Baldur’s Gate 3: 7 Speedrun Tricks To Make Honour Mode Easy

Summary

• Use the jump spell on high strength characters to skip encounters and reach checkpoints easily.
• Utilize shadowboxing to skip boss fights and reach certain areas without dealing with unnecessary obstacles.
• Crush your enemies with a giant bear by enlarging it, giving it jump and feather fall buffs, and making it invisible to initiate combat.

Speedrunners are experts at doing things fast, not necessarily easier, but sometimes they find tricks that make bosses a cakewalk. As they develop ways to beat Baldur’s Gate 3 at lower and lower times, you can take pointers from them to manage the game’s most difficult modes.

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When looking at tricks from these experts, you want to focus on the ones that do full playthroughs since “any percent runs,” as they are usually called, finish at Act Two with poor Gale blowing up. If you’re still trying to gain your own golden dice, use these tricks to complete Baldur’s Gate 3 once and for all.

7 Use The Jump Spell On High Strength Characters

This Is Why Speedrunners Make Strong Wizards

The important thing to note about using these tricks is that unless you are also aiming to speedrun the game, you don’t have to use these tricks just like speedrunners do. The idea here is to give the jump spell to a character with high Strength, which can have them traverse immense distances with a single minor action.

This way, you can skip encounters and reach checkpoints with ease, and you can even combine it with invisibility to ensure your safety. This is also important in the final acts of the game, where a well-calculated jump can have you face the Netherbrain without facing any of its minions.

6 Use Shadowboxing

It Is Less Complicated Than It Looks

Shadowboxing might not be the easiest of techniques but it requires no farming. Basically, you kill Shadowheart (or any companion, really), grab their corpse as an item, and place it in a box, setting said box on fire and throwing the box at an area that triggers a cutscene.

Youtuber ImTaiyl explains it wonderfully, giving a great example of how to get to Ketheric Thorm’s second fight without having to deal with any of the Moonrise Towers business. While he’s using it to end the game right there, you can use that trick to skip quite a few boss fights, having all the resources you need to end the fight your way.

5 Crush Your Enemies With A Giant Bear

You Can Do It With Rangers Or Druids

If Mario has taught us anything, it is that jumping on enemies deals damage. While that doesn’t apply to every single game, it surprisingly does in Baldur’s Gate 3, and the bigger you are, the better, so speedrunners have been increasing the size of bears and using them to beat unskippable fights.

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You just need access to a bear, a spell to enlarge it, and give it the jump and Feather Fall buffs to top it off. While this is already a great combo, you can also make the Bear invisible, so it doesn’t initiate combat with enemies, particularly ones with large health bars that require more than one jump.

4 Toss Gortash Off A Bridge

Gravity Will Do The Rest

Once you make it to Rivington in Act Three, you’ll be on your way to meet Gortash, one of the main antagonists of Baldur’s Gate 3. Speedrunners have found out that if you enter his throne room from the side (easily done with improved jumps on a Fighter or the ability to fly), you can turn invisible and grab him as an improvised weapon.

At that point, you can just walk outside, aim at any cliff, and drop the poor tyrant. Alternatively, you can also just make an alliance with Gortash, removing the need to kill him altogether; definitely less funny than throwing him off a cliff, but the end result is the same.

3 Kill Orin As She Impersonates A Child

She’s At Her Most Vulnerable

Playing the game in Honour Mode will likely have you plan around strategy rather than roleplay, making your companions work more like tools than the fleshed-out characters that they are. You can use this to your advantage, recruiting no more than three party members for the whole journey.

Since Orin always kidnaps someone and takes their place, if you give her no character to kidnap, she’ll shapeshift into the small child that appears in your camp. Knowing this, speedrunners go to her lair directly, skipping all the traps with jumps and invisibility and just blasting Orin away with any spell.

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If you want to deal with Orin the easiest way possible, but you don’t want to cheese her that much, you can always start the game as the Dark Urge. That origin lets you challenge Orin to a duel, and while Orin is a capable assassin, she’s definitely easier to deal with than her Slayer form.

2 Subdue The Netherbrain In One Turn

A Surprisingly Simple Tactic

The final battle of Baldur’s Gate 3 is hard, even on the easiest difficulty, and adding Legendary Actions on top of that can only make it a nightmare. However, there’s one way to deal with all that legendary business in one turn, and it doesn’t involve any elaborate tricks.

Since this strategy involves no combat, it's best to enter it with a single character.

If your whole party is invisible when you enter the fight, well, the fight won’t start. You can have your Illithid ally fly right to the Crown of Karsus and begin channeling. This will start combat, yes, but your turn usually comes first in these fights, and since you were already channeling the Crown, when your first turn comes around, you can already enter the Netherbrain.

1 Kill The Netherbrain With Fireworks

A Pretty And Explosive End

While finishing off the Netherbrain isn’t the hardest part of the fight, it is the final thing you need to do, so you might as well prepare for it. The idea here is to take all the fireworks sold in the shop at Baldur’s Gate, pile them up, and set them alight; the explosion will, most likely, kill the Netherbrain with damage to spare.

Now, since you’re not speedrunning, you can use this arsenal for many difficult fights or even as insurance for the Netherbrain; you only need one character to finish the fight at that point. With this in mind, the entire final act can be sold with only your Illithid character flying around invisible, but it does mean that you need to be the one to subdue the Netherbrain; having the Emperor or Orpheus around will only make matters worse.

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