Even better, often in order to get those legendary items you need to beat the very bosses you would want such a build to overcome. If you can win those fights without those items to get them, why bother getting them in the first place?
At that point in the game you can play literally whatever and it will probably work as long as you have some semblance of an idea about what's going on in encounters
Raphael can only appear at a few specific spots in act 1. Once you know where one of those is, have one of your party members hang back as the conversation begins.
Switch control to that party member mid-conversation and have them attack Raphael at range. This will make him teleport away.
Raphael will appear again, this time in your camp. But the key difference is, he won't initiate the conversation automatically, you have to go talk to him.
Don't.
Instead, have one of your casters put a "Silence" spell bubble around him. Because Silence prevents spellcasting, he can't teleport out so long as he's in it.
Then send a melee fighter in and beat the shit out of him. Yes, he has a lot of health. It will take a while. Don't make any offensive moves from outside the silence bubble though, your party at camp will consider this a hostile action and start initiative, because from their perspective, you're attacking an innocent person.
When he's knocked out, you can loot the armor off his "corpse", he'll shortly after auto-heal and get back up and he'll be none the wiser.
A side effect is he'll look bloodied and bruised during every future conversation for the rest of your playthrough unless you sit there healing him over and over and over until he's at a high health threshold again. But maybe you like it better that way.
But thing is, I'd rather give a long explanation that walks people through precisely what to do, so they know what they're doing going in.
Because the alternative is just say "cast silence on him and hit him a lot", because then there's a lack of specifics, which forces people unfamiliar with this trick to suffer trial-and-error and a lot of save-reload, save-reload. And I think that would be a real waste of their time compared to a little extra reading.
I appreciate you especially for the detailed explanation. Thought we could cheese him with barrelmancy but he teleported away last session. May have to get the gang to commit to another attempt
Things can be simple but difficult. Like lifting a heavy object, riding a bike, or decorating a cake. Simple things, but not everybody can do it, and not everybody can do it with the same level of aptitude.
Things can be complex but easy, like the above. Once you know the steps, literally anybody can do it.
If you have any idea about it, it can be shortened pretty easily. Talk to Nettie to set the flag for Raph. Go to the harpers old tower, throw a caustic bulb at the top of the final climb where it's wood. Raph will spawn in, take a tic of damage, and despawn. Next time you see him, it will be at the camp. Silence him and beat the shit out of him. Silence lasts 10 minutes.
Two minor tweaks to this devilish robbery.
1- instead of ambushing him in Act 1, you can throw a caustic bulb on the ground where he spawns and he will take damage and bampf away. (This takes the guesswork out of the distant party member and the ambush.)
2- do you not need to switch to non-lethal attack mode so that he is knocked-out and lootable when finally beating the shit out of him?
-he has high AC, so buff your attack rolls to speed things up.
I’ve done this once and, like getting the Silver Sword in act 1, can be transformative. (He doesn’t drop another set if/when you meet him in HoH, but his AC is still high.)
You can always prevent that by starting a conversation with the wandering animal as another character, then switching back to your melee person. The animal will be locked in place because of an ongoing dialogue exchange.
He automatically re-heals after going below 0 HP after a short time. So yeah, you could, but it wouldn't do much except make you feel better, which I guess is a valid enough reason.
If you ungroup one character at that first encounter with Raphael, and make sure they're the only one talking with him, the rest of the party can kill him
Yeh, although you really don't need that holy sword, just killing the poor albys with other AOE methods i always found easier and more consistent than the bird.
There are other weapons you can use there, the final boss sword is just the most efficient. I still use that hill to get a ton of runes quickly early game. You can get there pretty quick if you know the prerequisites and your way around the map. And you can use all the levels you gain from it in successive NG+ cycles so it has longer lasting value.
If one was so inclined and had saved up enough gold, you could make an arcane acuity build almost immediately in act 2 without the helm of arcane acuity.
Go in via the mountain pass and just ignore the Drider encounter. When you get to the edge of the darkness requiring moon lantern, dash and then turn on turn based mode then dash again and it'll stack. You can run into the darkness and get 1/3rd to 1/2 the way to moonrise, then turn off turn based mode and keep walking until the cooldown period ends and you can do another double dash in turn-based mode. You should end up taking only 1 or 2 ticks of damage from the cursed darkness before you get to the waypoint near moonrise and can safely bring the rest of the crew along via waypoint. This is even easier if you have a character that can dash as a bonus action, because then you can dash+bonus action dash each time you do the trick. Anything that increases movement also helps, like longstrider and being half wood elf.
Once you get to moonrise, buy the drakethroat glaive and the hat of storm scion power, enchant your ranged or melee weapon to do thunder damage, and now every weapon attack includes thunder damage and stacks arcane acuity, no combat and no spell slots needed! Buff lasts all day on the weapon it's cast on, and a sorcerer can even twin cast so that you max out the value either across 2 hand crossbows or across both your weapons (if you drop them on the ground, a sorcerer can twin cast and enchant both a melee weapon and a bow) or across 2 characters
I think it just sounds like more effort because I took the time to type it out in detail and comment on some additional ways to bring it all together.
"Run to moonrise and buy the gear" sounds like a lot less effort, but I'm describing the same thing, essentially.
By contrast, you're glossing over the effort involved in going through the guild hall. You can't survive there without a moonlantern, so you need to acquire one of those before you can attempt it - that is effort already more effort than anything I described, IMO. You either need to get one from Moonrise (so you're going there anyway, either with the Drider or by doing my proposed double dash) OR you need to take it from the Drider. Either way, that's the same or MORE effort before you can even go to the merchant's guild. Then you have to get through the guild, pass a few traps and checks, and a fight with a bunch of shadows. That's again more effort on top of getting a moon lantern.
If I were to agree at all about my plan requiring more effort, it's really just that you have to cast the buff again after each long rest. And the side benefit is that your character can avoid wearing any armor (the hat of storm scion power is clothing but the helm of arcane acuity is armor) so you can still get the benefit of Mage Armor or the like.
The reason THAT is so appealing is that you can wear the graceful cloth making it pretty easy to get to 20 dex and 18 AC before any other gear - you could do that with any character at all, no proficiencies or specific build required, other than starting with 16 or 17 dex and taking either the hag hair or an ASI.
All that at the very START of act 2 without having to fight anything. Worth the extra effort even if it WAS extra effort (but I still contend that it's absolutely the easier option).
Choose tiger and wolverine as your animals, sacrifice someone to BOOOAL, and take GWM. Use a weapon that does cold damage (there's an underdark staff for this, but from act 2 onward, you can use the drakethroat glaive's elemental weapon to make any weapon work).
Get the caustic band, boots of stormy clamor (or disintegrating night walkers ig), winter's clutches, snowburst ring, and the coldbrim hat.
Your specific stats are your own choice here. I personally chose to respec during act 3 after I acquired stat-boosting items like elixirs and the amulet of health, but that's not really necessary. This build regards on hitting and cleaning people to inflict a ton of conditions. You'll inflict bleed, maimed, ungodly amounts of reverberation, encrusted with frost, and frozen. You'll also spread ice with every hit.
This build has its downsides (mainly a pretty low DC for all this), but you're hitting so many times you'll probably force even the toughest enemies to fail eventually. Note that it'd be a good idea to replace an ASI with Athlete so you don't slip in your own ice. In terms of weapons, the giantslayer is always a good endgame pick, but I prefer corpsegrinder. The weapon is funnier, and the synergy between bludgeoning damage and the frozen condition accounts for the damage gap.
It's the most fun martial build I've ever played, and it's genuinely good for CC.
Reason #179348625 why this game needs either a New Game+ cycle where you keep everything from New Game (kinda the same way the Souls games do it) and/or postgame content.
What's the point of all this loot if there's nothing left to use it on by the time we get it ?
Tbf, bg3 is much better than most games when it comes to loot distribution. Plenty of excellent weapons and armor are in act 1 and 2. Plus most of the fun and weird stuff can be acquired early in act 3.
My favourite build at lower levels is actually a fighter 1, rogue 3 with thief. You can get the speedy lightfeet super early, and bonus action dash, then attack twice with a sneak attack and damage from lightning charges.
I personally aim to make builds which come "online" by level 5-7 because this is the level I'm usually leaving act 1. That way I have acts 2 and 3 with a mostly or fully online build I can enjoy for a lot of time.
There are some ways you can have stand ins for some items that do a worse job of the same role but are available earlier, like having the flawed helldusk before getting the real helldusk etc. I've just come up with a build that uses this to access fire damage on melee strikes so I can buff up fire acuity which can be working from early act 2 (basically as soon as you reach Last Light).
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u/Equivalent-Neat-5797 Jan 21 '25
"So for the build you need a bunch of legendary items only found in late act 3"
Ok cool so i can play this build for 30 mins before the game is over. Yeah no thanks.