Act I Reddit
Act II Reddit
Act III Part 2 (bosses)
Reddit has a 40000 character limit, had to split act III in 2 parts
1. Introduction:
2. Expectations:
3. Main Rules:
4. General Tips:
5. Nautiloid:
6. Act I:
Act I Reddit
7. Act II:
Act II Reddit
8. Act III:
Act III Part 2 (bosses)
Act III is the biggest act by far and gives the player the most freedom, you can choose to fight any boss at any order, but the biggest difference here is that you will get lvl 12 pretty early in the Act and so, there's no need to farm xp.
Throught this guide, I recommended you to do all content, because it would give us XP to make fights easier down the line, but that isn't the case on act III, you will probably do every boss fight at lvl 12, meaning that, if the rewards you get from defeating a boss aren't good enough, don't do it - there's no reason to do every single boss fight. The same applies to quests, if you just want to get strong and rush to fight the Netherbrain, you should focus on doing stuf that makes you and your party stronger and nothing else.
But let's ignore boss fights for now and focus on the present:
- Once you reach Rivington, before you do anything, send Shadowheart back to camp;
- While I generally don't point out specific items for specifics builds, I think is important I point out this item, because it is really good and really easy to miss. Hellrider Longbow +3 Initiative and Perception is insane on any spellcaster or other build that doesn't need a bow or on a party member with low Initiative. You can get it from Ferg Drogher, if you have shadowheart with you, you will not be able to trade with him;
- I suggest bartering with him too, the bow is pretty expensive. Once you traded with him, you can get shadowheart back;
- Right now our goal is to get to lvl 12 ASAP while gearing up, collect 6,6k gold and a Scroll of Artistry of War (NECESSARY FOR THE END FIGHT!!!) find 2 Scrolls of Globe of Invulnerability (for raphael em viconia) and a lot of invisibility potions (we will need at least 3 for the final fight and we will use invisibility to setup some boss fights/encounters);
- If you don't have a lot of potions of speed, it's a good idea to start buying them too;
- There is a chest near the guard tower with a lot of gold (X:15 Y:49), you can also get a lot of gold at the House of Couting by lockpicking safes;
- 5k gold will go to Boney at the circus. Buy a statue from him, the statue will give a permanent Bless) to whichever party member is speaking to Boney;
- The rest of the 1,6k will be spent in Baldur's gate;
- Go to X:44Y:-38 at the Abandoned Windmill's basem*nt, you will find a mindflayer you can kill to get a tadpole;
- Also, Relevant map for Act III;
- There's also 3 extra tadpoles near the beach, use the map above to get them;
- Talk to Wulbren to get another Runepowder bomb;
- If you forgot to get the other Bomb from Philomeen, you can find it at the Gnome Hideout too;
- You can also skip both bridges requirements by using Fly/character with high jump;
- Btw, I'm assuming you are using the Astral-Touched Tadpole;
Besides that, there isn't a lot of stuff to do in Rivington (for now) worth talking about, we will come back later to kill Gortash and Ansur, but that's in the future. I will skip to Baldur's Gate:
- Again, avoid all hard fights for now, focus on getting 12 and gearing up;
- Reminder to barter with merchants;
- DON'T TALK TO ETTVARD NEEDLE (editor in chief for the Baldur's Mouth Gazette) if you aren't planning you finishing his quest ASAP, this quest will fail if you long rest, resulting in you getting a lower reputation in town, the important part is that this applies to merchants, making items more expensive;
- If you want to deal with the quest, you could kill Ettvard and that would solve the low reputation thing, but there is a way to avoid fighting, which will give positive reputation as well;
- Use fly/jump to reach the top of the build, break the barricade (without falling down), get invisible and then jump down and use the elevator (we will do this entire thing invisible);
- If you don't have fly, you need to choose someone with a really long jump, we will need it once we go back;
- You can do this without invisibility if you want to/if your invisibility expired, use turn based mode to avoid fighting the steel watchers;
- Active turn based mode and run to the door shown below;
- Get Make Big Money by Trading with Adventurers (X:-1029, Y:1058) from the wicker basket and go to straight ahead to door that is furthest away;
- You will find Jelliwing, if you helped the pixie at act II, Jelliwing will agree to help you as soon as you speak to her, if you didn't save the pixie, you'll need to pass a persuasion check;
- Once everything is done, you can go back using the elevator again, I imagine you have enough time to do everything and still be invisible, leave from the top of the building and that's it;
- After reaching the sewers, I like avoiding Aelis Siryasius (the guy of the Grease Elementals), maybe I'm just unlucky, but in my previous playthroughs, he always liked to randomly attack me for no reason just because I walked near him, the fight itself isn't hard, but can be if you get unlucky, as the ground is slippery and your party members can trip and skip their turn. Not worth the headache IMO, as he doesn't give any notable loot;
- Once you have 1,6k gold, go to Stormshore Tabernacle near the Basilisk Gate waypoint;
- The wiki summarizes pretter well this area, so I'll copy and paste from there;
- Inside the player can make offerings to Helm, Tyr, Selûne or Mystra or various other deities at the Statue of Gods in exchange for the condition: Anointed in Splendour). The condition ends after each long rest, but can be reapplied again for free;
- The amount you have to offer to receive the blessing depends on your level and difficulty. At level one, 400 gold will grant you the blessing and at level 11/12 it's 4500 gold increasing to 5000 gold on Tactician difficulty;
- The blessing is only available to the character that made the offer, and the character who received the blessing must pray at the corresponding statue each day to reapply it. Each character can receive their own blessing, but they must make their own (separate) donations. Once a character makes a sufficient donation to receive a god's blessing, they cannot make donations to other deities.
- td;dr: respec your entire party to lvl 1 and donate 400 gold to 4 deities using different party members on each one, totalizing 1600 gold;
- QoL tip: use map markers to indicate which deity each party member prayed, so you don't need to figure out which deity each character needs to pray to everyday;
- You can get that gold back by using a hatch near one of the statues. GET YOUR CHARACTERS TO MAX LVL BEFORE DOING THAT, THERE'S A WAY TO LOSE YOUR SAVE HERE IF YOU DON'T, because stealing the gold back will get you Castigated by the Gods) curse (AVOID HEALING IF YOU GOT THE CURSE!!!). Once you remove it with Remove Curse , you will need to fight an enemy (99,9% will of the time will be a Deva) which hits pretty hard and will surprise you 100% of the time;
- If you don't remove the curse, 2 enemies will spawn if the cursed character is healed or takes a short/long rest, so it's just objectively better to use Remove Curse;
- After that, you can go to Felogyr's Fireworks, go to the basem*nt (you can either get there by using the hatch on the store or by using a door near Philgrave’s Mansion, I like using the door);
- Once you reach de basem*nt, STOP. Split your party and move your party one by one in small steps, there's A LOT OF TRAPS HERE, be extremely careful, you won't actually die, but we want to steal all the explosives and the traps will set them on fire;
- Get every single firework you see, box of fireworks, popdrakes, woogglims, if anything does damage, get it and send it to camp;
- There's also a lever behind some wooden barrels you can use to reveal a hidden room with smokepowder barrels, grab them too (there's another trap in the room with the barrels as well, be careful or all the barrels wil explode);
- You can steal from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floor of the store too, but you will 100% of the time start a fight and the enemy likes to blow up the fireworks as soon as the fight starts;
- You can also buy fireworks for the merchant of the store;
- Now we will go on an adventure collecting tadpoles;
- First, Gortash parents have parasites, you can kill them at X: -29 Y: -115, you will probably alert the nearby guards after killing them, use Silence to avoid this;
- There are 6 Mindflayer Parasites at X: 204 Y:126 hidden inside a boat, if you don't sneak, you will have 2 fight 2 steel watchers;
- Near them you will find Volo in a "bit" of trouble, after saving him and killing everybody, you can find 2 more parasites on the corpses;
- Of course, these aren't the only parasites in the map, If you wanna get all available, use this map, there's a filter specific for parasites;
- While you’re near Volo, go to - Water Queen's House and donate an item (literally any item) to the “Offerings Chest” and you will receive the bless buff until your long rest (only works once);
- What we are doing here is maximazing your build as much as possible before we start fighting bosses.
Also, just a random tip if you decide to do the artist quest, get the Torch of Revocation from the Mystic Carrion (tips for the boss fight are a few lines ahead) before going to the mansion, then follow this images:
Doing this will skip all the annoying sh*t and go straight to the top, now you just need to open the door to the secret room and burn the portrait.
Now we're going to do the boss fights. Like I said before, there's no need to do everything, do the bosses your build needs to.
Heads up: your build NEEDS TO BE ONLINE NOW, if your party feels weak, there's something wrong. I will provide tips for each fight, but you shouldn't need to if your party is strong enough, you will be surprised to see how easy some of the boss fights will be as long as you're building correctly. I will give you a turn estimate (Time to beat) on every boss to show how fast I beat that boss so you can compare so you know how weak/strong your party is. The turn estimate counts how much the fight lasted, not how fast I killed the boss.
If you feel strong, you don't actually need to follow all the instructions I will give here, most of them are overkill, if you feel like there's to much setup for something, that's probably because it is. Again, for the same reason as the Ketheric fight, I have no way of knowing how strong you are, so I will low ball everything I can to make each fight easier.
Anyways, once you're 12 and bought all the gear you need, we will proceed to doing boss fights.
But before that last 3 tips:
- If you're on your last turn of potion of speed, you can use another potion of speed to dodge the Lethargic Debuff. When you use the 2nd potion of speed, you will trigger the debuff on your current turn, not on the next. You can abuse this by using all your actions and then drinking the potion of speed on your last bonus action, making it so you ignore the debuff altogether (copy and pasted from act II, in case you forgot);
- 2nd: Best way to approach every boss fight is by killing the boss as fight as possible (with exception of Lorrokan) and ignoring everything else, if possible, 100ing to 0 in one turn, because some bosses get certain buffs when they reach a certain health treshold once their turn begins. Prolonged fights do not benefit you at all, the longer the fight, the more value their legendary actions will get and most of them are objectively better than your party's skills.
- 3rd: A lot of bosses have annoying reactions (Raphael, Lorroakan, Cazador), there are certain types of conditions that make the enemy unable to react, like prone and stunned, Hold Person and etc.
As there is no order to do each boss fight, I will go from the easiest to the hardest. We will start with Mystic Carrion:
Act III Part 2 (bosses)
