Concentration is one of the most important mechanics that players need to be aware of in Baldur’s Gate 3, and while most of the time you want to maintain Concentration on a spell as long as possible, sometimes canceling it is necessary.
In Baldur’s Gate 3, spells with lasting effects require what is called Concentration to maintain. Characters can only keep one spell that requires Concentration up at any given time, making it imperative to know what spells your characters are keeping up and which spells might override other spells.
How to cancel Concentration spells in Baldur’s Gate 3
Most players cancel Concentration spells on a regular basis without even knowing it just by casting another spell that also requires Concentration. As soon as you cast the second spell, it will override the previous spell that required Concentration. In nearly all situations, that’s the optimal way to go about dealing with the cancellation of Concentration spells because you’ll maximize your uptime of the first spell by not prematurely canceling it manually.
However, if you find yourself in a situation where you want to end a Concentration spell early without casting another spell, you can do so by going to the bottom left corner of your screen. Underneath the photo of the character that you are controlling, you will see a tooltip image for any spell that they are using Concentration on. It will be slightly to the left of their thumbnail.
Hovering over that tooltip, you can see more information about the spell that they are using Concentration on, and you can end the spell by clicking the white “X” that is in the upper right corner of the tooltip.
I personally don’t typically feel the need to stop Concentration on a spell early in most situations. Instead, I usually will just let the spell end naturally after however many turns it’s supposed to. I feel relatively comfortable doing so because typically I’m only stopping one Concentration spell to start another.
The big exception here is if you’re using something like Gaseous Form, which gives you the ability to sneak into places you otherwise wouldn’t be able to, but it prevents you from performing certain actions. In that case, clicking off the buff is a great way to more quickly go about whatever business you wanted to without much delay.
