A Baldur’s Gate 3 player has figured out how to one-shot the final boss of Act 2 using nothing more complex than a large pile of gold, a special weapon, and a bit of reverse-thievery.
Reddit’s u/GoldenThane shared their strategy on the Baldur’s Gate 3 subreddit yesterday. Their post does contain spoilers, so first we’ll give you a spoiler-free explanation of what they did. Basically, GoldenThane used a weapon called Twist of Fortune that’s available elsewhere in Act 2.
The morning star has, among other abilities, a Weapon Action called Blood Money that deals an extra 3 piercing damage per 300 gold that the target possesses. So to one-shot the boss, they “reverse pickpocketed” them before the fight to dump 15,000 gold into their pockets, then bapped them with Blood Money and called it a day.
Warning: We go into even more detail below the video, including spoilers for the end of Act 2 of Baldur’s Gate 3. Read on at your own risk!
Specifically, GoldenThane used this ability on what appears to be the second phase of the Ketheric Thorm fight at the end of Act 2. Because the fight includes multiple phases, they had to reverse pickpocket Thorm before it started, then used the Blood Money ability on the second phase, when Thorm becomes an Apostle of Myrkul. Fifteen-thousand gold divided by 300 is 50 ticks of Blood Money, which adds up to 150 bonus damage on top of the base damage of the attack.
That alone would only get GoldenThane up to 167 of the boss’ 225 total HP, but based on comments elsewhere in the thread it looks like GoldenThane had a number of other effects proc, including a bunch of hits of an Illithid power called “Cull the Weak” and possibly other abilities.
The mace in question, Twist of Fortune, is conveniently available right before this section of the game via Gerringothe Thorm, who you can kill or pickpocket or otherwise creatively dispose of to collect this special weapon.
Notably, this strategy seems to be scalable up to even higher health pools. Elsewhere in the thread, users were debating whether this would work on the first fight against Thorm earlier in the chapter, when he’s meant to be unkillable. A stack of 50k gold does the trick to get him to 0 health in this situation, according to u/srsbsnsman, but the game doesn’t let him die – he just sits around with 0 HP and continues to act, effectively softlocking the game. So…maybe do that specific battle as intended.
GoldenThane also detailed another reverse pickpocketing strategy in another thread (warning: spoilers for Act 3 if you click through) that effectively involves dropping a cursed corpse into the inventory of a major Act 3 foe. This strategy is a bit more involved, but pretty funny if you can pull it off, and lets you cheese your way through an extremely difficult fight.
You can try either of these strategies yourself or, if you’re more interested in working through the fights normally, we have a guide to Baldur’s Gate 3’s Act 2 right here. We’ve also covered more Baldur’s Gate 3 community shenanigans here, including someone beating the game with the worst possible ending for everyone, and a speedrunner finishing the game in ten minutes.
Rebekah Valentine is a Senior Reporter at IGN.