Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game that puts a whole wealth of power in your hands, but some of its most tantalizing fruits are those that feel just a little bit forbidden. Making use of the various Baldur’s Gate 3 Illithid powers can be a great way to enhance your capabilities, but oftentimes the temptation to wield them can feel a little insufficient to justify the costs of using them. Fortunately, a new BG3 mod is a great way to make the tradeoffs feel worth it – though do note that some Baldur’s Gate 3 mechanical spoilers follow.
Storming its way into the best Baldur’s Gate 3 mods is the BG3 Illithid Powers Overhaul 2.0 mod, which comes from creator ‘Siael.’ As the name suggests, it’s an expansion to a previous add-on they made for the Dungeons and Dragons RPG from Larian Studios. While the previous installment was largely designed to round out the effectiveness of the Illithid powers to avoid any feeling too weak, this is a more comprehensive overhaul of one of the most interesting mechanics in Baldur’s Gate 3.
While it’s no secret that you’re carrying around a Mind Flayer parasite inside your head from the opening moments of BG3, a curious act one reveal is the ability to make greater use of those powers by utilizing other parasites you come across over the course of your adventure. However, while there are certainly some interesting options at your disposal, none of them felt exciting enough to tempt me down what was clearly a dangerous road.
That all changes here. Illithid Powers Overhaul 2.0 is a much more dramatic rework, and replaces the cooldowns on Illithid powers with a new feature – Illithid Potency charges. You’ll get one of these for every power you take, making it much more worthwhile to snag more than one or two abilities once you start to sample from the tentacled-tasting platter. You’ll get half these charges back on a Short Rest, or all of them with a Long Rest.
The powers themselves have seen a range of rebalancing and reworks, and there are some additional bonus abilities up for grabs. Core to these is the new Illithid Mind, a passive that makes all your Illithid abilities increasingly potent as you collect more of them, but at the cost of taking more physical damage.
For example, Cull the Weak, which acts as an execute with a bonus explosion, gets transformed into a toggleable passive that increases your damage based on the missing health of the target, and allows you, on a kill, to turn the extra overkill damage into an explosion that grows in correspondence with your rank of Illithid Mind.
At the high end, there are even new abilities such as Mind Flayer, allowing you to truly embrace your new form and, in return, apply insanity effects to targets whenever they’re damaged by your Illithid powers, giving them a chance to fall victim to any number of different negative status effects such as frightened, terrorized, or bewitched. You’ll even have the ability to dominate a target’s mind directly and transform it into a temporary ally.
The Baldur’s Gate 3 Illithid Powers Overhaul 2.0 is out now. It’s a vast mod packed with changes to basically every Illithid ability, so be sure to check out the full mod page for all the details, where you’ll also find download and install instructions. Personally, I’m already eyeing it up for my next playthrough.
Looking for the best Baldur’s Gate 3 builds to pair your newfound powers with? We’ve got you covered. We’ve also picked out the best games like Baldur’s Gate 3, in case you’re all done with Larian’s masterpiece and on the lookout for your next adventure.
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