Baldur’s Gate 3: Honor Mode In-Depth Guide

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this guide was originally made for reddit and then copy and pasted on steam, if there’s any weird formatting it’s probably because of that

2nd, I recommend you to use the google docs [docs.google.com] instead of the steam guide, adding links to steam is a pain in the ass and also makes the guide way uglier. This guide has a lot of links, so I will only add extremely necessary links for steam, if you want your guide with links, use the google docs.

3rd, I may not answer your question here, if you want your really want your quest answered, use the reddit guide .

4th, as I copied and pasted everything, there may be some mistakes/missing content, feel free to point them out.
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I will start by saying: don’t expect to first try this, it is very hard to not ♥♥♥♥ up during upwards to 100 hours. (MAJOR SPOLIERS IN THIS GUIDE ENTIRE GUIDE)

Second, this game is (unsurprisingly) extremely complex and has a LOT of different outcomes, a lot of things can change based on what party members you’re using and what decisions you made, while I will try to point out things like, brings X party member when you are doing Y and etc when I can, I still don’t have enough knowledge to point out everything, I STRONGLY encourage you to read through the wiki to make sure everything goes as you wish at all times.

(my party composition through mostly of the game will be: Shadowheart, Karlach and Lae’zel, If you wondered)

I want to make clear that this guide is a compilation of multiple hours of research; most of the ideias on this guide are not my own. And that’s why I want to give a shoutout to Fracture , a lot of ideias from this guide came directly from his videos, his channel is very underrated, he plays games on the cheesiest ways possible and is very fun to watch, I watched him before making this guide and you should definetly check him out too, he is extremely creative and puts a ton of effort on his videos.

Furthermore, I will repeat myself a lot in this guide, cause I’m assuming you will read it in a span of a few days or weeks, I understand you will probably forget things as you play, so I believe that repeating myself sometimes is a bit necessary.

Also, this guide is based around my personal experience with the game, if I wrote something wrong or you think I missed something, you’re welcome to point that out. I will add it to the guide and credit you for your work!

And last: English is my second language, expect grammar mistakes and sorry for the ugly graphics. It’s a miracle my rx550 can run this game at 30 fps. Anyways, here comes the guide:

This guide will only work assuming you are doing these things:

• Playing with a semi-decent build for all characters you’re using;
• You have finished bg3 at least once, so you know what expect;
• You are tackling most, if not all, of the side quests;
• You are actively engaging with the crafting system, by collecting ingredients and crafting potions.

if you don’t have have a specific build in mind, here are three channels I think may help with that:

• https://www.youtube.com/@sintee106
• https://www.youtube.com/@NizarGG
• https://www.youtube.com/@Stealth_07

Monks is a pretty busted class right now (Patch 5), by far the best, can do more dmg with a bonus action than some classes in their full turn, if you’re in doubt what to choose, get Monk.

• the golden rule of this guide is: avoid all hard fights as much as possible and only do them when you are at least one level ahead (if possible) or just had a huge powerspike , this will make the everything 10x easier and safer during the first two acts when you are at your weakest;
• Second: if possible, always attack enemy first from stealth to trigger the “Surprised” [baldursgate3.wiki.fextralife.com] debuff;
  • https://youtu.be/bCsWBUMFN-s?si=M0h-jRBH-HSrAKYW
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAf_13RjJU
• Third: I suggest having always at least one invis potion/scroll/skill or a high mobility skill at all times so you can flee if you really need to;
• Four: You’re going to have a lot of nerve-racking moments while doing this, so, when you are in danger and think there’s a chance you’re going to lose you save, I need you to do one thing: STOP! Stop whatever you’re doing and reset you mental. The game is turn-based, you have infinite time; there’s no need to rush. If you just go through the motions here you will probably die. If you really need to, go away from your PC, go take a shower or go for a walk, if that’s what it’s needed to for you to mentally reset, do it. Remember: you can almost always flee, but, to make that decision, you need to pause and think. It’s easy to forget that fleeing is an option because you don’t do it often. And, even if you can’t flee, it’s still good decision-making to mentally reset too. I lost my 1st save in a situation I could have easily fled cause I was too focused at the fight to realise I could flee anytime I wanted. Most of your deaths will occur due to poor decision-making when feeling nervous and you can almost always prevent that by mentally reseting.

• Perilous Stakes (Illithid Power) got changed on honor mode to allies only, is essentially worthlesss now;
• Extra actions granted through Hastened or Elixir of Bloodlust no longer benefit from Extra Attack (only on honor mode too);
• Also, Hastened effects don’t stack;
• Boss fights on honor mode got changed;
• Shameless plug about other post I made which can be very handly, specially if BG3 is your first D&D game (This post discusts about how the dmg is calculated);
• I strongly recommend you to have Shadowheart in your party, not only because she’s best girl and god’s favorite princess, but because are Clerics borderline busted and we really want to have access to Guidance at all times, especially in honor mode. Guidance is probably one best spells in the entire game if you don’t save scum. Besides Guidance, Cleric is still pretty strong and versatile class that can fit almost every party;
• If you really don’t want Shadowheart in your party, you can choose Pact of the Tome for Wyll as another source of Guidance;
• If you choose to have to Shadowheart in your party, please, for the love of god, respec her ASP to another domain, Trickery Domain is probably one of the worst classes in the entire game;
• Once you get Withers, recrute hirelings, they can be very useful. For example: Transmutation Wizards can brew two alchemical solutions instead of one (You need to put points on WIS and medicine), I also like to have a Life Domain Cleric for heals if my party really needs to and I don’t want/have potions to be used;
• Further, Hirelings come with a revivify scroll + 1 Healing Potion and you can get you gold back from Withers by stealing (He doesn’t mind you stealing from him, so you can do as many times as you want) – they’re basically free;
• I think playing as dark urge can be pretty good for an honor playthrough, the cape you get pretty early at the game is pretty nuts and helps a lot with survivability;
• Buy every potion of speed you see, they are by far the best potions in the game;
• If you plan to buy/sell from a vendor often, I recommend to barter with them. Honor mode prices are really high, so it’s good having at least one vendor with max approval per act, best choice for this is Dammon, cause he appears on all three and sells a lot of good stuff.
• The gold threshold for max approval changes depending on your level, if you really want to, you can respect to lvl 1 with Withers and use the same character to barter to get max approval with only 400 gold. The approval is not party-wide, so, if you use Wyll to do this, the vendor will have 100% approval with Wyll (you need to start the trade with Wyll too, if you begin the trade with your main character (MC) and then change to Wyll’s inventory, the discont will not apply);
• Also, prices change depeding of the CHA of the character who started the trade. If you want to maximize gold, get max approval with the character with the highest CHA in your party and only trade using them (I managed to get 114% discount from Dammon at act III doing this;
• Your approval rate/CHA also affects how much the merchant will pay for your stuff;
• Scratch doesn’t die, he goes back to camp – don’t be afraid of using him. While he’s not the best summon, he can be situationally good, besides tanking a hit or two, he’s the only summon who can use the “Help Action” (I think) and is helpful out of combat with Scratch’s Sniff;
• Jumping is very often better than walking (if you don’t mind using your Bonus Action), especially if you have high STR. You can get some ridiculous jump ranges even early on, not a bad idea to check how far you will go jumping before commiting to walk;
• If you’re using Great Weapon Master and/or Sharpshooter, press K and add the passives in your hotbar, so you can toggle them on/off when necessary. Both feats make you less accurate in trade for more dmg, but if the chance to hit is so low you’re missing most of your hits, you should be toggling them off. My personal treshold is 50% or less chance to hit, if they reach that low I toggle them off and then on again once the chance goes over 50%;
• You can throw health potions at the ground to heal 2~3 party members with one potions, most people know this, but you can actually do it with other types of potions aswell, like invisibility potions and potions of speed;
• Keep in mind that, as long as one party member lives, you are good to go (duuhhh), you can abuse this fact by splitting your characters into multiple parties, for example, if you’re fighting bosses with a lot of trash mobs, like the Phase Spider Matriarch, for example, you can send a 3-stack suicide crew to kill all the annoying eggs and the 2 Phase Spiders, revive you team at camp with the last party member and come back for a 4v1 later;
• I strongly recommend you to try to respec multiple times and multiple characters to see what works and what doesn’t. Builds are hard to evalute by just watching a guide on youtube, their power can vary a lot based on skill, playstyle, party composition and etc. Try things by yourself and don’t be afraid to respec if you’re not confortable with the results you’re getting;
• Again, you call steal all the gold you pay Withers, so respec cost nothing;
• Positioning is a VERY KEY aspect in this game, you should try to split your party and position them optimaly every fight to maximize your chances to win – starting a fight with your 4 characters stacked near each other is a very bad ideia if the enemy has any AoE spell, but in addition is just very clunky in general, cause your party members can block walking paths and/or force you to go around them instead of walking on a straight line.;
• And, for last: this guide doesn’t have everything, check other sources.

Once you get to Shadowheart, kill those 2 guys that are near her, the xp you will get here together with the xp from Commander Zhalk will make so you will begin act I at lvl 2.

I think everyone probably knows this, but you can cheese the last fight by stacking 3 chest as shown bellow to block the 2 cambions from coming, combo that with Command: Drop to disarm Commander Zhalk to steal the everburning blade (Shadowheart doesn’t have Command, you’ll have get it from the prepared spells), you are going to need luck, of course, but if you really want to, you can start as a cleric for 2 extra tries and then respec later when you get Withers.

If you managed to steal the blade, give it to lae’zel, you have enough time to kill the cambion with it to get a bit of XP. Also, you can get a few Nautiloid Tanks you can save for later. (Cheese counter: 1).

Map from the Nautiloid[mapgenie.io], if you’re having problems finding the chests, use the filters;

Now we stacking those bad boys here like this:

Yes, your characters will still be able to jump pass them, for whatever the reason, but, as long as they can’t walk to the other side, you’re good to go

Now they are stuck :))
Now you have almost infinite time to get the blade.

Early levels (1-3) are pretty effortless, while you’re at you early lvls, you should farm Inspiration Points and keep them for later. Once you reach 3 is when things kick off:

• This site will show every Inspiration Point available on each act[mapgenie.io], alternatively, you could also check on the wiki before an encounter to see which options give inspiration points or not;
• If you don’t know how to check home many inspirations point you have at any given time, look in your inventory screen – top right, the middle number;
  
• I know, you really want to see those 2 banging in the blighted village, it’s really funny and I love the facial expressions of everyone on that part, but I strongly suggest you to not do it now, cause the ogre has like +80 HP so it’s not an easy fight – do it later;
• If you happen to find basilisk oil, get it and save it for later;
• Collect barrels as always;
• But, you shoud actually go to blighted village for other reason: Lump’s War Horn, a must have item to help you rush early game and get to lvl 4/5 as fast as possible. You can use your inspiration points here to guarantee you get the Horn;
• I like doing a detour (image bellow) and entering the village from the south, as it is the best way to avoid a fight (in my experience, sometimes I didn’t get the option to talk with the goblins on the seeling and had to fight them);
• We really don’t want to fight them, as they are in a very annoying position to get and they have explosives barrels near them aswell;
  
• While at the village, get Shovel Scroll, respec a party member to wizard, right click the scroll and then click “learn scroll”. Shovel is an insane summon; she can become invisible, meaning YOU CAN USE HER TO ALWAYS SURPRISE THE ENEMIES WHEN STARTING A FIGHT. This is a huge power boost when fighting basically any enemy. Thanks u/Cletelcharnal for the tip.
• You’re free to choose which fights you’re going to use the Horn. I like using them when fighting the Gnolls attacking the Zhentarim, Paladins of Tyr, and Minotaurs or Spectator.
• Talking about Gnolls, LOOT EVERY SINGLE GNOLL AND HYENA YOU SEE. They provide you with Hyena Ears, which is one of the ingredients for Potion of Speed, one of the best potions in the game. Later on, Hyena Ears are hard to find, so it’s extremely important to get as much as you can get here. Craft the potions with your Wizard hireling (I managed to get 19 potions of speed after leaving act I; pretty sure they will last for the rest of the game).
• Right now your main goal is reaching lvl 4 to get feats while avoiding any hard fight.
• Get branded at the goblin camp; this can help you avoid fights in the future and will give some items bonus effects.
• Reminder to Barter with vendors you trade constantly (Dammon, do this with Dammon; your approval stays the same throughout the acts). Respect to lvl 1 so max approval is only 400 gold. Do this with the party member with the most CHA and only trade using them.
• Be careful when going to the Zhentarim Hideout. One of the NPCs is programmed to blow every barrel when you start a fight; almost lost my save there, cause both of the NPCs on the bottom floor teleported from the bottom to the top next to Zarys(??) when the fight started and they exploded 3/4 of my party.
• Talking about the Zhentarim, If you let Rugan live and looted the chest they were carrying, they will torture him and discover you have the chest. THEY ARE PREPARING A TRAP. If you go to the Zhentarim Hideout, they will let you enter and then explode everything once you get near the stairs. Extremely easy to wipe here; the best course of action is to kill Rugan and his partner to avoid this.
• Once you reach underdark around lvl 4, kill both of the Minotaurs (the fight is pretty easy with the help of the Ogres). If you don’t have the horn, this fight will be very difficult; you can try to kill one minotaur, flee and then kill the other or wait until you’re 5.
• Reminder to attack from stealth to trigger the Surprised debuff.
• Get Phalar Aluve at (X:116, Y:-192); it’s very near the Minotaurs, one of the best swords in the entire game. You should keep it with you until the end.
• Go to Myconid Colony and get Glut; go back to the Minotaurs and use Animating Spores in one of the Minotaurs. Use them to fight the Spectator; you can use the basilisk oil you saved at the petrified drows to make the fight easier.
• The Spectator will surprise your party, but you can bypass that by attacking one of the Drows from stealth from far away.
  
• After that, you can use Glut and the Minotaur (if the Minotaur is low/died, you can go back and ress the other one) to kill Bulette. Once you kill Bulette, you can ress it as well with Animating Spores. Be careful because both the Minotaur and the Bulette are very fat wide, so they don’t fit in a lot of spaces and may get left behind if you don’t pay attention;
• If you kill the Duergar near the beach with Glut and don’t side with them, they will turn hostile. If you don’t want to side with Glut, leave the Bulette away from your party so it’s only a 1v4. Once you kill Glut, THE BULETTE WILL NOT DESPAWN. I suggest leaving the Bulette near the Selûnite outpost or the Sussur tree because there’s no reason for you to go back there (do this before fighting the Duergar, Bulette has basically no space to walk in that fight so it will do basically nothing);
• Stop by the Arcane Tower and get Mystra’s Grace. This item looks weak, but it isn’t. You can cast Feather Fall as much times as you want, so it’s overall a QoL item if you don’t have easy access to this spell or don’t want to spend resources on it. Trust me, you will use this item more times than you expect. It should be in your inventory until the rest of the game;
• There’s a way to skip Bernard’s fight. I suggest you do it, as there isn’t anything worth the trouble of fighting them;
• Your main goal while in the underdark is to farm XP to reach lvl 5 and then go back to clear the goblin camp. Then farm more XP to reach lvl 6 to kill the Spider Matriarch and Hag (remember the golden rule), waiting for 6 to make both fights very effortless. And remember: every boss now has a legendary action you should pay attention to;
• After reaching lvl 6, you can fight the Hag and the Matriarch. The fights should be pretty straightforward at this point as long as you are building correctly. On top of that, I chose to let the githyanki patrol near the bridge for last; we will fight them when we are going to the crèche;
• If you find yourself unable to reach 6, don’t worry. Level 6 is a bit overkill for both fights; lvl 5 should be good enough as long as you’re building correctly;

• Following the 2nd rule, start both fights the Matriarch fight (Hag is invisible) from stealth to get the Surprised debuff;
• You can’t kill the Spider by pushing it off a cliff anymore. In my save, the Matriarch tp’ed back when I pushed it;
• You can destroy all the spider eggs before the fight begins if you want to be extra secure;
• Be careful when fighting the Hag on her home if you are 6, cause you can very easily kill her there and not get the option to get her hair;
• After killing them both, go to grymforge;
• You should have at least 3 inspiration points once you leave grymforge, it will be VERY USEFUL later. Remember that you will get Inspiration Points by killing Nere and Grym, so you can actually use some points if you really need to;
• Again, relevant map for Inspiration Points.[mapgenie.io]
• Once you reach grymforge, keep an eye out, cause this is probably the hardest part in act one if you play it normally. Fortunately for you, I have some cheese strats that make grymforge extremely simple;
• If you’re not 6 yet, you can go to grymforge to farm xp before fighting Nere, but you can’t long rest while doing it. Nere will die if you long rest and all the duergar will be gone, you can still get Nere’s head, but you will lose a lot of xp/items. I think you can get away with killing grym (as the fight is very simple), get 6 and go back to kill the Duergar and Nere without long resting.
• You can fight Nere at 5 too, fighting him is easy if he’s alone, the main problem is the Duergar. You can use minor illusion to group up every duergar and use barrels + AoE, but you will probably kill all the iron hand slaves in the process too;
• Before killing everybody, get the Fetish of Callarduran Smoothhands (bro, wtf is this ring’s name) from a body near X: -610 Y: 408, we will use invisibility a lot on this guide, and this ring will give us invisibility free of charge once per long rest, which is pretty good;
• First off, fighting the Duergar and Nere (if you’re 6, if you aren’t go to the grym fight). There are 2 ways you can proceed here: you can strike a deal with Elder Brithvar to Kill Nere with their help or you can do as I did and kill the duergar from here before dealing with Nere (Cheese counter: 2);
  
• There is one Duergar with an Arrow_of_Roaring_Thunder, keep your party spread;
• Once you clear every Duergar, you can kill Nere alone, I still kept 2 party members up there just in case the fight got too hard so I could easily flee;
• The rest of Grymforge is pretty simple until you reach Grym and, again, we have a very easy way to cheese the fight too (Cheese counter: 3):
  
• Choose one person to do all the stuff (BESIDES THE LAVA VALVE) you need to begin the fight and keep the rest where I’m pointing at. Once you finish, group up your last party member with the other three and shoot the lava valve with your bow (thanks u/shar-teel for pointing you can shoot the valve), Grym will show up, but it will not be able to reach your party, as it doesn’t have any ranged attacks, now the fight is pretty easy, but it’s going to take a while;
• You can use summons to lure Grym to the hammer and then use a bow to pull the lever to speed things up. Thanks again to u/shar-teel and u/Haddock_Lotus for the tip;
• Go to X: -539, Y: 468 and steal the Runepowder Barrel from Philomeen. THERE IS WAY YOU CAN DIE HERE IF SHE EXPLODES THE RUNEPOWER, KEEP ONE PARTY MEMBER AT CAMP;
• Once you are done with the grymforge, go to the crèche;

• On your way there, you will find the githyanki patrol, bring your Cleric with you or any character with the Command skill or anyone who can disarm and PRAY TO RNGESUS (don’t bring Lae’zel with you here, she will turn hostile after what we do);
• Late edit: Disarm isn’t the best option here, as I said, it’s only 12%, there are better skill/spells for this, I heard that an invisible fighter with Disarming Attack (Melee) can have more than 50% chance. Other options: Honeyed Paws and Heat Metal.
• Use Command: Drop on Kith’rak Voss, you have like, 12% I think to drop his sword, Silver Sword of the Astral Plane, which is literally one of the best swords in the game that you’re supposed to get at act 3;
• Whatever the result, leave, you’re going to start a fight on a very awkward position, so it’s just best to leave and do it again from stealth to get the surprised bonus;
• After killing them, go to the Mountain Pass;
• Stop by Lady Ester to get Periapt of Wound Closure, this is a very useful item to help your economy, the idea here is not to have the item equipped at all times, but to keep in your inventory and only equip it when you are going to heal to make the healing more effective;
• Get the Dawnmaster’s Crest, you will use it to get the Blood of Lathander;
• Before reaching the crèche, Go back to camp and pick Lae’zel and Shadowheart (or any other character with Resistance);
• Small disclaimer here: I always had Lae’zel with me at all times here on every playthrough, so Idk what happens at camp if you don’t bring her;
• Once you reach the crèche, let Lae’zel speak with the githyanki, if you try speaking yourself and fail the skill check, you will begin a fight and we don’t want that to happen;
• Go straight to the Infirmary, you will finally use the Inspiration points you were collecting;
• We are going to get the Awakened Buff, probably the best permanent buff in the game – it makes so you can use all Illithid powers as a Bonus Action.
• If you don’t have 4 points yet, you can proceed to act II and come here later;
• Talk to Ghustil, she will have your parasite removed, if you have Lae’zel, she will want to go first and you will have to pass a persuasion check. I do not recommend letting Lae’zel go first, as you will need to roll 30 arcane check. If you go instead, choose the dialog option “You would still be hurting for this place…” as I have heard if you choose the 3rd option, she will turn hostile (?);
• Anyways, once you sit on the machine, you will need to pass a 12 INT, 15 WIS and 18 CHA saving throws, with Resistance + 4 inspiration points, that should be fairly simple to get.
• Once you leave the machine, you will have to pass a Persuasion check or you will start a fight, only with the Gith at the Infirmary (the rest of the Crèche will not be hostile towards you);
• Now, if you’re lvl 7, you can proceed to meet the Inquisitor, if not, you can go back to act I to farm or proceed to act II and come back later;
• Or, you can ignore the fight entirely, you don’t actually need to do this to progress the main story;
• You will need to do around ~ 150 dmg in one round if you want to easily win this fight, if your party isn’t capable of that yet (even if you’re lvl 7) go to act II and return later;
• Again, Lae’zel will turn hostile here if you attack the inquisitor before talking with Vlaakith and entering the astral plane;
• THERE IS A WAY TO LOSE YOUR SAVE HERE IF YOU DISRESPECT VLAAKITH, just obey her and everything should be fine;
• The fight will begin after leaving the astral plane, the main goal is to rush the inquisitor down before he has a chance to use his power, as the fight will be SIGNIFICANTLY MORE DIFFICULT if he manages to live for a few rounds. Again, if you want to play this safe, you can come back here later when you’re higher level, there is not timer on this quest as long as you don’t finish act II;
• Once the inquisitor is dead, the fight should be pretty easy;
• DON’T GO BACK, you’re not in the best conditions to fight here as you probably spent a lot of resources to kill the inquisitor (everyone on the Crèche is hostile). Instead, get the Blood of Lathander using the Dawnmaster’s Crest and and leave the Crèche;
• Congratulations, you just finished Act I!!!!!

Act II is a bit weird, cause you can bypass 4 boss fights here using dialog, so, if you want to play really safe, you can save Inspiration Points for each boss fight ( Malus Thorm, Thisobald Thorm, Gerringothe Thorm and Yurgir). I will still provide workarounds if you fail the dialog btw. Anyways, here is the step-by-step:

• First thing, IGNORE ISOBEL FOR NOW, I RECOMMEND TALKING TO HER MUCH, MUCH LATER SO YOU DON’T ♥♥♥♥ UP THE ENTIRE STORY HERE – YOU CAN GO TO LAST LIGHT INN, JUST DON’T TALK TO HER;
• Again, relevant map, if you want to farm inspiration points[mapgenie.io];
• Also, do not talk to Kar’niss yet (if you’re not lvl 7);
• If you have the Blood of Lathander already, it should be equipped in one of your characters, probably the single best item in this entire act;
• Daily Reminder to Barter with vendors you trade constantly (If you forgot to max Dammon’s approval, now is the chance!!!), it only cost 400 to max approval if you’re lvl 1;
• if you’re not lvl 7 yet, getting to lvl 7 should be you’re priority right now, you will probably get it by just walking around and discovering new areas and progressing quests – it shouldn’t be that hard;
• While you farming for 7, avoid the areas bellow if you can, there a big chance you will die here, as they’re all ambushes, meaning that, if you fail your perception check, your party will get the “Surprised” debuff and lose an entire turn where the enemies will attack you for free, not ideal;
  
  RED CIRCLE – LVL 9 ENEMY, AVOID AT ALL COST, THERE’S NO REASON TO GO THERE BESIDES THE ACTUAL FIGHT. Green circle is harper ambush, you should avoid that too, we will use that in the near future. Blue circle are lvl 6 ambushes
• Even if you succeed the perception checks, all the fights are pretty annoying to deal at lvl 6, so I should probably avoid them anyways;
• You should avoid the Meenlocks underneath Last Light Inn too, as the fight can get very hard if you get unlucky with saving throws, you can come back to fight them when you’re 7. Thanks to u/clv992 for the reminder. Use Protection from Evil and Good to avoid getting Frightened;
• Of couse, you don’t have a lot left if you have to avoid all these fights, so I suggest you take this path, to moonrise towers if you didn’t get lvl 7 yet:
  
• You could also go back to act I to fight the gith to get lvl 7, but, be careful, it’s not a simple fight;
• Once you reach lvl 7, go back and talk to Kar’niss, when you get to the Harper ambush, side with the Harpers, this should be not difficult, assuming you’re 7 and you have the help of the harpers. Also, Kar’niss likes to focus the harper first, for some reason;
• Or, you could convince Kar’niss to give you the latern, if you choose this option, you will have to fight the shadow-cursed version of Kar’niss and his crew later, idk what are the consequences if you fail the persuasion check here, however;
• Moreover, you can disarm Kar’niss and get the latern if you want to, he will not turn hostile if you use Command (Drop) , I’m unsure what happens you use Disarming Attack. You will have to fight his shadow-cursed version later too;
• Just a small warning here: sometimes on older saves, the option to side with the harpers didn’t show up and I had to fight by Kar’niss side, IDK what’s the trigger for this, I assume it is because my party is a bit far away from Kar’niss when he sees the ambush, I really don’t know for sure, but stick to Kar’niss just in case;
• We want to fight Kar’niss here for 2 reasons: if he lives, he will show up at the last fight with Ketheric, making the fight more difficult. 2nd, and most important: he will drop his moonlantern and we can free the pixie inside to get the pixie blessing, which will make act II ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gazillions times less annoying;
• If you manage to lose the blessing (IDK how you can do this btw, I read you can lose by going back to act I, but didn’t happen for me), you can reaply it by using the bell the pixie gave you;
• If Kar’niss dies near a harper, there’s a chance they will get the lantern and you will have to kill them too;
• If the Harpers take the moonlantern after killing Kar’niss, Isobel will have it and gives it to you with the blessing. u/CptKnots
• Once you get the blessing, you’re free to do whatever you want and you can finally split your party members again, yay!!!!;
• small warning: if you care about the plot, you may want to do the Halsin quest later (I did it at lvl 9) and bring a cleric with Spirit Guardians with you to play safe. The portal fight is REALLY HARD if your party lacks sustained AoE dmg, not a bad a idea do respec classes like Assassin/Gloonstalker because they will do nothing in this fight;
• We can deal with the lvl 9 ambush now;
• Hard to explain, watch this video. Yes, you could have done this at 6 too, but I think it’s better to play safe, just in case;
• Again, avoid Isobel together with the Githyanki Ambush for now;
• Before we start killing bosses, you can bring Astarion to Araj Oblodra at moonrise towers, she will offer a +2 permanent STR potion to you, as long as Astarion bites her. If you are dating Astarion, there’s a chance he will break with you if you do this, IDK exactly what happens, but I read from multiple sources this is a possibility;

Now we can start killing bosses!!!

• All the undead bosses from this act are immune to Control Undead;
• Go to Thisobald Thorm, again, if you have 4 inspiration points you can try to do the performance checks;
• If everything goes south – don’t worry – as a pattern you will see repeat on this act, Thisobald can’t jump, has a pretty low mov speed and his attacks don’t have lot of range, meaning you can play hit and run using ranged attacks, slows, jumps and he can never catch you, it’s hard to really explain how to do this with images/text, so I will leave a video showing how to do it. Wyll is very good here if you want to do this, Eldrich Blast + Hunger of Hadar are pretty helpful and make kiting back very easy (Cheese counter: 4);
• If you don’t feel like doing the dialog, attack him from stealth as always;
• Now your focus is to farm for lvl 8;
• Still ignoring Isobel and the Githyanki Ambush;
• Once you reach lvl 8, go to the house of healing for the next boss;
• Again, you can save up to 4 Inspirations Points for the next boss;
• Next: Malus Thorm, if you fail the dialog, you can stack a few barrels near him and the nurses and blow everything up, he really needs the nurses to do his gimmick, so if you kill them all, he will spend his entire turn reviving 16 health nurses, making everything simple for you;
• Again, if you don’t wish to do dialog here, use invisibility to stack the barrels, attack from stealth to trigger the Surprised debuff and then blow up the barrels once the fight is started;
• Again, no ranged attack, no jump, slow mov speed, I like to position my party members like this to make really annoying for him to take everyone out;
  
• As said above, he really needs to be in melee to do anything, you can play hit and run with him as you did in the Thisobald fight too, just make sure to kill all the nurses so he will spend his turn reviving them, Elixir of Bloodlust can get a lot of value here;

We are going straight for the next boss, cause getting lvl 9 will take a while;

• Obligatory 4 Inspiration Points reminder;
• Next: Gerringothe Thorm – shes continues with the trend of no ranged attacks, no jumping, but she can use Dash as a bonus action. Again, you can kill her here using dialog if want to. It’s good advice to leave all your gold at camp, she has a skill she will use at her fist turn that can instakill someone as long as they have enough gold.
• The easiest way to win this fight is to lead Gerri on these weaken floorboards and breaking them when she’s right bellow them, she will be stuck there for the rest of the fight and you will be free to deal with the skulls as you find fit (Cheese counter:5);
  
• The best way to do this is by making your best lockpicker invisible and lockpick the door, as the door in question is right next to her, so if you go visible, you will start a dialog;
• Furthermore, you can yeet her from the building and only deal with the skulls this way too (she won’t die from the fall);
• I like the 1st option more, cause it works 100% of the time;
  
• Blue circle is the place you can shove her, red circle is the door you need to unlock to get to the room with the weaken floorboards;
• Or you could be a gigachad and pay her 5000 gold;
• And, as with the other Thorms, you can play hit and run here too, you can cast Wall of Fire or similar spells near choke points (like the stairs) her skulls will need to pass for easy dmg;
• Now you’re 8 and probably has spent a lot of gold upgrading your items, we can go back to talk to Isobel, or don’t, doesn’t matter as the buff she gives you is worse than the pixie bless;
• If you decide to talk to her, you should position your party for the incoming fight to maximize the chances she and other NPCs survive;
• Or, you can barter with her to get max approval, and then cast on her Feign Death with the character with max approval when beginning the fight. You can respec you character to lvl 1 so it only costs 400 to get max approval. Get Boots of Apparent Death (this boots gives you Feign Death) at ( X: -165 Y: 45 ) to cast Feign Death on her with your lvl 1 character to guarantee she doesn’t die. Of course, the fight will be way harder, but if you’re lvl 8, it shouldn’t be that hard. Thanks for u/Pristine_Relief5837 for the tip about the boots;
  Cast Sanctuary/invisibility on your lvl 1 party member so they don’t die before their turn starts;
  
• Stack boxes near this door as shown above, if your character can’t open the door from the OUTSIDE, you’re good to go (idk why, but I could always open the door from the inside, no matter what I did, doesn’t matter though, as the Winged Horror will come from outside), the Horror will probably waste 2 full turns just walking because of this;
• You can position your party like this bellow, I like to initiate the conversation with the party member using the blood of lathander to apply Blinded on Marcus, the boxes shown in the pic are for traversal, you’re supposed to use them to go up and down without needing to jump to save bonus actions if you really want to prevent anyone dying (Marcus likes flying downstairs, for some reason), probably an overkill tbh;
  
• If you are not using the Blood of Lathander, Protection from Evil and Good does the job too;
• I like keeping Lae’zel downstairs just in case a Winged Horror does something cheeky, she can kill two of them in one turn with action surge + Great Weapon Master, if you don’t mind random NPCs dying, 4-stack on top;
• Before the fight starts, cast Sanctuary or Invisibility on Isobel, pop Spirit Guardians on your Cleric (if you have one), initiate the dialog. Once the fight begins, Marcus will focus one of your party members, as Isobel can’t be targeted;
• Now the fight is pretty much done, Isobel is safe, your party is lvl 8, one less Winged Horror to worry, I imagine you should kill him pretty quickly;
• You can Disarm or use Banishment on Marcus if you want to be 100% sure nobody dies;
• Of course, there’s still an element of randomness that can make this fight harder. You really want your party to go first and Isobel to be dead last, you can use Elixir of Vigilance on your main beater, just in case;
• You can always use potions to heal her and reuse Sanctuary;
• Get the Shifting Corpus Ring from Marcus for the free invisibility if you missed the Fetish of Callarduran Smoothhands at act I;
• Now we can go back to the Githyanki Ambush;
• You can use invisibility to trigger them spawning without starting a fight by walking near the bridge, or you can sneak from the right side of the bridge and try crossing the bridge, they will spawn without initiating a fight too (Not really the best idea, you need to be realise precise). Or, you can summon scratch or other summon and ask them to walk near the bridge alone to trigger them spawning. Now they’re spawned, you can attack them from stealth to trigger Surprised, if you used the summon method, you will need your summon to die/flee/dismiss before attacking from stealth;
• If you’re having too much trouble with this fight, you can attract them far away from the bridge, they will start taking damage from the shadowcurse, the damage doubles every turn meaning they will die pretty fast as long you can stall for multiple turns;
• Now we can proceed with the main quest;
• You can go talk to Z’rell if you didn’t already, she will send you to the mausoleum and, oh look, she conveniently stays in a room with no other enemies besides an easily killable scrying eye, I wonder what we could do with this information;
  
• From now on, you can begin doing some “clean ups” at moonrise, picking off isolated guards. This will make the last fight less stressful. Besides, it’s just way better to deal with enemies individually instead of them grouped up. Leave one party member at camp just in case you aggro too many enemies at once;
• Additionally, just a heads up: the fights should be getting easier by now, if you’re following a good build guide and are buying the right items, you should expect easier fights from now to the end of act II. I will explain simple ways to kill Balthazar and Yurgir and the rest, but I feel like you won’t need to if you’re building correctly. My fights against Balthazar and Yurgir were so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ easy I almost killled Balthazar before his first turn, if you’re still struggling with fights, maybe you’re missing a key item from your build, messed up something while leveling or is not using your build correctly;
• To be more clear: it’s ok if ONE of your builds hasn’t come online yet, but if 3/4 or 4/4 of your party members feels weak, there is definetly something wrong;
• Once you reach the mausoleum, find Balthazar, but don’t fight him yet;
• Get the Summon Golem Bell from Balthazar;

• From there, you can do shar’s trials;
• Soft-Step Trial: you can literally kill the shadows, they have like 31 health or something, just kill them if you find the challenge annoying, furthermore, you can use turn-based mode to make the puzzle easier;
• Self-Same Trial: This is the trickiest trial, on a normal run, you wouldn’t worry that much, but now you’re min-maxing, now your build is actually very strong, my lae’zel can deal up to 150 dmg in one turn with actions surge, which is more damage than the character with the most health in my party, be careful here – remove all your items before entering the trial and then equip them again after starting the trial, all the shadow will have not equipment ;
• Faith-Leap Trial: Move your camera to the end of the trial and click for your character to move there, your character will autopath the entire maze for you you’re welcome;
  
• Again, reminder to farm 4 Inspiration Points;
• Then you can go fight Yurgir, the fight becomes simple if you pass the first persuasion check to kill all the trash mobs, I suggest you do it. You only need to pass a 16 persuasion check, which is not really that high. Before talking with him, you can stack “a few barrels” just in case you miss the check. Once the fight starts, you can summon the Flesh Giant from the bell to help, beware that the giant will turn hostile once he reaches around 30% hp;
  
• Or you can side with him to avoid the fight, and help him break his contract, never actually did it myself, but I know for a fact if you agreed to help Astarion discover the meaning of scars on his back , he will be extremely pissed if you side with Yurgir (You will still need to pass a 16 Persuasion Check to help Yurgir);
• If you do not wish to talk with him, you can flank them by jumping into these stairs before meeting him, attack from stealth as always. Yurgir has the Alert feat, but his minions don’t;
  
• After killing or helping him, If you aren’t lvl 9 yet, this should be your priority right now, go farm to 9 before we progress the main story, DONT GO FIND AYLIN YET, freeing her will trigger the final battle and we don’t want this right now;
• Reaching lvl 9 will unlock lvl 5/6 scrolls to be purchased on stores, THIS IS A HUGE DMG BOOST for the last fight. if you don’t find the scrolls you’re looking for, you can take a partial long rest using no food to reset the merchants to infinite reroll until you find what you want;
• Please barter with vendors, did I mention it only costs 400 gold if you’re lvl 1?!?!? It also makes the things you sell cost more!;
• Always reminder to trade with the party member with the highest CHA;
• Before buying anything: I will overestimate the last boss a lot in this last part of the guide and that’s because you can’t flee and I don’t know how strong you are, so I’m overestimating bcs Idk how your fight will be. If you’re building correctly, are lvl 9/near 10, if you’re feeling strong, if the Balthazar fight felt easy: you’re probably good enough and buying scrolls here is overkill. They cost a lot of gold you can save for the next act. Again, if your party is strong, the fight against Ketheric should be easy, I’m will definitely oversell the fight on the next steps just in to guarantee you are ready, but the fight isn’t as hard it seems;
• Relevant scrolls you may want to buy: Scroll of Sunbeam, Scroll of Conjure Elemental, Scroll of Desintegrate, Scroll of Globe of Invulnerability (Globe is insane on the last fight). These are just a suggestion, you should buy the scrolls you think fit what you are lacking;
• Also, if you don’t have a way to make one of your party members invisible, you should buy a potion of invisibility, we will use it in the fight agaisnt Ketheric, it is very important you have a way to make one of your characters invisible in the last fight;
  
• Now, after gearing up, we are going to finally fight Balthazar and get Good Girl Dame Aylin;
• BUUUUTTTTTTT, if there are areas you didn’t explore yet, enemies you didn’t kill or unfinished quests, I suggest finishing them, I have never started the last fight before finishing everything, so IDK what happens if you do;
• Im pretty sure if you don’t have Shadowheart here, she will leave your party for good;
• Now we enter the Shadowfell;
• You can stack all the skeletons he summons by moving the piles of bones all in one place before the fight starts and then Aoe Kill almost all of the skeletons when the fight starts (Cheese counter: 6);
• Relevant video ;
• Don’t bother hitting from stealth to attack, as he has the Alert feat;
• Now you can do whatever you want, you can finish killing the 2 big skeletons or focus him, he has only has 118 hp, so It should be a simple fight without all the skeletons around;
• If you are playing dark urge and didn’t kill Isobel, Sceleritas Fel will force you to kill the party member you’re dating the next time you go to camp, I imagine you don’t want that, so, if you have Risky Ring equipped, unequip it before going to camp, as it will give a disadvantage on your saving throws. You can also get Amulet of the Harpers from Talli to get advantage on saving throws (You will only need to pass a 14 Wisdom check);

• Annnnnnnnnd, at long last, we reached the end of act 2;
• PSA: you will not get the achievement by nuking Gale, I thought it worked. Thanks for u/worm4real for the source;
• Now, this is it, no going back, pop all your Elixirs and Soul Coins, you still have an opportunity to buy lvl 5/6 scrolls from Quartermaster Talli one last time;
• Keep the Blood of Lathander in you inventory, if you aren’t using it;
• Assuming you did your homework “cleaning up” the guards, the first fight should be done and dusted;
  
• Once you reach the top of the tower, your focus should be 100% on Ketheric, as once he loses around 25% hp, he will flee and leave you killing necromites;
• Once you kill everyone on top of the tower, you can actually long rest if you really need to, reapply your elixirs if you do it;
• Once you get to the Mind Flayer Colony, the first thing you need to know is that you can still use the Restoration Pod, BUT ONLY ONCE;
• We need Scract for the last fight against Ketheric, he is actually really important, as we will use him to free Aylin, be sure you can summon him or have him at your party when you use the elevator;
• Before Freeing Zevlor, kill all the intellect devourers and then release the pods, so you will only have to fight against the mind flayers alone;
• There is an actual hard fight at the Necrotic Lab if you party lacks AoE (around 14 enemies), you can skip it or, if you have the Blood of Lathander in your inventory, as I requested, you can equip here before the fight, stack all the enemies and use Sunbeam, the item will also give them all disadvantage on attack against your party, you can also use Protection from Evil and Good. If you have a Cleric in your party, ignore this, the fight will be effortless;
• If you got the Resonance Stone, send it to camp for now, it makes you vulnerable to Psychic Dmg and we are going to fight a Mind Flayer;
• Use the Restoration Pod and to the last fight we go!!!;
• Stop, think, take a deep breath and take the elevator;
• Remember: you will not get the achievement by nuking gale;
• Put everyone into sneak mode and summon Scratch, make him invisible (you can throw a potion on the ground to make Scratch + one party member invisible);
• Move him right next to Aylin, but don’t use “Help” yet;
• Activate turn-based mode;
• Position your party as you find fit while sneaking, without starting the fight;
• Once you’re ready, attack from stealth to trigger Surpried and then a dialog will occur, immediatly after the dialog ends, free Aylin using Scratch;
• You need to free Aylin before atacking, as Ketheric doesn’t take dmg while Aylin is chained;
• Focus the Mind Flayer first and then the rest of the Trash Mobs, we want to clear the entire room so we fight the Apostle Of Myrkul alone;
• Once everyone else is down, finish Ketheric on his human form;
• Now the real fight starts;
• Quick tip: if you’re on your last turn of potion of speed, you can use another potion of speed to dodge the Lethargic Debuff. When you use the 2nd potion of speed, you will trigger the debuff on your current turn, not on the next. You can abuse this by using all your actions and then drinking the potion of speed on your last bonus action, making it so you ignore the debuff altogether;
• If your build is good, you’re at the right lvl (should be lvl 10 or close), this shouldn’t be a difficult fight. Again, if you are feeling nervous, stop and think, you have lvl 5/6 scrolls you can use, you have oils, potions, arrows, you can do it, I believe in you;
• I haven’t used Scroll of Globe of Invulnerability in this fight, so I may be wrong, but I think you need to position it in a way it doesn’t reaches the Apostle Of Myrkul, cause if you do, it may affect him too, making the scroll useless;
• Focus the necromites when they’re up, Apostle of Myrkul can use Finger of Death to deal massive dmg in your party if you let a necromite near him;
• Also, play around his Legendary action: Gaze of the Dead;
• You can actually use disarm on the Acolyte, didn’t actually know that, thanks u/timburache for the tip!;
• Once the fight is over, rejoice, you will not feel this nervous for a while now;
• Tecnically, act II isn’t over yet, but the rest of the content is pretty straightforward and should not require comment;
• Congratulations, you finished Act II !!!!!

Act III is the biggest act by far and gives the player the most freedom, you can choose to fight any boss at any order, but the biggest difference here is that you will get lvl 12 pretty early in the Act and so, there’s no need to farm xp.

Throught this guide, I recommended you to do all content, because it would give us XP to make fights easier down the line, but that isn’t the case on act III, you will probably do every boss fight at lvl 12, meaning that, if the rewards you get from defeating a boss aren’t good enough, don’t do it – there’s no reason to do every single boss fight. The same applies to quests, if you just want to get strong and rush to fight the Netherbrain, you should focus on doing stuf that makes you and your party stronger and nothing else.

But let’s ignore boss fights for now and focus on the present:

• Once you reach Rivington, before you do anything, send Shadowheart back to camp;
• While I generally don’t point out specific items for specific builds, I think it is important I point out this item, because it is really good and really easy to miss. Hellrider Longbow +3 Initiative and Perception is insane on any spellcaster or other build that doesn’t need a bow or on a party member with low Initiative. You can get it from Ferg Drogher, if you have Shadowheart with you, you will not be able to trade with him;
• I suggest bartering with him too, the bow is pretty expensive. Once you traded with him, you can get Shadowheart back;
• Right now our goal is to get to lvl 12 ASAP while gearing up, collect 6,6k gold and find 2 Scrolls of Globe of Invulnerability and 3 Scrolls of Chain Lightning and a lot of invisibility potions (we will need at least 3 for the final fight and we will use invisibility to set up some boss fights/encounters);
• If you don’t have a lot of potions of speed, it’s a good idea to start buying them too;
• There is a chest near the guard tower with a lot of gold (X:15 Y:49), you can also get a lot of gold at the House of Counting by lockpicking safes;
• 5k gold will go to Boney at the circus. Buy a statue from him, the statue will give a permanent Bless to whichever party member is speaking to Boney;
• The rest of the 1,6k will be spent in Baldur’s gate;
• Go to X: 44 Y: -38 at the Abandoned Windmill’s basement, you will find a mindflayer you can kill to get a tadpole;
• Also, Relevant map for Act III;
• There’s also 3 extra tadpoles near the beach, use the map above to get them;
• Talk to Wulbren to get another Runepowder bomb;
• If you forgot to get the other Bomb from Philomeen, you can find it at the Gnome Hideout too;
• You can also skip both bridges’ requirements by using Fly/character with high jump;
• Btw, I’m assuming you are using the Astral-Touched Tadpole;
  
  
  Besides that, there isn’t a lot of stuff to do in Rivington (for now) worth talking about, we will come back later to kill Gortash and Ansur, but that’s in the future. I will skip to Baldur’s Gate:
• Again, avoid all hard fights for now, focus on getting 12 and gearing up;
• Reminder to barter with merchants;
• DON’T TALK TO ETTVARD NEEDLE (editor in chief for the Baldur’s Mouth Gazette) if you aren’t planning to finish his quest ASAP, this quest will fail if you long rest, resulting in you getting a lower reputation in town, the important part is that this applies to merchants, making items more expensive;
• If you want to deal with the quest, you could kill Ettvard and that would solve the low reputation thing, but there is a way to avoid fighting, which will give positive reputation as well;
• Use fly/jump to reach the top of the building, break the barricade (without falling down), get invisible and then jump down and use the elevator (we will do this entire thing invisible);
• If you don’t have fly, you need to choose someone with a really long jump, we will need it once we go back;
• You can do this without invisibility if you want to/if your invisibility expired, use turn-based mode to avoid fighting the steel watchers;
  
• Active turn based mode and run to the door shown below;
  
• Get Make Big Money by Trading with Adventurers (X:-1029, Y:1058) from the wicker basket and go straight ahead to the door that is furthest away;
• You will find Jelliwing, if you helped the pixie at act II, Jelliwing will agree to help you as soon as you speak to her, if you didn’t save the pixie, you’ll need to pass a persuasion check;
• Once everything is done, you can go back using the elevator again, I imagine you have enough time to do everything and still be invisible, leave from the top of the building and that’s it;

• Get Make Big Money by Trading with Adventurers (X:-1029, Y:1058) from the wicker basket and go straight ahead to the door that is furthest away;
• You will find Jelliwing, if you helped the pixie at act II, Jelliwing will agree to help you as soon as you speak to her, if you didn’t save the pixie, you’ll need to pass a persuasion check;
• Once everything is done, you can go back using the elevator again, I imagine you have enough time to do everything and still be invisible, leave from the top of the building and that’s it;
• After reaching the sewers, I like avoiding Aelis Siryasius (the guy of the Grease Elementals), maybe I’m just unlucky, but in my previous playthroughs, he always liked to randomly attack me for no reason just because I walked near him, the fight itself isn’t hard, but can be if you get unlucky, as the ground is slippery and your party members can trip and skip their turn. Not worth the headache IMO, as he doesn’t give any notable loot;
• Once you have 1,6k gold, go to Stormshore Tabernacle near the Basilisk Gate waypoint;
• The wiki summarizes pretty well this area, so I’ll copy and paste from there;
• Inside the player can make offerings to Helm, Tyr, Selûne or Mystra or various other deities at the Statue of Gods in exchange for the condition: Anointed in Splendour. The condition ends after each long rest, but can be reapplied again for free;
• The amount you have to offer to receive the blessing depends on your level and difficulty. At level one, 400 gold will grant you the blessing and at level 11/12 it’s 4500 gold increasing to 5000 gold on Tactician difficulty;
• The blessing is only available to the character that made the offer, and the character who received the blessing must pray at the corresponding statue each day to reapply it. Each character can receive their own blessing, but they must make their own (separate) donations. Once a character makes a sufficient donation to receive a god’s blessing, they cannot make donations to other deities.
• td;dr: respec your entire party to lvl 1 and donate 400 gold to 4 deities using different party members on each one, totaling 1600 gold;
• QoL tip: use map markers to indicate which deity each party member prayed, so you don’t need to figure out which deity each character needs to pray to every day;
• You can get that gold back by using a hatch near one of the statues. GET YOUR CHARACTERS TO MAX LVL BEFORE DOING THAT, THERE’S A WAY TO LOSE YOUR SAVE HERE IF YOU DON’T, because stealing the gold back will get you Castigated by the Gods curse (AVOID HEALING IF YOU GOT THE CURSE!!!). Once you remove it with Remove Curse, you will need to fight an enemy (99,9% of the time will be a Deva) which hits pretty hard and will surprise you 100% of the time;
• If you don’t remove the curse, 2 enemies will spawn if the cursed character is healed or takes a short/long rest, so it’s just objectively better to use Remove Curse;
• After that, you can go to Felogyr’s Fireworks, go to the basement (you can either get there by using the hatch on the store or by using a door near Philgrave’s Mansion, I like using the door);
• Once you reach the basement, STOP. Split your party and move your party one by one in small steps, there’s A LOT OF TRAPS HERE, be extremely careful, you won’t actually die, but we want to steal all the explosives and the traps will set them on fire;
• Get every single firework you see, box of fireworks, popdrakes, woogglims, if anything does damage, get it and send it to camp;
• There’s also a lever behind some wooden barrels you can use to reveal a hidden room with smokepowder barrels, grab them too (there’s another trap in the room with the barrels as well, be careful or all the barrels will explode);
• You can steal from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floor of the store too, but you will 100% of the time start a fight and the enemy likes to blow up the fireworks as soon as the fight starts;
• You can also buy fireworks from the merchant of the store;
• Now we will go on an adventure collecting tadpoles;
• First, Gortash parents have parasites, you can kill them at X: -29 Y: -115, you will probably alert the nearby guards after
• There are 6 Mindflayer Parasites at X: 204 Y:126 hidden inside a boat, if you don’t sneak, you will have 2 fight 2 steel watchers;
• Near them you will find Volo in a “bit” of trouble, after saving him and killing everybody, you can find 2 more parasites on the corpses;
• Of course, these aren’t the only parasites in the map, If you wanna get all available, use this map, there’s a filter specific for parasites;
• What we are doing here is maximizing your build as much as possible before we start fighting bosses.
  Also, just a random tip if you decide to do the artist quest, get the Torch of Revocation from the Mystic Carrion (tips for the boss fight are a few lines ahead) before going to the mansion, then follow this images:
  
  (no need to use turn based)
  

  Doing this will skip all the annoying ♥♥♥♥ and go straight to the top, now you just need to open the door to the secret room and burn the portrait.

  Now we’re going to do the boss fights. Like I said before, there’s no need to do everything, do the bosses your build needs to.

  Heads up: your build NEEDS TO BE ONLINE NOW, if your party feels weak, there’s something wrong. I will provide tips for each fight, but you shouldn’t need to if your party is strong enough, you will be surprised to see how easy some of the boss fights will be as long as you’re building correctly. I will give you a turn estimate (Time to beat) on every boss to show how fast I beat that boss so you can compare so you know how weak/strong your party is. The turn estimate counts how much the fight lasted, not how fast I killed the boss.

  If you feel strong, you don’t actually need to follow all the instructions I will give here, most of them are overkill, if you feel like there’s to much setup for something, that’s probably because it is. Again, for the same reason as the Ketheric fight, I have no way of knowing how strong you are, so I will low ball everything I can to make each fight easier.

  Anyways, once you’re 12 and bought all the gear you need, we will proceed to doing boss fights.

  But before that last 3 tips:

  • If you’re on your last turn of potion of speed, you can use another potion of speed to dodge the Lethargic Debuff. When you use the 2nd potion of speed, you will trigger the debuff on your current turn, not on the next. You can abuse this by using all your actions and then drinking the potion of speed on your last bonus action, making it so you ignore the debuff altogether (copy and pasted from act II, in case you forgot);
  • 2nd: Best way to approach every boss fight is by killing the boss as fight as possible (with exception of Lorrokan) and ignoring everything else, if possible, 100ing to 0 in one turn, because some bosses get certain buffs when they reach a certain health treshold once their turn begins. Prolonged fights do not benefit you at all, the longer the fight, the more value their legendary actions will get and most of them are objectively better than your party’s skills.
  • 3rd: A lot of bosses have annoying reactions (Raphael, Lorroakan, Cazador), there are certain types of conditions that make the enemy unable to react, like prone and stunned, Hold Person and etc.

  As there is no order to do each boss fight, I will go from the easiest to the hardest. We will start with Mystic Carrion:

Time to beat: 2 turns, boss dead on 1st turn.

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

You can also use Arrow of Undead Slaying here.

Honestly, don’t even know if I should consider this a boss fight or not, follow his quest like normal, destroy his heart and that should be good enough. He takes double dmg from fire dmg as long as you destroyed his liver.

Time to beat: 3 turns, boss dead on 2nd turn.

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

You can also use Arrow of Humanoid_Slaying here.

Same as with mystic carrion, pretty easy fight, just ignore Lorro and kill all the elementals, he has a reaction he can use multiple times a turn that deals massive dmg if all the elementals are alive, kill the 4 elementals first and then go after him. You can talk to Aylin at camp and she will help you with the fight.

Get the Markoheshkir.

Time to beat: 1 turn.

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

You can also use Arrow of Undead Slaying and Arrow of Dragon Slaying (yep, tooltip says he’s just undead, but he still counts as dragon) here.

Sooo, remember all the explosives we got a from the Felogyr’s Fireworks? We are going to use it here:

• Do all the challenges to get to Ansur first;
• Drink a Elixir of Lightning Resistance to play around Stormheart Nova (10-180 dmg);
• Or you can get one extra Scroll of Globe of Invulnerability;
• We are going to abuse a small bug for this. Yes, I know, I don’t like using bugs either, you can do this without bugs, but it is PAINFULLY SLOW compared to this;
• Get a barrel near your camp chest, open both the chest and the barrel and use shift click to transfer from your camp chest to the barrel all the explosives you want to use for the Ansur fight. Ansur has 600 hp, get enought barrels to deal 800 dmg (I will explain why 800 in a near future) . You can do math to calculate how much explosives you need using the avg dmg;
• Then click to add all to inventory on the barrel using a character with Fly, now you have like 30~40 explosives inside your inventory at once, which shouldn’t be possible if you try picking them up individually;
• You can use fly to move around faster so your party member with all the barrels don’t falls behind;
• This bug just makes things faster, because leaving one party member at camp and then slowly sending barrels is very boring, but you can do that if you don’t want to abuse bugs;
• Stack 600 dmg worth of explosives near the Ansur’s body without interacting with him (avoid spam clicking here). If you’re using Smokepowder Bomb or other stackable explosives, you need to split them up before dropping it, if you drop a full stack, it will only deal the dmg of one individual item and consume all of them;
• Position the rest of the party members near the door;
• Before interacting with the corpse, cast sanctuary (invisibility didn’t work for me, idk why) on your party member interacting or position them away from the explosions and then start the dialog;
• Once the fight starts you can walk always without triggering an attack of opportunity if you have sanctuary active and then explode everything once they’re in a safe place;
• He will get to one hp and then receive 100 temporary hp and cast storm nova in 1 turn (yes, the game says 2, but it’s wrong, only one turn);
• I feel like that should be good to go, you have 1 turn to deal 100 dmg;
• if you feel like you don’t have the dmg, you can use the rest of the Barrels you have to create a 2nd explosion (you need 200 dmg bcs he has resistance to everything, so he will only take half dmg)
• Or, as the rest of your party is near the door, you can flee and then comeback to kill him after the explosion when he’s 1 hp, Stormheart Nova has 40 m/130 ft radius, run as far away as you can;
• And, that’s it (Cheese counter: 8).

If you want to do this fight without barrels, good luck, probably the hardest one in the entire game.

Time to beat: 4 turns, boss dead on 4th turn.

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

Same with Mystic Carrion and Lorroakan, should be an easy fight, albeit a very annoying one.

I like starting the fight by positioning everyone near a shroom first, I like leaving ranged party members dealing with the shrooms near chasms.

(small bug)

If she’s invisible, you can figure out where she is by clicking on jump (but not jumping) and moving around with your mouse, since you can’t share space with your enemies, the game will not let you jump at their location, so if you aren’t able to jump at some place, that’s where the Hag is. You can also learn her location by pinging her portrait (left alt + rightclick).

If you don’t want to abuse bugs, Create or Destroy Water can break her invisibility.

Use Arrow_of_Ilmater so the mushrooms don’t heal, just focus the Hag and the shrooms, the other enemies will become friendly after you kill the Hag.

UPDATE THE GAME TO HOTFIX 17, THE 16TH HOTFIX MADE THIS FIGHT WAY HARDER THAN IT SHOULD BE BECAUSE OF A BUG.

reason

Time to beat: 3 turns, boss dead on 2nd turn.

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

You can also use Arrow of Undead Slaying here.

First of, you don’t actually need to have Astarion during the fight to progress his quest (as long as you don’t kill cazador once he enters his coffin). Once you’re done with the fight, don’t interact with anything (neither the coffin nor the NPCs), go back to camp and pick up Astarion and come back to interact with the coffin, this should advance his quest as normal.

The fight itself is pretty easy, Cazador has very little hp and you can shutdown his entire gimmick by casting Daylight. I can assure you, the fight becomes SIGNIFICANTLY easier if you use Daylight.

Btw, pushing him off a cliff doesn’t work anymore.

Time to beat: 3 turns, boss dead on 2nd turn (I wanted to become an unholy assassin, so I did it the hardest way)

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

You can also use Arrow of Humanoid_Slaying here.

DO NOT BRING MINSC OR JAHEIRA IF YOU WANT TO BECOME AN UNHOLY ASSASSIN, YOU WILL BE FORCED TO KILL THEM IN OR PASS A VERY HIGH CHECK.

There is 2 ways you can proceed this fight, the easiest way is to pretend (let me cook) that you want to be an unholy assassin, you can become an assassin by killing one person (loot their hand) from the murder list and then Olfaith Olumssdottir will show up and ask you to kill another, after killing the 2nd person (get thier hand too), he will give you the password to the tribunal.

Alternatively, you can kill Dolor and steal the hands he’s collecting, but you will have to pass a 10 Deception check when talking to Sarevok. Regardless of how you got the hands, you need to say you killed them and then cut their hands off (idk what happens if you choose the other options, everywhere I looked ppl always chose that option).

Also, you can skip this entire thing if you either are playing Dark Urge (by passing an intimidation check) or Killed Gortash.

Anyways, once you pass the test, the 3 Echoes will TP to the room with Valeria. Luckily for us, Saverok will walk there, so you can start a fight now with him alone in the room in a 1v4. The room with Valeria is locked (only Sarevok has the key) and the Echoes will not be able to help with the fight at all, they all will stack near the door and pass their turn until Sarevok is dead, then you can open the door with the key and kill the Echoes after killing him.

Also, if he gets to attack 4 times he will get Deathbringer Legacy (for one turn) and be able to cast Deathbringer Assault (20-200 dmg range), but all his attack are melee and the buff only lasts for one turn, so you can play around that by letting your tankiest member near him or running so far way he can’t reach anyone. But, again, if your party is strong enough, he will not have time to do that.

Relevant video

I like positioning my party like this before the fight, Sarevok only has melee attacks

Second method is harder (ugh, why do you do this to me? Why you always want to do things the hard way??), the main reason you want to choose this method is if you want to play as a good guy or want to actually be an unholy assassin to buy items from Echo of Abazigal. If you became an unholy assassin, the Echo of Abazigal will fight against you too if you decide to kill Sarevok

First, avoid killing the Echoes as much as possible, Sarevok main gimmick is that he gets stronger as the Echoes dies, just focus him down, shouldn’t be that hard, he has no relevant resistances. The Echoes like to buff Sarevok, you can cast Silence so they can’t cast Haste, Sanctuary and other stuff on him. If he already has Haste, you can cast Mind Sanctuary near him, hasted effect don’t stack, he will not get stunned, unfortunately, but he will lose Hasted (you can deactivate Sanctuary, if you don’t want to give him one extra action in the subsequent turns).

(copy pasted from the easiest way, just in case you skipped)

Also, if he gets to attack 4 times he will get Deathbringer Legacy (for one turn) and be able to cast Deathbringer Assault (20-200 dmg range), but all his attack are melee and the buff only lasts for one turn, so you can play around that by letting your tankiest member near him or running so far way he can’t reach anyone. But, again, if your party is strong enough, he will not have time to do that.

Time to beat: 3 turns, boss dead on 1st turn

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

You can also use Arrow of Construct_Slaying here

Before doing the actual fight, I need you to do a few thigs:

• Buy around 3 (4 if you don’t have Markoheshkir) Scrolls of Chain Lightning;
• Have Markoheshkir in your inventory;
• Equip the Markoheshkir (how tf do you pronounce that?) and use Kereska Favour to get Bolts of Doom (don’t unequip the staff or you will lose the buffs), Bolts of Doom will give us our 4th Chain Lighting,
• If you don’t want to buy scrolls, you can stack your party with lighting damage dealers (like tempest cleric);
• f you’re going to use the scrolls, you need someone with high spell attack rolls (a caster) in your party and give the scrolls to them.
• Just to point that out: your probably don’t need that much prep, this fight is pretty easy if you party is well geared, my lae’zel did like ~50% of the boss hp alone.

  Once you have everything, go to the foundry, but don’t go down the stairs yet.
  
  

  You can avoid fighting the steel watchers before saving the gondians underwater, cast invisibility before entering the factory and read the letter shown above and leave. You can come back later, after rescuing the gondians, and the gondian workers will fight by your side (As long as you talked with Zanner Toobin), this will save you resources for the fight against the Titan.

  Also, we’re not going to use the Runepowder Bomb Wulgren gave us for obvious reasons (we’re going to use it in another fight), Zanner Toobin can disable the foundry for us. If he’s dead, you can cast Speak with Dead on his corpse and he will give you the code to disable the foundry. If he’s dead and you can’t speak with him for whatever the reason, there’s a tip about the password to disable the foundry in his journal (should be in his body). Read it and go back to the foundry and get a book called “The Many Faces of Gond” at a bookshelf near the surgery place, which will tell you gond’s real name (this is the password).

  Of course, you need to actually kill the boss first before doing that, the Titan and the Hellfire Steel Watchers are vulnerable to lighting, we are going to use Chain Lightning to abuse that. Use all 4 of them at the boss, if the Watchers are close enough, they will get hit by the lightining too, as long as you hit every bolt and are doing avg dmg (without counting Luck of the Far Realms), you shoud do around 360/479 hp of his hp in 2 turns only using your caster (with potion of speed).

  Also, keep in mind that you can disarm both of the Watchers and the Titan.

  And that should be good to go, once you’re done, remember to not use the bomb.

(I’m assuming you did steel watch first btw)

Time to beat: 4 turns, boss dead on 3rd turn, Lae’zel 100ed to 0 Gortash in one turn so I didn’t even needed to shove him off.

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

You can also use Arrow of Humanoid_Slaying here.

Get at least one Elixir of Cloud Giant Strength and use it right away, get two or more if you want to play safe.

Heads up: this fight is very easy if you party has a lot of melee attackers, Gortash has no resistances and not a lot of hp, the only annoying thing is that he uses a bubble that lasts for 2 turns that reflects ranged attacks. But, again, if you don’t care about that he can be very easily killed and you don’t need to do all this setup. He will spend his entire first turn to use that bubble, use this opportunity to burn him down in one turn.

Before the actual fight, there’s a way to skip all the enemies and go straight to Gortash.

You can get to Gortash by going right.

Once you’re at the top, destroy the 4 traps before engaging the fight just in case.

Stack 3 of your party members near where I’m showing below (keep at least one invis or sneaking, preferably the one with the highest STR). The idea is very simple: engage Gortash with one party member (preferably the one with Fly) and then run away from him to the rest of your party, Gortash has high mov speed and high initiative, so he should be the 1st to reach the your party. Once he reaches the you, throw him where I’m poiting at and try shoving off the cliff. This will also skip 2 off his turns, meaning the bubble he used is gone. If he uses his legendary action, remember it is a curse , so you can cleance it with Remove Curse or Noblestalk. Of course, this works best if you have multiple characters with high STR.

Conviniently, his body will not fall of the map and you can find it right here:

Time to beat: 2 turns, boss dead on second turn.

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

You can also use Arrow of Humanoid_Slaying here.

We are going to use what I like to call the Runepowder Barrel/Bomb + Divine Interverntion: Sunder the Heretical + Globe of Invulnerability Technology.

The idea is have to an invisible party member with the bomb away from the fight (don’t engange in the fight until Shadowheart’s turn) , start the fight and then stack all party members near each other, besides the invisible one (let them far away so AoE dmg doesn’t reveal them), when Shadowheart’s turn starts, you use Scroll of Globe Of Invulnerability on the 3 party members with her, Potion of speed + Divine Interverntion: Sunder the Heretical and then drop the Bomb, move the invisible party member inside the globe and then explode the bomb with the invisible party member.

Alternative option: have 3 party members invisible, cast sanctuary on Shadowheart and then start the fight through dialog. Use turn base on your party members that are not fight so invisibility doesn’t expire. Once the fight starts, skip your turn until all the enemies stack near Shadowheart and then do the combo . But first, move Shadowheart to a place with no enemies, so they don’t stay inside the globe once you decide to explode everything (there will be no opportunity attacks as have sanctuary buff).

The explosion has a 18m/59ft radius, you can me measure the distance by hovering your mouse to walk (on combat or while sneaking), this will show the distance between you and the point you’re hovering. You can use that to decide where to position the bomb.

As long as you position the bomb correctly, you will nuke the entire place and kill most of the low hp enemies (if you’re lucky, even Viconia). Viconia starts with Sanctuary, so it’s hard to kill her on the first turn. You can disable your Globe of Invulnerability if you want to afterwards.

Also, I don’t have this 100% confirmed so do it at your own risk, but I read that if you kill Viconia and flee, all the other enemies will not be hostile the next time you come back.

Tip for mirror of loss: respec your class to monk and get religion +5 and int +17 then level up to get int 20 and use with guidance.

Time to beat: 2 turns (duel).

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

You can also use Arrow of Monstrosity Slaying here.

Bring someone who can upcast Magic Missile to at least 4th lvl twice.

Before reaching orin, you can skip the fight before orin by using Invisibility in one of your party members and letting the rest here.

Walk until you reach the next waypoint and then tp the rest of your party there.

You can go this route and talk to her mom using Speak with Dead, you can use the information she gives you to bypass the persuasion check to save your party member.

This will start the duel, if you’re playing Durge, (you can’t duel if you aren’t durge) or the normal fight if you’re playing as normal Tav.

Talking about the duel, I didn’t find anything reliable, but there is a way you can fight Orin in the duel without her transforming, but Idk what’s the trigger for that. In my case, I had to fight her transformed.

Of course, dueling a Boss is not ideal if your build isn’t really, really good, I suggest you do the normal fight instead unless you’re really confident about your character.

If you do not wish to duel, you can stop it at any point by walking with your party inside the ring to start the normal fight (orin will gain 12 Unstoppable stacks)

Sorry normal Tav players, now we will talk about the usual fight. Best to way to proceed is to upcast Magic Missiles, the spells has a 100% hit chance and each missile procs 1 stack of unstoppable, so, if you use two lvl 4 Magic Missiles (use potion of speed or metamagic), you will hit Orin 12 times and consume all her stacks in one turn. Orin has only 238 hp without the stacks, that is low enough you can kill her in one turn.

The other enemies all have sanctuary, but can be still pushed and instakill as they are very near the chasm.

Time to beat: 3 turns, boss dead your 3rd turn.

Reminder to use elixirs and other buffs!! Surprise attack if possible

Almost all Raphael attacks deal fire dmg, use elixir of fire resistance.

Probably the hardest fight in the game.

Once you get the Hammer, get Hope through here, you will start the fight in a better position than going downstairs.

We are going to do the as same as Viconia, using the Runepowder Barrel/Bomb + Divine Intervertion: Sunder the Heretical + Globe of Invulnerability Technology, hope has divine intervention. You can also use the rest of the barrels you collected.

Haarlep will drop Helldusk_Gloves, don’t equip it yet, as Raphael is immune to fire dmg. Furthermore, the the Restorarion pod near Haarlep can be used multiple times.

The idea is have to an invisible party member with the bomb away from the fight (don’t engange in the fight until Hope’s turn) , start the fight and then stack all party members near each other (including hope) besides the invisible one (let them a bit far away so AoE dmg doesn’t reveal them), and wait for Hope’s turn to begin.

Then, do this things order:

• cast globe of invulnerability with Hope
• If you don’t know, yo can do that by pressing tab -> right click the scroll of invulnerability -> cast (Hope);
• move the invisible party member inside the globe;
• explode the bomb;
• potion of speed with Hope(you can do that using tab too);
• cast divine intervention with Hope (for me, this made the globe go alway, idk why);
• If there are any enemies left after that (besides raphael), kill them all, this will make things easier on Raphael’s second phase.

  The fight will not be easy even after that, Raphael has an annoying legendary action Beguiling Rebuke which makes bursting him really dificult. The best way to play around that is by CCing him in some way, as if they are prone or stunned, they can’t use reactions. Try splitting your party, as Raphael has a lot of AoE dmg.

Time to beat: Didn’t fight him.

Gonna post the link to the wiki, because even I didn’t know he existed [baldursgate3.wiki.fextralife.com]

Yep, this guy exist and is an actual boss, you can only fight him if you stole the egg from the Crèche, I have never fighted him and it’s really hard to find anything about this guy, I don’t have too much too add, because Idk how his mechanics works, but I do know you can yeet him and instakill him.

Time to beat: 1 turn (elder brain)

The end fight is no joke – don’t fool around, the dragon fight with the mindflayers is very hard, I tried doing myself and I unironically almost lost my save trying to kill the dragon.

Instead, there is a way to bypass literally every fight besides the Netherbrain. I wasn’t satisfied with the results I found on youtube so I decided to record a video showing how to do it:

Video

If you’re not confident, you can bring Gale with you and nuke the brain, this works to get the achievement.

And that’s all folks! Thank you for reading the whole thing, thank you to Larian, again, for making one of a kind game and congratulations on your new Golden Dice! If you want to, you can share your honor mode win here.