Larian’s released a whole treasure trove of fun stats for Baldur’s Gate 3, and I encourage you to peek the full list yourself—however, one particular statistic leapt out at me and immediately activated the prehistoric lizard part of my brain that’s obsessed with min-maxing in RPGs, because I’m almost certain I know exactly why it happened.
Shadowheart, god’s favourite princess and the Forgotten Realm’s smarmiest cleric, has been respecced 4,890,005 times, per the graphic below. It specifies “by number of campaigns”, which if my rusty statistics knowledge is to be trusted (it isn’t) means they divided the amount of times she was respecced by the actual campaigns she was in, in an effort to help curb both the buildcrafters and the indecisive from mucking up of the numbers.
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Kind friends, companions, adventurers all—I know exactly why Shadowheart has been respecced near five million times. Or, well, I know two reasons why. Vanilla Shadowheart just, er, kinda sucks. I’m sorry.
Reason number one is her stat line. In the base game, Shadowheart comes with an utterly baffling array. Most of it’s fine—a 17 in Wisdom as a Cleric is good, and a healthy 14 in Constitution means she won’t fold in combat. But for some Shar-baffling reason, she comes with 13 Strength and 13 Dexterity.
I cannot properly convey how useless of a stat spread this is. In Baldur’s Gate 3, your modifiers go up by +1 for every two points in a score you have. Having 14 Strength and 12 Dexterity would be fine, giving her a +2 to whack with her mace and a little bit of AC in Medium Armour. But 13 in both? Why?
This gets even worse when you get to level 4, and you’ll need to pick two ability scores to bump up by one. With a properly built array, you could start Shadowheart with a solid 14 strength, a 15 in Con, and a 17 in Wis, knocking both up to 16 and 18 when she turns level 4. With the one the game gives you, you’re basically obliged to waste this first stat-bump on correcting one of her terrible 13s. The munchkin in me recoils and hisses.
The second reason as to why she’s the most-respecced is, in my opinion, the fact that the Trickery Domain cleric is terrible. Advantage on stealth checks is nice, but Invoke Duplicity is perhaps one of the worst Channel Divinity options, whether you’re playing D&D’s 5th Edition or Larian’s all-timer RPG.
That’s because it takes concentration, and Clerics have so many good concentration spell options—Spirit Guardians, Bless, Shield of Faith, Hold Person, the list goes on and on—making Invoke Duplicity basically useless right out the gate.
As for what players replaced it with, Larian says it’s clean down the middle between Life and Death cleric, which, as the blog post outlines, absolutely tracks. At least these stats are a little more explainable than the 33% of people who got all-natural with Halsin back in 2023.
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