Concentration - effectively maitaining your spell effects - Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3)

Concentration is one of the most important mechanics in Baldur's Gate 3. Knowing how it works, allows you to effectively use various spells, especially control ones, and maximize your group's combat potential.

How does it work?

So the idea is pretty simple, especially if you have encountered spells already. Spells will only be active while the Concentration slot is taken by them, as it is not overwritten or cancelled.

So for example, the spell below will have Fearful applied as long as you will maintain concentration. If it gets cancelled, broken or disabled in any other way, the spell effect ends. This can be especially problematic if you used an expensive spell and it loses its effect on the first turn.

The goal is to be able to run it for the duration of the spells.

How can one break it?

So maintaining spell Concentration is important, but it some cases you might want to do that early, or the effect is no longer relevant. Let's go through a few cases:

Manual cancellation

This is pretty easy to do and, as strange as it sounds, can be very useful. This can be done near the character icon at the bottom of the screen. Just click X and the spell/effect is cancelled:

Why do this? Well, sometimes, when the combat ends, and a spell like Hunger of Hadar is active, it will damage your allies. So of course, you will want to disable it, so that group members are not damaged.

Another case could be that during combat, something like Sleet Storm is active, but you ally that is concentrating on the spell wants to move through this area. So you cancel Sleet Storm.

Casting another Concentration spell

In other cases, the spell might no longer be relevant. So you cast another Concentration spell that cancels the previous one. For example, you start combat with Darkness, build Arcane Acuity and want to move to the next combat stage. Now you cast a spell like Confusion or Hold Monster to fully disable foes and concentrate on mopping them up.

Receiving damage and failing Concentration Saving Throw

This is probably the most important and relevant one to understand. In most cases, your spell concentration will break because the character failed a Constitution Saving Throw. This is very important and works like this:

• Concentrating character receives damage from any source
• The Difficulty Class (DC) is calculated which is based on damage/2 or 10, depending which is higher.
• You roll a dice and add any bonuses like constitution saving throw proficiency, Constitution ability modifier, etc
• If it is higher than your DC, you maintain the spell concentration

So as you can see, this can become hectic, and in many cases, even a small amount of damage multilple times can break your concentration. The rolls of 1 also result in Critical Failure. In the next sections I will give a few strategies and ideas on how to minimize this.

Getting a specific condition

Besides Saving Throw rolls, and manual cancellation, there are a number of conditions that outright cancel Concetration. So you should avoid them as plague:

• Prone - probably the most common one, which you will receive
• Sleeping
• Rage - if you are multiclassing into Barbarian, be careful as this action will cancel it.
• Downed - this is pretty obvious: being close to death will result in concentration cancellation
• Incapacitated - this is a group of conditions, which can be received with - Hold Person, Hypnotic Pattern, Banishment and other similar spells.

There are a few others, but overall, these cover all the most important and most used conditions.

Maximizing your success chances

The main question - how to best maintain spell Concentration? The goal usually is to either minimize your damage or increase the Concentration Saving Throw rolls. Let's go through a few options, that are really popular in various builds:

• Concentration Saving Throw proficiency - starting as a Fighter or a Sorcerer. This increases as you level up with the base proficiency bonus
• A special mention is the 2 levels of the Star Druid with Starry Form: Dragon. This makes so that the lowest score you can roll is 10, meaning its impossible to get a Critical Failure. This is one of the best level 2 dips in the game.
• Items with Constitution Saving Throw Advantage - Amulet of Greater Health, Armour of Landfall, Spidersilk Armour, Dark Justiciar Half-Plate, Dark Justiciar Half-Plate, Moon Devotion Robe, etc. This means that you will roll two dice, and use the higher one
• Flat Constitution bonuses - Holy Lance Helm, Flawed Helldusk Helmet
• Items with bonuses to all saves - Ring of Protection, Safeguard Shield, Helm of Balduran, Armour of Agility, Bonespike Boots, Flawed Helldusk Helmet, Phalar Aluve: Sing from Phalar Aluve, etc.

There are other options, but this should set you on the right track

Spell options

Now I would like to share a few examples of Concentration and Concentrationless spells. The latter is especially important, as you might skip them just from assumption, while in reality, they are really powerful spells.

Examples of Concentration spells

Now I would like to give a solid list of most used Concentration spells. Some of them you might have skipped, or used accidentally:

• Hold Person and Hold Monster
• Spirit Guardians - the ultimate cleric spell
• Darkness, Eyes of the Dark: Darkness, Shadow Arts: Darkness
• Sleet Storm, Spike Growth, Hunger of Hadar, Evard's Black Tentacles, Insect Plague, Cloudkill - these are popular area of effect spells, that changes surfaces or whole areas
• Hypnotic Pattern, Confusion, Fear - these are more or less full disablers, forcing enemies to skip turns, run away or make them harmless
• Wrathful Smite, Branding Smite, Searing Smite - weapon attacks that also activate Concentration
• There are many more, but these are really popular ones in most of party compositions.

Examples of non-concentration spells, that you might assume as Concentration

So there are also spells, which might seem really powerful for what they do, but they do not use Concentration. Here are a few:

• Command - extremely powerful spell, that has various variations
• Glyph of Warding: Sleep - has no concentration and can disable a group of enemies
• Blindness - applies Blindness and greatly weakens foes