameplay hence I’ve been trying to surprise as much as possible & here are some of my findings.
1. If the target is yellow (non hostile) you need to attack normally with sneak attack as reaction, then click ok to sneak attack once the initial hit lands (needs to be fast enough then you can bypass the conversation). I’ve been getting consistent surprise round with npc that are not red / hostile with this method, like the paladin of tyr, nere after siding with him, and random npcs that have yellow border.
2. Invisibility is a bit weird, sometimes you will get surprise but normally it works when you are invisible and you need to be standing right inside their red sight cone.
3. Normal hiding and just standing at the edge of enemy’s sight cone will normally generate a surprise round once you attack an npc that is red.
4. If the npc is red or an enemy, recommend to open with sneak attack as assassin, then once the action is refunded you can have another sneak attack in. If you open with normal attack and sneak attack as a reaction, I found out that the surprise round will initiate immediately and you will only get one sneak attack instead of 2.
Hope this helps! I’ve been watching your video explanation alot because I’m addicted to the sneak gameplay in this game. I can’t do much testing because I don’t play a lot and I only have 1 playthrough which is on honor mode now 😅