Baldur’s Gate 3: Notes on honour mode

What actually is Honour mode

– Hardest versions of bosses: they are tougher and have special abilities that can be found only in honour mode;
– No reloading. Game will not allow you load your save in any given time except of you continuing your playthrough

What makes you fail Honour mode

– You will fail if all your active party members die.
– If they are dead you can’t reload and continue honour mode, therefore to get the achievement you need to start over. You can continue play as your honourmode character though, in a custom mode. There is no achievement for that but you can continue with the story.

The purpose of that guide

How to get the last achievement – completing the game on honour mode. So this is walkthrough of all the necessary stuff for that, and that is why as for now it doesn’t have all the act 3 side quests – because these are nor needed for the achievement. I included here some notes on bosses I tried on a custom difficulty later (pretty much honour mode but with an ability to reload), so the guide may be updated while I try different things on side bosses. It is however has notes on everything you need to know to complete the game in one-save run.

If you are playing on PC and really want to reload your last save, you can do that if you kill the game process on your computer.
There is detailed Steam guide by アンジェル how to do this.
You need to minimize the window with the game (do not quit the game!!! The save will be overwritten if you do), press Win+R and type the command listed in that guide (different commands depending on you using Vulkan or Direct X). This will force close your game without overwriting your save.

Case example: you are approaching a boss, got the autosave and proceed to fight the boss, but feel like you will lose. If you are still having somebody alive, technically honour mode isn’t over. Minimize the game window, kill the game process, so you can reload from the last autosave before that boss and do things differently.

I don’t know anything about consoles, so not sure what options are there.

Honour mode is not fair to the player, therefore in my opinion it is designed to be exploited.
My main strategy is getting the most and giving the least. Fortunately for us, Baldur’s Gate 3 is full of exploits and opportunities for being creative.

I played this game ridiculous amount of times so I already have an idea where is everything in each act, what quests are there, etc. This guide is not the fullest game solution, it implies that you have played the game too and have an idea about it’s contents.

Act 1 and Act 2 can be done relatively easily in their entirety, as in kill everyone and do all the quests. By doing so you are going to be max level as soon as possible, and being max level drastically improves your quality of life.

Shortest way through Act 3 is to side with Gortash, and we are doing exactly that. Gale can use his orb and the achievement is yours! So our main goal is to bring him to the brain and don’t get overwhelmed while doing so.

So my plan was to make a character that can eliminate a lot of enemies before they will have their turn and do anything. For this run I decided to play as a Open hand monk/rogue multiclass. At this point I tried lots of classes in BG3 and in my opinion that is the best early-mid game choice if you are going to fight everyone and everything.

Open hand monk can attack with bonus action. 3 levels of Rogue subclass give an additional bonus action.

Open hand monk has stunning blow, that can help to control enemies, and that is crucial for the game in general: preventing your enemies from doing something by killing/controlling them is the foundation of fights in this game.

I made my Tav a wood elf, so she has more movement speed and proficiency in stealth, and both of these features will come in handy. Also one of the monk’s abilities is to spend a bonus action on an endless jump – you get infinite amount of free jumps, as long as you have movement speed. So Wood elf open hand monk can reach pretty much any place, any enemy, any part of the arena, this is so broken, I love it so much!

For the act 3 this class will not be the main dd, but in general it still be very useful.

This character will be the mvp for the early-mid game. For the late stages you need someone to deal A LOT of damage, and this monk at that stage is going to be good, but not great, and focused more on control than one-shot kill. So I relied on party members, this is not a solo character notes.

My act 1 party was monk Tav + Astarion (rogue, dual daggers for more attacks), Lae’zel (fighter champion because I like crits) + Shadowheart (cleric). This is pretty standart party that allows to kill most things in act 1 without any problems.

Usual DnD party calls for a wizard of any sort in videogames like that. Baldur’s Gate 3 lets any character read scrolls without fail, so entire Act 1 is very much doable without Gale or other wizard at all.

Lae’zel and monk/rogue are going to do all the damage, Astarion is going to help with his rogue crits/sneak attacks and open/disarm everything, Shadowheart will heal and bless.

I wanted to have Minthara for acts 2-3 and make her a paladin/bard multiclass, so I was not going to kill her in act 1.

I can not recommend enough to get Alert feat on level 4 for EVERYBODY. Let the world wait. You must have the first turn.

Barrels! Try to collect and send to camp as much as you can.
Main barrel sources: goblin camp, zent camp, Lathander temple winery ruins. But Act 1 has a lot of these, so keep the eyes opened.

Permanent See invisibility eye can be got from Volo, so make sure to save him from the goblins and invite to your camp.

Volo also is selling a very good ring for Shadowheart, so she can cast bless on heal. That means she can use 1 bonus action for a mass heal and bless the entire party at the same time!

Armor of cat’s grace is very good for Astarion, get it from Lady Esther.

Since my Tav was a monk, I collected as much strength potions as I could, because having 21 strength changes everything. Overall don’t sleep on potions.

Make a dagger from sussur tree and give it to Astarion as an off hand weapon, so he has 2 chances to hit success on a bonus action and give silence to the enemy. This can be a game changer and helped me so much!

First, level up as quickly as possible. Every level makes insane difference in this game, especially if YOUR level is higher then the enemy’s. Every inspiration point is an additional exp for a character that got it. Read all the books and notes you find, some of these provide exp for reading too. If you are doing every possible thing in act 1 (including the creche area), in the end of it you are going to be level 7, closer to level 8. And level 7, my friends, is no level 5.

Second, some of act 1 bosses are legit scary, especially Grym and the Inquisitor at the creche. Overall giths are very dangerous, and this means we will not fight fair.

Best and cheasiest strategy is using barrels. You probably are familiar with it already. Some people judge the ancient art of barrelmancing and dismiss it as cheating, to which I answer that one who never played Divinity Original 2 as Fane and haven’t used deathfog barrels is missing out. We are going continue Fane’s teaching here. Collect every possible firewine/oil/shadowpowder barrel and send it to camp. Your camp can keep safe infinite amount of barrels in your camp chest. When the time will come, you can grab some and send even the deadliest enemy to the astral plane.

Third, remember that honour mode will be over if every other character in your party will die. So if something bad is ahead, make sure that at least 1 character can hide and escape so you can regroup if something went wrong.

Fourth, attacking enemies from stealth can be used pretty much from the start and helps very much, because that means that first round enemies will be surprised and will not make moves at all! Be sneaky.

Fifth, use surfaces. If an enemy fell down on a greese or ice he will miss the turn. We want that.

It goes without saying that you need to do a long rest before anything major.

I filmed my playthrough so I am going not just explain but also show how I’ve done everything, including the mistakes and how I managed to correct them and do not lose a playthrough.

As I said, in the end of Act 1 it is possible to be level 7, close to level 8. So the main goal is to become as overpowered as possible.

I recommend take every possible companion you can: Lae’zel, Shadowheart and Us. Even on a low level the enemies may overwhelm you, so make sure you have your party ready.

First ever battle in this mode as a monk was smoother than lots of others classes. An attack on a bonus action makes not one, but a series of hits, so the chance to kill an enemy on your turn is much higher. Those imps didn’t even realized what hit them.

Zhalk
I do not recommend trying to kill Zhalk on honour. He is over level 5, he can have several attacks per round and even on tactician he is pain in the ass. His sword is kinda good, but there are better swords in act 1. I left him to the illithid and focused on other enemies and picking up stuff around the arena.
A battle with him has a counter, starting on 15. 5 rounds later Zhalk will get help from his friends.
There is a myth that these additional guys can stuck in the corridor if you barricade the entrance with chests, that can be found during the prologue. I did that but I managed to reach the nerves on 12th round so never got a chance to test it.
Do not sleep on the purple explosive “barrels”! Pick as much as you can because they will be useful later.
As for the battle, monk/fighter/cleric/us can easily kill both packs of imps, just don’t do it near Zhalk because he has opportunity attacks and you don’t want to trigger these by being to close to him. On level 1 a single hit from Zhalk can down any of your companions.

Nautiloid crash side
Even the first fight after the Nautiloid crash can be the end of it, because at best it is going to be you and Shadowheart against several intellect devourers, who can hit pretty hard and also have distance attacks. This is why the best approach is stealth. There is a barrel of illithid explosives, so it is pretty easy to do damage to them even before you’ll start a battle.

There is an event where you can get a gameover, if you are not lucky, so I just skip it by killing an illithid from a far, and I strongly recommend to do the same and don’t gamble here.

Jergal temple
The bandits outside have several spots where it is easy to ambush them. One of them can be instantly killed by shutting down a stone on a rope.

Recruit Astarion and send him to the door to talk his way through. This will make the guard surprised, pretty much free xp. Go through the door inside and lo and behold – once again there is a barrel with the enemies nearby, asking for some fire.
Use the door to you advantage: close it so enemies will waste their turns on dashing to you, hide behind the walls. Overall pretty easy and satisfying fight.

Jergal’s guards usually will attack you when you are opening the Withers’ tomb. Do not trigger this event. Instead, loot all the corpses, position your party strategically, so the enemies will waste their turns on approaching you. Add a barrel, if you want to make this quicker.
After all the preparations, send your most tanky character (Who probably will be Lae’zel) and make her pick up closest corpse. The battle will start immediately but you will not enter it from the narrow dark ladder near the tomb, and can have all the advantages that way.

Spider nest
Spiders themselves are easy, just make sure to grab the spider bomb, so you can use it later to distract your enemies. Astarion with 2 daggers and a monk with additional attacks on a bonus action make this battle pretty quick.

Owlbear
This is the first legendary boss. His special power is that now there going to be 2 adult owlbears instead of one: the first will summon the other during his turn, so the second one will not be available before that.
Take Andrick and Brynna with you, they can be useful (although in my case they weren’t, wasting everything on killing the cub, but that’s my luck I guess).
I thought that I’ll kill the first big owlbear, then run far and the second one will attack Andrick and Brynna, but I retreated not far enough and he jumped right on me. If you are going to try this, you need to hide way further than I did.
Anyway, the second owlbear is not that hard. He will chose one target and be busy with it, so all you need to do is heal his target and hit him with the rest of your party.

After all that, if Andrick and Brynna are alive, kill them too for additional exp. They are easy on any difficulty.

Gnolls
Don’t go there if you aren’t at least lvl 4. Gnolls can shoot you, so if you are to low and have less hp this can be a death sentence.
Skip the cutscene with the hyenas, try to attack them from a far and then hide behind the broken bridge. All the gnoils will follow you, and they will waste their turns on dashing, while you shoot them. If hyenas manage to call for more gnolls it is even better. They tend to stuck on the way if you are too far, so you can kill them in small groups, and even if some have a chance to shoot you, it is not going to be a big deal.

Flind
Don’t go there if you aren’t at least lvl 4. This is the place where something can go really wrong, so I suggest to hide one character so they can be used for reviving everyone else if there is a crisis, or join the battle later, if you feel comfortable to do so.
This is also a place where you really need to focus on enemy till it is dead.
I strongly recommend to use the ogre horn here. The gnolls tend to focus on them, which is very good for you and if the ogres die in that battle, you will get some loot from them anyway. With the ogre shield this battle can be comfortably done on lvl 4 or higher.

I remember that in the early access and first couple of patches for the full version of the game you could initiate a dialog with Flind through the tadpole if you half her hp. The dialog had lots of possibilities: you could make her kill other gnolls, eat herself, go away. I am not sure what changed but I couldn’t trigger this for a long time. I wanted to use that in honour mode, but it never appeared to me. So I had to fight fair and finish her an oldfashion way.

Zentarim and their cargo
Zentarims in the cave are basically free exp on top of their quest. Talk to them, then kill them, take the cargo.

Paladins of Tyr
I delayed this fight before lvl 5, so I could hit twice per turn with Laezel and 4 times with tav the monk. When I got lvl 5 this was a walk in the park. I sneaked to the mage and finished her with Tav before she could do anything. Others entered the battle one by one from the back door and killed the archer. The paladin’s first turn went to just running to me, and I could hit him with everyone on the second round, so he didn’t even do anything.

Grove entrance
Honour mode version of this battle is pretty much the same as on tactician. Focus on an anemy until he is dead, then go to the next, Wyll and tieflings will help and distract the goblins. This way this fight will be pretty easy.

Inside the grove
Make Rolan and his siblings stay at the grove, save Arabella from Kagha, talk to the bear to make way to the elevator and climb the hill from the right side – this way you will be in time to save Nadira from a bugbear, and when you enter the battle, he will be surprised, free exp again. Convince Nadira to give you a soul coin.

Save Sazza from a tiefling, but not open her cage before you cleared the tunnel in the prison. If you first go with Sazza and save Findal from goblins there, he will become sus and you’ll need to do rolls to convince him that Sazza can go with you. Better be done with him before – save him, kill the goblins and turn off the traps, then return for Sazza and escort her outside easily.

Kagha and the shadow druids
Get the most exp here. Save Arabella, steal the letter from Kagha’s chest and read it, find another letter at the swamp and read it – all this will give your party exp.
When you have the swamp letter, return to Kagha and make her side with you against shadow druids.
This way you will fight them with all the allies available, and this is going to be an easy fight, even though the shadow druids are higher level than your party probably will be.

Harpies on the beach
Don’t go there until you are at least lvl 4 and have an alert feat.
The harpies may charm your party, so you can miss your turns. If you are level 4 or higher, you will survive even if they do charm somebody, it will just be an annoying running back and forth.
Focus on one harpy until it is dead, this is a common advice for any battle but here it is really important.

Enter this location disguised as a drow. This makes goblins to let you in without throws and gives you 100 exp for free.

Goblins in the village
Killing this goblins will not make any other goblins hostile! So do it for quicker exping.

Rooftop ambush
Since they will not be hostile, divide your party 2/2 and send these groups on top of both roofs, so each group of the ambush goblins would have someone close to fight them.
When I had the last goblin left, I passed the sleeping bugbear and he joined the fight too, but it was not hard by any means. Easy fight.

Grukkoh and Buthir
Really easy fight if you make them waste their turns on approaching to you.

Leftover goblins
Pretty much free exp. Easily killed one by one or in their small group.

Ettercaps and spiders
You can enter that battle either through the well or through the hole at the blacksmith’s basement. All you need to do is to touch the webs.
The spiders are annoying because they teleport. You will be probably level 3 when you encounter them, so no alert feat, and that also can complicate things.
However I was hoping for a relatively easy exping there but stumbled upon an issue that almost wiped out my party. I am not sure if this is a bug, but it might be.
These spiders and ettercaps are by no means bosses, however in honour mode they now have improved webs that not only zero your movement but also do damage. I think I read something about similar webs related to the spider matriarch boss, however this ordinary fight also had it. We were on the edge, but we survived!

Ogres
I strongly recommend to get the Lump’s horn and use ogres for difficult battles. They are still buggy af (I started my playthrough at patch 6) but if the horn works, it makes all the difference

Apothecary
Illyn Toth placed some undead in front of his secret room in the basement. These will summon each other by opening coffins. If you kill the last undead before all the coffins were opened and exit the battle mode, you can not re-summon the rest of the undead by opening coffins yourself. So to get the most exp here you need to do your turns smartly and make sure that all the coffins would be opened during the battle.

Barcus Wroot
This place has so many enemies (therefore so much potential exp) BUT they can not just wipe ypur party if you are not lucky, but also flee the battle, taking exp with them forever.
That’s why I always approach them from the side and trying to kill everyone else before their leader, also the fence helps to hide from their attacks as well.
This is the place where ogre horn can be very useful. Even if they will bug all the way, they are going to be your live shield.
I was very lucky and got maximum from this encounter, the leader was the last one, so I didn’t missed anything. Also let’s enjoy ogre bugs together, that one guy just run away lol.
I can’t recommend more the ambush place shown on video, I think this is the best spot for this fight.

Spider Mathriarch
Spider matriarch’s legendary action lets her entomb a creature attacking her spiderlings once per round. So I figured, if there is no little spiders, she can’t do that.
I’ve already done the pest control achievement and here my goal wasn’t kill the spider eggs before the fight starts. Instead I entered the battle one by one, killed lesser spider asap with my Tav, and while she was in the battle, the rest of the party did their best to kill all the eggs before entering too. So when it was finally Matriarch’s turn, she had only one little spider from half burned egg, and he was gone quickly too.
This boss is very monk-friendly, I had so much successful prone hits on her.
This fight proved to be way easier than I thought. By going one by one and doing the most out of the fight I feel like I skipped most hardships here.
But I would not recommend to come here before lvl 5, so you can attack twice per turn with your fighter classes. Also don’t forget to drink poison resist potion with everyone!

Ancient mud mephits
Mephits explode when killed, so don’t be near them when they are getting the last blow.
Wood woads don’t know how to jump!!! So lure them to you and jump away on another island, they will stuck and you can kill them without any contact at all.
By jumping away I made mephits to use their turns for chasing me instead of summoning endless reinforcements, and the woads were useless at all, so overall this was actually one of the easiest fights!
Don’t forget to loot Kagha’s letter in this location! Read it for additional exp, then proceed with that quest.

Red caps
We all know at this point that sheep are the red caps. Each sheep has it’s own traectory which can be easily tracked and enhanced with barrels. If you kill the one on the hill it’s 1 less with the controlling spells, which makes the fight way more comfortable for you. Even if some partymember gets under the spell of the surviving caster red cap, you still have 3 others to save them.

THE FROG
You probably already know that the frog can kick your ass, and it is way better to complete her quest rather than to kill her. However I wanted to risk a bit and to try her at honour mode.
So this is probably the best way to kill the frog: start the fight by attacking as someone who can deal the most damage, then finish her with something solid, like Astarion’s bite which is 100% hit chance.
The first attacker will get the Madness debuff for 2 turns. It makes the target to be hostile to everyone they see around, including the rest of the party obviously. So make sure to run away from your mad Tav for a bit)
Was it worth it? Not really. But now you know.

Hag
Hag has 2 cheezy strats to deal with her easily and I recommend to try both.
First, you can try to kill her before she runs away downstairs. You need a lot of initiative and hast to do that. However the honour mode does not allow to save scam (or load any saves at all lol) so if your characters failed to hit the hag a couple of times and she survived to her second turn, she will run away, and you are left with the second strat.
Second strat is to trigger her cutscene, she will stop hitting you and offer her hair even if she is absolutely winning the fight. Her legendary move creates insane amount of her copies and they can easily wipe you down if you fight fairly. So make sure to deal all your damage to the right hag so she is damaged enough to give up. To recognize which hag is real pay attention – the real one will have a faded icon because she finished her turn.

Masks
If you had to kill the hag downstairs, kill the masks too. They are very easy to sneak on, you can ambush them so they wouldn’t even have a chance to do something.

Also kill other hag’s prisoners, they give additional exp.

Goblin patrol before the camp
This is very convenient place for killing everyone with the great satisfaction. Talk to the goblins, chose something peaceful, so they don’t touch you. Or if you have Sazza freed she will help you pass them. Then bring some barrels with the firewine and oil, place these where the most goblins are (and make sure to place one near the war drum too). Go to the sniper’s nest and enter the fight by kicking the sniper goblin down. After that lit the fire and explode the barrels – most of the enemies will die immediately. All you have to do after that is to finish the leftover goblins and enjoy loot/exp. Killing the patrol doesn’t affect the main camp, they will be still friendly.

Goblins outside the camp
You absolutely should kill everyone, but you probably don’t want to fight all the camp at once.
If you have Wyll, Astarion or any other character who has big charisma/deception, you absolutely should start by poisoning goblin’s beer and then talk your way out of it. This insta kills some goblins, other will have lalf hp + you can get an inspiration point for this.

Second, you can divide that fight and kill separately all the goblins on the first and on the second level of the temple’s yard. If you fight everyone, it may go south despite the goblins on their own are not that bad. Your main concern here are the ogre on the first level and Booyag Piddle on the second level. Booyag can be especially bad since he has a perfect sniper nest and if you fight the camp going from the gates, he can make things very difficult.

So what I recommend here is to start from the top. Goblins on the lower level will not see you fighting the top level, this calls for almost no any special effort of being sneaky.
Start from the top, your first target should be a drunk group. You can explode them quickly with the barrel, or steal it for later – these guys are not really tough anyway. If you don’t go forward and make everyone come to you, you will not aggro a lot of goblins and most importantly you will not aggro Piddle. So you can kill all surrounding him goblins and then just sneak on him one by one, so he never gets his turn.
I was a bit careless and looted afterwards without sneaking and that aggred a bunch of goblins from the right part of the lower level. There guys will gladly come upstairs for you, so if you found yourself in the similar situation – let them come. Do not go down to them, you can finish all of them upstairs without the rest of the camp joining the fight. If the scout summon a warg, kill the scout, so warg will despawn peacefully.
This fight is where monk’s ability to jump infinitely was really useful – I could send my Tav to deal with any needed enemy, where everyone missed, the monk will succeed!

When you are done with the upper level, you can clear the rest. Since you’ve already halved the goblin population, you have very many options how to approach that fight. I went through the main gate and hid behind the barricades. While the ogre was wasting his turn to approach me, I could kill all the goblins around him, so when he finally came I could focus solely on the ogre and shoot him to death. Shadowheart’s summoned weapon tanked an ogre and all the goblin archers.
The bugbear is bugged, for some reason he wasn’t joining the fight until I was at his sight.
Check the outskirts to find all leftover goblins.

Gut
Gut was surprisingly complicated. I planned to do her scripted event and kill her in peace while nobody is watching. But her sleep potion doesn’t work on both elves AND half-elves, and since I talked to her as Shadowheart, Gut failed to drug her and not just started the fight but also called for reinforcements.
I was still level 3 at that point, and ogre horn didn’t worked because it is so buggy, so I didn’t really wanted to fight all the camp.
I killed Gut and some goblin that was the closest. After that I moved the party from the main floor downstairs, to Gut’s room. When the last partymember left, the fight ended, but the goblins, which Gut called to join, stayed hostile forever. I later killed them one by one. The goblins that never joined were neutral.
Zent traders returned to neutral as well.
The whole thing feels really buggy and may change after the upcoming patches.
Anyway if you found yourself in a similar situation, use that strategy to leave the battle quickly. As soon as all your party moved to another location, you can teleport away/rest/regroup, and the monsters usually never chase you downstairs, at least if your last party member went down before any enemy, the battle will immediately stop.

Goblins inside the camp
Since I’ve got some permanently aggressive goblins, I tried to clear them in small portions. This strategy is generally good here if you are not in a mood for fighting the whole camp.
Main problem is that you can attract some more goblins than you wanted. If things start get sour, this is an excellent place to use the ogre horn.
Some notes: If any goblin reaches the war drum, goblins who heard it will turn perma aggressive. Zent traders will either join the battle (if they are in your sight) or disappear.
The priest of Loviatar will try to leave the temple as soon as you finish the battle, where the war dram was used, so you can quickly finish him too for some additional exp. If you want his bless, make sure to get it first (even before Gut).
The drum will affect even the goblins that were behind the closed doors (so it’s a good practice to close the doors, they will wait till you are done fighting somewhere else).

Polma
Downstairs in Gut’s room there is Polma, her personal guard. She can be killed pretty easy, there is a good spot for ambushing her. Easy exp.

Minthara
I really wanted to recruit Minthara later, so my main goal was to knock her down. The main problem with that is that the last blow should not be lethal. Even when you enable knocking down in your passives you still can accidentally kill your target by having an additional damage or multi attacks in one blow.
At the same time Minthara is a tough enemy, that is why I want her at my side at the end of a day. So I really wanted to deal with her without anyone else interfering.
The Selune temple has plenty of convenient places for the ambush. I lured Minthara to the upper level by shooting into the magic eye. Minthara saw that, ran to me, while all her goblins staid where they were.
My monk did the majority of the job while Leazel waited for the opportunity to deal the last knock out blow.
I did that before going for Halsin, so when he is going to be freed, we only need to kill Dror Ragzlin.

Halsin
I think the best moment for saving Halsing on honour mode or any other difficulty is when the only goblin leader left is Dror Ragzlin.
Kill the goblins near the prison entrance, they should not be a problem.
Inside the prison there is a warden goblin who is very convenient for the battle starting since she is separated from the rest of the enemies. By hitting her you will aggro everyone but they will be very far from you. Some will run to you, wasting their turns to moving. Some will attack Halsin, so keep an eye on him. If you kill goblins quickly, they will not release the wargs, so wargs would stuck at their cage. Some goblins will try to run away so make sure to kill them too for additional exp.
When Halsin is free, ask him to help you with the last goblin leader.

Dror Ragzlin
Dror Ragzlin is a legendary boss. His special legendary action is Devoted Galvanism – he can immediately galvanize his minions within 5 m radius per turn when the enemy targets one of his minions. That means that he can be the least effective if you kill his minions from a far, and when you face him, he would not have anyone near him to galvanize.
Dror Ragzlin has lots of goblins wandering all around him. I lured out and killed sneaky as many as I could.
Then I divided my party and each member was entering the battle one by one from the different places. You can get to the upper level and shoot down the fire lamps to enemies’ heads.
What is very convenient is that most of the enemies are going to be down, so you can hit and hide, they would try to get to your longer.
First I was focused on eliminating those who managed to came upstairs.
Dror Ragzlin tends to bug here. Apparently he doesn’t know how to use ladder, so he can skip his turns and just wander downstairs! While he is down there you can move him with void bulbs and place him to the most convenient place for shooting into.
I wanted to hid Lae’zel in the cloud of darkness, but failed and she got downed, so don’t do that)
I sent Halsin to Dror’s room from the other side, so next Dror’s turn he spent on running back from Lae’zel to Halsin. Then I could send Astarion, who still never entered the battle, to backstab the enemy who was in Dror’s radius.
Dror is barbarian, he can rage and attack twice. Halsin with full hp can tank him for one turn, but make sure to heal him!
The monk have a really good chance of stunning Dror, and control here is everything. While you can clear the rest of the goblins with half of your party, the other half (Monk the stunner + Halsin + Astarion in my case) can concentrate on Dror while he is doing absolutely nothing.

Spiders
The only enemy I totally forgot of is that couple of spiders near Dror Ragzlin. So I never fought them on honour mode. But if you are not familiar, you can actually make them to fight for you (and then kill them for more exp lol).

Honour mode is the only playthrough where I realised that this place has a hidden timer. I discovered the burning tavern but took a long rest or two before going inside. And when I eventually did, all people trapped inside were already dead, including Florrick! So if you want her as an ally later, make sure to rescue her at once, otherwise she will be lost forever.

Flaming fists
Even if Florrick is dead, her flaming fists will be wandering at their usual place, kill them for additional exp. They are not that tough.

Zaris
I always talk my way to zentarim’s hideout so I can explore, trade and free Oscar for his buggy portrait. I think it’s the best option for the honour mode too: convince Zaris to let you come, promise her the chest, maybe even give it to her to complete that quest, STEAL ALL THE SHADOWPOWDER BARRELS, and then and only then go for the kill. If you leave even 1 barrel, chances are they will explode it and pretty much waste for nothing, because you are obviously going to attack from the highground, and nobody will be down there near the barrels waiting for the explosion.
This is my fight with Zaris, went smooth as silk. Put everyone to the highground with her, start fight by attacking her, so she is dead quickly. The rest could be attacked from a far, and when you are done hitting them, move from the edge so they can’t reach you back easily. When I was playing, one of them threw a fire bomb, so I put water under everyone’s feet so they would get rid of the burning debuff. If someone comes up by the ladder, you can use all you actions for the attack and then push them down with the bonus action. Very easy and very satisfying fight.

The rest of Zentarim guards
After dealing with Zaris and her gurds you will still have some more Zentarims lurking deeper in the cave. These guys are tend to bug. Sometimes they are hostile even before you killed Zaris. Sometimes they are friendly after her death. I am not sure which is the normal for them, but during my honour mode run I got the friendly option, which actually allows to arrange that fight so you don’t receive any damage!
First, shoot all the mines. You need to be sneaky, because the guards will run and check what is going on, but it is quite easy to hide from them. Steal all the barrels on your path, destroy all the explosives. Last, destroy the bridge so they can’t easily reach you and just shoot everyone. Also if you summon something the enemies will most certainly distract on the summon and never ever go to you.

Githyanki patrol
This is the place where you almost certainly can fail something and get a fight with the patrol. They always have higher level than you, and fighting them fairly could be tough AF.
If you trigger the cutscene, Lae’zel will run to them. Don’t leave her on her own, apparently if you do a long rest while she is there, she will be perma dead.
Instead, pick one character and go there, the rest must hide.
I picked my Tav and joined Lae’zel, letting her handle Voss as she pleased, but he decided to kill us anyway. When the fight started, I used invisibility potions and simply left (Tav was my sacrificial lamb/distraction).
The giths will stay at that place even if you do the long rest, and they will be always aggressive. Also, they have a perfect position for one of the most epic barrel use known to the human kind.
I returned later with LOTS of barrels and the explosion was just beautiful. This is where you can get a wonderful sword for Lae’zel.
This also the place where the game bugged and didn’t gave me exp for some of the killed enemies. At least the log looked sus. But some exp and great loot were totally worth it!

Anyway, this tip can be used for any similar situation – invisibility is great for escaping the battle you don’t want to do.

When all the enemies and all the quests are done on surface in act 1, here is some additional stuff you can do.

Steal the idol of Silvanus.
If the idol is at your inventory, you will get the blessing of Silvanus, and other companions will get it too if they are close enough. The blessing gives a proficiency in Nature and Animal Handling.
Halsin absolutely does not care if you do this. You can bring the idol to the camp and toss it to Scratch – Halsin doesn’t give a flying fuсk.
The rules of stealing are the same on any difficulty: be invisible, grab the thing and teleport away asap.

Kill all the druids in the grove.
At this point you will be more than capable to deal with all the druids. None of them has legendary moves, but all of them will reward you with additional exp. And this again does not affect Halsin at all, he doesn’t care if you slaughtered the grove and still will stay at your camp and help in act 2. Kagha alone is very good exp-wise, and after completing all the quests she will be placed perfectly for an easy kill.

Mycanid village
If you are minmaxing, it is better to save the mycanid village till the very end of everything act 1, so you had a trader there and could bring Nere’s head to Spaw.
However keep in mind that there are bunch of NPCs there you might want to keep for act 3, and if you attack the village, they all will become hostile.

Two minotaurs
If you enter Underdark from Zentarim’s hideout, you can access the best place for that fight, where you can just shoot both of minotaurs while they are distracted by a summon, or trip on surfaces you create. Very easy and quite a bit of exp.

Spectator
I was very lucky to complete my honour run before patch 7 so I killed him before he could do any turns at all because he wasn’t a legendary boss yet.
Since patch 7 this is probably the worst boss of act 1. Don’t come blindly!!!! Watch my video for details! In a nutshell, he is a very early boss (I usually get to him at lvl 4) that now can wipe your party easily. You no longer can simply approach him as a melee character, because of his aura, so make sure to have any sort of invisibility. And if you hit him 5 times and he didn’t died he will shoot from all his eyes all at once, putting damage, paralise, confusion and fear on 4 random targets (which usually means all your party) in one turn!! Thank you Swen for this wonderful gift. I experimented a lot with the legendary ruleset and came up with a solid strategy for him. Must haves: any invis, drow poison, potions for spell slots if you came really low level, a dd that can make A LOT of damage on one hit, like a paladin, or a wizard. This boss is doable on level 4 as seen in the video, but if this is your no loads playthrough come later to be safe. Hide one of your characters for troubleshooting, make everyone else invisible, summon him by shooting any stone drow and try to do as much damage as possible, and if you were lucky, the drow poison will put him to sleep so he will miss his turns.

Bulette
I killed him before the game was patched and bulette got his legendary action. It was a very easy fight, because bulette can be stunned. So I stunned him and he never got a chance to act.
After the patch 7 though he got 100 extra hp and while he has it, you can not damage him, and to remove additional hp you need to hit him on 15 or higher. He however reduces incoming damage so this can be very tricky. I experimented a bit and found the easiest way how to remove all his protection in one shot, but you need to be level 6 for it

Sovereign Glut
Sovereign Glut has a lot of use before you need to kill him. Take him with you and make him to create zombie out of a minotaur or a bulette. The Glut zombies were very bugged when I was playing, but even in their worst (not joining the fight, no access to control them) they are excellent meat shields because the enemy will waste their turns on them. Take Glut and a zombie with you everywhere before you go for the duergars for additional help.

Kuo toa
You can get the most exp if you kill everyone, so make sure to aggro all the kuo toa and a red cap. Or kill the red cap and then kill kuo toa. Even if they are all attacking you at once they are not really tough, all you need to do is just have your turns before them. Seriously, I can not recommend the Alert feat more.

Hook horrors
These guys are pretty much free exp, because if you focus on one, he will be gone very quickly.
When you reach the tree top make sure to kill the drow first though, he is a wizard and can be annoying. Luckily for us, he has pretty low hp so you can get rid of him by switching all the focus on him.

Bernard
Read all the books in the tower, so you can get a ring from Bernard. Read a page on the table near him for another command to get some more loot. It may be buggy, each patch I’ve gotten different stuff or nothing at all.
Separate the party and make them be spread the way Bernard’s aura will not cover everyone at once. I put weaker companions far from Bernard and surrounded him with Lae’zel, Tav the monk, Glut and his minotaur zombie. Enter the battle by punching Bernard as a zombie and there is a chance you’ll hurt him quite a bit before the battle starts. This way at the start of the battle you will get him with lower hp and at the same time full actions for all your proper companions! Bernard can be stunned, so do that if you can. In my case he never ever got the chance to do anything – all my strong companions were focused on him while the rest distracted his minions. With Glut’s help this fight was way easier than I thought.

Duergars
Having Glut and his summon really helps the odds to be in your favour. Keep in mind that one of the duergars has contraspell, so your first attempt to cast magic will probably fail. Duergar necromancer will summon his zombies but they worth nothing against your zombie minotaur. If the game says you that he can’t fit through doors, use jump or rush to an enemy.
If someone became invisible, use aoe skills to reveal them and to deal some damage at the same time.
When the battle is close to an end make sure that Glut and his summon take the most damage, so they can be easily put down later. I jumped down to do so, and when the time came, it was a quick goodbye.

Duergars on the raft
Ironically honour mode fight was the easiest for me, because I’ve tried different strategies on tactitian and made all the mistakes there.
What you need to know is that all the durgars are looking for any opportunity to push your party members into the river, so you need to stay away from the edges.
While playing this walkthrough I had an idea that if I stay on my raft and fill the enemy raft with darkness spells/arrows, the duergars will waste their bonus actions on jumping to mine raft instead of pushing me, and possibly even skip their turns. And that worked very well there. Filled their raft with darkness, focused on one enemy at a time, killed everyone, got all the loot exp and zero pushes to the river!

If you cleared everyone and everything on the surface of act 1 and pre-grymforge Underdark, you are going to be near lvl 6. You will unlock it on the start of Grymforge.
When you find Philomeen, take all the runepowder from her.

Ochre jellies
These guys are pretty easy on any difficulty. I think the only obsticle with them is to find where they are, since they are in an ambush.
This is where they are.

Duergars
To get the most here you need to kill all the duergars. If you side with them, they will leave. If you betray them, you are going to fight them all together and some can disappear (at least that what happened when I tried it – I sided with duergars, killed Nere, betrayed them and killed all the duergars at Nere’s room, but when I went to look for the leftover duergars in different rooms, they were gone.)
After a while I concluded that the most lucrative way is just go for them batch by batch. Good news is that if they physically never saw you fighting one of them, they will not turn hostile. So you can just move from one small group to another.
Also there are some creative ways to kill them or to mess with them: some can be poisoned, you can make spiders betray their duergar master in a name of faith and get an inspo point for that.
Same thing with the duergar/rothe group – kill everyone, nobody else will notice. Rothe too, they are 80 exp total after all. All you need to know about this fight is that both duergars and rothe can push you into the chasm, so make sure not to end your turn close to the edge. And the rocks can be blown with shadowpowder.

Nere’s guards
If you start clearing up duergars from the harbor and move up, you will end up with the last bunch of enemies around Nere’s place. Now behind you is an empty space that can be used for your advantage. Make them run and trip on surfaces, shoot them, lure them to you, and even a quite big group of enemies will not be a problem. The magic eye will desperately call for the reinforcements, but there is nobody left already, so you can ignore it, and when the time comes pucs it into the chasm, hit with thunder damage or just punch until you roll a crit (I feel like simple physical roll should be higher than 10 or even more). If a duergar turnes invisible, you can reveal him throwing a bottle of any surface creating stuff, even a simple water.
I lured everyone to the main hall and killed methodically, that included the trader. The trader can make you drop a weapon so keep that in mind! I also recommend finish all his rothes for additional exp.
That leaves you with all duergar dead, 2 traders still alive at mycanoid village, Nere alone waiting to be handed his own butt and lots of exp and loot.

Nere
Nere is supposed to be a legendary boss. But since you already killed all his entourage, alone he never gets a chance to do anything. He can be stunned, so he never gets his turn. Probably one of the easiest bosses, just make sure he is alone and control him.

Animated automatons
The main difference here is that they have very high chance to evade the distance attacks. Melee also could be better, but the distance ones can be like 2% to hit, keep that in mind. This is where Shadowheart’s heal+bless combo comes in handy since bless make all the chances to hit higher. The monk has 90% chance to hit an automaton under the bless. Other than that these guys are pretty easy.

Fire mephits
These guys will explode when killed. So don’t fight them if your party is not full hp – even if they seam easy they can bring some unpleasanty. Drink fire resistance potions and try to stay away from those who are about to die.

Fire elemental
Fire elemental regenerates insane amount of health if he is on the burning/lava surface. So what you want to do here is to make sure he leaves lava and comes to the small island where you later will find a cursed amulet. I also cover all this island with water. When he is out of lava, punch him with everything you’ve got, especially any ice attack or spell – he is weak to those.

Grym the adamntine golem
This boss is ridiculously tough, so I suggest to cheese him. Go to Withers and ask for a druid ally. Make that druid a mood druid, who can shapeshift into the owlbear. Prepare an enlarge spell. Go down with one character, summon Grym. The rest of the party should be upstairs, approximately near -605; 242. Your one character who called for Grym should move to that same coordinates at the boss arena. I used Lae’zel with her gith jumps, lured Grym to the spot and made sure he will waste all his turn on approaching me. Next turn lava goes away, I moved her to the final position, let Grym to hit her once so he moved to that place too and then switched to the druid, shapeshifted into the owlbear, used enlarge spell on him and then jumped down on Grym using owlbear’s special jump attack (crushing flight). That was an one hit kill.
Usually when you fight Grym some fire mephits join the fight at some point, but that never happened to me here. Not sure if that is a bug, or intended.

Mimic
Mimics in Grymforge will surprise you if you fail the perception roll and get the scripted scene of mimics appearing. You can avoid that by shooting at the chests before they reveal that they are mimics.
Mimics can steal your weapon, and if you later push them down to the chasm you will lose your weapon, keep that in mind. This fight is one of those where monk not having a weapon at all cancels that all at once.

Do not miss the Stained glass puzzle!!!
Solving this puzzle will give you a token for Lathander’s blood – if you insert the token, you can take it freely, without activating the cannon. And also once you’ve solved the puzzle, you will get a bless buff LASTING TILL LONG REST, so plan this strategically: before doing the puzzle go to rest, start the new day with solving the puzzle and get free bless on all your party for the rest of the day. That comes in handy for visiting the creche. Stained glass puzzle solution is here. One of the weapons needed for the puzzle is guarded by

Guardian of faith
This enemy will receive damage each time he attacks you, so no matter what you do, he will damage himself to death. Don’t approach him with wounded companions and you will be good.

Gremishka
If you have an eye from Volo, you may discover invisible gremishkas at the temple. Gremishkas can explode if you use any magic around them. And there are quite a lot of them at the ruins.
In my opinion best place to approach them is through the barricade near the waypoint. This way they will be too far from the entry point and need to waste their turns on moving, so they can’t attack you all at once.

Kobolds
This is where I screwed up a bit. I wanted to steal as many firewine barrels as I could, but since I’ve bought the gloves from Lady Esther, my Tav was dealing an additional fire damage and even when she punched a kobold, one spark was enough to lit up everything. Rip the barrels. Do not recommend wear these gloves here lol.
Other than that these guys are easy. The hardest part is to preserve the barrels.

Giant eagles
The eagles can push you down and the fall damage from their nest can be severe. So make sure to focus on controlling them – they can be stunned with a good chance.

Go here only when you are fully done with Act 1 quests. If you just enter that location, many unfinished quests will end. For example, if you didn’t saved Halsin and enter the mountain pass he will die.

Lady Esther
This NPC has very good stuff in her store.
The Graceful Cloth – a must for any dex-based class. Astarion can lockpick and disarm anything while wearing this
Periapt of Wound Closure – this amulet can save your honour mode playthrough. What it does is automatically stabilizes a downed user at the start of their turn and maximizes the amount of hit points restored when healing. Make sure to wear this if you think the enemy can overdamage you.
Gloves of Cinder and Sizzle – adds fire damage for unarmed attacks, I bought it for the monk, but that was maybe not the best choice, but more on that later.

Death shepherds
The most difficult thing here that can come as an unpleasant surprise is that there are 2 death shepherds and they can resurrect each other. So they should be your main focus, kill them both before they have time to help each other.
This place is where Blood of Lathander can help very much. If all the undead are gathering together, they are pretty much asking for the Sunbeam thrown in there.
Be careful though, the side path has hidden mines! So better approach the enemy by the main road

This location has one of the worst bosses – this is where I almost lost the playthrough.
But also this is where you can get lots of exp, lots of loot and kill everyone in small bunches, very similar to the goblin camp in act 1, but here they don’t have war drums, so it is way easier to divide the enemies, they will not alarm others if you just close the door. Some are wondering alone – easy targets.

This place has a lot of places that grant you exp for just visiting them. Most you will find anyway, but one can be missed, so make sure to go to that one location behind the gith trader!

The gith trader
The gith trader has very good stuff, some items that are worth attention:
Gloves of Dexterity – give a character 18 Dexterity and increase their Attack rolls by 1. Good for any character to be honest.
Knife of the Undermountain King – +2 shortsword that increases the frequency of scoring Critical Hits and grants Advantage against enemies in the shadows. Astarion can use this as a dual weapon.
Vital Conduit Boots – grants the wearer temporary Hit Points when they cast a Spell that requires Concentration.

The trader will be friendly to you while she doesn’t see you killing everyone else in other rooms and this will last until you visit the astral prism.
So I recommend to save her to the very end, kill everyone, sell her all the loot, get all her good stuff and kill her only before you leave the creche. Usually she drops some of her stock, I think I got the Knife of the Undermountain King after killing her both on tactician and honour.
The best spot for an attack is approaching from the hall, not going directly through the door.

The gith youth room
Get the gremiska from the kids for additional exp. I used a spell while rolling so I didn’t even needed to attack them, just to wait till the spell ends and they will attack me. The youth in the main room are easy, the giths from the dormitory can be unpleasant so make sure to kill them before they can do a lot of harm. They will try to cast hold person on you, so make them your priority.

The hatchery
Focus on Varsh Ko’kuu. He can disrupt magic and overall more dangerous. His guards are not that strong, usually they try to shoot you from a distance and don’t use any magic.
This is the place where monk’s endless jumps will be very useful, so you can approach even a far standing enemy.

Sa’varsh Kethk
Sa’varsh Kethk and all his trainees have a perfect position for barrelmancing. First, close the door! Then place one of your companion near the wizard, chose someone who can kill him on their own. Fill the place with barrels, explode, kill those who are still alive. Gith kids can’t be killed and also can really harm you, so ignore them.

Kith’rak Therezzyn
Shadowheart may be afraid of wolves, but she still can hit them. Place someone near each githyanki, talk to Kith’rak Therezzyn and refuse to give her a prism, or just punch her, it is well worth it to kill everyone in this room. Kith’rak is quite strong, so don’t approach her with weaker characters.
When you are done with the fight, loot everyone, one of the giths has the item that you need to open the door and go further.

Ch’r’ai W’wargaz, Inquisitor of Vlaakith
This is the worse boss I’ve seen here. Not only he himself is very mean with his broken legendary action (summoning up to 2 flying swords per round as a response on any attack on himself or his allies), but also if you don’t do everything in a certain order, Lae’zel will turn on you!!!!
First, I will tell and show you WHAT NOT TO DO. If you are going to kill him before going to astral prism, do not ever ever ever talk to him. If you do, Lae’zel will be determined to go to the prism no matter what, and then report back to W’wargaz so if you attack him before going, she will turn on you. Losing her here forever on top of the legendary boss and his multiple guards is pretty much a death sentence.
You don’t want to leave him alive and go to the prism though, because when you return he will be hostile anyway, but your position will be way worse, you will be pretty much surrounded by the enemies. Lae’zel will be on your side, but the fight is going to be a hard one anyway. If you placed barrels around the inquisitor and went to the prism, you returning point is going to be at the middle of planned explosion, and you will need to figure out how to teleport everyone, etc.
So the right approach is to attack him before the prism and never talk to him. You can position all the party near the gates – way more convenient!
Don’t be tight on barrels – it is better to oneshot W’wargaz rather than let him run around summoning additional enemies left and right. Those of his guards that will not die in an explosion are pretty easy on their own. If the inquisitor survived, try to kill him asap, but better try to overdamage him in one hit.

EXPLODING GALE’S ORB IN ACT 2 DOESN’T COUNT AS COMPLETING HONOUR MODE!!!!!!!

so don’t do it, or you will waste your playthrough and will not get the achievement and the golden dice.

This is where you can finally recruit Minthara and make her one of the best multiclasses that this game has to offer – paladin+sword bard. She already is a paladin, so 2 levels of that, + 5 levels of Sword bard. Minthara kinda made for that, she already has a lot of charisma. And I can’t recommend this multiclass more! On level 7 this is immediately a hell on wheels.

Paladin’s smites are very much needed in Act 2, because most of the enemies are some sort of undead. But as a bard multiclass you will get higher spellslots that all can be spent on smites! Minthara is going to be the dd in my playthrough till the end.

Shadowheart can do her Shar things, Astarion can continue with his shenanigans and 2 multiclasses will cut through everyone and everything.

Clean classes will get their feats at level 8, and I recommend to use sharpshooter for both. There are many occasions where everyone attacks enemies from a distance, and sharpshooter is BROKEN in your favour.

Act 2 is pretty much a continuation of what we started in Act 1. Since you reached it almost at level 8, it is going to be kinda easier to play, now you will have so much to offer for a fight, and we are going to fight everything we can. Act 2 has a lot of enemies, and if you grind everyone, you are going to be almost done with leveling in the end of this act.

At this point of the game you will be getting tadpoles regularly, and have enough to unlock these for your whole party. Here are those powers that I used in my honour mode playthrough and found the most useful

Favourable Beginnings – The first Attack roll or Ability check you make against any target gains a bonus equal to your Proficiency Bonus.
Luck of the Far Realms – When you make a successful Attack roll against a foe, you can change that attack into a Critical Hit. Recharge: Long rest.

These two work beautifully on any class or companion. You can save up the 100% crit of Luck of far realms by not choosing it to play out until you hit the target you wanted. Having a guaranteed crit is very good because there are some items that can do things on crit, so you can plan a synergy attack on a tougher enemy.

Cull the Weak – When you bring a creature down to fewer hit points than your number of evolved illithid powers, it dies and all nearby creatures take 1~4 Psychic damage.

This is also a must for every possible companion you have, so any character who dealt enough damage on an enemy would insta kill that enemy.

Concentrated Blast – Deal 3d6 Psychic damage. You must be Concentrating on another spell to cast this. If the target was concentrating, you heal as much as the damage that was dealt to it. The spell you were concentrating on will end.

This is very convenient, if you don’t want to use the spell you are concentrating on, you can use that additional type of attack. Or, cast something with the concentration on yourself before the battle and then use this attack. It is a 3 dice attack after all, don’t sleep on it.

Kar’niss
I think the best way to deal with him is to kill him during the escort to the moonrise towers. You don’t want him to join Kethrick on top of the towers later, especially since on honour mode Kar’niss has a legendary action. He buffs his allies with Spindleweb Fanatic buff, and if you kill someone who has it, he can use a Legendary Action to possibly deal 6d10 Damage and Silence the attacker. He also gave a debuff to several companions of mine. Imagine all that during the Kethrick encounter. So this is why Kar’niss should go asap.
Even though the harpers are supposed to help in this battle, they are useless. We just must accept it, no matter the difficulty NPC alles are dumb and the best they can do is not interfere and not get themselves killed.
I honestly got lucky in this battle, because I successfully landed the silence on the orc mage – Astarion’s sussur off-hand dagger proved itself once again.
I liked the silencing, so I continued on this path and made Shadowheart cast the silence sphere on top of all the enemies, including Kar’niss. The silence always makes the enemies to move, and therefore to provoke the opportunity attacks.
Kar’niss can be stunned with the monk’s attacks, but I had to try several times before I rolled success. As soon as he is stunned, everything changes in your favour! Everyone could just focus on him, and harpers even helped a bit and killed the last goblin.

Saving Minthara
Since I wanted Minthara asap, I went for her even before going to the Last light inn.
Fighting-wise you will need to have at least one battle – with her guards. All the others can be convinced to let you go. If you feel like you can fail the dialogue checks, you can just cast invisibility on Minthara and move her away from the moonrise towers in the turn-based mode.
Minthara will join your camp as soon as she reaches the Moonrise towers waypoint. Keep in mind though, that even if you talked your way out and successfully lied to the guards that Minthara is now serving you, if you return later with her, everyone will be hostile. It is convenient for me, but may not be for some, so be aware of that and do all you need in the tower before saving her, for example get the potion from Oblodra.

Meazels
These guys hit your companion and then teleport with them randomly, which isn’t lethal per se, but it is annoying. So the best you can do here and turn the table and ambush them. If you successfully discovered their ambush, you can approach them invisible and hit them – they will become surprised, which means they will miss their first turn. Being not that tough, they can be wounded pretty badly first round, so when they finally will have their turn, if alive, they are going to be way easier to kill, and, what most importantly, way quicker.

Shadow mastiffs
Don’t miss that fight! They are very easy, give you a decent amount of exp, the only thing is they are kinda hidden a little bit. Destroy the torches to start that fight. If someone becomes invisible, use throwables that can create a surface, even water will do. If you hit an invisible enemy with these, they will reveal themselves.

Helping Rolan
If Rolan is alive at this point, he will try to save his siblings and go to the cursed lands in search for them. All events like these have their hidden timers and on the honour mode that timer is very short. For me Rolan left the inn as soon as I did, after saving Isobel. I didn’t even went for the long rest, checked the location and he was there. And as far as I know if you don’t find him quickly, he will be dead, so if you need Rolan in your playthrough, make sure to look out for him.

Shadow ravens
One of the most satisfying fights if you have a multiple target arrows. All the ravens have 1 hp, so all you need to do is aoe them.
Several patches ago the other very pleasant way to deal with them was to use the spiked bulbs there, but since then these stopped working and now they will deal 0 damage here. So use the arrows, or fireballs, or Shadowheart’s guardian spirits.

Shambling Mound
This is a legendary boss. His legendary effect is if a creature ends its turn within 5 m / 17 ft of the Shambling Mound, it will take 3d10 Necrotic and Shadow-Cursed Vines will grow at its feet, possibly Entangling it. He also is surrounded by exploading needle blights and some other monsters. There are a couple of harper corpses nearby – on his first turn the mound will resurrect them as his allies as well. Also he can hook your party member and pull to himself.
This fight was all over the place. I wanted to explode a barrel with a fireball wand – the fire didn’t caught the barrel. I feel like that wand may be bugged, it’s always working in a weird ways as far as I can recall. Then I wanted to throw a hp potion on a wounded companion but instead hit them to death lol. Don’t repeat this.
Anyway, what I want to say is this fight can become really unpredictable so it is maybe worth it to hide one of your companions and enter the fight only if you feel that you can win, and flee otherwise. That one companion can escape, go to the camp and resurrect the others.
Shambling mound will always resurrect the dead harpers, so it is useful to loot their corpses before they join the fight.
The monk can stun the mound, and i feel like the best approach here is to control him and try not to be near him for his legendary action damage. Minthara’s smites were very good here too.
At one point he had a lot of exploding enemies near him and i detonate them all to deal big damage to the boss. This however made me to sacrifice one of the nearby companions.
So be really careful here and I can’t stress enough about having one companion ready to flee.

Shadow-cursed blights
There are two groups of shadow-cursed blights hidden in the ambush. They are not really bad, but you need to keep in mind that the needle ones will explode after you kill them. The best way to deal with them is to shoot them, so when they do explode, you are positioned far enough.

Check the traders in the inn, they have a lot of good stuff but what’s most important, in the act 2 they will start selling multiple target and shadowpowder arrows. These are good in pretty much any fight that is ahead of you. So check for the arrows each time the traders reset their inventory (after the long rest)
Quartermaster Talli and Dammon have a lot of interesting items for sale. Some examples:
The Mighty Cloth – the +2 str armour, also gives the ability to carry more stuff for the hoarders like me (sold by Talli)
Cloak of Protection – grants the user +1 Armour Class and +1 to Saving throws (sold by Talli)
Hat of Uninhibited Kushigo – grants +1 bonus to their Spell Save DC after dealing damage with an unarmed attack, a very good helm for the monk (sold by Talli)
Darkfire Shortbow – a +2 bow that grants Resistance to Fire and Cold and grants the ability to cast Haste. (sold by Dammon)
Swordmaster Gloves – grant proficiency in three types of sword and provide a bonus to melee Attack Rolls. (sold by Dammon)

Saving Isobel
This fight allows you to locate all your party where you need them. And what you need is main damage dealers near Isobel and the rest downstairs to help the npcs, because as per usual they are screwd on their own.
As soon as Marcus appears make sure to kill him first. All the enemies on Isobel’s floor will target her first. She can survive the ghouls but if Marcus gets to her on top of them, she will die. So do everything to Markus – in my case that meant all the smites. When Markus is dead, clear all the undead around Isobel and you are good.

Defending Halsin’s portal
You can visit the place of the fight before anything will start there, and strategically place barrels. The enemies will spawn from both sides of the portal, and it is very convenient ti put the barrels on that exact places.
Your goal here is to survive 5 rounds of enemies and don’t let them to destroy the portal. Most enemies can only fight in melee, but there are some archers, focus on killing them asap.
Some waves will consist of shadow-cursed ravens – make sure you have multiple target arrows for those.
I strongly recommend to use on your dd an elixir of bloodlust. This potion grants you an additional action if you kill an enemy, and there will be a lot of low-hp enemies to kill and get one more shot on the next target. I used it on Minthara and she was very effective with that.
Portal itself can not be healed directly. However if you use the mass-heal the portal will be healed as well! At least this is how it was working during the patch 6. Let me know if something changed.
If you have a firewall spell it is very good here, put it in front of the bulk of enemies so they run through it, and when they passed it, throw them back with void bulbs.
You need to hold up all 5 turns. Even if you killed all the enemies at 1 round, there will be new ones spawning at the start of the next round. As soon as the 5 rounds will be over, you are done and Halsin will return.

Meenlocks
Meenlocks are hiding at the Last light inn’s basement, you can enter either from the inn itself or through the abandoned shack near the cemetery.
The thing about these guys is that if you approach them, you need to do a successful safe-throw or you are going to be frightened. You can see at the video that Minthara is really scared lol, that is why it is way more convenient to sneak on them not in the turn-based mode, so if you’ll get the fright it is less time to wait til it is over.

Shadows at the square
There are some shadows at the square, near the hidden Shar shrine. They can put a debuff on you on hit, so try to kill them before they can do so.
Here is the place where I feel like the game tends to bug. In my previous playthroughs I always used Volo’s magic eye, and usually when an enemy turns invisible, he need to roll a dice or be revealed by that eye. Or, if you approach an invisible target, you roll the dice for a chance to dispell the invisibility. So I was expected to run around with my Tav and find the invisible shadows, however none rolls had happened. I am really not sure what happened here, is it a bug, did something change or maybe I was mistaken in my expectations?
Anyway, throwing surface-creating stuff always works, as soon as you guessed right, you will reveal an invisible enemy this way.

Shadows in mason guild
There is a secret door at mason guild with some monsters in it. They are pretty much the same thing as the ones at the town’s square. They can become invisible, so make sure to try your best to reveal them. Interestingly enough in this fight Volo’s magic eye worked as I expected, as can be seen on the video, the last shadow turned invisible, approached me and was automatically revealed by Tav’s magic eye.
All and all, that is some nice extra exp here.

Hidden Shar shrine
Open the secret Shar’s shrine at the center of the square, do all the challenges and then take a ceremonial dagger – this will summon Shar’s guards for you to fight. These guys are vulnerable to the radiant damage and have no radiant retort, so smite them as you please.
One of the guards is a wizard, if Astarion’s sussur dagger procks a silence on him, he will just run around doing nothing. Another one is a priest who can cast guardian spirits – it works the same for them as it works for you, so that means you need to break their concentration to remove it.
This place is very good, it has everything: loot, pretty easy fight with fat exp, buffs until long rest for the challenges! Also I accidentally hit my own summon by mistake in that fight lol

Oliver
Thaniel/Oliver will teleport to the town square and fight you there, so make sure to clear the monsters that were there before that.
Oliver is a legendary boss and his legendary action is to spawn multiple 1 hp shadows each round.
I think this is actually more useful for us because we can hit more enemies and damage Oliver’s bubble by doing so. If you attack him directly, you will get A LOT of retaliation damage, so instead you must kill all his allies, and the more allies the better.
Sometimes when there was no allies to kill anymore I risked and hit his dome directly, wasn’t my best decision, but I really didn’t wanted to waste action points. This I don’t recommend, better safe than sorry.

Gith ambush
The gith ambush is located on the bridge. Approach it through the right side so when you enter the fight, you are going to be closer to that bridge. The strongest githyanki is going to stand directly on the bridge, focus on her and try to kill her before she gets her turn and starts to rally everyone left and right. Apparently that is a legendary boss who can use a legendary action to resurrect her allies, but since I killed her first I never saw her in action lol. All the others can be easily controlled by putting the oil under their feet and it is very easy to kill them one by one when their leader is already dead.

Thorms
All three Thorms can be killed without a fight, if you have a charisma-based character to convince them to do so. What you need to do is save up inspiration points and talk with all the Throms with a character who has the best chance to lie to them: any bard or warlock, Astarion for deception throws, Wyll.

Gerringothe Thorm
She requires GOLD and a couple successful throws to convince her to give up. In all my playthroughs I never failed her checks, they are not impossible and she needs just 2.
This is how I did it with Shadowheart who wasn’t even the best choice for that dialog. Same scenario works on any difficulty.
Later I returned here with a custom difficulty, so I had legendary ruleset and reloading and tested the fight. She is very easy if you know what to do. First, alert fit really helps here. You want to have your turn before her and the sculls. Second, remove all your gold from your inventory before the fight.
She can turn one of your characters to a gold statue, so that’s why you want to get your turn asap. But the main thing here is ignore her and kill all the sculls first. So get ready to chase them – shadowstep, hast, etc. With each scull dying Gerringothe loses parts of her armor. When all of them are gone, she is a one-shot kill even on the legendary difficulty.
If she drops grenades, try to leave the explosion area before the round ends, they will explode on their next turn.
If you focus on sculls she really is very easy, but if you try to push through and let sculls have their turns and help her she will wipe your party out.

Thisobald Thorm
You need to do a lot of rolls to outdrink him. You also need to tell him stories, and these are all with the throws too. Once I even tested all the stories just to get all his reactions and what I discovered is that different stories will require different number on a dice.
I think the list of stories is based on what you’ve done during the playthrough, so I can miss something for the quests that have different solutions. However in my experience the hardest ones usually are on top of the list, and on the bottom can be even some 16-18 throws instead of 21.
Shadowheart is surprisingly good drinking buddy for Thisobald. With Shar’s help she can drink his brew several times without a punishment. However the story rolls can be harder for her, so if you don’t have a lot of inspiration, maybe try Wyll or Astarion for this.
Thisobald can even forgive you one time each story round and give a chance to tell another one, but if you fail those too, it is going to be a fight.
I think the easiest way is to outdrink him and then kill all the tavern zombies, they are pretty much free exp.
I tested the fight with him in a custom playthrough, came at lvl 8, he was lvl 6. His legendary move is Overflowing Brew does a random type of damage AoE: 3 m / 10 ft (Radius). He gets several retaliation conditions that are called refluxes, his drink changes its type and then he shot everyone in his small radius with the damage type he ended up with. This may be buggy because it was inconsistent – sometimes he used the legendary action on hit, sometimes he used it as his own attack. Not sure what is going on there. What’s important is that we need him to become as drunk as possible, so he gets the Blacked out condition, which makes him very vulnerable. But until he is not blacked out he is immune to physical damage, so the only damage he can get is non-physical. Smite will deal the radiant damage but will not deal slashing damage, you get the idea. He also is immune to thunder damage.
The Waning moon has a convenient placement of every enemy. If you enter through the main door and attack some of Thisobald’s clients, he will spend a few of his turns just on running towards you, while you shoot him with whatever non-physical stuff you have.
Overall he is a pretty easy boss that can be just punched until he is dead. Since his aoe radius is really small the key here is to take turns and don’t place everyone too close to him. Remove from him those who is the most wounded, hit him with everything non-physical you have and that is pretty much it. If you enter the fight from the place I showed in the video, most of his minions will spend ~3 turns just on running towards you, while you are busy with Thisobald. When they finally arrive, they can be easily stopped from attacking you by cleric’s turn undead spell – they have a very low chance to resist it! So while they are turned, you can continue punching Thisobald. You need to hold on for ~4-5 rounds so he uses his drinking several times – after that Thisobald will finally become blackout drunk, lose all his immunities and can be released from whatever hp he had left very easily. His minions are still very easy, no surprises there.

Malus Thorm
Malus is the hardest one to kill wfithout fight imo. Usually you spend all your inspo on other Thorms and here you are left relying solely on luck. All his throws are really high, and some exclude others. For example you can make the nurses to kill Malus, but then they will be still alive, for you to fight later. The best way is if you convince the nurses to fight each other, so they remove themselves from the fight (the video on that link is not honour mode, my honour mode fight gonna be shown later), and then if you are very lucky and especially if you are a cleric, you can make Malus to kill himself, but this is a 21 throw.
In my honour mode playthrough however I was out of all the inspiration and failed checks, so this was the boss I fought during my one-save playthrough.
Malus Thorm is a legendary boss and he has TWO legendary actions. One is based on him having his nurses around: once per round, Malus Thorm can use his Legendary Action after being attacked to make every assistant cast Wail of Loss simultaneously. The other one is pretty harmless – once per round, Malus Thorm can use his Legendary Action to Grasp a creature and pulling it closer. What it means for us, is that we are going to make malus maidenless in a true elden ring fashion.
Focus on killing all the nurses, so he can’t cast his first legendary action and waste his turns on trying to resurrect a nurse for it. When all the nurses are dead, hit him with everything you’ve got and keep an eye on any nurse he could raise from the dead.
And while you are at the hospital, kill all the other nurses too
for the additional exp.
Malus has one of the best amulets that grant a paralyses oh crit once per day, so with the luck of the realms illithid perk this is a guarantee paralyzed enemy every day.

This is totally optional location which however contains a lot of monsters and loot, so make sure to visit and do everything.

Shadow-cursed harpers in front of the morgue entrance
This group of enemies has the best spot for being ambushed and surprised.
They have a wraith and a shadow mastiff with them, but if you succeed with the surprising the fight is very easy.

Inside the morgue there are some zombies sleeping on the traps. Zombies are very easy, if you don’t go to the poisonous fumes, they will go to you, so you can kill the first and disarm everything later. The location itself is very buggy, even though visually there may be no fumes after you’ve disarmed everything, but you can still be poisoned by the invisible clouds that seem not to dissolve after you removed all the traps. So the only way to truly clear that place is by using the Gust of wind spell.
Inside the locked room there is a cave with some more enemies – hollow armour with some oozes. He is pretty easy on any difficulty, but you need to know that when you kill him, he will become a wrath and you’ll need to kill him again.
There is an exit from that location to the abandoned fisherman’s shack where you can find more enemies to fight – shadow-cursed kuo-toa, sitting in the ambush. They can be easily ambushed themselves and they are located in 2 separate crowds so they are pretty much asking for the multiple target/shadowpowder arrows or a fireball.

Since saving Minthara, everyone became hostile, which makes them easy to lure to you in a small bunches.

I wanted to test if the gate guards will follow me through the shadow curse. They do, but looks like they didn’t got any big damage from that, alas. Anyway, making them run is a very easy and solid strategy, and Minthara can show off her double shot that she got from the sword bard multiclass.

Harbour
This is one of my best work. The harbour can be approached from the outside, so you can not just ambush the enemies, but cheese tf out of this fight.
At one point BG3 addad a protection, if an enemy is too far and you shoot at them, they can heal full hp, but you can overcome this if you are attacking in real time and have very little space between your attacks. So I killed one guard from a far before he ever could enter the fighting mode, and then I ambushed the rest ond killed them one by one while they were surprised and did absolutely nothing.
Don’t forget to pick up the tadpole barrel here. There is no dialogue options for it, but if you just put it in your inventory you will get several tadpole points.

Prison
For some reason all the enemies in the prison are were neutral to me, while all the upper floors were hostile. Maybe they didn’t got the news that I rescued Minthara, idk. If that bug still can be repeated, use this to your advantage.
Anyway, if you enter through harbour door, you can easily kill them one by one, and if Astarion still has his sussur dagger, you can silence the eyes so they never call for the reinforcements.
If the eyes never alarmed the guards, they will be spread widely at the prison and can be approached in stealth. I ended up killing all of them before they could do anything.

Oubliette
Don’t forget to visit this place! There are few hook horrors here (which means exp), a tadpole, a harper pin and a hidden chest.
The chest is located at the same place as the hook horrors. Don’t dig it up during the battle, because it may bug and the chest never appears.

First floor
If you’ve cleared the prison already, you can enter from there and clear some surrounding rooms without aggring all the floor. That can be also useful if you want to regroup, rest, go sell stuff – you can clear a part of the floor and then teleport away to sell all you’ve got and rest.
But if you have all the tower hostile towards you for saving Minthara (or any other reason), there is a very convenient location for the fight – the main gate. You can place multiple surfaces and lure all the enemies towards you. If the enemies stuck in your traps too much the game can bug in your favour and they WILL STOP DOING ANYTHING AT ALL.
This is the bug I observed in the multiple patches, and I am 99% sure that to make it happen you need to make you inaccessible to the enemies. Hide, place surfaces, make them run and stuck in the darkness, etc – there is a chance they will literally give up at one point lol. That includes the scrying eyes.

Second floor
If the second floor guards never joined the fight at the first floor, they are very easy to ambush, because they have a perfect position for it.
Z’rell is scripted, at least when I was playing my honour mode playthrough. So I wanted to attack her straight away, but as soon as I approached Z’rell the cutscene started as if I didn’t killed so many of the Absolute followers.
If you get the Z’rell cutscene there is a chance to to make her destroy her own ogre bodyguard.
After that the best next thing is to make her go to her office, so she would be alone and very easy to kill there. Use thunder damage to remove the scrying eyes.
The guards of the rooftop entrance are easy, focus on the wizard, the rest are an non-issue.
After doing all that make sure to go around and clear all the hidden enemies. There are a couple of guards here and there, there are flying ghouls, a zombie dog and a mimic.
All combined are a good chunk of experience for you to take. Also search for Ketheric’s letters and diaries so you could convince him to give up later.
After you are done with the second floor it is time to lay the groundwork for the end of this act and kill all the guards at the

Rooftop
I discovered a brilliant thing: all the guards on the roof can be lured and killed, while Ketheric is still waiting at the center. Come to the rooftop, lure all the undead towards the entrance, and fight there. Ketheric never joins! So you can kill all of his entourage and when the time will come and you’ll be back here, he will be alone! That is why I recommend to kill Kar’niss during the escort mission as well as Ketheric’s dog at the second floor.
When you finally come for Ketheric that fight will be pretty much a bunch of cutscenes, because he is alone, and you can bring Aylin and Jaheira. Start asking him to give up and promise forgiveness, that will be useful later, when you fight him again.

Balthazar’s guards
When you just enter the location, you will meet Balthazar’s undead guards and then attacked by Shar’s guardians. There will be black spheres who will summon enemies, each round more dangerous, so if you don’t waste the time or risk, focus on the spheres to end the battle quickly.
Same thing will happen again a bit later, and since I was holding all these barrels for Balthazar, I couldn’t wait to explode him, so again, focus on the spheres and that is going to be it very fast.

Balthazar
Necromancy may be legal in Cyrodiil, but few will openly admit to practicing it now that the Mages Guild has banned it, and that is why Balthazar is going to meet the BARREL JUSTICE. That is pretty much a oneshot kill, if Balthazar dies, so do almost every other of his guards, so you just need to clear a few zombies and that is it.
If you don’t feel like doing any work at all, just do this – he will be dead and you can just sit back and enjoy it unfold.

Cloaker
A cloaker is hidden in the caves behind one of the Balthazar’s rooms. He can summon his own copies but they will all disappear if you kill the original one.

Yurgir
The best place for killing him is the broken stairs neat the elevator. There will be his cat girlfriend there so you can easily aggro Yurgir and all his guards by shooting at her, while all your companions can hide.
This can be a bit tricky though if the enemies bug and stuck, not approaching you where you want them to, and if the cat is dead, the battle will be over, so you’ll need to go for the rest of the enemies and try to lure them closer. You really want Yurgir to reach the shooting gallery and stay there, and to keep him in place you can use various summones.
In the end of each of his turns Yurgir becomes invisible so it may take a while to reveal him with various surface throwables.
Yurgir is a legendary boss. Once per round, Yurgir can spend a Legendary Action to
Blinding Ambush Hunted creature when it attempts to attack or cast a spell. So keep in mind that the character who has a Watchful Hunt debuff will get blindness after hitting Yurgir.
When you damage Yurgir enough, he will throw his bombs under his legs and all you need to do is just way 1 round and continue to shoot him, the bombs will detonate peacefully and after all that you can just go and clear all Yurgir’s guards who will probably stuck somewhere at the background.

Lyrthindor
If you are going for Lyrthindor, start shoot rats as soon as you meet them. Kill a couple and they will start to run down to the altar and gather there. Go there too but not to the very bottom, let Shadowheart cast the guardian spirits and shoot one more rat – the fight will start, but now the rats need to climb back to you and die immediately at the spirit circle. If some survive that, you can just finish them easily. Lyrthindor himself is very easy, he has no legendary moves and since it is 4 vs 1 he is doomed.

Shar’s library
This place has a big orb that is casting silence on the whole library. Kill the sphere first so you can use magic as soon as possible. The guards themselves are easy.

Shar trials
After so many hours in this game and trying all the fair ways to do the trials I think I had my contribution in that and now it is cheating time.
Soft-step – just drink a potion of gaseous form and go straight where you need to go. All the guards do not care about gas, and you do not trigger any traps this way.
Self-same – go alone and naked. The game will copy one naked character. Sneak to the arena, put on clothes and throw some aoe to start the fight, even if you failed to reveal the enemy, that is how you find them. Now it is you in your full gear vs naked and scared copy.
Faith-leap – you can fly through the whole thing, so just do it. No need to jump onto the invisible platforms at all!

Aylin
When I was going down to Aylin I got a bug that could cost me the playthrough if I was a solo character. There is a place that allows you to jump, however you will bump into an invisible wall and that would be an instant death. Check the video to see how this can occur and be careful!

Every neutral intellect devourer here is 140 exp so make sure to kill them all! This is basically A LOT of free exp.

Undead
I was wondering if I don’t touch the death shepherd, can he raise multiple additional enemies so I get even more exp, so I didn’t touched him at first, placed an insect swarm in the hall and pretty much watched the zombies killing themselves there. Unfortunately this never happened, I think each time I played this game I’ve only seen the shepherd raising one additional enemy, even though he has multiple set of bones waiting there. Still not sure if that is possible here.

Saving Zevlor
If you release everybody, the intellect devourers will join the illithids. But not the other way around, if you start killing the devourers, the illithids can do nothing until you free them. So clear that place, then release everyone and try to focus on one target at a time to kill each illithid as soon as possible.

Kressa Bonedaughter
Kressa Bonedaughter and her friends have the perfect position both for the ambush and all aoe attacks you can come up with, all of them could be killed before they got their turns.

Us
If you never killed Us in the prologue you can recruit him here! He becomes a summon and he has both melee and distance attacks.

Apostle of Myrkul
This fight went not as I planned at all, because I made several mistakes and had to correct these.
1. I planned to convince Ketheric to give up Myrkul and jump into the hole, saved up so much inspiration points but all of them failed! So I had to fight his human form too.
2. I wanted to sneak each character into that fight but apparently if you save Nightsong all the party joins the fight automatically even though they were hidden far away, and now I was dealing with my favourite strategy turned against me – I had to waste my turns to approaching the enemies.
3. I wanted Jaheira to become an owlbear and jump onto Apostle of Myrkul, but I forgot to save up an enlarge spell, so this fell flat, pun intended. I drank an enlarge potion in her human form, turned into the owlbear and it didn’t worked – or maybe I haven’t been high enough to do proper fall damage.
4. I had a hast potion effect coming to an end and wanted to replace it with the self-casted hast spell, what I’ve got was 10 turns of hast and at the same time 1 turn of lethargy – I am really not sure if this even supposed to work like that.
This location allows unlimited summoning of undead, so do this if you can.
Human form of Ketheric has a legendary action Hordestrike – Ketheric can spend a Legendary Action to Hordestrike an enemy when it is attacked by one of his minions following Deadly Orders. He also has an ability to prone someone who hit him in melee on any difficulty. Ideally, first hit on his human form in melee should be done by some throw away one-time per turn attacker, but the only one who was available for me was Minthara, so she did got her fair share of damage and retaliation. Ketheric’s successfull attack can blind a target for 10 turns, this can be removed, for example, with the arrow of salving.
What however he can not do at all is to retaliate to any distance attack. So this fight is the time to use your best arrows, shadowpowder ones are especially good here, because they will deal damage no matter the evasion. Btw, since Ketheric has a really high evasion, and can be really mean if you hit him in melee, you can also use any other 100% damage no matter what thing. His last portion of hp I removed with the cloud of daggers spell.
All undead enemies at first are cluttering on one platform at the left, they all can be one-shot killed by a high-level aoe skill, like chain lighting. If you manage to kill them all, they will not respawn for a while.
Open hand monk shines bright here as Nightsong saviour, because of the endless jump skill. However the main damage dealer for Ketheric/Apostle is going to be a paladin.
Aylin is relatively good at killing all misc enemies but even on honour she is still pretty useless in anything else in my opinion.
Now, to the Apostle of Myrkul himself. His legendary action is Gaze of the Dead – he retaliates first hit on him per round with can frighten the target and deal some necrotic damage. Unlike Ketheric, he can do it to anyone, including those who attacks him from the distance. This is why it is good to have a lot of summons here and hit the Apostle first with all of them and all your characters that are not going to deal a lot anyway, if at least one of them succeed, Apostle will waste his retaliation on them instead of your dd.
You can not heal characters who have the bone chilled condition on them, so make sure to move to the safe distance from the Apostle to be healed or to drink potions.
Apostle still can eat the undead guys to heal himself, but I decided to concentrate on him anyway. He managed to consume one, but that wasn’t a big problem, this did not healed a lot. And when he dies, all the undead will die too.
Jaheira’s failed leap of faith turned out a blessing in disguise since she was a tank and a first hit dealer most of the time. While Apostle was busy with her I could try to hit him with everyone else, heal Minthara and make it possible for her to come close and finally unleash all her smites on him. Even with the misses she got almost all his hp in a couple of rounds and monk epicially ended him.

Two multiclass characters proved themselves way stronger than clean classes, so I felt comfortable to take with me Jaheira and Minsk just for the memes, reactions, nostalgia and rare dialogues, honestly can’t recommend the bard/pal combo enough. I never really bothered with any more experimentation and successfully fought everything the game had thrown on me.

I made half-illithids both of my multiclass characters, there are really no negative effects of doing so.

All these killings from acts 1-2 will make your party lvl 10 and a half at the start of act 3.
I decided to get to lvl 12, deal with the main bosses and rush to the end to see if you actually can cut the corner with Gale here and unlock the achievement with his orb which feels almost too easy. Spoiler: yes you can!

Act 3 grants you a lot of exp for just visiting places, talking and so on, so lvl 12 can be obtained pretty quickly.

Helping the Emperor
First part of that battle has a time limit. You need to enter the portal before 3 rounds will end, or it is going to be a game over.
I think each turn new bunch of enemies will spawn, similar to Halsin’s portal. But although the temptation to stay and kill everyone to get max exp is real, don’t risk it if you are not absolutely sure you will reach the portal in time with at least one character. Keep in mind that all the gits are monks and they can stun you so you miss the turn and can lose your playthrough because of that!
Inside the portal these are more giths. As a monk myself I want to let you know that here you can find the boots of Uninhibited Kushigo – these are a must! These allow to add more damage based on Wisdom to the unarmed strikes, so don’t miss them, they are dropping from one of the enemies.
One more advice here – since this is the astral realm, you have an unlimited length for jumps, so don’t even bother walking, jump to the giths and try to kill them one by one – less giths means less potential stuns to you. The only problem I got here is again the invisible wall bug (18:21 on the video), but at least this time my character didn’t died. I am still not sure what makes this bug to appear and if this is still around.

Some easy exp here:
– Help the strange ox. Bring him to the lower city. But keep in mind if you forgot to take him when you first go to the Lower city, the quest will close without a reward.
– Find the gnomes in the cave, agree to take the bomb
– Enter the circus
– Return crazy monk’s amulet to his relative’s grave
– Find and return the letters Tara stole
– Help Scratch and shoo away the mean dog lady

All these give exp without fighting.

Now to the fighting part.

Doppelgangers in the temple’s basement
These guys have a perfect location for being surprised so they can be killed without doing any of their turns.
From that location you can exit outside and find

Zentarims and thief guildsmen
I think the best way is to kill both Zentarims and guildsmen. You will get twice the loot, twice the exp, and also everything that is on the ship. The main goal here is to be the one who actually kills everyone because Zents and thiefs can attack and kill each other, and if that hapopens you will not get the exp. Luckily for us they are located in two convenient butches, asking for aoe thrown on them.
Things like insect plague and good old surfaces work here well.

Dinosaur island
Steal the ring from genie, play the lucky wheel with your strongest character and be teleported to the dinosaur island, which is pretty much a free exp for someone like pal/bard. Plus, the dinosaurs tend to bug, sometimes they will skip their turns if they can’t reach you. Killing all of them gives a lot of experience, and don’t forget to grab the jackpot prize on your way out!

Young illithid
This guy should’ve probably been listed under free exp lol.

Fake harpers
Now this encounter I could get only when I have Jaheira in the party. There are some fake harpers at the Danthelon’s dancing axe store’s basement. If I come to that basement without Jaheira, the enemies never spawn to me, so bring her here. Also I feel like this can be only available before you go further to Wyrmrock and Lower city, so make sure to check that place and talk to Danthelon while having Jaheira in the party. He will give you a basement key and the fake harpers will be there.
They are pretty easy and I think that everybody need to meet harper Geraldus at least once in their life!

Find the ‘stern librarian’ Ffion
This is a very easy quest that can be done quickly, grant you lots of exp and marks all the murder targets in the Lower city later. If you want to lvl up quickly, do it! It doesn’t have any fights and everything is located at a couple of neighbor houses.

Where to get an invite to the coronation
There are 2 ways to get it that require minimum work
– Talk to Valeria and convince her that she needs your help with the investigation. You need to kill dopples in the temple a find a murder weapon for that.
– Steal an invitation from one of the Sharess’ Caress customers. Also there is an easy +250 exp there and the dryad can give you a rupture buff.
– Arfur Gregorio can give you one. His quest can be done without fighting at all, each party member gets 800 exp, + inspiration.

This place grants you exp for literally doing nothing. Attend Gortash’s coronation, promise him your help, boom you are lvl 11 now. All is left is gain lvl 12, do Sarevok, Orin and this is it.

Aradin
If Aradin survived act 1, you can find him in front of Sorcerous Sundries causing a scene yet again. Tell him that Nightsong is in your camp, he will come at you long rest and tries to fight you. The hilarious part of this is that he is still lvl 3, and although his allies are way higher level, they are a bunch of fools, delivering extra exp and loot for you.

Mizora’s goons
A similar event exist for Mizora. I am not entirely sure what causes it. I only get it once, maybe this was added in patch 6? What I did was attending Gortash’s coronation without fighting or refusing him, rejected Mizora as a lover. She then send some mercenaries to hunt me, they are very easy and provide extra exp and loot for minimum efforts. Unlike Aradin or vampire spawns, they do not come for you at your camp, instead they will attack you at the street. The only difficulty here is not hit some flaming fists/steel watchers/pedestrians by accident.

Lorroakan
Lorroakan has lots of allies, so I decided to do the same thing and summoned whatever I could. As for him specifically I decided just to keep him stunned while I kill all his friends. So one hit/stun to him, if successful, switch on the next target. He never got a chance to have his turn so I don’t know if he actually learn some new magic for the honour mode. His allies are not really dangerous, just take a little time to kill because they have high evasion. Aylin actually was helpful here!

Dolor and related quests
A very quick way to get lots of exp is just visiting all the killer targets you learned from the Find the ‘stern librarian’ Ffion quest. Most of them are already dead, you don’t even need to do anything, just visit the place and loot everything. That quest almost 100% repeats locations for find Dribbles, most of those are in the Lower city and grant exp for visiting even if you never took the quest Find Dribbles.
One of the murder targets has a funny quest that is familiar to everyone who played pretty much any rpg game. It was fun to do it almost at 1 lvl.
Dolor himself will be at the wine party no matter what. I was wondering if I can cheese that battle a bit and skip the cutscene by hitting him directly. That unfortunately did not worked, because he immediately teleported away and left just his copies. I was hoping to kill him on the spot but alas. The copies of him are pretty easy. And since he ran away he will bring some more at his second spawn location which in the end of a day means more exp.
Dolor’s second spot is at Figaro’s. Watch the cutscene and reveal yourself asap, so he will not kill Figaro! This time Dolor will have bunch of dopples spread at all Figaro’s shop, which is a bit uncomfortable since you’ll need to run between them, but in the end of a day this is an easy fight either. Loot, exp, and if you have Minthara in the party, buy any expensive clothing item from Figaro, because she gets an inspiration point for it!
After doing that quest you will have everything you need to enter Sarevok’s lair

Saving Minsc
Another way to get a lot of exp in Lower city is doing the Minsc quest. This quest can be cheesed because you can kill almost all Minsc’s allies before he even spawns at that last location. Do not go through the sewers, it is long a convoluted way. Instead go through the strange warehouse building -251; -90 (Keep out mark at the navigator). Open the secret door, go down and kill all the bhaalists there. This fight is pretty easy, I like to stay at the platform and make the enemies run to me while I clean my backpacks and throw every other thing I’ve gathered through 3 acts lol.
After that, go to the banc, read the clerk’s thoughts and get the vault pass. Go down to the vaults, open the big door, watch the cutscene and kill new batch of enemies. If an enemy has a sanctuary, you can’t hit them directly, but still can deal damage with aoe. And if someone became invisible and you failed to reveal them, use surfaces. After that fight is over, return to the first place. You will find Minsc there with only 2 other enemies! Make sure to knock Minsc out, kill his last standing absolutist friends and that is it! Relatively easy exping and a new fun companion. I brought Minsc with me for the rest of the game just for the memes and did not regret this choice one bit!

Thief guild
You can kill all the guards in front of the guild without any repercussions from Nine fingers Keene. Loot the ring either from the guards or from the house nearby to open the door to the guild. If you already freed Minsc, you will find the final battle between Zentarim and thieves inside. It is pretty easy and Keene is actually helpful. You still get a decent chunk of exp here.

Saving Volo
The fight itself is easy, bring Minsc here for the flavour and additional dialogue lines. What is really important is that Volo is sitting on the priceless barrels so make sure to protect them from exploding and collect all of them after the fight!

I tried this fight with the legendary ruleset in my other playthrough. I made Shadowheart a dark justiciar so that already was an easiest version – you can convince most of Shar’s congregation switch sides and join you in the fight.
My main concern was Viconia’s divine intervention. This is why I started the fight with the protection sphere for everyone. I think Larian knows that people like this spell very much because now all enemy ai makes their top priority to come under the dome as well! So instead of surviving some insane legendary attacks that fight became all about finding a way to kick out Viconia and clean the darkness spell her minions casted. For cleaning Gust of wind spell is pretty good. The kicking part is tricky, because Viconia’s legendary skills include sanctuary, so usually you can’t attack her directly or just push her away. While she was having her sanctuary we a had a weird status quo where nobody could do anything, but as soon as she opens an opportunity, there was nothing better than wait until your strongest character has their turn and just push her away. When she is out, you can finally kick her. Don’t use radiant attacks because she has a radiant retort buff and will bite back BADLY.
This fight is a perfect place for saving up your guaranteed illithid crit from Luck of realms. As soon as your fighter/pal has the opportunity to hit her, make the critical hit and then paralyze with Malus Thorm’s amulet (guarantee 1 paralyze on crit per day). After that combo Viconia never gets her turn ever again))

I tested this fight in my other playthrough (so different party) and found an exploit.
If you have Astarion in your party and go fight Cazador, he will always bind Astarion to his ritual and you will need to hurry up and save him, similar to Aylin in a soul cage. Also there will be a hidden timer and if you fought for too long and didn’t save Astarion, Cazador will complete his ritual and kill all the spawns, including Astarion.
However if you never ever started that scene and just attacked Cazador from far, he will not get Astarion! That also means no ritual active, no runes, no legendary aura around him – none of that. He is still an annoying pest, becoming a mist which is easy to miss and all that, but no near as unpleasant as he could be.
This worked for me during the patch 7. I killed all his entourage, got him almost dead and then made a mistake of getting Astarion too close to him, which started the cutscene and the ritual. However that wasn’t unfixable, he had almost no hp left, so I just spammed magic missile onto him, because no matter legendary evasions and any other buffs that one spell has 100% chance to land on the target.
As soon as Cazador is dead, Astarion is automatically free and can help to fight the leftover bats.
If Astarion ascends, you will need to fight the gurs after all that, but even with the legendary ruleset they are basically helpless children at this point.

Yet another boss I tried later on a custom difficulty.
I tried different things and my best try was first focusing on the regular steel watchers, and only then go for titan. If the watchers are alive, they can make things really bad really quickly, if you are unlucky you can end up with almost entire arena covered with hellfire, so they mast be removed to prevent things like that.

First, all these enemies can be surprised. So make sure to come to the area invisible and start with the sneak attack – that makes a free round for you, focus on one watcher and when he is damaged enough he will explode, as do the usual watchers.

All the hellfire watchers have ranged weapons which means they have no any opportunity attacks.

I killed them one by one, while doing a counterspell on whatever the titan was trying to do, and only after the last hellfire watcher was dead I started hitting the boss.

As soon as titan has his hp halved and gets his turn, he will enable his super-annoying ability Defensive Protocol: Bulwark, and if you are playing on a honour mode or a custom with the legendary ruleset that means while he has the condition he can’t be damaged by any attack less than 40 in one hit (so sum damage like smite + physical will not cut it unless you have 40 of something in there), plus he has 200 temp hp. Usually he will use the protocol to heal himself and to shoot hellfire around, so there is no need to even bother with hitting him while he is doing that, although I tried out of desperation, but never rolled 40 lol. Instead better to concentrate on avoiding his hellfire zones.
He usually will be like that for ~3 rounds, but when he finally stops he will not have his full hp, so as soon as you will damage him enough, he will do his final trick and become invincible for a round again, only to self-destruct next turn.

If you cleared his guards first and have good damage dealers in your party, this actually isn’t a bad fight, just a bit annoying to wait.

As far as I know the only way to prevent him from his defensive protocol is to save up Flashblinder bombs which can be bought from Ironhand gnomes, but I never tested this myself so far. As you can see he can be killed even without those, just takes a bit of patience.

Sarevok fight was the one where barrel cheese kinda stopped working. You still can deal a lot of damage, but not as much as you used to. I think late game legendary bosses evade half of the damage or something like that. But his closest allies still died from the explosion so it is early to give up on barrelmancing completely.
Sarevok’s legendary action allows him once per round use his Legendary Action to immediately strike back at their attacker. Orin has this legendary action as well.
This fight is where I panicked a bit because barrels dealt less than I expected and also because I forgot that if you attack Sarevok in his throne hall the door guards will join the fight too. So I feel like I made a mistake trying to distract the guards. Probably should’ve concentrate solely on Sarevok. Putting aside legendary stuff, he has a really high evasion due to his version of mirror image, so some attacks will miss him, and therefore he needs the most of the attention. And when he is dead all the door guards die too.
While panicking and trying to come up with something on the spot I decided to try to cast a stone wall on top of Sarevok, and it worked unexpectedly – he actually trapped inside the wall! It made it harder for me to find the spot where I actually could hit him, but also caused a fun synergy in my favour – the only one enemy near him was Minthara, he hit her once and she procked an illithid charm on him, so he stopped hitting her and wasted his turn onto fighting the wall! Casting silence aura on him worked surprisingly well, he just ran away from it but did nothing else! That may be a bug though.
Haste spores came in handy here too, but the real life saviour was Shadowheart’s divine intervention. Since I didn’t succeed in killing Sarevok before he could show up all his fancy powers, he downed a couple of my characters, but healing divine intervention makes all the downed character to wake up with half hp and restore as is they had a long rest. This changed everything in my favour. +1495 exp for each character and all Sarevok’s cool gear.

At this point you will be lvl 12, so it is time to deal with Orin and go get your achievement.
Orin is in the Bhaal’s temple in the sewers. You will pass some of her bhaalists on your way, they are a non-issue.
To open Bhaal temple just shoot the hanging corpse and spill blood onto the symbol below.
Further there is the last challenge before Orin – Farslayer of Bhaal Ghislev.

Farslayer of Bhaal Ghislev
What this is supposed to be is: you approach Ghislev, he puts a debuff on you that will insta kill all your party in 5 rounds. Other bhaalists spawn around him.
This battle is very cheesable though, so here is what I did:
– put invisibility on everyone, so all the bhaalists never showed up while I was approaching.
– Sent one character to Ghislev’s location, even though he still was invisible. If you don’t have anything to reveal Ghislev, use surfaces. For me the barrel worked, the grenade didn’t. Ghislev has his lesser version of Bhaal blessing which prevents him from receiving proper damage. But his Unstoppable is only 4 lvl so it is pretty much 1 magic missile away from removing. After being hit 1 time he will apply slow on the character who did the damage and teleport away.
– I placed all my other characters to the place where he always teleports after the first hit for that very reason. When he appears at the spot, attack him with everyone, leaving your invisibility. You just need to overpower 4 lvls of unstoppable and kill him at last, he only has 88 hp.
When Ghislev is dead, all the other bhaalists will despawn peacefully, even on the honour mode this is a 1 turn battle.
Some other notes on him:
– he has immunity to pushing so you can’t push him down from the original location.
– several patches ago I completely broke that challenge because I landed silence on him with the sussur dagger, so he never could to cast his debuff. But I am not sure if this still works.

Cranium rats
You may want to discover the waypoint near the harbor, but keep in mind that the rats will attack you if you don’t have all the stones – correct me if that wasn’t the condition. For me they always neutral if I have everything and attack if I came here before killing Orin.
This place is the guardian spirits time to shine.

Orin
Save up a bit of inspiration points so you can convince Orin not to kill her victim before she fights you.
I think this is where devs fed up with the barrel cheese completely, because although I brought to Orin pretty much everything I had, the explosion didn’t really have done much to her. However it wasn’t completely useless since it killed most of her minions.
Orin has 12 levels of Unstoppable, after being shot with the shadowposder arrow + the explosion she was left with 9. So everyone was focused on removing the rest of unstoppable buff first. When it was done, I sent my main dd (Minthara) to hit her with all the smites she had. Orin has a legendary action where she retaliates to the first melee attack and deals bleed, but for heavy armored pal/bard she didn’t do much damage. Plus, I gave Minthara Sarevok’s sword which healed her from bleeding on her next attack!
If Orin got under your sphere of invulnerability, use the illithid spell to end you concentration and get a 100% hit instead.
This battle is very good for summons – you want as many damage dealers as you can get before the round ends and Orin gets her Unstoppable back.
It took me 3 rounds to kill her. 2 rounds I honestly removed the Unstoppable and hit her, and she had very few hp left. On the third round I shoot her as Shadowheart and her additional poison killed Orin, despite her having most of her unstoppable in place. I think this was a good redemption for all these times when Shadowheart had missed her targets!

The easiest way to deal with him is to go through with the alliance, refuse to give him stones, and proceed to the harbor. This is where you take Gale with you on your last camp long rest!

Go down the river with Gale in the party. The only fighting you need to do here is an intellect devourer ambush battle, aoe is the key here.

After all that you will find Gortash, start the cutscene and from now on all you need to do is to sit back and relax, while everything unfolds.

What is left is accept Emperor’s plan and proceed to the final fight. You need to talk your way out one last time since Voss will be angry with you. Your allies don’t matter as long as you brought Gale.

The enemies in front of the brain always confuse as in why are even there. You are not gaining exp anymore, you have the best gear already. This is why you can skip that battle with the clear conscience. Apply invisibility on any character with multiple dashes to move quicker, run alone through all the enemies, just straight forward to the gates so nobody will disspell your invis. You can easily approach the brain stem this way and even eavesdrop absolutists. As soon as your one character reaches the brain, everyone else will be teleported there, and all you need to do is to send Gale to the brain.
I was not sure if this actually will qualify for the honour mode till the last second, but it did!
After all the endings and epilogues, when you see the credits, you will unlock the achievement.

If you want to fight the brain, here are my notes on the boss on custom mode (legendary ruleset).

I brought all the leftover barrels and bombs to the last fight. Runebomb and everything else I had were enough to half dragon’s hp and kill some of other monsters. Keep in mind that on a legendary difficulty the dragon will retaliate with a fireball on a first successful attack onto him per round. So if you want to explode him, make sure that you removed everyone far from that one companion who will lit the bombs up.
On this difficulty the illithids can be especially mean, so if on tactician I usually run towards the brain asap, here this may be a bad idea – you don’t want to be in illithid’s range too soon so they don’t attack or stun you, and the brain itself now attacks a random enemy at the end of a round too! So if you didn’t rushed to it, it’s first couple of rounds will be spent on your summons, not on your party.
Allies here are pretty much interchangable – have a couple of group summons (in this case I had thief guild, Astarion’s undead and Shar’s cultists, but I assume Florrik’s fists, Zhentarims or whoever else will work too). Mizora was a pleasant surprise – I experimented with this fight quite a bit and she always applies hold monster on a dragon successfully, even though it says 30% chance. That maybe a bug but as of today (Jan 2025) this still works! Although keep in mind that to have her as an ally you need you need to have Wyll’s pact not broken. Anyway, you need to have a lot of distraction so the enemies will fight your allies while you approaching and removing illithids.
As soon as you near the brain, cast the Globe of invulnerability, hide your illithid under it and try to dominate the brain. But remember to clear the illithids around. I learned the hard way that their stun can penetrate the globe spell, so I had to waste a round and redo everything. If a nautiloid comes – no worries, as long as you had allies distracting the enemies, a few more will not really matter.

The brain itself on honour mode / legendary ruleset has an ability to become immune to everything you’ve hit it with previous round. On top of that first successful attack will still make the brain to retaliate and make a companion who landed the hit mindbroken, so make sure to do your first shot with someone who has only one attack. Also the netherbrain summons the bombs that destroy it’s arena, and I feel like on the hardest difficulty there is more bomb than on tactician.
Anyway, the main thing here is to have multiple types of attacks ready. If you hit the brain with smites one turn (so physical+radiant) it will become immune to these elements next turn, so you will need to come up with something else for your paladin for the next round.
The brain will have 450 hp, it took me 2 rounds to kill it. And I feel like 2 rounds is pretty much all we have on legendary, because looks like on the third round the brain would destroy all the arena anyway.

Well, this was quite a ride!

Thanks for reading! If you actually read the whole thing I admire your determination since this is the longest guide I’ve ever made so far.

Hope these notes will help you with the achievement and you will get your golden dice!
And if you don’t know how to enable it, this is how you do it.