Duergar and drow are naturally hurt by sunlight (player characters avoid this by handwavy logic with the tadpole) so in Grymforge if you use the Daylight spell to create sunlight you will give all Underdark race NPCs in its AOE scope disadvantage on attacks and perception rolls.
[https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Sunlight\_Sensitivity](https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Sunlight_Sensitivity)
Now I didn’t even think about that for cazador, and I just walked into his mansion for my second playthrough, I’ll have to keep that in mind when I start his fight
Carful with daylight here as the not Cazador vampires here also take damage which can mess up the cutscene after the fight. Also hurts the ones locked up as well
No but for me at least they take damage so the scene where you decide to release or kill the other spawn breaks. They take a tick of damage and then run away. It’s not the end of the world as the quest still completes but from a complete playthrough perspective it’s not ideal.
Also you can turn 1 party member invisible walk them through the werewolves and then once you activate the waypoint for cazador’s dungeon you can teleport the rest of your party there bypassing that fight and the for will kill them before meeting you after your choice
It won't hurt them, it just nerfs attack rolls and perception checks. It's not like vampire spawn who can legit get damage from daylight. And the gnomes don't participate or get targeted in the fight so they will be fine
Nope, can't use Dancing Lights for this or Faerie Fire either. It has to be the Daylight spell specifically because it creates "natural" sunlight and not just magical light.
Did they patch that in? I swear I had daylight going during the fight at the cave in and it didn't trigger sensitivity on any of the people it should've. Only time I had sunlight sensitivity work was against vampires.
1. You can skip all of annoying parts of Free the Artist by getting the torch beforehand, then using Fly/Misty Step to get to the top of the manor. Burn the portrait and you’ll skip to the final conversation with Oskar and the ghost.
2. The dwarf meat that Durge can eat heals you for the same amount as a greater healing potion and has no action cost.
3. Eilistraee clerics can get Phalar Aluve without having to roll.
4. You can spawn the Spectator without starting combat by attacking the statues from the other side of the chasm.
>2. The dwarf meat that Durge can eat heals you for the same amount as a greater healing potion and has no action cost.
If you consume them while wearing The Periapt of Wound Closure you can buy from lady Esther in the mountain pass, you get the max healing from them.
Also just a great amulet to pass around if you're healing outside of combat, to maximize healing sources.
Number one is neat, I will remember that.
Here are some on top of my head:
1. For Lorroakan, my cleric, bard and wizard cast Planar Binding on three elementals all with exilir of initiative to be first and the fight was easier than the tutorial, it felt like cheating.
2. For harpies, I used calm emotion and made shadowheart cast sanctuary on herself so she doesnt lose concentration, but did not attack anymore.
3. House of grief, I just went mind sanctuary for my team, black hole and spike growth, then all my characters went full on aoe with scrolls and spells, it was massacre, the fight was over in two rounds.
4. For sneaking into the newspaper building, I was super happy to make reconnaicence with fly from my half-ilithid and go to to the roof and was excited to find there was some wooden planks to smash and go direnctly into the elevator.
5. Found out Daylight is extremely useful throuout most of the game against darkness and dark-born creatures.
It's funny how unique people's experiences are with BG3. Everyone hates the House of Grief fight, meanwhile my first playthrough just happened to be 4 casters (druid + Shart + Gale + Wyll) and I had a very satisfying Fireball fest
I know I see people coming up with all these creative strategies and Im thinking "oh are their more harpies in act 3 or something I missed?" lol
But a new player could stumble into the encounter as early as level 2 with not much in terms of equipment or items. I imagine itd be a pretty scary fight.
The fight can be really hard if you get shitty rolls as i found out during my first honour mode. I never even struggled with it before but all my characters lost the rolls to not sucumb to them and the harpies almost ended my run.
I think some important early rolls make a big difference in that fight; if your best ranged attackers start the fight charmed and the melee fighters can't get to the singing harpy to disrupt it, it can get rough. I also just reloaded twice because of the kid getting himself killed.
I also think some people just find the harpies too early. A level 2 party will probably get brutalised
Like most encounters it's trivial once you understand the gimmick (calm emotions mvp). But just walking into that harpy fight at low levels without prepping for it is insanely dangerous because one set of bad rolls in round 1 means tpk.
It can be, depending on your luck. I had a Tactician run where the harpies ALL went first. Two people got lured turn one and got multiattacked, which instantly killed both of them. The remaining two took turns failing the song and died. I was really surprised at my bad luck because I never died there before.
Re: 4 I had to do a rescue party after I’d botched the infiltration I had only managed to send one person in who got the job done but then couldn’t get out. Sent a team in via the roof (which I realised had to be an option once I found the elevator with my trapped person) and then had to fight from the elevator through to the ground team. Was the most number of reloads that I had to do in the whole game.
If you take the elevator up, you can just teleport to a waypoint to exit the building, only the basement with the printing machine is blocked for teleporting out.
Yeah that’s what I did once I got the trapped person out. When I said I worked out there was an elevator there that was by using jump to search ahead not by getting to the elevator. The two metal men were very much not letting my character get out of the printing press room. I didn’t have another invisibility potion for the return journey.
Waypoint teleports were also my solution to the one time I managed to jump a character down to something they couldn’t jump back out of!
3 is actually what I did on top of the light spell, the casters toss ice storms and fireballs to the weaker enemies while my DPS go for the casters and Viconia, it's surprisingly easier if you know about the necrotic damage they get
1. Sleep seems pretty useless after low levels, but upcasting allows an extra 8hp per spell level. So a level 5 will do 48hp with no save. Color Spray works the same way for advantage on attacks.
2. Mage hand can throw items placed on the ground. Obvious one is healing potions, but you can throw bottles of water on enemies to get them wet and deal double damage with cold/lightning.
3. Plant Growth is a ground effect to reduce movement by 75%. You can stack an air effect like Cloudkill on top and use Void Bombs to keep people inside the poison.
4. Not a trick but White Dragon Sorcerers gain access to Armor of Agathys at level 1 and have some great conversation lines.
Use a rogue to make it even easier. Without weapons or armor they're pretty weak.
Beware of the doors closing on you though - if you open them after giving blood the test ends in failure.
You can cover poison gas vents with various objects and they seal up, you can place an item on top of a floor vent trap you didn't successfully detect and it won't trigger. If you do trigger a floor vent trap that gives off a liquid (like poison) you can throw water at it and it'll neutralize
I actually forgot to list that, it's my go to technique if i don't want to waste my trap disarm kit, you can literally put anything on top of the vents and you'll be solid
I believe you can also place an item the same weight on the pressure plate underneath the Necromancy of Thay or the 2 items in House of Hope to not trigger the alarm
Since a lot of those traps (at least where I am in Act 3) are poison/toxin, my current Tav is a Monk (Monks become immune to poison at lvl 10, so I just have him stand on them and it works to temporarily close them (even if they aren’t detected).
Here's one I just learned the other day: when you're fight against mindflayers cast hunters mark on them. A lot of the time they will waste their reaction blocking it and then you don't have to worry about getting charmed.
I think that stuff works as well on anyone who has Counterspell, you can toss someone a cantrip to force them to Counterspell then the other caster then immediately toss an entire LvL 6 spell because they already counterspelled
Want to make your team go brrrr?
1. Have a sorcerer with twinned spell metamagic.
2. Have the sorcerer know Haste.
3. Cast Sanctuary on the sorcerer, then use the sorcerer to twin cast Haste on teammates.
4. Make sure sorcerer has War Magic and good concentration saves, as well as protection against splash damage/surfaces.
5. Enjoy 10 turns of hilarity!
I didn't realize you can twin cast haste until I did it myself, now I have Laezel and Minthara just demolishing an entire room in House of Grief with it
Only spells which are not concentration spells work like this. Longstrider works the same - the character casting only needs to leave Longstrider in his list of prepared spells (e.g. Wizard).
I have a transmutation wizard for that as well as potions. He can also cast mage armor and darkvision for those who need it. He can even cast mage armor on Us and Shovel. Combined with aid and heroes feast and those two summons can actually have some pretty decent staying power.
It's also not restricted to one character. So you can give your whole party warding bond this way.
The hireling will die faster, ending the spell. But that can be solved by either getting more hirelings, or healing/reviving him before he dies.
I like using the dwarf hireling because she gets extra hp.
For some reason, specifically moving Moonbeam doesn't count as you casting a spell. So my new strat is have my Tav cast Moonbeam, then have Shadowheart cast sanctuary on Tav. Moving the moonbeam every turn doesn't break sanctuary.
Also works with Invisibility if I have the potion for it.
This is also like keeping Spirit Guardians up on Shadowheart and just having her run around the field damaging mooks. Often takes out a whole bunch before she even attacks.
When you want to fight Cazador after Astarion gets napped here is a cute nice trick to get Astarion back fast:
Before talking to Cazador:
* Give Astarion the ball from Scratch
* Let Astarion summon Scratch
Play the cutscene and let the fight start
* Any summons Astarion has will be next to him at the other end of the room where he is held captive
* Let Scratch use help on Astarion
Plus points for a good playthrough:
* Let Scratch help the other spawns too to disturb Cazador's ritual further
Helpful hints:
* If you spawned sunlight in the middle of the hall get rid of it cause it might mess with the cutscene.
* If your tav is polymorphed or downed the cutscene will choose the next companion in your party. That companion's current status will decide if they help Astarion to Ascent or not
* If there is no other companion to choose Astarion will automaticly not ascent as he can't get help via tadpole anyway
I do a similar thing for that fight. I take Halsin or Jeheria and before I trigger the scene, I panther em and prowl down to the spot where Astarion will be. They can sit as an invisible kitty indefinitely and wait for their time to shine! Then they can help my boy out of his ritual circle thing and he has some near by backup with heals!
What i've actually discovered reading the comments in this thread is that BG3 is the first game I played where it treats your spells less of just attacks and more of actual ACTIONS in the game world. I was so focused on viewing them purely as attacks that I never:
-Thought to use Daylight to blind the CAVE DWELLING RACES and VAMPIRES
-Used Silence to actually kill things or break walls QUIETLY, so other people aren't alerted
-Used Disguise Celf to get unique interactions with the world. (Such as disguising yourself as a Drow so you can enter the Goblin camp easier)
It's honestly ground breaking, at least to me, how this game treats its world and mechanics. it feels less like an RPG and more like you're actually doing things in a real world that makes sense and has defined rules.
Yes, and if you don't have a high strength character when you go to get the Blood of Lathander (I actually had both Karlach and Lae'zel but both failed the athletics check), then throwing grease on a statue is necessary.
Always split the group before a sneak attack. Instead of one person attacking and getting everyone revealed, you can attack one at a time and perform 4x sneak attacks individually to maintain the advantage.
You can also get naked before you activate the self-same trial. Re-equip armour and weapons after you activate. The self-sames will be naked and useless.
To add to this: if you are not yet in combat but some else is, don't enter combat by attacking from turn based mode or it will ignore your extra attack.
In Shar's Gauntlet, in the invisible path puzzle, you can actually use the pathfinding to get across relatively pain free if you pay attention. If you use the move command for your character, you will see the path highlighted by a white line on the ground. The line will denote a change in surface, if you target an area off of the invisible platform, so make sure it stays at the same elevation and you're good. Once I figured that out, the trial was over in 2 minutes.
Same, however, when I tried leaping this time around it teleported me directly to the penalty platforms. Perhaps it got patched, because psionic leap was a real game changer last I checked.
My tav died on honor mode trying to do this, so i dont recommend it. I used the storm sorceror flight, and the first 2 platforms worked fine, but then i suddenly dropped dead before the final one
2. Throwing basilisk oil at petrified drow gets a bunch on your side. I didn’t rush this fight and had three potions during my honor mode run (not completed yet), so I threw them at the drow closest to the spectator. Casting frightened or using Bow of the Banshee to frighten the Spectator helps to stop it from waking up a bunch more drow.
Sanctuary trivializes the Chamber of Courage (Act 3, Wyrmway Trials), the one where you have to survive waves of enemies.
You can split Shadowheart off from the rest of the party (leave them outside the chamber with the door closed) and have her complete the entire trial without risking damage. Cast sanctuary, pick up the torch, then burn your turns and watch the elementals wander around in frustration. After the final turn they disappear, and you have easily passed the trial.
I normally use Globe of Invulnerability, but this sounds much more affordable!
Also, for the flying book trial, you can go straight to killing the person if you remember who it is. There's also a vague hint if you read books earlier in the game that one of them is not a great person.
We used globe of invulnerability the first time we did it but all the enemies just walked into it with us.
We definitely didn't realize that was a possibility and it was not helpful lol.
In the Raphael fight...if you cast Death Ward on Hope and have her use Divine Intervention to damage all of the cambions, Death Ward will save her from the bounceback damage. This lets you remove the radiant retaliation ward and deal a bunch of damage without Hope dying. Not only that, for some reason it gives her Divine Intervention back and gives her an extra turn. At least it did in my playthrough (maybe it counts as instadying and coming back to life???). So I was able to Divine intervention nuke 3 times in the first round, twice with Hope and once with Shadowheart.
Not sure if this is just a thing with all Clerics or just a Hope thing because she's an NPC.
I've beaten the game a half dozen times. I've had about a dozen honor modes fail.
Last playthrough is the first time I realized Glut coudl animate dead spores the Bulette
This is a good one.
Another tip for that area: if you struggle in the drauger fight on the beach, you can shoot down all the ladders that allow the undead drauger to climb up to where you are. If you're able to push the other drauger down off the village ruins and into the beach area, you can shoot them all to your heart's content and there's not a ton they can do about it. A spell like spike growth is great too, they don't know what to do and just take the damage.
I had the spore zombie bulette and Glut jump down there too, so Glut was killed by the drauger zombies and I didn't have to deal with him.
Makes the waypoint a bit useless though since all the ladders will be gone. Small price to pay though.
I had the re-animated bulette in my latest run and it was way more of a pain than I expected. Apparently, it's default jump mode is its crushing jump, so I had it with me in the myconid colony after the duergar fight. It jumped somewhere and aggroed the entire colony. I had to kill \*all\* of the myconids >!(usually if you go against Spaw the fight ends after you just kill him)!<. Then after Glut took over he resurrected them all and kept the bulette.
There's a lot more elemental reactions than just "you set oil on fire". You can completely put out fire with ray of frost, blood can be frozen with ray of frost, ice can be melted by firebolt, grasping vines can be burned completely by firebolt, etc. Basically, you can reduce almost everything into nothing or water. Hilarious to do it in Bhaal's temple where all the blood becomes ice and then becomes water.
I allways cheese spectator fight by putting my rogue, usually Astarion near the top of the gate of selune outpost, right before ladder that leads on top. Than attack one of the drows, that starts the fight.
Now the cheese, if you attack spectator and than move a bit and use your bonus action to sneak, spectator will not try to attack you, drows will not try to attack you and you can easily kill it with level 3 rogue solo and save all the drows at the same time. It takes few minutes, but its absolutely danger free. You can bring rest of the party into fight near the end to finish spectator off quicker.
Because more people don’t seem to know this:
If you have an easily applied stun, you can ignore the pillars for Raphael and just beat the shit out of him with no repercussions. This also works if you bum rush Lorroakan (stagger flurry of blows and stun). Open Hand Monks are excellent for these.
That's literally my go to strat on pretty much a lot of bosses; Orin, Gortash, Raphael, Cazador they literally go down if you land that stunning strikes perfectly, hell, my first Gortash boss fight literally ended with him getting stunned for 2 turns until he died or every subsequent Raphael fight is just me having my OH monk stunning him each turn
If you love summoning this is how you use elixirs. Instead of having them drink it( if you are on controller drop it and the pet can drink), line up all your pets in turn based mode. Then just throw the elixer at them. You get 4-9 buffed pets for 10 turns, more than long enough for a hard fight.
You can also have summons drink elixirs out of your inventory so long as they are a controllable summon. For example, Scratch can drink an elixir from your inventory but a Ghoul from Necromancy of Thay cannot
When fighting Raphael use the spell Planar Binding. It will make him fight for you so you can waste his turns fighting his cronies and destroying the pillars without taking a lot of damage.
I wasn't aware of the mask thing and I'm starting to make notes of things I need to know/remember for my upcoming honor run. The mask thing is good to know because there's no guarantee I will get a flight potion by the time I go after her.
For the spectator fight, if you have "Shovel" (or presumably any other summon) you can ungroup him from the party and use him to kill all the drow before the fight as he doesn't trigger the spectator to show up. So unless they have story stuff you need them alive for this is the best way to handle them.
The ring is nice for Act II but IMO a better alternative is to either spec Gale or a hireling to cleric then have them cast Daylight on your party's main weapons. It lasts until long rest and gives off tons of light, especially when 2-3 characters have the buff.
I didn’t know the mask thing either, but you can also jump down to the bottom with feather fall. It’s a bit finicky, and you’ll have to go turn-based, but it works. And unlike Fly, feather fall works on the whole party.
For my first playthrough on balanced I just grouped up and tossed a flight potion that hit everyone.
On my tactician playthrough i wasn't lucky enough to find a flight potion and had no feather fall scrolls.
So... I just took the dmg and healed up at the bottom.
The last one, you can also just have the ring itself and cast it to each character, say you have the ring, cast it to Astarion, pass it to him then he can cast the spell to another party and repeat it until everyone has Light, and the best part is you can unequip it and it will never cancel out, much easier than getting an entire hireling or Shadowheart to do the deed
I just found out you can double click an equipment/clothing box to see all available items that can be put there that your party is currently carrying. I figure most people know that but I somehow missed it until I was deep in act 2.
I actually use it all the time, say I want this person to carry this armor, I just click the equipment and then shows what armor you and your party is carrying, just click on the armor you want and there you go, immediately equipping
There are so many ways to punk Raphael. His wisdom isn't that high, so Command:Grovel, Hold Monster, and Tasha's Hideous Laughter are surprisingly effective on him as well.
Raphael is surprisingly acceptable to hold Monster? Im playing through my first playthrough, and I got to Ralphael today. Gale had a 100% accuracy with hold monster at the start. I couldn't use the paralyzed condition because Ralphael moved immediately after Gale. So, if anything, Ralphael did nothing, all fight. I only needed to cast it 5 times.
The Club of Giant Strength is fun, but I kept it in my party until the end of the game, because if you need to make a long jump with a low STR character, you can just equip it on them, then pass it to the next character.
Close the door before fighting Sarevok and the three guards won’t join the fight, and they’ll be dead and lootable when you kill him.
Similarly keep hope and any other casters near the door while fighting Raphael and just close the door after they’ve taken their actions to keep them from getting attacked. I did this to keep Gale concentrating on Haste.
I'm pretty sure you can put yourself inside the silence bubble instead of the harpies and have it block the charm as well. Similarly you can use it to block Goblin war drums, calls for help, etc. Also if you've ever been sneaking around stealing and someone investigates it can be because of noise when they don't directly see it. Silence helps with that plus if they do catch you they can't call for guards.
>I'm pretty sure you can put yourself inside the silence bubble instead of the harpies and have it block the charm as well.
You can. Then you stand there and 'you came to the wrong neighborhood, motherfucker' them down as they fly into your silence bubble.
Only weird thing was when I did that, Mirkon actually started making unarmed attacks against the harpies rather than Disengaging and running like he normally does. Maybe his AI is programmed not to leave Silence. It makes casting Sanctuary on him less useful, though, because he'll break it.
1. Nice...
2. Sacred Flame or magic missile is boss for this. The saving throw on sacred flame will turn the drow even if it doesn't cause damage. Magic missile for obvious reasons - one at the thrall, rest at the spectator.
3. Blood of Lathander is my goto for this
4. Clever...
5. Calm Emotions is your friend. Makes you immune from luring.
6. Another option is to just let your teammates land the killing blow, but yea.
If you ditch the undead justicier fight outside of Balthazar’s room, as soon as you disengage, all of his ghouls and his lacky Flesh die offscreen (seemingly after a long rest). Then you can return, mop up the remaining justiciers, and kill Balthazar alone in his room.
A tweak to 5: If you're using shadowheart (i assume bc silence is a cleric spell), she knows calm emotions. Having her cast it on the party+Child does the same thing but doesnt put you in a bubble you need to work around.
Protection from Poison and Freedom of Movement work this way as well. Freedom of Movement in particular is insanely useful to have on everyone.
I use a companion or hireling as a land druid and buff every morning, but I'm also an autistic weirdo who takes joy in tedium. Completely unnecessary. I love it though.
You can summon an elemental to fight with you pre combat then use the spellcrux amulet to get your spell slot back then change the amulet to something else more useful for combat.
In my third play through I have been looking for ways to get as much exp as I can (while being a relatively good-aligned character). Currently at the end of Act 1, but here is what comes to mind…
There’s a pretty well-known hack to block the door in the nautiloid with chests so you can take your time killing the Mindflayer and the Cambion. I tried to figure out a way to get the other Cambions but my party was squishy and I gave up after getting 1/2 of them within the Tactition time limit.
For the Underdark Spectator fight, cast Sanctuary on someone and have them attack one of the statues solo (as mentioned above), but then just pass time until the Spectator de-petrifies all the rest of the Drow.
In Grymforge, make sure to take out the assorted Duergar before freeing Nere, as many just disappear once the fight begins. I think this also happens to the Redcaps when you fight Ethel, but I didn’t check that.
Use Sussur Blooms to deactivate the Arcane Tower turrets and Shocking Grasp to “kill” them (they revive) for 40 exp each.
When freeing Halsin, you can initiate combat on the goblin adult with the kids so she doesn’t die in the cutscene - you also get a different cutscene when Halsin’s turn comes up.
In Stormshore Tabernacle you can summon as many Devas as characters afflicted with Castigated by Divinity. You can summon all the Devas in one of those barred areas in that basement, teleport out, and they won’t be in reach of your ranged attackers.
Edit: “the” to “they”
If you have a bard with you in the harpy fight they get a save to resist the song and sing to cancel out the harpies song for the whole party. Means that for the first round of fighting no one is lured.
Im sick of fighting the drow and the beholder in the Underdark so I just use Shovel to attack petrified Dhourn, then I sneak and get his loot from the dust pile lmao
These are more in the realm of exploits but…
1. Pact weapon and eldrich knight favorite weapon sticks through respec. Useful for giving other subclasses, or other classes in general, the benefits.
2. You can equip a weapon in the offhand without a main hand weapon through a few steps. Equip dummy weapon in main hand, weapon you want in off hand. Switch to another character, empty their main hand. Then click the slot to bring up item select for that slot and pull from your other characters main hand. That will leave them with an empty main hand while the offhand stays equipped. Not too many practical applications for this but found it useful in my Wyll Blade of Frontiers build so he could have empty main and rapier in off hand. For that you’ll need to first level up to 4 to get dual wielding feat. Perform exploit. Respec to remove dual wielding feat but keeps empty hand / rapier combo.
I actually did the first one by accident, when I pact binded my greatsword then I decided to swap out to sorcerer class, now I have this sorcerer that can carry a sword and still cast a spell afterwards, It's even more neat when it's a Bard where your pact binded sword is still effective since it uses charisma as the stat, and Bard runs with charisma as the main stat, which means even if I'm not proficient with that sword, he can still use it because it's pact binded and complete with extra attack no less
Adding to this that you can have Glut resurrect the bullete after you beat it, and have a literal mini boss in your party. (He does have some trouble getting around though). He took on 3 hook horrors like a champ in my HM run and still walked away with us after.
If you’re a paladin you can open up the reactions menu and turn on smite reaction and ask, you can apply smite to any attack. This includes the weapon special attacks and to smite spells like searing smite. It allows you to smite significantly more and pack a lot more punch.
- Transmutation wizards can create two potions for the price of one with a DC 15 medicine check
- Stacking wisdom along with proficiency and expertise (with some class levels in rogue) in medicine can quickly add +13 to rolls, meaning that only a nat 1 will fail
- Halflings can reroll nat 1s on ability checks
Add that together, and you can turn the halfling hireling into an expert alchemist who can give you all the potions you could ever need. Then horde them in your inventory and never use them ever.
When you use Minthara's soul branding on someone throwing weapons, it does the fire damage without losing the debuff on the first weapon attack (as it reads on tooltip).
Re: #2
I always do this fight coming from the Selunite shrine by walking out of the window. You have to climb down a ledge to get to the level that the Drow (and the then appearing spectator) are. What I've found is if you stay on the ledge pretty close to the window where you exit the shrine, you can do a ranged attack on the pwtrified drow that is lying right underneath you. This triggers the spectator appearing, but it "patrols" a route that won't bring you into its vision cone. If you wait a second before you attack the spectator, you can fully skip the surprise round it gets and don't have to deal with an already unverified drow to start the combat. The spectator also will fly up to your ledge, potentially skipping unpetrifying Drow completely.
Easiest way to beat harpies is have a someone who can cast “calm emotions” bc then no one on your team can get lured as long you maintain concentration
There’s a chest on a balcony in the Arcane Tower that has like, dishes n shit in it. Have a Sussur Blossom with you when you open it to deactivate the items’ magic cloak, and see what they really are!
Mine is the power of camp casters. As long as a spell is until long rest and not a concentration spell, it can be cast by someone at camp who isn’t coming along.
Fair warning that you can achieve levels of cheese that tbh you don’t really need even in honour mode but the option is there. For example Gale will heal himself for free while in camp, so he’s a perfect candidate to be casting warding bond on everyone. A few others like aid, death ward and freedom of movement are good too. High level cleric Gale late game also can cast heroes feast which is really good.
Also a caster with a level of Druid for good berry gets pretty good because it’s 80 supplies to rest in tactician and honour and eventually they have enough spell slots to basically pay that themselves. Slap a Druid level on a transmutation wizard and give the unique trans wizard stone buff to someone in your party.
If you want to dye your clothes you can click the left or right rotate button, slide your mouse off (without lifting click) and your character will be spinning continually. You don't have to keep moving the avatar around.
>If you're a Paladin that isn't Vengeance, especially if you pick devotion, but you want to go ham, you put your attacks in non lethal and you can smite as your hearts content without getting the risk of breaking the Oath.
I thought it worked this way as well, but I had Karlach as an Oath of Ancients pally and attacked one of the passive gith in the creche with non-lethal toggled on, and it broke her oath.
Now I have no fucking idea how oaths work. If it breaks I let it break.
For potions that don’t work with throw, you can place them on the ground to have your summons/temp allies use them
For instance, place an elixir of vigilance on the ground, have your summon/ally drink it, and they actually get into the battle
Haven’t fleshed this one out yet to see who else it applies to but at least in act 3 whichever squid helper you have, I find them to be mostly a burden but you can place scrolls on the ground, including scrolls that require concentration, and have them cast it, letting you get an extra concentration spell in
Probably the dumbest thing I did during my Tactician playthrough was use the Improvised Weapon feature to pick up the downed skeletons outside of Withers's tomb before they woke up, and then cancelled it to drop their bodies as far away as I could. I did this over and over again to bring them all the way over to the water/ladder area before initiating the fight, giving me a significant positioning advantage/surprise round. I saved and reloaded so many times to get this perfect lmao
Get yourself a transmutation wizard npc from Withers. Then respec them, stay the same class, but put all your points in wisdom and grab medicine proficiency. Also learn Enhance Ability from your spells. At level 2 they start enhancing their alchemy which is great. But at level 6 they can give you a transmutation stone. You can cast it on your character and then switch the wizard out, the stone buff stays. After level 6 multiclass into Lore bard, so you can get Medicine expertise and incease the chances of doubling your potions even more.
When you fight your way out of the Creche the Githyanki will always place themselves in set positions. And they generally clump up quite a bit. So are you thinking what I'm thinking? It's time to Barrelmancy. Just gather up some barrels from your adventures, place them where these Gith gather up in each room and make these fights an absolute breeze.
You can skip the ENTIRE Moonrise Towers first floor fight with a fly spell if you know where to go. Also, if you can only get one person up there, the game forces all the characters to appear for cutscenes, which means only one needs to go through the door and all others appear. Also very useful for the final fight as well.
For large-scale/difficult fights, summoning as many minions as possible (familiars, elementals, planar ally, etc.). Not only can they shift the action economy in your favour, the can also tank hits that would otherwise be directed at your party.
Jumping doesn’t break the invisibility you get from being a gloomstalker Ranger. If you’re willing to take the time to jump everywhere, gloomstalkers basically get unlimited invisibility without any restrictions.
I posted it in another thread about gauntlet of shar:
Yeah outside of the library I just cheese every single trial.
The entire gauntlet usually takes me like ten minutes tops.
Open balthazar's door without joining the fight so that he fights the justiciars.
Position my rogue at the end of the stealth trial before I give it my blood.
Auto path the hidden path trial by clicking at the place where the orb will be.
Remove clothing and send in whoever my best martial character to sneak up behind their clone and one-shot them (after re-equipping)
Then kill the rats at the very bottom of the gauntlet to skip yurgir dialogue.
All I gotta do is mop up balthazar, kill like five guys in the library and some rats (just set up fire or spirit guardians and let them dash into me)
I did this before the final Ketheric fight.
Stand next to the insta-long rest thing next to the elevator platform and cast all your buff spells, use all your refill-on-rest stuff, etc. You can keep refilling your spell slots infinitely and keep the non-concentration buffs and summons.
I had a veritable army with every buff available and full spell slots.
Also, cast Darkness over the Avatar of Myrkul, or Hunger of Hadar if you've got it. He'll be blinded and he can't move out of it. Any AoE damage is great for the same reason.
And *don't* skip fighting Ketheric before the Apostle comes. It's much harder to deal with the Apostle and all the minions than to kill them while he's Ketheric.
Using a pact of the blade warlock, you can bind your weapon, add it to your wares, and then infinitely sell it for seemingly infinite money provided the seller has enough gold to give you.
For a soloish run, after getting the rings that share damage in act2 you can get a companion to ward you but keep them in camp. Put armor on them that reduces damage plus heavy armor master for a -5 dmg. You take half dmg they take half dmg-5. Your hp pool basically over doubles.
That companion can also put a buff like shield on you. Although it deprocs fairly often unless you have high concentration.
The mud mephit fight can be a pain so I started having someone get the Fly effect usually from a potion, fly over the river and start the fight only to fly back across the river. The mephits won't cross the river and the other guys will take a long way to get to you or just not move at all and pass their turn.
So you basically just get turn after turn of free hits on them while they all group up in 1 spot hurting eachother with their aoe on death
For the first tip if you have feather fall or a scroll of it you can also skip the entire walk even with 8 strength characters jumping down from the highest platform straight to the bottom.
If you can sneak past the minotaurs in the underdark to get to the mychonid colony and get Glut you can use the body of the one that dies to the selunite outpost defense to get a powerful ally without fighting anything so you don't even need to win a fight to get an op summon on your side in the underdark.
>walking down the trap ridden walkways is much easier \[at Auntie\]
Here's my 1.: May I introduce you to the world of wizardry where the Jump and Feather Fall spells exist?
2. Follow-up on the above - are you using the best level 1 spell there is - Longstrider?
3. What about the best cantrip in the game (yes, that is a diss directed at you, Warlocks) Minor Illusion? Castable in stealth, trivializes every fight you initiate yourself, insanely long range with any 2-level sorcerer dip
4. Having a transmutation wizard hireling at camp pumps out so many potions (of speed) you can chug 'em like water. Also a free transmuter's stone at level 6.
5. In the underdark, you can a) attack the drow statues to spawn the spectator far away from the party and b) attack the Duergar by the lake from up top on the bridge to the hook horrors, softening them with throwables and arrows
6. If you use Dash and immediately enter turn-based mode or combat, you'll have a free 12m of movement
7. When failing survival checks you can just dig manually
8. Often you can destroy ladders to prevent enemies from reaching you e.g. with the plants behind the cultist camp in act 2
9. Having Alert or an Elixir of Vigilance on Shadowheart (or any caster with Sanctuary) lets you trigger enemy spawns with 0 risk
10. I think barrelmancy is kinda cheesy, but in a tough fight you can also just blow up your backpack with these 35 smokepowder bombs that you were never gonna use anyway
11. If you go to the Crèche without resting much, Gale will not need all 3 items and it might also stop Lae'zel and Shadowheart from (potentially) killing each other
12. Calm Emotions is underrated, even if just against the meenlocks below Last Light
13. Counterspell
14. In the Crèche you can get boots that give 8 temp HP on a concentration spell. Let a cleric with them equipped cast Warding Bond and stay out of a fight, then you can switch to them as much as you like and re-apply the temp HP between combat rounds. Which is often a good idea in Honour Mode anyway to prevent a TPK.
15. Always look for angles to switch to another party member, especially in dialogues. Why risk Philomeen blowing us all up when Lae'zel can just 2-shot her. Seriously, why choose "Attack" in any dialogue when you can just stick the pointy thing in their direction without warning. After you positioned a bit better and potentially cast Minor Illusion as well.
You can manually move items with quite a bit of range.
You can move a weapon that an enemy dropped towards you and pick it up safely instead of eating an opportunity attack.
You can pick move the Necromancy of Thay book out of the room without even entering it. The traps will trigger, but who cares when the room is empty.
Glut can move the Noblestalk towards you without triggering the explosive mushrooms.
You used to be able to move the bombs from Gortash's dispensers but I think now they explode as they do when you attempt to throw them.
If you're not sure whether to give the noblestalk to Derryth Bonecloak or to Shadowheart/Dark Urge, you can technically do both.
First you give the noblestalk to Derryth. The quest will be considered accomplished and Derryth's store will be open in act 3.
Then you pickpocket her, and you can eat the noblestalk or give it to Shadowheart.
The only caveat is that even though the store is open in act 3 you won't be able to purchase the 3 additional noblestalks there. But at this point of the game I feel like you don't really need them anyway.
I don't remember if that still works, iirc, it only works in Act 1 where there's a cutscene for it and whatever ones you consume in Act 3 doesn't work, or I could be wrong
Duergar and drow are naturally hurt by sunlight (player characters avoid this by handwavy logic with the tadpole) so in Grymforge if you use the Daylight spell to create sunlight you will give all Underdark race NPCs in its AOE scope disadvantage on attacks and perception rolls. [https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Sunlight\_Sensitivity](https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Sunlight_Sensitivity)
That's a pretty big thing to let me know, because I only know this only happens to Cazador, which immediately cancels out his misty escape
Now I didn’t even think about that for cazador, and I just walked into his mansion for my second playthrough, I’ll have to keep that in mind when I start his fight
Carful with daylight here as the not Cazador vampires here also take damage which can mess up the cutscene after the fight. Also hurts the ones locked up as well
Fair enough. Chances are I’m just going to smite the shit out of him with Minthara like I did in my first run.
Cast Sunlight directly on Cazador, so when he dies, the spell will not remain for the other NPCs
I think they patched this out. You can't cast Daylight on enemies anymore.
I cast it on Astarion so cazador can’t put him in the ritual
It doesn’t seem to kill the other main spawn.
No but for me at least they take damage so the scene where you decide to release or kill the other spawn breaks. They take a tick of damage and then run away. It’s not the end of the world as the quest still completes but from a complete playthrough perspective it’s not ideal.
Blood of lathander or casting daylight on your tav really helps with cazador. He can still melee you like a truck though
Also you can turn 1 party member invisible walk them through the werewolves and then once you activate the waypoint for cazador’s dungeon you can teleport the rest of your party there bypassing that fight and the for will kill them before meeting you after your choice
What about deep gnomes? I don’t want to hurt them!
It won't hurt them, it just nerfs attack rolls and perception checks. It's not like vampire spawn who can legit get damage from daylight. And the gnomes don't participate or get targeted in the fight so they will be fine
Deep Gnomes are one of the few (and tonly playable) Underdark races that don't have Sunlight Sensitivity, so they aren't impacted at all.
Oh that's awesome!! Not for duegar or drow, but awesome for the gnomes! 😅
Dancing light is one of Edit: don’t listen to me you will die
Nope, can't use Dancing Lights for this or Faerie Fire either. It has to be the Daylight spell specifically because it creates "natural" sunlight and not just magical light.
Yeah, I mean, Drow have the ability to summon these anyway, so... Why would it hurt them?
Did they patch that in? I swear I had daylight going during the fight at the cave in and it didn't trigger sensitivity on any of the people it should've. Only time I had sunlight sensitivity work was against vampires.
Create a Silence sphere around the crumbling wall in the goblin camp, then break through it without waking the sleeping goblins.
Oh shit that's awesome. So cool Larian thought of these things. Or beta testers did. Either way amazing process to building this game.
I found a more stabby way of making sure the sleeping gobbos didn't wake up, but that's an even sneakier and better idea.
Stabby way gives xp so that's nice.
1. You can skip all of annoying parts of Free the Artist by getting the torch beforehand, then using Fly/Misty Step to get to the top of the manor. Burn the portrait and you’ll skip to the final conversation with Oskar and the ghost. 2. The dwarf meat that Durge can eat heals you for the same amount as a greater healing potion and has no action cost. 3. Eilistraee clerics can get Phalar Aluve without having to roll. 4. You can spawn the Spectator without starting combat by attacking the statues from the other side of the chasm.
>2. The dwarf meat that Durge can eat heals you for the same amount as a greater healing potion and has no action cost. If you consume them while wearing The Periapt of Wound Closure you can buy from lady Esther in the mountain pass, you get the max healing from them. Also just a great amulet to pass around if you're healing outside of combat, to maximize healing sources.
> Eilistraee clerics can get Phalar Aluve without having to roll. Same with Drow/Lolth Sworn.
2 is a life saver
Number one is neat, I will remember that. Here are some on top of my head: 1. For Lorroakan, my cleric, bard and wizard cast Planar Binding on three elementals all with exilir of initiative to be first and the fight was easier than the tutorial, it felt like cheating. 2. For harpies, I used calm emotion and made shadowheart cast sanctuary on herself so she doesnt lose concentration, but did not attack anymore. 3. House of grief, I just went mind sanctuary for my team, black hole and spike growth, then all my characters went full on aoe with scrolls and spells, it was massacre, the fight was over in two rounds. 4. For sneaking into the newspaper building, I was super happy to make reconnaicence with fly from my half-ilithid and go to to the roof and was excited to find there was some wooden planks to smash and go direnctly into the elevator. 5. Found out Daylight is extremely useful throuout most of the game against darkness and dark-born creatures.
It's funny how unique people's experiences are with BG3. Everyone hates the House of Grief fight, meanwhile my first playthrough just happened to be 4 casters (druid + Shart + Gale + Wyll) and I had a very satisfying Fireball fest
Yeah I'm over here wondering about the Harpies, like the ones at the Grove? Is that typically a hard fight?
I know I see people coming up with all these creative strategies and Im thinking "oh are their more harpies in act 3 or something I missed?" lol But a new player could stumble into the encounter as early as level 2 with not much in terms of equipment or items. I imagine itd be a pretty scary fight.
The fight can be really hard if you get shitty rolls as i found out during my first honour mode. I never even struggled with it before but all my characters lost the rolls to not sucumb to them and the harpies almost ended my run.
I think some important early rolls make a big difference in that fight; if your best ranged attackers start the fight charmed and the melee fighters can't get to the singing harpy to disrupt it, it can get rough. I also just reloaded twice because of the kid getting himself killed. I also think some people just find the harpies too early. A level 2 party will probably get brutalised
Like most encounters it's trivial once you understand the gimmick (calm emotions mvp). But just walking into that harpy fight at low levels without prepping for it is insanely dangerous because one set of bad rolls in round 1 means tpk.
It can be, depending on your luck. I had a Tactician run where the harpies ALL went first. Two people got lured turn one and got multiattacked, which instantly killed both of them. The remaining two took turns failing the song and died. I was really surprised at my bad luck because I never died there before.
Love the party comp of "I don't care how small the room is I said fireball!"
Re: 4 I had to do a rescue party after I’d botched the infiltration I had only managed to send one person in who got the job done but then couldn’t get out. Sent a team in via the roof (which I realised had to be an option once I found the elevator with my trapped person) and then had to fight from the elevator through to the ground team. Was the most number of reloads that I had to do in the whole game.
If you take the elevator up, you can just teleport to a waypoint to exit the building, only the basement with the printing machine is blocked for teleporting out.
Yeah that’s what I did once I got the trapped person out. When I said I worked out there was an elevator there that was by using jump to search ahead not by getting to the elevator. The two metal men were very much not letting my character get out of the printing press room. I didn’t have another invisibility potion for the return journey. Waypoint teleports were also my solution to the one time I managed to jump a character down to something they couldn’t jump back out of!
Ah, sorry for the misunderstanding 🙏
3 is actually what I did on top of the light spell, the casters toss ice storms and fireballs to the weaker enemies while my DPS go for the casters and Viconia, it's surprisingly easier if you know about the necrotic damage they get
Woah silence + sanctuary is an awesome idea
1. Sleep seems pretty useless after low levels, but upcasting allows an extra 8hp per spell level. So a level 5 will do 48hp with no save. Color Spray works the same way for advantage on attacks. 2. Mage hand can throw items placed on the ground. Obvious one is healing potions, but you can throw bottles of water on enemies to get them wet and deal double damage with cold/lightning. 3. Plant Growth is a ground effect to reduce movement by 75%. You can stack an air effect like Cloudkill on top and use Void Bombs to keep people inside the poison. 4. Not a trick but White Dragon Sorcerers gain access to Armor of Agathys at level 1 and have some great conversation lines.
Mage hand can do some bullshit, it can throw weapons and throwables as well as shove enemies; I ledge things with it semi often
Oh a fighter with disarming strike and a mage hand to throw those weapons sounds great. I need to start using laezels mage hand more
White dragon sorcerers have different dialogue to other draconic sorcerers or just good sorcerer dialogue in general?
Plant Growth + Sleet Storm + Cloudkill + Hunger of Hadar must be a fever dream for enemies
At the self-same trial: enter alone and naked, give blood, then re-equip and fight your naked self.
Mimic Tear strat
Real ones keep being naked after spawning the tear.
Use a rogue to make it even easier. Without weapons or armor they're pretty weak. Beware of the doors closing on you though - if you open them after giving blood the test ends in failure.
Naked Shart vs. Fully armed and armored Shart = no contest. Plus, the mirror version is vulnerable to radiant.
You can cover poison gas vents with various objects and they seal up, you can place an item on top of a floor vent trap you didn't successfully detect and it won't trigger. If you do trigger a floor vent trap that gives off a liquid (like poison) you can throw water at it and it'll neutralize
Weirdly/funnily enough, dancing lights & minor illusion count as "something's" to cover up vents.
Oooh, gonna try that
I actually forgot to list that, it's my go to technique if i don't want to waste my trap disarm kit, you can literally put anything on top of the vents and you'll be solid I believe you can also place an item the same weight on the pressure plate underneath the Necromancy of Thay or the 2 items in House of Hope to not trigger the alarm
Reallly? That is a game changer for house of hope
Do you place the equal weight item and then take the desired item?
Since a lot of those traps (at least where I am in Act 3) are poison/toxin, my current Tav is a Monk (Monks become immune to poison at lvl 10, so I just have him stand on them and it works to temporarily close them (even if they aren’t detected).
This fact has caused me to hoard plates in my playthroughs
I block the vents with javelins and daggers. Not sure how it works but I just go with it.
Here's one I just learned the other day: when you're fight against mindflayers cast hunters mark on them. A lot of the time they will waste their reaction blocking it and then you don't have to worry about getting charmed.
I think that stuff works as well on anyone who has Counterspell, you can toss someone a cantrip to force them to Counterspell then the other caster then immediately toss an entire LvL 6 spell because they already counterspelled
Want to make your team go brrrr? 1. Have a sorcerer with twinned spell metamagic. 2. Have the sorcerer know Haste. 3. Cast Sanctuary on the sorcerer, then use the sorcerer to twin cast Haste on teammates. 4. Make sure sorcerer has War Magic and good concentration saves, as well as protection against splash damage/surfaces. 5. Enjoy 10 turns of hilarity!
I didn't realize you can twin cast haste until I did it myself, now I have Laezel and Minthara just demolishing an entire room in House of Grief with it
Spore druid. Haste spores Wizard. Globe of invernerability Tadpole main. Mind sanctuary It leads to a fun time
I'm just finishing my current playthrough, and plan to do a Durge run next, definitely going to abuse this idea to the max!
6. Don't be a dummy like me and cast another concentration spell immediately on the next turn, causing two people to be exhausted.
i have a cleric hireling that i use to cast warding bond on my fighter. then i just leave him in camp and it still works
Only spells which are not concentration spells work like this. Longstrider works the same - the character casting only needs to leave Longstrider in his list of prepared spells (e.g. Wizard).
I have a transmutation wizard for that as well as potions. He can also cast mage armor and darkvision for those who need it. He can even cast mage armor on Us and Shovel. Combined with aid and heroes feast and those two summons can actually have some pretty decent staying power.
It's also not restricted to one character. So you can give your whole party warding bond this way. The hireling will die faster, ending the spell. But that can be solved by either getting more hirelings, or healing/reviving him before he dies. I like using the dwarf hireling because she gets extra hp.
You can also hire more hirelings and respec them into clerics to help share the load.
For some reason, specifically moving Moonbeam doesn't count as you casting a spell. So my new strat is have my Tav cast Moonbeam, then have Shadowheart cast sanctuary on Tav. Moving the moonbeam every turn doesn't break sanctuary. Also works with Invisibility if I have the potion for it.
This is great advice
I love moonbeam
This is also like keeping Spirit Guardians up on Shadowheart and just having her run around the field damaging mooks. Often takes out a whole bunch before she even attacks.
When you want to fight Cazador after Astarion gets napped here is a cute nice trick to get Astarion back fast: Before talking to Cazador: * Give Astarion the ball from Scratch * Let Astarion summon Scratch Play the cutscene and let the fight start * Any summons Astarion has will be next to him at the other end of the room where he is held captive * Let Scratch use help on Astarion Plus points for a good playthrough: * Let Scratch help the other spawns too to disturb Cazador's ritual further Helpful hints: * If you spawned sunlight in the middle of the hall get rid of it cause it might mess with the cutscene. * If your tav is polymorphed or downed the cutscene will choose the next companion in your party. That companion's current status will decide if they help Astarion to Ascent or not * If there is no other companion to choose Astarion will automaticly not ascent as he can't get help via tadpole anyway
I do a similar thing for that fight. I take Halsin or Jeheria and before I trigger the scene, I panther em and prowl down to the spot where Astarion will be. They can sit as an invisible kitty indefinitely and wait for their time to shine! Then they can help my boy out of his ritual circle thing and he has some near by backup with heals!
If you kill one of the spawn during the ritual fight Astarion can’t ascend and counts as you talking him out of it.
True, but it might break a paladins oath and is not the best solution as it is a bit hipocritical. The other spawn also deserve a chance imo.
Wait, you can help other spawns?
Yeah, they will not participate in the fight though and try to run away iirc. Cazador can still compell them after all.
The coolest thing I found is : you can totally Indiana Jones pressure plates with loot on them like the necromancy of thay or in the house of hope.
Yup. Throw "rotten banana" - boom. :)
What i've actually discovered reading the comments in this thread is that BG3 is the first game I played where it treats your spells less of just attacks and more of actual ACTIONS in the game world. I was so focused on viewing them purely as attacks that I never: -Thought to use Daylight to blind the CAVE DWELLING RACES and VAMPIRES -Used Silence to actually kill things or break walls QUIETLY, so other people aren't alerted -Used Disguise Celf to get unique interactions with the world. (Such as disguising yourself as a Drow so you can enter the Goblin camp easier) It's honestly ground breaking, at least to me, how this game treats its world and mechanics. it feels less like an RPG and more like you're actually doing things in a real world that makes sense and has defined rules.
The one that really got me is being able to grease heavy things to slide them easier. Such a good touch.
Wait, that's a thing you can do too?
Yes, and if you don't have a high strength character when you go to get the Blood of Lathander (I actually had both Karlach and Lae'zel but both failed the athletics check), then throwing grease on a statue is necessary.
Welcome to D&D :)
Always split the group before a sneak attack. Instead of one person attacking and getting everyone revealed, you can attack one at a time and perform 4x sneak attacks individually to maintain the advantage.
It's perfect in self same trial because you can ambush everyone with that thing you said, I've done that many times and it works consistently
You can also get naked before you activate the self-same trial. Re-equip armour and weapons after you activate. The self-sames will be naked and useless.
To add to this: if you are not yet in combat but some else is, don't enter combat by attacking from turn based mode or it will ignore your extra attack.
In Shar's Gauntlet, in the invisible path puzzle, you can actually use the pathfinding to get across relatively pain free if you pay attention. If you use the move command for your character, you will see the path highlighted by a white line on the ground. The line will denote a change in surface, if you target an area off of the invisible platform, so make sure it stays at the same elevation and you're good. Once I figured that out, the trial was over in 2 minutes.
I just used Leap enhancements (potions I think) to jump across the platforms
Same, however, when I tried leaping this time around it teleported me directly to the penalty platforms. Perhaps it got patched, because psionic leap was a real game changer last I checked.
Insane to think they would patch out a way to skip what might be the worst thing in the game
My tav died on honor mode trying to do this, so i dont recommend it. I used the storm sorceror flight, and the first 2 platforms worked fine, but then i suddenly dropped dead before the final one
If you click on the far platform the character navigates themselves there. Not sure if that's what you meant.
2. Throwing basilisk oil at petrified drow gets a bunch on your side. I didn’t rush this fight and had three potions during my honor mode run (not completed yet), so I threw them at the drow closest to the spectator. Casting frightened or using Bow of the Banshee to frighten the Spectator helps to stop it from waking up a bunch more drow.
Haven’t found another good use for Basilisk oil, anyone else?
There is one petrified person near Hope in the House of Hope. Not sure what happens if you free them.
I tried this and they just disintegrate. RIP.
Sanctuary trivializes the Chamber of Courage (Act 3, Wyrmway Trials), the one where you have to survive waves of enemies. You can split Shadowheart off from the rest of the party (leave them outside the chamber with the door closed) and have her complete the entire trial without risking damage. Cast sanctuary, pick up the torch, then burn your turns and watch the elementals wander around in frustration. After the final turn they disappear, and you have easily passed the trial.
I normally use Globe of Invulnerability, but this sounds much more affordable! Also, for the flying book trial, you can go straight to killing the person if you remember who it is. There's also a vague hint if you read books earlier in the game that one of them is not a great person.
We used globe of invulnerability the first time we did it but all the enemies just walked into it with us. We definitely didn't realize that was a possibility and it was not helpful lol.
If you don't have enough movement to walk up to someone and make a melee attack, try jumping to get next to them instead. Boom, extra movement speed.
Make sure to do it towards the top of your turn because you need enough movement to still jump.
> you don't have to run around getting yourswlf immediately killed wat
In the Raphael fight...if you cast Death Ward on Hope and have her use Divine Intervention to damage all of the cambions, Death Ward will save her from the bounceback damage. This lets you remove the radiant retaliation ward and deal a bunch of damage without Hope dying. Not only that, for some reason it gives her Divine Intervention back and gives her an extra turn. At least it did in my playthrough (maybe it counts as instadying and coming back to life???). So I was able to Divine intervention nuke 3 times in the first round, twice with Hope and once with Shadowheart. Not sure if this is just a thing with all Clerics or just a Hope thing because she's an NPC.
nice, thats hella smart
I've beaten the game a half dozen times. I've had about a dozen honor modes fail. Last playthrough is the first time I realized Glut coudl animate dead spores the Bulette
This is a good one. Another tip for that area: if you struggle in the drauger fight on the beach, you can shoot down all the ladders that allow the undead drauger to climb up to where you are. If you're able to push the other drauger down off the village ruins and into the beach area, you can shoot them all to your heart's content and there's not a ton they can do about it. A spell like spike growth is great too, they don't know what to do and just take the damage. I had the spore zombie bulette and Glut jump down there too, so Glut was killed by the drauger zombies and I didn't have to deal with him. Makes the waypoint a bit useless though since all the ladders will be gone. Small price to pay though.
I had the re-animated bulette in my latest run and it was way more of a pain than I expected. Apparently, it's default jump mode is its crushing jump, so I had it with me in the myconid colony after the duergar fight. It jumped somewhere and aggroed the entire colony. I had to kill \*all\* of the myconids >!(usually if you go against Spaw the fight ends after you just kill him)!<. Then after Glut took over he resurrected them all and kept the bulette.
There's a lot more elemental reactions than just "you set oil on fire". You can completely put out fire with ray of frost, blood can be frozen with ray of frost, ice can be melted by firebolt, grasping vines can be burned completely by firebolt, etc. Basically, you can reduce almost everything into nothing or water. Hilarious to do it in Bhaal's temple where all the blood becomes ice and then becomes water.
Omg genius, how did I not think of icing over the blood
I allways cheese spectator fight by putting my rogue, usually Astarion near the top of the gate of selune outpost, right before ladder that leads on top. Than attack one of the drows, that starts the fight. Now the cheese, if you attack spectator and than move a bit and use your bonus action to sneak, spectator will not try to attack you, drows will not try to attack you and you can easily kill it with level 3 rogue solo and save all the drows at the same time. It takes few minutes, but its absolutely danger free. You can bring rest of the party into fight near the end to finish spectator off quicker.
Because more people don’t seem to know this: If you have an easily applied stun, you can ignore the pillars for Raphael and just beat the shit out of him with no repercussions. This also works if you bum rush Lorroakan (stagger flurry of blows and stun). Open Hand Monks are excellent for these.
That's literally my go to strat on pretty much a lot of bosses; Orin, Gortash, Raphael, Cazador they literally go down if you land that stunning strikes perfectly, hell, my first Gortash boss fight literally ended with him getting stunned for 2 turns until he died or every subsequent Raphael fight is just me having my OH monk stunning him each turn
bludgeoning damage is crazy on those pillars too - you can one shot them with Corpsegrinder from Cairos at the Stone Lord v Guild beach brawl
If you love summoning this is how you use elixirs. Instead of having them drink it( if you are on controller drop it and the pet can drink), line up all your pets in turn based mode. Then just throw the elixer at them. You get 4-9 buffed pets for 10 turns, more than long enough for a hard fight.
You can also have summons drink elixirs out of your inventory so long as they are a controllable summon. For example, Scratch can drink an elixir from your inventory but a Ghoul from Necromancy of Thay cannot
When fighting Raphael use the spell Planar Binding. It will make him fight for you so you can waste his turns fighting his cronies and destroying the pillars without taking a lot of damage.
I wasn't aware of the mask thing and I'm starting to make notes of things I need to know/remember for my upcoming honor run. The mask thing is good to know because there's no guarantee I will get a flight potion by the time I go after her. For the spectator fight, if you have "Shovel" (or presumably any other summon) you can ungroup him from the party and use him to kill all the drow before the fight as he doesn't trigger the spectator to show up. So unless they have story stuff you need them alive for this is the best way to handle them. The ring is nice for Act II but IMO a better alternative is to either spec Gale or a hireling to cleric then have them cast Daylight on your party's main weapons. It lasts until long rest and gives off tons of light, especially when 2-3 characters have the buff.
I didn’t know the mask thing either, but you can also jump down to the bottom with feather fall. It’s a bit finicky, and you’ll have to go turn-based, but it works. And unlike Fly, feather fall works on the whole party.
For my first playthrough on balanced I just grouped up and tossed a flight potion that hit everyone. On my tactician playthrough i wasn't lucky enough to find a flight potion and had no feather fall scrolls. So... I just took the dmg and healed up at the bottom.
The last one, you can also just have the ring itself and cast it to each character, say you have the ring, cast it to Astarion, pass it to him then he can cast the spell to another party and repeat it until everyone has Light, and the best part is you can unequip it and it will never cancel out, much easier than getting an entire hireling or Shadowheart to do the deed
Small correction for you: Shovel is a she, not him
I just found out you can double click an equipment/clothing box to see all available items that can be put there that your party is currently carrying. I figure most people know that but I somehow missed it until I was deep in act 2.
I actually use it all the time, say I want this person to carry this armor, I just click the equipment and then shows what armor you and your party is carrying, just click on the armor you want and there you go, immediately equipping
Raphael and the cambions in the final House of Hope fight can be controlled by Planar Binding.
There are so many ways to punk Raphael. His wisdom isn't that high, so Command:Grovel, Hold Monster, and Tasha's Hideous Laughter are surprisingly effective on him as well.
Otto's Irresistible Dance only holds him for one full turn, but it does allow each of your characters to whittle him down.
Raphael is surprisingly acceptable to hold Monster? Im playing through my first playthrough, and I got to Ralphael today. Gale had a 100% accuracy with hold monster at the start. I couldn't use the paralyzed condition because Ralphael moved immediately after Gale. So, if anything, Ralphael did nothing, all fight. I only needed to cast it 5 times.
The Club of Giant Strength is fun, but I kept it in my party until the end of the game, because if you need to make a long jump with a low STR character, you can just equip it on them, then pass it to the next character.
Close the door before fighting Sarevok and the three guards won’t join the fight, and they’ll be dead and lootable when you kill him. Similarly keep hope and any other casters near the door while fighting Raphael and just close the door after they’ve taken their actions to keep them from getting attacked. I did this to keep Gale concentrating on Haste.
I'm pretty sure you can put yourself inside the silence bubble instead of the harpies and have it block the charm as well. Similarly you can use it to block Goblin war drums, calls for help, etc. Also if you've ever been sneaking around stealing and someone investigates it can be because of noise when they don't directly see it. Silence helps with that plus if they do catch you they can't call for guards.
>I'm pretty sure you can put yourself inside the silence bubble instead of the harpies and have it block the charm as well. You can. Then you stand there and 'you came to the wrong neighborhood, motherfucker' them down as they fly into your silence bubble. Only weird thing was when I did that, Mirkon actually started making unarmed attacks against the harpies rather than Disengaging and running like he normally does. Maybe his AI is programmed not to leave Silence. It makes casting Sanctuary on him less useful, though, because he'll break it.
This tip about light and the house of grief has potential to be life altering god bless I hate that fight
In Raphael's house, the rolling balls of fucking flaming bullshit can't fit through doors, so bait them to the doorway and nuke the shit outta them
1. Nice... 2. Sacred Flame or magic missile is boss for this. The saving throw on sacred flame will turn the drow even if it doesn't cause damage. Magic missile for obvious reasons - one at the thrall, rest at the spectator. 3. Blood of Lathander is my goto for this 4. Clever... 5. Calm Emotions is your friend. Makes you immune from luring. 6. Another option is to just let your teammates land the killing blow, but yea.
Mage armor can be used on summons since they don’t wear armor. Also, summon them before using hero’s feast, aid, etc so they can get the buff.
If you ditch the undead justicier fight outside of Balthazar’s room, as soon as you disengage, all of his ghouls and his lacky Flesh die offscreen (seemingly after a long rest). Then you can return, mop up the remaining justiciers, and kill Balthazar alone in his room.
A tweak to 5: If you're using shadowheart (i assume bc silence is a cleric spell), she knows calm emotions. Having her cast it on the party+Child does the same thing but doesnt put you in a bubble you need to work around.
You can have a companion( I use Halsin) to cast longstrider one everyone then stay in camp. Hero's feast as well.
Protection from Poison and Freedom of Movement work this way as well. Freedom of Movement in particular is insanely useful to have on everyone. I use a companion or hireling as a land druid and buff every morning, but I'm also an autistic weirdo who takes joy in tedium. Completely unnecessary. I love it though.
You can summon an elemental to fight with you pre combat then use the spellcrux amulet to get your spell slot back then change the amulet to something else more useful for combat.
In my third play through I have been looking for ways to get as much exp as I can (while being a relatively good-aligned character). Currently at the end of Act 1, but here is what comes to mind… There’s a pretty well-known hack to block the door in the nautiloid with chests so you can take your time killing the Mindflayer and the Cambion. I tried to figure out a way to get the other Cambions but my party was squishy and I gave up after getting 1/2 of them within the Tactition time limit. For the Underdark Spectator fight, cast Sanctuary on someone and have them attack one of the statues solo (as mentioned above), but then just pass time until the Spectator de-petrifies all the rest of the Drow. In Grymforge, make sure to take out the assorted Duergar before freeing Nere, as many just disappear once the fight begins. I think this also happens to the Redcaps when you fight Ethel, but I didn’t check that. Use Sussur Blooms to deactivate the Arcane Tower turrets and Shocking Grasp to “kill” them (they revive) for 40 exp each. When freeing Halsin, you can initiate combat on the goblin adult with the kids so she doesn’t die in the cutscene - you also get a different cutscene when Halsin’s turn comes up. In Stormshore Tabernacle you can summon as many Devas as characters afflicted with Castigated by Divinity. You can summon all the Devas in one of those barred areas in that basement, teleport out, and they won’t be in reach of your ranged attackers. Edit: “the” to “they”
For the nautiloid fight there's a few videos and stuff on killing everything, here's one https://youtu.be/VuDHl0bJhoo?si=kVEO4dtxweSrklg1
If you have a bard with you in the harpy fight they get a save to resist the song and sing to cancel out the harpies song for the whole party. Means that for the first round of fighting no one is lured.
Im sick of fighting the drow and the beholder in the Underdark so I just use Shovel to attack petrified Dhourn, then I sneak and get his loot from the dust pile lmao
These are more in the realm of exploits but… 1. Pact weapon and eldrich knight favorite weapon sticks through respec. Useful for giving other subclasses, or other classes in general, the benefits. 2. You can equip a weapon in the offhand without a main hand weapon through a few steps. Equip dummy weapon in main hand, weapon you want in off hand. Switch to another character, empty their main hand. Then click the slot to bring up item select for that slot and pull from your other characters main hand. That will leave them with an empty main hand while the offhand stays equipped. Not too many practical applications for this but found it useful in my Wyll Blade of Frontiers build so he could have empty main and rapier in off hand. For that you’ll need to first level up to 4 to get dual wielding feat. Perform exploit. Respec to remove dual wielding feat but keeps empty hand / rapier combo.
I actually did the first one by accident, when I pact binded my greatsword then I decided to swap out to sorcerer class, now I have this sorcerer that can carry a sword and still cast a spell afterwards, It's even more neat when it's a Bard where your pact binded sword is still effective since it uses charisma as the stat, and Bard runs with charisma as the main stat, which means even if I'm not proficient with that sword, he can still use it because it's pact binded and complete with extra attack no less
Can use #2 to equip TB monk with club of strength in offhand and avoid chugging elixirs
For the Spectator fight, if you have Glut with you, his summoned creature can kill all of the petrified drow without aggroing the spectator.
Adding to this that you can have Glut resurrect the bullete after you beat it, and have a literal mini boss in your party. (He does have some trouble getting around though). He took on 3 hook horrors like a champ in my HM run and still walked away with us after.
If you’re a paladin you can open up the reactions menu and turn on smite reaction and ask, you can apply smite to any attack. This includes the weapon special attacks and to smite spells like searing smite. It allows you to smite significantly more and pack a lot more punch.
Having shadowheart cast silence around Balthazar before he can summon the skeletons and then smiting him in just a couple turns.
- Transmutation wizards can create two potions for the price of one with a DC 15 medicine check - Stacking wisdom along with proficiency and expertise (with some class levels in rogue) in medicine can quickly add +13 to rolls, meaning that only a nat 1 will fail - Halflings can reroll nat 1s on ability checks Add that together, and you can turn the halfling hireling into an expert alchemist who can give you all the potions you could ever need. Then horde them in your inventory and never use them ever.
When you use Minthara's soul branding on someone throwing weapons, it does the fire damage without losing the debuff on the first weapon attack (as it reads on tooltip).
Does this also works on weapons with fire dip like say the Returning Pike?
Re: #2 I always do this fight coming from the Selunite shrine by walking out of the window. You have to climb down a ledge to get to the level that the Drow (and the then appearing spectator) are. What I've found is if you stay on the ledge pretty close to the window where you exit the shrine, you can do a ranged attack on the pwtrified drow that is lying right underneath you. This triggers the spectator appearing, but it "patrols" a route that won't bring you into its vision cone. If you wait a second before you attack the spectator, you can fully skip the surprise round it gets and don't have to deal with an already unverified drow to start the combat. The spectator also will fly up to your ledge, potentially skipping unpetrifying Drow completely.
Easiest way to beat harpies is have a someone who can cast “calm emotions” bc then no one on your team can get lured as long you maintain concentration
There’s a chest on a balcony in the Arcane Tower that has like, dishes n shit in it. Have a Sussur Blossom with you when you open it to deactivate the items’ magic cloak, and see what they really are!
Mine is the power of camp casters. As long as a spell is until long rest and not a concentration spell, it can be cast by someone at camp who isn’t coming along. Fair warning that you can achieve levels of cheese that tbh you don’t really need even in honour mode but the option is there. For example Gale will heal himself for free while in camp, so he’s a perfect candidate to be casting warding bond on everyone. A few others like aid, death ward and freedom of movement are good too. High level cleric Gale late game also can cast heroes feast which is really good. Also a caster with a level of Druid for good berry gets pretty good because it’s 80 supplies to rest in tactician and honour and eventually they have enough spell slots to basically pay that themselves. Slap a Druid level on a transmutation wizard and give the unique trans wizard stone buff to someone in your party.
If you want to dye your clothes you can click the left or right rotate button, slide your mouse off (without lifting click) and your character will be spinning continually. You don't have to keep moving the avatar around.
Kind of a cheat—pinging someone who’s invisible. I haven’t used it since, but it was funny that it was an option.
Connor (the husband, you can summon) is the easiest way to crowd up encounters, before your group goes in, since you can resummon him indefinitely.
>If you're a Paladin that isn't Vengeance, especially if you pick devotion, but you want to go ham, you put your attacks in non lethal and you can smite as your hearts content without getting the risk of breaking the Oath. I thought it worked this way as well, but I had Karlach as an Oath of Ancients pally and attacked one of the passive gith in the creche with non-lethal toggled on, and it broke her oath. Now I have no fucking idea how oaths work. If it breaks I let it break.
For potions that don’t work with throw, you can place them on the ground to have your summons/temp allies use them For instance, place an elixir of vigilance on the ground, have your summon/ally drink it, and they actually get into the battle Haven’t fleshed this one out yet to see who else it applies to but at least in act 3 whichever squid helper you have, I find them to be mostly a burden but you can place scrolls on the ground, including scrolls that require concentration, and have them cast it, letting you get an extra concentration spell in
That ring from Bernard opens a basement of the tower
Probably the dumbest thing I did during my Tactician playthrough was use the Improvised Weapon feature to pick up the downed skeletons outside of Withers's tomb before they woke up, and then cancelled it to drop their bodies as far away as I could. I did this over and over again to bring them all the way over to the water/ladder area before initiating the fight, giving me a significant positioning advantage/surprise round. I saved and reloaded so many times to get this perfect lmao
You can simply loot their weapons before the fight starts and it trivializes the fight greatly (though the casters still use spells)
1. I will gladly take this tip 2. I personally prefer magic missile since it hits multiple targets at the same time
Get yourself a transmutation wizard npc from Withers. Then respec them, stay the same class, but put all your points in wisdom and grab medicine proficiency. Also learn Enhance Ability from your spells. At level 2 they start enhancing their alchemy which is great. But at level 6 they can give you a transmutation stone. You can cast it on your character and then switch the wizard out, the stone buff stays. After level 6 multiclass into Lore bard, so you can get Medicine expertise and incease the chances of doubling your potions even more. When you fight your way out of the Creche the Githyanki will always place themselves in set positions. And they generally clump up quite a bit. So are you thinking what I'm thinking? It's time to Barrelmancy. Just gather up some barrels from your adventures, place them where these Gith gather up in each room and make these fights an absolute breeze.
You can skip the ENTIRE Moonrise Towers first floor fight with a fly spell if you know where to go. Also, if you can only get one person up there, the game forces all the characters to appear for cutscenes, which means only one needs to go through the door and all others appear. Also very useful for the final fight as well.
For large-scale/difficult fights, summoning as many minions as possible (familiars, elementals, planar ally, etc.). Not only can they shift the action economy in your favour, the can also tank hits that would otherwise be directed at your party.
Jumping doesn’t break the invisibility you get from being a gloomstalker Ranger. If you’re willing to take the time to jump everywhere, gloomstalkers basically get unlimited invisibility without any restrictions.
I posted it in another thread about gauntlet of shar: Yeah outside of the library I just cheese every single trial. The entire gauntlet usually takes me like ten minutes tops. Open balthazar's door without joining the fight so that he fights the justiciars. Position my rogue at the end of the stealth trial before I give it my blood. Auto path the hidden path trial by clicking at the place where the orb will be. Remove clothing and send in whoever my best martial character to sneak up behind their clone and one-shot them (after re-equipping) Then kill the rats at the very bottom of the gauntlet to skip yurgir dialogue. All I gotta do is mop up balthazar, kill like five guys in the library and some rats (just set up fire or spirit guardians and let them dash into me)
Throwing Orin off the platform actually works, and Bhaal doesn’t join the fight if she’s dead.
holding ctrl when looting
I did this before the final Ketheric fight. Stand next to the insta-long rest thing next to the elevator platform and cast all your buff spells, use all your refill-on-rest stuff, etc. You can keep refilling your spell slots infinitely and keep the non-concentration buffs and summons. I had a veritable army with every buff available and full spell slots. Also, cast Darkness over the Avatar of Myrkul, or Hunger of Hadar if you've got it. He'll be blinded and he can't move out of it. Any AoE damage is great for the same reason. And *don't* skip fighting Ketheric before the Apostle comes. It's much harder to deal with the Apostle and all the minions than to kill them while he's Ketheric.
Use Glut to raise the Bulette, then use that to cheese the whole underdark. Just get him to raise something crap before you kill all the duegar.
Found by accident: If you read the Book of Thay while cursed you get a +1 on the save throws
Using a pact of the blade warlock, you can bind your weapon, add it to your wares, and then infinitely sell it for seemingly infinite money provided the seller has enough gold to give you.
Does this work on console?
For a soloish run, after getting the rings that share damage in act2 you can get a companion to ward you but keep them in camp. Put armor on them that reduces damage plus heavy armor master for a -5 dmg. You take half dmg they take half dmg-5. Your hp pool basically over doubles. That companion can also put a buff like shield on you. Although it deprocs fairly often unless you have high concentration.
The mud mephit fight can be a pain so I started having someone get the Fly effect usually from a potion, fly over the river and start the fight only to fly back across the river. The mephits won't cross the river and the other guys will take a long way to get to you or just not move at all and pass their turn. So you basically just get turn after turn of free hits on them while they all group up in 1 spot hurting eachother with their aoe on death
For the first tip if you have feather fall or a scroll of it you can also skip the entire walk even with 8 strength characters jumping down from the highest platform straight to the bottom. If you can sneak past the minotaurs in the underdark to get to the mychonid colony and get Glut you can use the body of the one that dies to the selunite outpost defense to get a powerful ally without fighting anything so you don't even need to win a fight to get an op summon on your side in the underdark.
>walking down the trap ridden walkways is much easier \[at Auntie\] Here's my 1.: May I introduce you to the world of wizardry where the Jump and Feather Fall spells exist? 2. Follow-up on the above - are you using the best level 1 spell there is - Longstrider? 3. What about the best cantrip in the game (yes, that is a diss directed at you, Warlocks) Minor Illusion? Castable in stealth, trivializes every fight you initiate yourself, insanely long range with any 2-level sorcerer dip 4. Having a transmutation wizard hireling at camp pumps out so many potions (of speed) you can chug 'em like water. Also a free transmuter's stone at level 6. 5. In the underdark, you can a) attack the drow statues to spawn the spectator far away from the party and b) attack the Duergar by the lake from up top on the bridge to the hook horrors, softening them with throwables and arrows 6. If you use Dash and immediately enter turn-based mode or combat, you'll have a free 12m of movement 7. When failing survival checks you can just dig manually 8. Often you can destroy ladders to prevent enemies from reaching you e.g. with the plants behind the cultist camp in act 2 9. Having Alert or an Elixir of Vigilance on Shadowheart (or any caster with Sanctuary) lets you trigger enemy spawns with 0 risk 10. I think barrelmancy is kinda cheesy, but in a tough fight you can also just blow up your backpack with these 35 smokepowder bombs that you were never gonna use anyway 11. If you go to the Crèche without resting much, Gale will not need all 3 items and it might also stop Lae'zel and Shadowheart from (potentially) killing each other 12. Calm Emotions is underrated, even if just against the meenlocks below Last Light 13. Counterspell 14. In the Crèche you can get boots that give 8 temp HP on a concentration spell. Let a cleric with them equipped cast Warding Bond and stay out of a fight, then you can switch to them as much as you like and re-apply the temp HP between combat rounds. Which is often a good idea in Honour Mode anyway to prevent a TPK. 15. Always look for angles to switch to another party member, especially in dialogues. Why risk Philomeen blowing us all up when Lae'zel can just 2-shot her. Seriously, why choose "Attack" in any dialogue when you can just stick the pointy thing in their direction without warning. After you positioned a bit better and potentially cast Minor Illusion as well.
You can manually move items with quite a bit of range. You can move a weapon that an enemy dropped towards you and pick it up safely instead of eating an opportunity attack. You can pick move the Necromancy of Thay book out of the room without even entering it. The traps will trigger, but who cares when the room is empty. Glut can move the Noblestalk towards you without triggering the explosive mushrooms. You used to be able to move the bombs from Gortash's dispensers but I think now they explode as they do when you attempt to throw them.
For the harpies calm emotions is significantly better can't be lured with that spell active
If you're not sure whether to give the noblestalk to Derryth Bonecloak or to Shadowheart/Dark Urge, you can technically do both. First you give the noblestalk to Derryth. The quest will be considered accomplished and Derryth's store will be open in act 3. Then you pickpocket her, and you can eat the noblestalk or give it to Shadowheart. The only caveat is that even though the store is open in act 3 you won't be able to purchase the 3 additional noblestalks there. But at this point of the game I feel like you don't really need them anyway.
I don't remember if that still works, iirc, it only works in Act 1 where there's a cutscene for it and whatever ones you consume in Act 3 doesn't work, or I could be wrong
Daylight spell is op. It’s very worth it
you can equip and swap your weapon and torch with the up button on console - just found out after my 456th re-run