Hey all, a random BG3 wiki contributor here. As Patch 7 is set to release soon in September, I thought I'd make a post about this not-insignificant bug so more people can be made aware of it, in the hopes that Larian would address the confusion. Unfortunately, despite some of us contributors of the BG3 wikia writing fairly comprehensive bug reports and sending them to Larian in the hopes they'd handle the issue, we haven't gotten anything else other than "send us your save files" and silence. And truth be told, we aren't even too sure on whether or not this is a genuine bug and oversight, or a confusing and completely bizarre and insane work-around characteristic they intentionally added in but in a really bizarre and especially inconsistent manner; and at this point, any clarification would be most welcome.
But before I begin, let me show the extent of the issue affecting the Harpers: of the 25 living base Harpers that can appear in Act 2 (Jaheira and failsafes/backups excluded):
- 18 of them are affected by this shared issue and its effects can be witnessed in-game.
- 5 of those 18 have extra bugs piled on top of them.
- 1 of those 5 has a completely unrelated bug that completely neuters the NPC in question.
- And of the 7 remaining Harpers that aren't part of the 18, 4 are also affected by the bug, but because they don't have the prerequisites to make the bug appear in-game in the first place, it doesn't have any effect on them. That totals up to 22 Harpers (out of 42 total in the game) affected by the issue.
- Additionally, of the 8 Flaming Fists that can appear at the Last Light Inn, 6 of them are affected by this issue as well.
So let's get right into it:
There's been multiple mentions and discussions on how the Harpers in Act Two are extremely mechanically weak, both on this subreddit and on other platforms.
There are multiple factors for that: intentional game design, letting the player be the dominant force in a set scenario, preventing the NPCs from taking center stage during combat, making the Harpers look like underdogs, etc. Basic stuff or presumptions.
But I'd wager instead that the main, and biggest contributing factor is the fact that every Harper in Act Two has had their Extra Attack neutered and blocked — and considering that 18/25 of the Harpers in Act Two are characters that rely on the Extra Attack feature (Rangers and Fighters), and that 11/13 of the Harpers you'd actually see in combat (Shadow Ambush upon entering Act Two through Grymforge, Ambush the Convoy, the Harpers that most frequently succeed the CON save during Resolve the Abduction, and during the Assault on Moonrise Towers) rely on Extra Attack, it impedes and impacts the Harpers' performance quite strongly. Not to mention that Extra Attack is quite literally the most important power spike for a martial class.
This is the case because Larian has given almost every single Harper and Fist in Act 2 an invisible tag that can only be seen in the code called EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKED. It does as the name implies. However, the tag is normally only used in the code to complement and fill other features, passives, or conditions that are actually visible in the game.
For example, the Slowed condition from the Slow spell actually has the EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKEDtag built into it in order to prevent players and NPCs from making multiple attacks in one turn, and Sarevok's Deathbringer's Legacy too has that tag so that he will actually use the action it enables rather than wasting a turn on a basic extra attack.
But for some reason, the EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKED tag has been directly added to a total of 28 characters in the entire game; they are the 22 out of 25 Harpers of Last Light Inn (including Yonas, but Jaheira and blue ones excluded), and the 6 out of the 8 Flaming Fists that can appear at Last Light:
So... what's the big deal? Clearly, this was done with intent and Larian added those tags in intentionally then, right? Maybe it's as simple as that, case closed? And that was pretty much my conclusion when I first discovered and noticed this a few months back.
However, I decided to dig deeper and found a lot of inconsistencies that didn't add up to it being an intentional tweak, and have since changed my mind once again. Here are my reasons for why this doesn't seem intentional:
- It isn't very clear as to why these characters in particular have been outright given the tag; the Harpers are already much weaker than their Absolutist counterparts to begin with, with lower stats, lower health pools, lower manpower, and are scripted to be at a disadvantage in pretty much all the fights they are involved in. During my testing, I gave a 100-turns Haste to every Harper that was engaged in combat (Ambushing Kar'niss, and Isobel's abduction at Last Light Inn), and even then more often than not they were constantly on the backfoot; and that's with the additional +2 AC Haste gives, and how I also gave Haste to a bunch of wizards that could now cast two spells per turn. If it was a matter of balance, then it is simply... still unfounded and unbalanced, even with player involvement.
- Additionally, utilizing this tag to manually give it to this seemingly random assortment of characters in one place doesn't make much sense — why use a tag intended to be used as part of bigger, broader things like conditions and statuses, to prevent an NPC from using Extra Attack? In fact, wouldn't it be much easier to simply remove the Extra Attack feature from those characters if you had to stop them from using it for whatever reason?
- And once again, the only other times where I could find
EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKEDused anywhere in the game files through the BG3 Modder's Multitool's Index Searcher were within other conditions/statuses, or its own code. - And then, one of the biggest dealbreakers I could find that I believe shows that either this is an unintentional bug/oversight, or Larian forgot to do the same for every NPCs: Larian is wildly inconsistent with its use. They added that tag to all the fighters in the Harpers, and all the rangers except for one Harper: Harper Karrow. And similarly-confusing, they added
EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKEDto a druid with no wild shape ability (Harper Chenti), two wizards that you never even see fight (Harper Donner, Harper Tumeril - fun fact, Tumeril wears a dog collar on his portrait), a Harper that's equipped with Ranger gear, is a wizard class, but only has a ranger/druid spell and no Extra Attack feature (Harper Mijah), and a cleric of all things (Fist J'ehlar). - Of the 3 Harpers in Act Two that don't have the
EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKEDtag, Karrow is the only one that can benefit from it as he is a ranger, because the two other ones are Harper Elindale and Harper Terradissia, two wizards of whom only one is guaranteed to be in combat during a scripted sequence (Ambush the Convoy). - None of the Harpers in Act Three, or the Shadow-Cursed Harpers, or the dead Harper corpses strewn about in the game are tagged with
EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKEDwhatsoever. Not even Geraldus, the disguised doppelgangers, etc... The Shadow-Cursed Harpers only attack once per turn because they have theSCL_SHADOW_CURSE_UNDEADstatus, which is given fairly consistently to all Shadow-Cursed enemies in the game (Undead giths, Fists, Absolutists, etc.) — including a duplicate of Yonas that's undead. - And finally, the backup/failsafe Harpers have the ability to use Extra Attack, because they didn't give them the
EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKEDtag!
Indeed, the four characters marked with a blue square in the lists above are failsafe Harpers in the event that the four original Harpers that help the party during the Assault on Moonrise Towers die before the attack. They cannot be found anywhere else in the game before the assault itself, and can't be interacted with until the party arrives to kill Ketheric.
I didn't add them to the original count of living Harpers as they were failsafes and couldn't be found in-world until their respective role needed filling — furthermore, as failsafes, they were most likely added later in development or differently from those that were added to be present at Last Light. And similarly, these backups' own backups aren't prevented from using their own Extra Attacks either, as they too lack the EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKED tag.
What I make of all of this information I got by digging through the game's files, and with a generous dose of presumptions in order to fill the blanks, is that at some point or another in the development stage of Act Two, Larian was experimenting on turning existing NPCs undead with the Shadow Curse. I assume that the original intention of EXTRA_ATTACK_BLOCKED was it has been either created with the intent to prevent the Shadow-Cursed Undead from using their extra attack, or was used retroactively after its creation to test and see how the newly-turned undead Harpers and Fists at Last Light Inn would behave in combat if Isobel is kidnapped — and to do so, Larian gave that tag to all the Harpers they could remember, and when the testing was done or when the actual Shadow-Cursed condition was made, they simply forgot to remove it from the NPCs it was given to.
If the above scenario isn't the case, and that preventing the Harpers from using Extra Attack was an intentional choice, then the bug herein lies in how Larian forgot to add it to some of the remaining Harpers and Fists at Last Light (but why would they do such a thing?). Not as spectacular as the Larian-accidentally-glitched-all-the-Harpers scenario, but still an oversight nonetheless.
Nevertheless, I still genuinely believe that it was an unintentional oversight from Larian's part, especially as how it seemed like Larian was still fixing or tweaking parts of Act Two just months or even weeks prior to the game's release — in the Baldur's Gate 3 Official Launch Trailer video, we can see a different version of Harper Lassandra with a different physical appearance and equipment, and in the Baldurs Gate 3 Official Launch Month Trailer at the 2022 Game Awards we can see Florrick, Manip Vidor, Fist Thadwick and Fist Cyril and a Harper that doesn't exist in the game anymore storming Moonrise Towers; in the final game, they are completely absent from the battle.
Still, that's just the main bug. Here are some more.
In the first image and list I've shown, I've highlighted that there were five Harpers that had bugs of their own unrelated to this first major issue.
First things first, Harper Branthos has been given the ability to do a Disarming Attack, but he is completely incapable of using it no matter the scenario.
That is the case because Target_DisarmingAttack requires a Battlemaster Fighter Superiority Die — something that none of the fighters in Act Two have. Instead, NPCs (not all, however) typically use an NPC version of superiority attacks that don't require any Superiority Die resources, but that can only be used once per turn.
For example, this is Harper Callie's own Disarming and Menacing Attacks, note the _NPC at the end. Callie does not have any Superiority Die resources either. Duplicating and adding Callie to your party with a third party mod will enable you to use these NPC actions once per turn, while trying to do the same with Branthos will be impossible due to having no dice (unless you level him up yourself into a Battlemaster).
Harper Branthos is also the Harper that leads the ambush against Kar'niss, so yeah, not only has he been slacking off and only attacking once per round, he's been hiding his ability to disarm and knock that damn Moonlantern from the Drider's hand for almost over a year now and no one even realized.
Next, Harper Skywin is a female wood elf bow-based ranger. She hangs out at Last Light Inn, and is part of the Harpers that ambush Kar'niss as well.
Except you might have noticed that she... has the stats of a melee fighter. And this isn't a cool "Hey, look at this cool melee ranger we made" thing, she fights with a shortbow and a dagger and her archetype in the code is that of a ranger.
If any of you have ever noticed or remember a Harper on a roof suddenly deciding to jump down to stab a giant spider with a dagger rather than shooting it from afar — that was Skywin, and it's because her AI realized she'd be more useful if she fought in melee rather than if she attempted to shoot the 19 AC spiderman with 11 DEX.
And that's not even all with her. Skywin has a twin duplicate of her in the middle of Reithwin, in front of Moonrise Towers. A Shadow-Cursed Harper that had the exact same physical appearance and equipment as Skywin, but with actual ranger stats!
What went wrong?
On third spot, we have Harper Mijah. She is a human wizard. Except... she has the equipment of a ranger, and the spell of a druid/ranger. She holds a Heavy Crossbow despite not having proficiency in Heavy Crossbows, and she is utterly incapable of using any magic at all whatsoever as she has no cantrips or spells, except for Cure Wounds.
Mijah is also bugged in a way unlike any other Harpers, as she is one of the four Harpers that stay behind at Last Light Inn while the rest storm the towers. However, unlike the three other Harpers that patrol a new route together, she patrols the exact same route as she did before the assault, and while the other three Harpers get new dialogue, interacting with Mijah in any way whatsoever will quickly reposition the camera above Mijah and then immediately end dialogue before cinematic camera is even engaged — it's as if Larian completely forgot about Mijah and that she was never even intended to be in the game to begin with; she is most likely one of the most unfinished NPCs in the whole game.
And finally, a two in one: Harper Bor and Harper Arthus are exact copies of one another — same class, same stats, same features, same physical appearance, same everything except voice actors.
Best twins ever
Arthus only ever appears once, in a cutscene to check on the escapees from Moonrise Towers if the party frees them and takes them to Last Light Inn by boat — once that is done, he simply walks off and disappears, never to be seen again.
That is all I have to share; hopefully with some luck, knowledge of these issues could get some traction or Larian is already on their way to patch or fix some of these in Patch 7. There are still a vast plethora of similar issues and minor oversights all over Baldur's Gate 3, and trying to document them as accurately and as much as possible have been something of a little past-time for not just me, but also other people in the BG3 wiki Discord.
The Harpers and Flaming Fists are some of the best, most important, most well-known and well-written factions in Forgotten Realms lore, so hopefully shedding some light on the issues these two factions face (Harpers mainly for now, the Fists have a lot of bugs and oversights as well) will help in polishing them further down the line as Larian is still pushing out hotfixes and patches to this day.
Edit: Huge thanks to Ntcarlson and Nodforkiss for creating the resources that allowed me to find the tags and information about those characters and for helping in investigating the bugs in the first place. Absolute legends.
