Summary
If you’ve finished the second act ofBaldur’s Gate 3, you’ll have fought against the Drider Kar’niss, repelled an attack from Marcus and his winged ghouls, and stormed Moonrise Towers. In all three of these battles, you’re aided by the legendary Harpers, a secretive organisation dedicated to protecting the innocent from the numerous evil forces that inhabit Faerun.
However, if you’ve experienced these fights, you’ll know the Harpers didn’t send their best. These brave souls serve only to distract enemies and do piddling damage as the player and their party do all of the heavy lifting.
Why are the Harpers so weak? The organisation certainly has an underdog mentality, they’re essentially a group of do-gooders who often face impossible odds. PerhapsLarianwanted to show that even though the Harpers are individually weak compared to their opposition, their indomitable spirit means they can overcome any hurdle. That does ignore the fact that the Harpers get exterminated 100 per cent of the time if the player’s party doesn’t help.
The Harpers Are Victims Of Oversight
A user on Reddit (NCBlizzard)has posited a different theory, with a mountain of evidence to back it up. It concerns the tag EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKED, an identifier that, when attached to an NPC, disallows them from using their extra attack, if their class has one. The Harpers are overwhelmingly fighters and rangers, and 22 of them have this identifier.
As NCBlizzard explains, there are valid uses for this identifier. If a character is slowed by the Slow spell, they gain this identifier so the conditions of the spell are enforced. Shadow-Cursed Harpers aren’t marked with this identifier, because they have their own tag SCL_SHADOW_CURSE_UNDEAD that also blocks extra attacks, which is consistent with other Shadow-Cursed creatures in the game.
Also, the Harper back-ups and the back-ups to these back-ups don’t have their extra attacks blocked. These are Harpers that will show up if all of the other Harpers die before you reach Moonrise Towers, and they can’t be found in the game before then. This strengthens the argument that the Harpers aren’t supposed to have their extra attacks blocked, because why would Larian forget to nerf their backup NPCs?
Therefore, the poster’s theory is that Larian experimented with a scenario that would inflict all of the Harpers with the Shadow Curse. For example, if you let Isobel get captured from Last Light Inn. But, they may have forgotten to take the tag off of the Harpers for the final release, resulting in the very weak fighters we see throughout Act 2. The Flaming Fist members present at Last Light also have their extra attacks blocked, further supporting this theory, and showing that it’s not exclusively a Harper problem.
This bug only affects the Harpers of Act 2, not those you encounter during Act 3, once again supporting the Shadow-Cursed theory.
NCBlizzard also goes into some of the other minor problems with various members of the Harpers. Harper Skywin has a short bow but the stats of a melee fighter, meaning she will often leap from her vantage points and stab enemies with a dagger. Harper Mijah is a crossbow-wielding Human Wizard who can’t use magic, and so on.
They have notified Larian of the bugged Harpers but Larian has yet to take any action besides asking for save file data. Mayhaps after they see the post, future players will have more fearsome Harper allies.
Baldur’s Gate 3
WHERE TO PLAY
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the long-awaited next chapter in the Dungeons & Dragons-based series of RPGs. Developed by Divinity creator Larian Studios, it puts you in the middle of a mind flayer invasion of Faerûn, over a century after the events of its predecessor.
