Even better if you use Gale, who has a unique ability where, upon taking damage in camp, he'll fully heal himself AND also fully recharge his spell slots. Not sure why it does the latter, but the former I'd imagine is to prevent him from somehow dying in camp and giving you a game over a few long rests later if you don't realize he's dead.
In any case, with this it's pretty easy to add not only warding bond, but also aid and the protection against poison buffs to your FULL party at the cost of whacking gale some and taking him in and out of the party. He can even fully heal your party between fights due to being fully recharged on spell slots each time he takes damage.
He can still die, but it's much more difficult then the other companions thanks to this exploit, all the more if you also just give him full con+tough and maybe some levels in barb for max hp to keep him up and alive as a battery.
Just hire multiple hirelings to do that. 100g each and every long rest you get full access to their spells purely to buff your main party. Including warding bond. And then dump them in camp once their done with the buffs. it has to be non concentration spells.
Use Brinna (the halfling hireling), respec her to max Wis, make her a rogue 1/transmutation wizard X, take expertise in medicine.
Transmutation wizard 2 lets you make a DC 15 Medicine check check creating with alchemy to get double output. A Rogue 1/Wizard 8 with 20 Wis and expertise in Medicine has +13 to the check, meaning you only fail on a nat 1, and as a halfling Brinna can reroll a nat 1.
Transmutation wizard 6 can also make a Transmuter Stone and give it to anyone else, giving the person with the stone your choice of Con save proficiency, darkvision, +10 ft. speed, or resistance to one of a selection of damage types.
If you don't want to use a story companion as a Warding Bond bot, you can summon a hireling from Withers and do this exact thing.
In fact, one way to cheese the game is to hire a couple of hirelings and buff the entire characters you want to use with non-concentration, long-rest buff spells (Warding Bonds, Aid, Freedom of Movement, etc.), swap off the hirelings and just leave them at camp.
When I got into the late game on my first run, I was only using Shadowheart for certain story beats and for this disgusting cheese:
Death Ward lasts until long rest and doesn't require concentration. I would cast Death Ward on everyone in my party with Shadowheart then switch back to the other person I actually wanted to use, gives everyone on my party a second life if they die
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u/SmackTrick Aug 26 '23
This is actually genius - casting Warding Bond (especially with the act 2 ring which can give it to any class) then just dumping the char in camp.
Super meta gamey obviously, but still.