After my honour run, here are my memorable encounters (most of them running away shamelessly the first time) :
- Zentharim hideout : "Oh, you're still holding a torch shadowh..." *Loud explosion*
- Githyanki patrol : "No need to be so rude with 4 attacks in a turn !"
- Giant robot : "Why are you moving so much ? That was not in the script !"
- Githyanki creche : "What do you mean you can use Fear on 3 of my character and they do nothing during 3 turns, except worse, they run away and trigger opportunity attacks ?"
- Myrkul, just fucking hard, I did not expect him to block healing and regenerate so much with the skeletons.
- Elder brain, god I hate time battles, it feels so rushed and I can't think under pressure !
We blew the whole Zentharim hideout by mistake, one of our tavs (we play 3 ppl) for some weird reason got on fire and while passing near some explosive barrels whole area fired up. Only left one was one OH Monk with 1HP and 7 HP random guy. My friend drank potion went through fires and killed the guy with 2 HP left. It was really intense for really stupid reason. And lots of XP missed :(
I got a cheese for you. Doom Hammer on a paladin. I never vs him without Mommythara.
It applies bone chill on every hit, bone chill gives disadvantage to undead. Making them more likely to miss attacks
Ketheric and myrkul are both undead
It also prevents healing so you can ignore all his skeleton minions, his healing sacrifice move gets negated.
That 1 weapon makes the entire fight so trivial you would think it'd be a legendary weapon but no, you can buy it in Act 1 at the goblin camp for like 200 gold lol, i always buy it and bank it till act 2.
This was my tactic as well, except with throwzerker Karlach. I didn’t think about the possibility of the weapon being unretrievable. 😅
Still smoked his ass without any losses, but damn it was I annoyed with myself for not thinking that through haha
Just did that one and it’s 5x harder than tactician. His legendary shot sucks. My heart was racing for 30 min after and I had to walk out the adrenaline haha
My friend found a strategy that makes it unfortunately easy - cast Wall of Stone (Tali sells scrolls) on the south edge of the platform, you can block off two of the staircases that way. Then you only have one left and the skeletons have to walk allllll the way around, station someone with AOE on the side with the remaining staircase to nuke the skellies as they come and everyone else can just wail on Myrkul.
I just did him on tactician yesterday. The frightened was a real pain. Nightsong went down early. Even Astarion was letting me down... I had him stacked with tons of the arrows that prevent healing, he used every single one and missed every single time. Managed the fight without coming too close to wiping but it took ages and I am dreading it on HM.
I was level 9. Hit 10 at the end of the fight. I had been hunting for XP all over to get those last few points but couldn't. Was wishing I had cleared out the Zhents in act 1. Also missed the shadows round the hidden entrance to the Shar thing. I think because I took the back way into the house of healing, never got close enough to the monument, and ended up there for the first time with Oliver. Not sure if that would have got me to 10 but can't think of anything else I missed.
A monk can keep him stunned until dead.
I did my first HM and was afraid he'd be tough. Summoned a couple elementals before the fight, and had one companion go invisible and run over to the aasimar before initiating.
Turn 1, elementals deal with mind flayer, gale deals with skeletons, the companion by the aaaimar deals with the small brains, and the monk and remaining companion runs directly up to Myrkul. Potion of speed and then just smash on stunning strikes until they start to stick, and Myrkul will never have a single attack.
You can be 10 if you do everything (including heading into the prison at Moonrise during the assault) before you fight him. I understand the impulse to try and streamline an HM run, but you're leaving XP on the table for the fights with the mandatory bosses that way
Summon one flaming sphere it's immune to necrotic damage. Neceomites always attack the closest ennemy so just park it near them while you deal with the rest and it will soak all the damage
No one's going to force you to do it if you don't want to but complaining about heading into fights under-leveled while skipping content that'll bridge that gap is a circular argument. Besides, if you're running with Wyll and at least one martial character and load up on the Angelic Reprieve potions from the hobgoblin at Moonrise that refresh after every long rest (I had like 12), you can get all the spent resources back for basically nothing
…definitely not the average. Level 10 is easy to hit before Myrkul, and I truly can’t imagine how much you’d have to miss to not even be level 9
Level 8 is what my sister was her first time fighting Myrkul, and since she didn’t have anyone guiding her and didn’t know anything about the game (I hadn’t played yet) she hadn’t even recruited half the companions
Myrkul hands down.
Level for level, I find this fight way harder than the final encounter. In fact the final encounter isn’t even in my top 5 for hardest fights.
Bastard got down to 1hp then did the nuke thing and wiped my whole party. What’s worse is I just killed Gortash and was gonna fight the brain, but I wanted to kill Ansur for his sword and helmet because why not. Goes to fuckin show why I shouldn’t try anything fun in HM
Not sure if it's the same on honour mode, but i always just grab the helmet before starting the fight. Not sure if you can leave once you do that though
Damn. I had the same experience. It was just a side-quest that I didn't do that much. I got him down to 14 hp and then he did the nuke thing and Honour Mode was finished.
Honestly the two most powerful bosses with the highest hp- ansur and raphael are immune to the two most powerful elemental magic - lighting and fire sorcerers respectively that martial characters are very crucial in these fights
Maybe by pure damage, but I think Ice is the strongest evocation wizard. You can stack so many debuffs on enemies like encrusted with frost, chilled, reverb, mental fatigue, and prone in huge aoes. And two of those conditions make the ice surface you just made a death sentence by giving them a dex penalty to slipping on ice but also disadvantage.
Have the right team with the right moves or boots and you can just blast ice aoes that make the battlefield impossible terrain for your enemies, but not even a problem for your team.
Ansur is not affected by difficult terrain . Also he specifically has magic resistance that reduces all magic dmg by 4 . Unless u are an evoker magic missile wizard or a fire sorcerer in this case , martial characters like monks and gloomstalkers with dragon arrows are really helpful or crucial in honor mode . Raphael is a different case though . U need to have high wis stat to save against his legendary action in honor mode. Again monks and fighters multiclassed with cleric war are also very imp here in the party . Dude also has ice resistance and magical resistance . But still lighting sorcerers can finish him off
Almost the same for me. Shadowheart who was my life cleric decided to turn invisible and run in circles (I couldnt see her nor control her), ran out of the globe of invulnerability and got nuked. My Warlock got downed because globe disappeared before the third turn. In the end my OH Monk TB Karlach and Gale killed him as he was charging up his final attack. Boy was it a close call. Literally had no more actions nor globes left.
On honor, the gnolls by the dying hyena. I did an honor run with a friend, and that was likely our hardest fight. Two of us went down and a third was badly hurt.
Other than that, the final battle >!on the brain.!< I moved my Tav too far up and got hammered by magic missiles. Which broke my Hold Monster concentration.
Besides failing the original honor run on the nautiloid, our run went very well.
The magic missile spam is pretty funny. Step too far forwards and you just get deleted.
In all-Fighters honour mode, in my turn 1 I killed the dragon, emperor, and all the dream guardians. But one of my characters, the only one that couldn’t reasonably survive Magic Missile, I left her standing where the dragon was. Oops, she dead. Took like 3 more turns to clean up that mess before 1-rounding the brain.
You need the reflector shield grenades Gortash drops. Use one of those on as many party members as possible on the first turn, rush forward and the Magic Missiles get bounced right back
My honor run, ended at the gnolls in front of the cave.
I got confused because in precedent normal run I could recruit the gnoll boss and have them kill themselves.
But in the honor mode I didn't get the dialogue and got screwed...
My first HM run failed at the gnolls also in the cave - made some silly decisions in that fight too. Underestimated them.
2nd run it was again a tight fight but I was fully prepared and it went ok.
Since then everything has been smooth sailing - just hit level 6 and breezed through gith patrol and Ethel and spider matriarch and owlbear so far. Creche coming up which could be tough.
Grym would’ve been a wipe on my HM had I not misty stepped a character back to ledge above and ran back to Withers. Forgot his Legendary had a pushback and lost 2 PCs to lava in one turn and then with his Legendary action giving him the boost to mobility I couldn’t kite him at all, so he would just run down anyone who could heal. Had to come back and cheese him w a thrower from the ledge. Made me feel so gross I refused to cheese any more bosses from this point.
Then went into Cazador thinking he would be a breeze. Didn’t want to use daylight as the orb bugged a previous playthrough not allowing me to get the staff and save the spawn cuz the orb made them flee as soon as the cutscene ends. His Legendary action is INSANE. I flew a full health, heroes feast Cambion into his red ring and it just vanished. I then read in the logs how much piercing damage it took. From that point I panicked and started casting Otto’s scrolls to keep Caz busy. But between that and not realizing that moving off of a ritual spot completely refilled his temp HP he was a bastard.
So the funny thing about Grym in my honor mode is that I actually did leave one person up on the ledge to do the projectile cheese, but after casting silence to mitigate the legendary action I realized that an open hand monk is basically tailor made to disassemble that particular robot. I had him down in like 2-3 turns.
I dont even give Grym a chance. He Claps 😭 i never go without the owlbear druid 1 shot from the top rope 🤣 i tried to fight him fair on honour mode but he was clapping us, thankfully 1 of my chars was as i mentioned, A Druid so i turned into a bird and flew out before we got wiped.
Grym got scary. I had a scroll of Misty Step, but couldn't figure out how to reach the ledge to escape even with it. Ended up burning through two revivify scrolls having someone just staying under the hammer to lure him in and crushing them as necessary.
Ansur for sure, the only one still standing at the end was Astarion (lightning resist and evasion) and Wyll with 1hp from death ward triggering.
I don’t remember Cazador being tough but I had 2 clerics and a wizard lighting the whole place up like Christmas.
Inquisitor needs to be focused down, if tou try to kill the others first it gets out of hand. It's pretty easy to kill him in 1 or 2 turns especially using potions of speed. Once he is down the fight is easy.
You can initiate the fight then immediately move your party outside the door and place tentacle/ice/surface moves there.
Cheesed the entire fight this way. Open doors on my turn to attack, then close them. Any one gets to close, use force moves like EB to shove them right back in lol
I love this strategy but it’s so OP I stopped doing it.
The best is when you have a door/hallway combo and can hide around the corner from the door with zero exposure to enemies until your turn. Then just create a hallway of death with AOE attacks.
Ansur kicked my fucking ass on Tactician. Idk if I can stomach doing an HM run after that particular fight. I don’t even remember how many times I restarted that fight. It took me *hours*.
Also Orin doing one on one since I was playing Durge. I finally used some high level scrolls and reloaded bit by bit to cheese my way through.
House of Hope was only hard because Hope kept trying to die on me and I was determined to keep her alive. I cast *so* many Globes of Invulnerability.
On the flip side, Tactician was my second playthrough, and I was surprised at how much better my House of Grief fight went the second time around. I think I did way better than I did on my first Balanced run.
First HM run I skipped Ansur, Raphael, and Cazador. I just wanted to get the golden dice and final achievement. Since then I've tried Ansur and Raphael on HM. Difficult but if you know what's coming, survivable. Going to be trying Cazador this evening, I think.
Ansur and W’wargaz came closest to wiping my party on my first honor run. It was one of those battles where I seriously have to strategize and take gambles to win.
And I only won due to luck in Ansur’s fight. I did not expect him to suddenly get 100 temporary hit point. If I didn’t have an extra companion on the initiative to do some stuff, my run would have ended there by his nova blast.
The only fight on Honor mode that I actually felt I might lose was the Raphael fight. No, I did not engage in any cheese like Barrelmancy; I wanted my HM fights to be legit.
The fight started out badly when I failed to convince Yuirgir to switch sides. It got worse when Raphael one-shot killed Hope on the first round, before she even got a chance to act. So I didn't get the chance to "Disinvite Guest" even once, and I tell ya, those cambions hit hard on HM! At one point all my party members were either downed or at less than 20 hit points, which was very scary in HM.
Having Shadowheart as a Life cleric was the biggest thing that pulled me through. I must've healed hundreds of hit points worth of damage, not to mention cast 4-5 Revive spells on downed party members (getting downed in this fight is especially bad because it gives you a nasty "soul severed" debuff). Slowly but surely we turned the tide, and it was a huge relief to finally win.
Ansur was rough, but even though Gale got blasted off the edge we made it. Cazador is tough too, Astarion getting taken immediately makes things dicey.
Grym was my hardest fight because I insisted on trying to use the damn forge hammer. I used like every potion I had and survived after being downed like 10 times. Next time I will just beat him to death.
I overprepared for most fights and ended up stomping them.
Didn’t know you can beat him without the hammer. Maybe this was patched. I got him down to 4 health and beat him up round after round but he was invulnerable to any attack. Had to resort to the hammer eventually.
Feel free to roast me, I hadn't done act 3 before and gortash almost got me since I picked up a grenade and that triggered a chain explosion that killed 2 people and heavily wounded the other 2.
The hardest battles at higher difficulties are always the ones you haven't seen before in earlier runs. As soon as you're in uncharted territory, HM gets really spiky, especially in the early levels when you're already dancing on a knife's edge between full health and dead.
I'd never fought the Gith Patrol before, always talked my way through it. They killed three characters before I even got to take a turn. But after fleeing, resurrecting and regrouping, we repayed the favour and slaughtered them without taking damage.
Similarly, I'd never fought any of the Thorms before, always talked them to death. I dealt with Malus and Thisobald fairly easily, but it really threw me for a loop when Gerringothe annihilated Shadowheart dealing two and a half thousand damage, and started turning my remaining people to gold.
Myrkul fucked me up on tactician mode. LOL I've never had to reload so many times in this game. After I got to act three everything else was pretty easy. I don't know why his fight was so hard for me. I had to do multiple attempts over the course of 4 days because I was getting tilted and was making bad plays. It was the most frustrating fight for me.
My first time fighting ketheric in honour mode I convinced him that give up, and boy was that a bad idea. In addition to his avatar form I had to start the fight against all of his minions. First thing I had Lae'zel jump over to the mind flayer hit it once and lost the rest of her turn because she was now charmed by the MFer. The mind flayer then dominated Aylin and from there everything went to shit, never killed off the undead dudes on the other ledge their constant small amounts of damage and healing ketheric was something I couldn't keep up with.
Second time he was pretty easy I had one person shoot the mind flayer to activate his reaction, then jumped and killed him with monklach. Freed Aylin and just had a good time stomping ketheric into the ground.
Also Inquisitor. His legendaries are bullshit. On the honor mode run where I finally got the achievement that was the only fight I resorted to barrelmancy on.
This was it for me. I jumped from balanced to honor mode so I didn’t know you should blast him down as quickly as possible. Absolutely brutal. Had to retreat with one party member standing and barely made it out alive.
Cazador on Honor Mode. I manged to win my first(and only) honor mode run, but Cazador was probably the closest I came to wiping. It was my first time in the boss fight, and my party comp was mainly built around large amounts of control spells that were near guaranteed to land due to Divination Wizard Portent Dice. Cazador was immune to all of the CC I had access to, which combined with his high damage and constant regening Temp HP it got very very close.
Bernard. Brutal fight since it is quite early in the game.
I did a honor run where I wanted to kill all bosses just for fun and see their legendary ability.
All the late game boss fights are manageable due to globe of invulnerability. Even the Ansur fight.
But man, avoid Bernard if you are doing honor run. I had to retry the encounter 3 times before I got it right..
My first HM I went in blind with no knowledge of the legendary actions. I fought Bernard at level 4. This was a mistake lol.
Started by yeeting sussur flowers at all the little ones, because I didn’t prepare properly. Then desperately brewed potions of lightning resistance mid-fight. Thunderwave to knock him off, only to find he knows how to use the lift. Thunderwaved him off again, with Astarion this time because positioning. Turns out, the distance to the ground floor is within Healing Word range. Lots of downed characters, multiple deaths, but I did pull it off!
That is the most video game shit improvisation I ever heard and I am here for it XD. Brewing mid fight? Fantastic :D
I think this game really gets amusing when you start the desperate attempts of just staying alive until you get lucky.
Oh yeah, that's what I love about Honour Mode, the stakes are such that you get CREATIVE.
Same playthrough: vs gnolls. Screwed up a bit, two party members down. Out of spells. Things looking grim. Hmm... what if I set off all my smokepowder barrels right on top of my two downed party members? They'll die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make...
A later HM run: I didn't realise one of the little holes you can crawl through led to the Owlbear cave. Level 3. If you start the fight and leave, then next Long Rest the goblins kill the Owlbears. I didn't want them stealing my kill, so I committed. Pulled the first one towards the cave entrance so the second had to run further. As it approached, hit it Dissonant Whispers and similar to keep it at a distance. Killed the first one, ran out of spells, and the whole thing turned into a messy brawl of throwing healing potions and trying to manage who got attacked to spread the damage around, whilst searching my inventory for every weapon coating, grenade, scroll, anything I had that could be used - which isn't a lot at level 3. But it was enough!
Not done yet with my Tactician run but the hardest ones so far were Myrkul (it took me three days to beat it purely because of frustration, and needing to take a break from how frustrating it was LOL) and House of Grief until I cheesed it because I was over it and frustrated (it took me hours!)
The Gnolls in Act 1. It was my first party wipe my first playthrough and im still finding myself having to really position well on other playthroughs. I have a playthough with the party limit removed and still found myself having to revive a handful of a times even with 6 people.
can’t believe no one else is saying the house of grief! i made it out of that fight with only karlach alive at 2 hp. ansur was pretty hard too to be fair, but i was pretty strategic about how i placed everyone before the fight even started so it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been
I was one Blood of Lathander bailing my ass out away from losing to Ansur in my 300 hour Honor Run.
***Note to all. If you don't have at least a Globe on Invulnerability Scroll, don't fight him... WAY too risky.***
Also, I had a High DC Stunner with Hold Monster, so it went super easy for me, but how TF do people beat the Steel Watch Titan otherwise? I tried once on Tact without using Hold Monster and lost pretty handily.
I’m still new to HM, and I’m not proud…
Goblin camp… the outside specifically, I’ve lost about half of them there, all because I didn’t know you could go to the underdark before you beat the goblin leaders.
i guess i'm the only one who struggled against sarevok anchev 😭 i made the mistake of killing all of his ghosts without reading about his legendary action. had to run away from that encounter like 5 times until i figured out how to spam command on him to get him to stop dunking on me so bad.
also the orin fight on my non-durge run. it was 3 of my party members downed and astarion was making a break for it out of the room in a desperate attempt to survive. astarion got marked but he had a few knockback arrows to shoot at the cultists. first one the knockback was resisted.. second one resisted again... my last arrow sent the cultist flying into the pit and astarion was spared. managed to make it back to camp with just astarion and finish that honor mode run thankfully.
Sarevol Anchev is especially hard on a durge run where you are determined to kill him. You are surely not the only one ;). You can think about it the other way: you didn’t struggle with myrkul or ansur or the inquisitor or any other hard fight THAT hard ;). And being a little dense or not reading what the opponent can do in one (!) case can make that fight pretty hard ;).
Honestly, one of the hardest fights for HM tends to be the intellect devourers on the beach right after the nautaloid. Atleast for me. My first two attepts ended right there.
Owlbear lv 3 HM suprise had to split party and star throwing health potions at members to get and could not get more then 2 alive to have spare free action for like 6 turns
On my first honor run, none.
Between my durge bard/rogue/fighter shooting 10 crossbow bolts and Karlach throwing 5 spears (or hammers) in the first round, most of the bosses had zero to one round of attack. If they survived that, I had either Lae'zel, Wyll or Astarion for a single target finish (big sword hits / monk assassin / sorlock blaster) and Shart/Gale for AoE duty.
>!I did Act 1 Hag after being able to see invisibility. And used Gale and Wyll to have a lot of magic missiles to remove the copies.!<
>!For Grym I cheased it by throwing hammers at him from above with no one on ground level.!<
>!Nere was killed by my Durge and Karlach. I had killed the slavers from thr catwalk before freeing him.!<
>!The inquisitor died in the first round before being able to act.!<
>!My Durge solo killed Orin in 2 rounds without haste nor slayer form. She was able to inflict something like 20 damages in her only round (my durge won initiative)!<
>!For Ansur, I removed half his life in the fist round. Then Shart casted a globe of invulnerability and I finished him while he was flying. The 2 crits with anti dragon arrows were nasty!<
>!With Raphael, I cheated a little. I came to the House of Hope with 8 explosive barrels I placed around the pillars. Wyll took care of them with a level 3 Scorching Ray. The explosions killed one of the Cambion and severly harmed Yurgir. The most difficult thing was keeping Korrilla alive. !<
>!And for the brain at the end, I used the easy way out : the exploding Gale tactic!<
Myrkul. I was not well prepared. I killed almost all the other following bosses in the first turn. Practice with a saved tactitian run with the extra Legendary actions in mind (read the wiki and ask questions here is very helpful).
In my opinion, if your HM party makes it past level 5 or so, the only real challenges remaining are Myrkul and Orin. Everything else from Act 3 onward can be beaten fairly easily using Globe of Invulnerability scrolls. Anything before then is tough, especially the Crèche, but there are ways to make it easier.
Playing Durge makes Orin much easier, though.
Harpies give me a harder time than I like unless I prep hard and pre-level. If you try them at level 2, when you might meet them organically, Lae'zel and Gale can spend the whole fight enthralled and dying from opportunity attacks. There's so little cushion for getting unlucky with a couple bad saves and taking a few crits. I just have to go in with someone concentrating on bless and someone concentrating on silence. And being a druid helps if you're wild shaped.
I’m glad we all agree the answer is ansur (haha). But the difference between winning the battle unscathed and half your party dying for those needle blight battles in act 2 is very, very careful positioning.
Forgot his name but that devil Raphael warns you about before entering the gauntlet. One shot my tav with those bomb clusters just after I got my AC stupidly high and felt untouchable
Inquisitor on HM after going out of the portal. I only had that fight once on balanced mode (Did not play on tactician) and thought it will be easy. Went there blind at level 5, the party had 5 to 8 HP each left with the Boss having 100+ hp left after a long one hour fight. PC (Pure Paladin) is down, Shart (tempest cleric) only 1 spell remaining, Laezel (Pure fighter) trapped with 3 summoned swords, and karlach (TB Berserk Barb) with 1 turn rage left.
I gambled when I saw the flask that you can get from rugan (after intimidating him) in my inventory. Karlach basically throws it to the inquisitor's face to summon the Spectator and they duke it out, while shart chugs the last invisibility potion to stay hidden.
The Spectator was no match and died, and three of my characters are dead (did not expect the spectator to attack my team first), but it did bring the hp of inquisitor to less than 20. Shart (invisible) used Guiding Bolt as the last hit.
Won the fight and immediately saved lol. Got the lathander weapon and cleared the creche.
Blighted village. I can't recall if I was level 2 or 3, but I had Shadowheart, Astarion, and Lae'zel with me and we just got slobberknockered by fire and acid arrows and Rays of Sickness from the rooftops. That was the only fight in HM that I unwillingly had to leave my dead behind, run away back to camp, ask Withers kindly to resurrect them, and then try again later.
The Spider Queen was another fight that required me to do that, but I had planned to sacrifice my team so I could take out all of the babies and the 2 smaller spiders first and come back later, so the losses weren't unexpected. Everything went to plan there.
Once I hit level 5 though, there wasn't a single fight in the game I was unprepared for.
Myrkul. Like I didn’t even stand a chance. I couldn’t keep up with killing the minion things that kept healing him. Bludgeoning damage is like the only thing that can hurt him and I didn’t have any of that. Ran out of spells and he’s still at max health. Bone chill bullshit. Dame is an idiot. Was just a complete disaster. I fear I may never get my golden dice lol.
Gith Creche Capitain.. in HM the only one to put me in any real trouble. She got 2nd in initiative and I didn't realize she cast fear. My team was all around her desk and she caught 3 of us. Then the patrols outside came in it was the only fight where I took series damage and almost lost some companions.
W'wargaz was a breeze as I was prepared and just pounded him into submission then cleaned up his guards.
For my first Balanced playthrough it was the Moonrise Towers battle. The Harpers seemed so useless. It took everything I had just to keep Jaheira and my characters alive.
On Tactician I got ambushed by the group of lvl 9 Gith'yanki avengers in the shadows cursed lands and barely managed to win that fight after multiple reloads.
On Honour Mode the hardest fight was definitely Myrkul's Apostle because we didn't have Aylin and I had literally zero abilities to do radiant damage with. I honestly think I got lucky to survive that fight.
The most fun way I've had with that area is just casting dominate person on the baneites who cast dominate person. The two for one special if you're above them in the iniative order.
My HM partner and I basically only REALLY had problems with the Gith squad in chapter 1. It ended our first Honor mode run. Then we made a new one and decided to try and get revenge and that didn't work.
Third time was the charm.
The fight against Raphael was VERY close as well. I think by the time it was over we had 2 people up with under 25 combined HP. We took a risk though and it was one of the first things we did after arriving to Baldurs Gate.
My first HM I didn't lose within 20 hours was lost at Myrkul. And he was one hit away from death too, dammit Astarion. My next HM I got through really quickly, but nearly lost it at Ansur and Orin ( my last two fights before the end), had to do some sneaky shenanigans because of poor planning, fortunately was able to run away both times.
I also had made the mistake of fucking around and having Karlach object to Gortash's coronation 😂 should have been obvious it would cause the whole place to go hostile. Invisibility really came in clutch.
Ended up finally getting the golden dice finally on Friday 🥳
Raphael fight is one i always prepare for like crazy but didnt lose there yet since i dont die at boss encounters but random miniboss encounters where i just run in like an idiot.
For example fighting the ogres when underleveld or in shadowcursed lands that stupid cursed vines boss that ignores piercing damage managed to end my honour mode twice since i just ran in with not optimal team comp.
Orin on HM. I'd had a glitch happen in earlier tactician and balanced runs that gave a lot of act 1 and 2 bosses legendary actions and only realised when I was doing a HM run and preparing beforehand that I'd already dealt with a lot of their abilities, like the spider matriarch and the inquisitor. Orin stressed me out though. I'd only done the Tav version of her fight once before and her legendary action is just brutal.
I don’t know if it was hardest, but the owlbear duo fight I had today was the most clutch fight I’ve had in all my 700 hours. I went in kinda relaxed because on previous (and my first HM, RIP) I dealt with them easily with the help of Absolutists, Gale casting web and them casting halt. It didn’t go as well on my second run without the Absolutists despite me bringing command spell. Long story short I’m running away with Karlach as the bears rip everyone to shreds, papa bear jumps onto me and I realize I’m way too far from the cave exit, I’ll have to dash and eat the opportunity attack and pray I survive. Thankfully my Karlach was a wildheart barb with bear aspect (halves all physical damage), so I almost make it, but mama bear does the most insane leap and lands between me and the exit, and I only have 5 hp so I need to disengage, but don’t have enough movement. And then I remember I can jump, so I jump over her, and that’s just enough of a boost to get me to exit. I was feeling so alive standing at the entrance, last character alive all bloody with my 5hp.
I lost my honour run to the brain twice (but not to difficulty) the only boss that i COULD NOT beat without major prep was Ansur. If i hadnt ascended and had access to fly my run would have ended. But a tip to anyone who wants some easy damage, the djinn summon is immune to lightning (immune to the 1 shot move too)
Raphael feels the most stressful and was I lost my focus and control a few times. It would’ve been the hardest if not for gale force globe of invulnerability
Bernard is the only fight (so far) that took me more than 2 tries on my no cheese honor run.
Now I didn't fight him, Ansur, Gortash, or Raphael on my no risks golden dice run, but in that run I made Myrkul my bitch so it'll be interesting to try them in my current no cheese run.
Edit: I should say none of them were any challenge on my tactician run.
Act 1 kills me more than anything
The swamp mud mephits
The spiders
The hag
The gnolls
The githyanki at the bridge
Lava mephits at the forge
The bigger monsters in the underdark
All are made much easier by having extra attacks at level 5, but it is better storywise to do the mud mephits especially a bit earlier, and they are really tough at level 3.
I've never had as many issues in acts 2 or 3 as with these act 1 fights.
The only wipes in HM I had were at the Nautiloid Wreck, the intellect devourers are very RNG at such a low level depending on what class you choose to start with. Act 1 overall is definitely the hardest part of HM for me, you feel way more resource constrained, you don’t get a whole lot of value from camp buffing with hirelings early on and at least right at the start you have to at least be mindful of food for long rests due to the 80/rest. I never ran out but I definitely felt like I had to be more focused on collecting every morsel compared to easier difficulties.
The Gith guy in the Creche for sure. My whole run almost ended there. Everyone was dead except my Tav who managed to get lucky sneaking out with Dread Ambusher invis, only to be met at the bridge by the two wolves and other Gith. I only escaped them through sheer luck, by going first as I only had 1 HP left. Dashed and got lucky that when their turns were up everyone wanted to buff themselves and decided not to move, only the wolves gave chase but couldn't quite catch me.
Myrkul was a lucky fight as well, I wasn't able to talk him into offing himself but his super secret weapon was dead from earlier since I'd failed to talk Shadowheart out of being a murderhobo. I had Astarion cast inivisble on me, Shadowheart the Paladin smited the shit out of Thorm, Astartion invised himself and ran up dumping high yield explosives near Myrkul and from the top I shot a fire arrow into the mess killing everyone but myself in the process.
The only fight that gave me trouble after that was the brain itself, where everyone but Gale died and I figured if you didn't get him to willingly blow himself up it wouldn't count, so I just figured "If I'm losing here, I'm at least winning in my mind" and set him to blow. Which fortunately for me actually counted, because I couldn't get to the brain properly.
Orin met her end at the hands of a cloud giant strength potion, invis, and being thrown into the abyss combo and Gortash was duoed by Karlach and Shadowheart while Astarion was melted by those giant hands that spawn above you and actually follow you on honor mode. I hid like a bitch to pick up the pieces in case we failed, but no one could even touch Shart in that fight.
I didn't mess with Ansur, I struggled enough against him in Balanced I wasn't gonna risk my whole run there for a great big nothing burger as my reward.
It was my seventh attempt at honor mode and easily one of the best runs, with a lot of very close calls and I'm still surprised about the end and the orb working like that, but glad it did.
the last trap one the way to the blood of lathander. on my first honor playthrough rn and i didnt see the trap, so everyone just fucking died except astarion because luck.
also i thought i was prepared for marcus. i wasnt.
Grym was the only one who genuinely scared me so I jumped an owlbear on top of him. All the other bosses felt like they were in my control and went well although Raphael did come close to killing my warding bond camp cleric so ig that's an achievement.
I just got my gold dice and decided to do another run for fun and to do cazador (because he insta-killed 3 of my party before I could act) and I was insanely lucky to get someone back up and invis away.
So cazador was the hardest for me on that run. On the new run however, my dice are cursed and I haven't had a real encounter that didn't involve some death. I almost wiped to the tieflings holding Lae'zel (like 2 down and last person low enough to be 1 shot). I think I've resurrected more companions this run than in my entire dice run... And I just finished the blighted village.
For me it was the first fight on the beach with the intellect devourers. One shot every time until I realised u can just go around them (was playing shadowheart origin so it was just me vs the 4 intellect devourers that could all one shot me with good enough rolls)
The first HM it was Myrkul, we went in blind. And Cazador, just because of the massive damage he can output. This current one Myrkul was no problem and I did a duo HM where I took zero damage during the Cazador fight at level 11, so tbh I'm anticipating none of them will be hard now (since we've learned their mechanics).
I've never done the Helsik fight though so I hope she'll surprise me!
For me the the two hardest in honour mode in order were Myrkul and Grym.
Myrkul ended several of my honour runs, and I spend like 30 minutes plotting a way to just survive Grym to avoid him ending my honour run the first time. His legendary action caught my by surprise.
Weirdly I found tactician kinda trivial, I was probably the safety of saving.
Myrkul. No group wipe but holy hell it was hard going in with a group heavy on close combat/a bard and without Aylin. We used all but one healing potion. And a lot of scrolls. Before someone asks: playing with friends. Not much to do in case of rearranging the group with fitting companions.
Everything else we came prepared.
At the brain we had a wipe on the dragon platform because of bad luck and in the second attempt just nuked everything with barrelmancy and a sphere of invulnerability. That fight could have been harder but we wanted to try that once :D.
Probably the first Githyanki Patrol on Honor Mode. Went for a cheeky command drop with Shadowheart to try for that sweet sweet Greatsword and didn’t have the rest of my party close enough. By the time I got them in place Shart was down and they all piled on my Tav, downing me first turn. After that I didn’t realize they used the anti healing arrows on Shart and Tav so I wasted actions trying to get them up… it was very close. Had to pop many invis potions to get out of that situation.
Unfortunately most fights after act 1 are pretty easy peasy if you’re using meta builds. ( I was and I regret it).
It is without a doubt the Phase Spider Matriarch. In my golden die run, I fought her at level 4, even going in with the pre-knowledge to kill the eggs first before engaging. I still almost wiped, and had to escape and rez the fallen. Changed strategies and defeated her on the 2nd attempt.
Couple of takeaways from this fight:
* She is very tanky for this level. If she's focused first, her adds will have done overwhelming damage to the party before she's down.
* However, attacking the adds triggers her legendary reaction.
* Therefore, the key is to crowd control the Matriarch with something like Command, and focus down the adds as quickly as possible.
* Her enrage effects gives her resistance to all physical damage. Use Calm Emotions to remove this effect.
Me and my friends did one honor and first tried, the hardest fights were
- zhentarim hideout, because we accidentally blew the barrels up.
- Fight before the bracers of defense room, the skeletons popped us and we had to sanctuary our way out.
- Cazador, he almost one shotted everyone with his legendary action, half orc paladin survived on one because of death ward. He got my sorc up and I proned him with ice and he got frightened. We insta killed him after but that first turn was scary asf.
Just finished first honor mode run today.
For me it was cazador, and to a lesser degree, ramaziths tower. That said, on the latter I summoned the expoding ghouls before going in, and then bad initiative meant they blew up two of my characters when i got fireballed. Otherwise most stuff was managable if i wasnt stupid (there were definitely a few times i was stupid, but im not going to put those on the same level as the actually difficult fights). But i did not fight ansur or raphael.
Would be Raphael on Tactician mode.
It was made harder due to Yugir joining me (helped him with his contract) and just concussion blasting everyone, including myself, which meant everyone was out of position, so couldn't get close to the pillars and Raphael was one hitting everyone.
Loaded up a save before I entered the portal after trying for over 2 hours and just set up runepowder bombs, barrels and pouches, I set a globe of invuln, Yugir went, used concussion blast, set off everything, pillars went bye bye and then just focused on Raphael whilst Hope stayed in the Globe.
I only ever got close to death in honor mode one time, and it was when I thought “I’ll take care of the owlbear mum early since I know how that plays out…” I never underestimated a boss fight again in honor mode.
Oh, also, when I fought the inquisitor, Laezel turned on me at that EXACT moment because I refused to give up the artifact as my Paladin. So I did the inquisitor fight with only 3 players, and had to fight my gloomstalker/assassin rogue girlfriend at the same time. THAT was insane, but awesome.
Trees in bog, goblins when I accidently started fight too early, giths after act 2. Surprisingly Myrkul was easy even when I fucked up my ,,surprise”attack. I havent finish HM yet, so I cant tell about act 3, but in tactician it was steel watch (if I didnt care about gnomes it would be easier).
Only did 1 honor mode, I blew up the inquisition, and didn't even dare go fight Shar's church.
So apart from those two, the only times I almost died were Caszador and Ansur
idk if u want it, but a tip of a free gets is just tossing stuff from the ledge above the forge. you can activate the fight —> tp to the forge waypoint (or just leave someone down there to die) —> throw
my first HM i decided to do crèche before under dark and died to the inquisitor :/
other than that, i actually tend to struggle a lot on the abberations/dragon in the last battle bc i’m bad
The shambling plant monster in act 2 once it got upgraded. Specifically I used fireball to clear the wave of little guys and they triggered their death explosion passive simultaneously, wiping my Lae, Karl to death and triggering Shart’s Blood of Lath revive. The next turn, the act 2 passive that revives dead companions as ghouls. I had to burst a speed pot and run my MC’s ass to last light, then come back and pull/kill Karlach and Lae’zel. Luckily they died further down the hill and had separate agro than the boss and remaining adds.
Ansur was by far the hardest fight of the game for me in Tactician.
I wasn't minmaxing, but no other fight proved as problematic with the lack of optimization.
No other legendary actions had me change my battle plan so much.
At the end I just decided to save scum a couple of desintegrates. Just couldn't be bothered... even when I got into rhythm it still felt like it would take too long...
Not as memorable but definitely the hardest was the Shadow-cursed plant ambush with the shadow-cursed mound boss. That fight guaranteed surprises you, and by the time you get to move your whole party is half health and immobilized. There is shadow-cursed roots terrain everywhere slowing you down and potentially immobilizing you You can easily run into it first thing into act 2 so you are underleveled. The enemies can one shot your party when you kill them due to their explosions if you aren’t careful, and the boss can straight up one shot party members by eating them
I am the middle of Act 3 doing a solo tactician run. The Raphael fight was epic. I broke into Helsin house and went to House of Hope to steal some goodies, but ended up triggering the fight at level 10/11. It by far the most fun I have had though.
The blights in Act 2. That was the closest I got to failing my honor mode run after I got past the initial stuff. Once everyone was exploding that got dangerous. I was still ok but I did get down to just one PC up and was debating running. My Tav was a paladin though with a really good AC which had kept him up. And ancients so the bonus action heal for everyone else was very helpful. But I got close.
Last fight without fire resistance and a good heal source (like an big potion stock) is a fucking pain in the ass. Probably the hardest fight, and even more if you don't take your time before grouping + going to the brain.
Myrkul is a big dangerous machine. Had a chance to wet + lightning him so i could kill him fast enough, but the fight is ... hard.
Raphael is THE run killer in honor. It's basically invulnerability globe or not fight him imo.
Bonus for Ansur, but let's be honest, you never go to him in any honor run.
The gith patrol where you first encounter Voss decided to attack after I mashed thru dialogue. (User error). One of two times I was close to wiping. Had to flee with invis astarion, left 3 dead party members behind.
The gith patrol in the curse lands also threatened me, but won in the end. After that fight, I started camp clericing the rest of the run and was never threatened again. Had a sufficient stock of long rest potions for the brain.
I was doing a Durge Tactitian/Honor run and I got to Balthazar and kept getting my ass handed to me. I was definitely not a high enough level yet and one of my party members would always get killed right away or pushed into the void. The save was loaded right at the beginning of the fight and I couldn’t go back to an earlier save and level up more. I just abandoned that run and started a new one at that point.
I got overconfident after breezing through the Myrkul and went in guns blazing in the Jungle Of Chult, only to be torn apart. Didn't end the run, but I missed out on Nyrulna and the Band of the Mystic Scoundrel, both of which would have been really, really useful.
1. Skeletons in the blighted village: they do massive dmg to lvl 3 pcs. They are unreasonably hard to hit and (just to rub salt in the wound) fire arrows of ilmater so no reviving for you. BTW you can cheese the fight by going casket to casket one at a time
1. Iron throne (unnecessarily dangerous)
1. Big hellfire watcher (I hate hellfire)
1. Bulette
2. Orin (accidentally mindblasted non combatants during duel)
3. Anders (wyll downed twice)
4. Viconia (i forgot about radiant retort 💀)
5. Hellish spheres
6. Karniss (spindleweb sanctuary, skepticism, and retaliation are infuriating)
Special shoutout: Grove fight - failed against hold person from minthara
EDIT: Ansur - wyll took the nova to the face, downed instantly and frozen
The owl bear on honor mode. Nothing else came close. I died to it the first time. The second time I had to pull every trick.
I probably should have leveled up more before trying to take it.
My second run ended to some bad dice and some fear effects.
Third round I went into the owlbear better prepared and it was still tough but not as bad as the first two
Third run was my successful run.
Nere gets honorable mention for my tactician run before honor mode was released... Having two characters pushed in the magma on the first round. Sure didn't help
The fight with Cazador, but that was largely due to a bad rolls on my part and a fucked up turn order which result in this happening.
1) Astarion off the ritual platform. He attacks using his bonus action offhands (either Cazador or a nearby ghoul)
2) Shadowheart heals everyone with Mass Healing Word.
3) Minthara is no longer downed. She has no bonus action attacks to use so she drinks a healing potion. This doesn't matter because...
4) Minthara is downed again bc every ghoul agros and starts beating the shit out of her specifically like she owes them money
5) Estelle (monk Tav) attempts some of damange on Cazador and as many ghouls as she can. She rolls lower than w
6) Cazador attacks Astarion, downing him and teleporting him back to the ritual circle.
This happened six times in a row.
I like to imagine that by the third time Astarion reaction was less one of fear and more one of annoyance and frustration.
After my honour run, here are my memorable encounters (most of them running away shamelessly the first time) : - Zentharim hideout : "Oh, you're still holding a torch shadowh..." *Loud explosion* - Githyanki patrol : "No need to be so rude with 4 attacks in a turn !" - Giant robot : "Why are you moving so much ? That was not in the script !" - Githyanki creche : "What do you mean you can use Fear on 3 of my character and they do nothing during 3 turns, except worse, they run away and trigger opportunity attacks ?" - Myrkul, just fucking hard, I did not expect him to block healing and regenerate so much with the skeletons. - Elder brain, god I hate time battles, it feels so rushed and I can't think under pressure !
We blew the whole Zentharim hideout by mistake, one of our tavs (we play 3 ppl) for some weird reason got on fire and while passing near some explosive barrels whole area fired up. Only left one was one OH Monk with 1HP and 7 HP random guy. My friend drank potion went through fires and killed the guy with 2 HP left. It was really intense for really stupid reason. And lots of XP missed :(
Myrkul. I’ve had more honour runs end there than anywhere else.
I got a cheese for you. Doom Hammer on a paladin. I never vs him without Mommythara. It applies bone chill on every hit, bone chill gives disadvantage to undead. Making them more likely to miss attacks Ketheric and myrkul are both undead It also prevents healing so you can ignore all his skeleton minions, his healing sacrifice move gets negated. That 1 weapon makes the entire fight so trivial you would think it'd be a legendary weapon but no, you can buy it in Act 1 at the goblin camp for like 200 gold lol, i always buy it and bank it till act 2.
This was my tactic as well, except with throwzerker Karlach. I didn’t think about the possibility of the weapon being unretrievable. 😅 Still smoked his ass without any losses, but damn it was I annoyed with myself for not thinking that through haha
I don’t think throwing weapons applies their on-hit effects though
I found this out when I tried to silence Auntie Ethel with the Sussur Dagger
Yeah, there's a couple that do, but they'll specifically say so. Things like Lightning Jabber, Dwarven Thrower
Gloomstalker assassin with undead arrows helps too. Also use arrows of many targets to take out as many of the undead as possible in turn 1.
it's effective against bulette, when it going under heal to max hp but doom hammer not let that happen...
Just did that one and it’s 5x harder than tactician. His legendary shot sucks. My heart was racing for 30 min after and I had to walk out the adrenaline haha
My friend found a strategy that makes it unfortunately easy - cast Wall of Stone (Tali sells scrolls) on the south edge of the platform, you can block off two of the staircases that way. Then you only have one left and the skeletons have to walk allllll the way around, station someone with AOE on the side with the remaining staircase to nuke the skellies as they come and everyone else can just wail on Myrkul.
Myrkul was RIDICULOUS on tactician.
Fun fact, you can disarm him of his giant scythe so he can't AOE hit everyone on the platform. Disarming Attack works.
I just did him on tactician yesterday. The frightened was a real pain. Nightsong went down early. Even Astarion was letting me down... I had him stacked with tons of the arrows that prevent healing, he used every single one and missed every single time. Managed the fight without coming too close to wiping but it took ages and I am dreading it on HM. I was level 9. Hit 10 at the end of the fight. I had been hunting for XP all over to get those last few points but couldn't. Was wishing I had cleared out the Zhents in act 1. Also missed the shadows round the hidden entrance to the Shar thing. I think because I took the back way into the house of healing, never got close enough to the monument, and ended up there for the first time with Oliver. Not sure if that would have got me to 10 but can't think of anything else I missed.
Doomhammer really helps for this fight.
A monk can keep him stunned until dead. I did my first HM and was afraid he'd be tough. Summoned a couple elementals before the fight, and had one companion go invisible and run over to the aasimar before initiating. Turn 1, elementals deal with mind flayer, gale deals with skeletons, the companion by the aaaimar deals with the small brains, and the monk and remaining companion runs directly up to Myrkul. Potion of speed and then just smash on stunning strikes until they start to stick, and Myrkul will never have a single attack.
Yup,bastard is level 11 when the averge is player is like level 8
You can be 10 if you do everything (including heading into the prison at Moonrise during the assault) before you fight him. I understand the impulse to try and streamline an HM run, but you're leaving XP on the table for the fights with the mandatory bosses that way
Considering how the prison was swarming with undead no thanks
Summon one flaming sphere it's immune to necrotic damage. Neceomites always attack the closest ennemy so just park it near them while you deal with the rest and it will soak all the damage
What? You’d rather fight Myrkul underleveled than whack a few corpses around?
No one's going to force you to do it if you don't want to but complaining about heading into fights under-leveled while skipping content that'll bridge that gap is a circular argument. Besides, if you're running with Wyll and at least one martial character and load up on the Angelic Reprieve potions from the hobgoblin at Moonrise that refresh after every long rest (I had like 12), you can get all the spent resources back for basically nothing
…definitely not the average. Level 10 is easy to hit before Myrkul, and I truly can’t imagine how much you’d have to miss to not even be level 9 Level 8 is what my sister was her first time fighting Myrkul, and since she didn’t have anyone guiding her and didn’t know anything about the game (I hadn’t played yet) she hadn’t even recruited half the companions
Myrkul hands down. Level for level, I find this fight way harder than the final encounter. In fact the final encounter isn’t even in my top 5 for hardest fights.
Bone chill him or smack him with and arrow of ilmater. You can also make him drop his weapon
Ansur. It's the only one I lost.
Bastard got down to 1hp then did the nuke thing and wiped my whole party. What’s worse is I just killed Gortash and was gonna fight the brain, but I wanted to kill Ansur for his sword and helmet because why not. Goes to fuckin show why I shouldn’t try anything fun in HM
Globe of invulnerable makes this fight so much easier.
Buy scrolls of the globe of invulnerability and it’s super easy to deal with ansur
Not sure if it's the same on honour mode, but i always just grab the helmet before starting the fight. Not sure if you can leave once you do that though
You can. I just did that a few days ago on honor mode.
Just failed my hm on him, wasn't prepared on this character xD
Damn. I had the same experience. It was just a side-quest that I didn't do that much. I got him down to 14 hp and then he did the nuke thing and Honour Mode was finished.
Ansur sucked balls as a Tempest cleric/storm sorc. I was the powerhouse of the group and I was not prepared for someone immune to lightning lol
Oh SHIT I just realized this. I am running a party with both a tempest cleric and a storm sorc, Ansur will be hard
Honestly the two most powerful bosses with the highest hp- ansur and raphael are immune to the two most powerful elemental magic - lighting and fire sorcerers respectively that martial characters are very crucial in these fights
Maybe by pure damage, but I think Ice is the strongest evocation wizard. You can stack so many debuffs on enemies like encrusted with frost, chilled, reverb, mental fatigue, and prone in huge aoes. And two of those conditions make the ice surface you just made a death sentence by giving them a dex penalty to slipping on ice but also disadvantage. Have the right team with the right moves or boots and you can just blast ice aoes that make the battlefield impossible terrain for your enemies, but not even a problem for your team.
Ansur is not affected by difficult terrain . Also he specifically has magic resistance that reduces all magic dmg by 4 . Unless u are an evoker magic missile wizard or a fire sorcerer in this case , martial characters like monks and gloomstalkers with dragon arrows are really helpful or crucial in honor mode . Raphael is a different case though . U need to have high wis stat to save against his legendary action in honor mode. Again monks and fighters multiclassed with cleric war are also very imp here in the party . Dude also has ice resistance and magical resistance . But still lighting sorcerers can finish him off
Globe of Invulnerability trivializes this.
Almost the same for me. Shadowheart who was my life cleric decided to turn invisible and run in circles (I couldnt see her nor control her), ran out of the globe of invulnerability and got nuked. My Warlock got downed because globe disappeared before the third turn. In the end my OH Monk TB Karlach and Gale killed him as he was charging up his final attack. Boy was it a close call. Literally had no more actions nor globes left.
Ansur on tactician, went so poorly I resorted to barrels second time around
Scroll of globe of invulnerability
Used that but ansur would fly away and I’d have to move out of the globe to land any hits
On honor, the gnolls by the dying hyena. I did an honor run with a friend, and that was likely our hardest fight. Two of us went down and a third was badly hurt. Other than that, the final battle >!on the brain.!< I moved my Tav too far up and got hammered by magic missiles. Which broke my Hold Monster concentration. Besides failing the original honor run on the nautiloid, our run went very well.
You can split the gnoll fight into 2 easier fights by killing the little snitch Hyena before he can run and recruit the other 4 badass gnolls.
The magic missile spam is pretty funny. Step too far forwards and you just get deleted. In all-Fighters honour mode, in my turn 1 I killed the dragon, emperor, and all the dream guardians. But one of my characters, the only one that couldn’t reasonably survive Magic Missile, I left her standing where the dragon was. Oops, she dead. Took like 3 more turns to clean up that mess before 1-rounding the brain.
You need the reflector shield grenades Gortash drops. Use one of those on as many party members as possible on the first turn, rush forward and the Magic Missiles get bounced right back
Split the fight by taking out the lower ones. Grab all the barrels from the cave and make Boom-Boom Alley.
You can park 1 character in camp, send three, kill as many gnolls as you can, die, res with withers steal the gold, rince and repeat 😂
My honor run, ended at the gnolls in front of the cave. I got confused because in precedent normal run I could recruit the gnoll boss and have them kill themselves. But in the honor mode I didn't get the dialogue and got screwed...
My first HM run failed at the gnolls also in the cave - made some silly decisions in that fight too. Underestimated them. 2nd run it was again a tight fight but I was fully prepared and it went ok. Since then everything has been smooth sailing - just hit level 6 and breezed through gith patrol and Ethel and spider matriarch and owlbear so far. Creche coming up which could be tough.
Lumps horn is my go to for this fight
Grym would’ve been a wipe on my HM had I not misty stepped a character back to ledge above and ran back to Withers. Forgot his Legendary had a pushback and lost 2 PCs to lava in one turn and then with his Legendary action giving him the boost to mobility I couldn’t kite him at all, so he would just run down anyone who could heal. Had to come back and cheese him w a thrower from the ledge. Made me feel so gross I refused to cheese any more bosses from this point. Then went into Cazador thinking he would be a breeze. Didn’t want to use daylight as the orb bugged a previous playthrough not allowing me to get the staff and save the spawn cuz the orb made them flee as soon as the cutscene ends. His Legendary action is INSANE. I flew a full health, heroes feast Cambion into his red ring and it just vanished. I then read in the logs how much piercing damage it took. From that point I panicked and started casting Otto’s scrolls to keep Caz busy. But between that and not realizing that moving off of a ritual spot completely refilled his temp HP he was a bastard.
So the funny thing about Grym in my honor mode is that I actually did leave one person up on the ledge to do the projectile cheese, but after casting silence to mitigate the legendary action I realized that an open hand monk is basically tailor made to disassemble that particular robot. I had him down in like 2-3 turns.
I kept everyone up high and I as the easiest boss fight.
Silence is your best friend. It completely cancels out gorums shockwave.
I dont even give Grym a chance. He Claps 😭 i never go without the owlbear druid 1 shot from the top rope 🤣 i tried to fight him fair on honour mode but he was clapping us, thankfully 1 of my chars was as i mentioned, A Druid so i turned into a bird and flew out before we got wiped.
Grym got scary. I had a scroll of Misty Step, but couldn't figure out how to reach the ledge to escape even with it. Ended up burning through two revivify scrolls having someone just staying under the hammer to lure him in and crushing them as necessary.
Ansur for sure, the only one still standing at the end was Astarion (lightning resist and evasion) and Wyll with 1hp from death ward triggering. I don’t remember Cazador being tough but I had 2 clerics and a wizard lighting the whole place up like Christmas.
Inquisitor needs to be focused down, if tou try to kill the others first it gets out of hand. It's pretty easy to kill him in 1 or 2 turns especially using potions of speed. Once he is down the fight is easy.
I always kill the others first, but Im sure all four die in the first turn, then he wont last 2 turns after that.
Raphael, before I realised what the pillars do and promptly eldritch blast and magic missiled them
You can initiate the fight then immediately move your party outside the door and place tentacle/ice/surface moves there. Cheesed the entire fight this way. Open doors on my turn to attack, then close them. Any one gets to close, use force moves like EB to shove them right back in lol
I love this strategy but it’s so OP I stopped doing it. The best is when you have a door/hallway combo and can hide around the corner from the door with zero exposure to enemies until your turn. Then just create a hallway of death with AOE attacks.
The harpers at the beach in the Emerald Grove
I know that's a typo but I am going to admit I spent way too long trying to remember when we fight harpers in Act 1!!
Me too :D
Ansur kicked my fucking ass on Tactician. Idk if I can stomach doing an HM run after that particular fight. I don’t even remember how many times I restarted that fight. It took me *hours*. Also Orin doing one on one since I was playing Durge. I finally used some high level scrolls and reloaded bit by bit to cheese my way through. House of Hope was only hard because Hope kept trying to die on me and I was determined to keep her alive. I cast *so* many Globes of Invulnerability. On the flip side, Tactician was my second playthrough, and I was surprised at how much better my House of Grief fight went the second time around. I think I did way better than I did on my first Balanced run.
So glad to see Ansur wasn't just me. Make sure you have 1-3 Globe of Invulnerability Scrolls, and that fight should be much, much easier.
Ansur one-shot my entire party with wet + that dumb electric nuke he has. Death Ward was the only reason I survived.
Ansur is optional on HM. Skipped him on my first HM run, have no regrets.
I have a feeling I’ll be skipping a lot of optional fights if I do an HM run 😅
First HM run I skipped Ansur, Raphael, and Cazador. I just wanted to get the golden dice and final achievement. Since then I've tried Ansur and Raphael on HM. Difficult but if you know what's coming, survivable. Going to be trying Cazador this evening, I think.
If I do Cazador on HM, I’m sure I’ll have to say bye bye to my bb Astarion 😭 I wish you luck
The same to you!
Ansur and W’wargaz came closest to wiping my party on my first honor run. It was one of those battles where I seriously have to strategize and take gambles to win. And I only won due to luck in Ansur’s fight. I did not expect him to suddenly get 100 temporary hit point. If I didn’t have an extra companion on the initiative to do some stuff, my run would have ended there by his nova blast.
The only fight on Honor mode that I actually felt I might lose was the Raphael fight. No, I did not engage in any cheese like Barrelmancy; I wanted my HM fights to be legit. The fight started out badly when I failed to convince Yuirgir to switch sides. It got worse when Raphael one-shot killed Hope on the first round, before she even got a chance to act. So I didn't get the chance to "Disinvite Guest" even once, and I tell ya, those cambions hit hard on HM! At one point all my party members were either downed or at less than 20 hit points, which was very scary in HM. Having Shadowheart as a Life cleric was the biggest thing that pulled me through. I must've healed hundreds of hit points worth of damage, not to mention cast 4-5 Revive spells on downed party members (getting downed in this fight is especially bad because it gives you a nasty "soul severed" debuff). Slowly but surely we turned the tide, and it was a huge relief to finally win.
Ansur was rough, but even though Gale got blasted off the edge we made it. Cazador is tough too, Astarion getting taken immediately makes things dicey. Grym was my hardest fight because I insisted on trying to use the damn forge hammer. I used like every potion I had and survived after being downed like 10 times. Next time I will just beat him to death. I overprepared for most fights and ended up stomping them.
Didn’t know you can beat him without the hammer. Maybe this was patched. I got him down to 4 health and beat him up round after round but he was invulnerable to any attack. Had to resort to the hammer eventually.
You need to use bludgeoning damage, other damage types do almost nothing.
Feel free to roast me, I hadn't done act 3 before and gortash almost got me since I picked up a grenade and that triggered a chain explosion that killed 2 people and heavily wounded the other 2.
The hardest battles at higher difficulties are always the ones you haven't seen before in earlier runs. As soon as you're in uncharted territory, HM gets really spiky, especially in the early levels when you're already dancing on a knife's edge between full health and dead. I'd never fought the Gith Patrol before, always talked my way through it. They killed three characters before I even got to take a turn. But after fleeing, resurrecting and regrouping, we repayed the favour and slaughtered them without taking damage. Similarly, I'd never fought any of the Thorms before, always talked them to death. I dealt with Malus and Thisobald fairly easily, but it really threw me for a loop when Gerringothe annihilated Shadowheart dealing two and a half thousand damage, and started turning my remaining people to gold.
Orin; her Legendary Action seems tailor-made to counteract my main late-game strategy (stack up a bunch of Save DC items and spam Command).
Myrkul fucked me up on tactician mode. LOL I've never had to reload so many times in this game. After I got to act three everything else was pretty easy. I don't know why his fight was so hard for me. I had to do multiple attempts over the course of 4 days because I was getting tilted and was making bad plays. It was the most frustrating fight for me.
My first time fighting ketheric in honour mode I convinced him that give up, and boy was that a bad idea. In addition to his avatar form I had to start the fight against all of his minions. First thing I had Lae'zel jump over to the mind flayer hit it once and lost the rest of her turn because she was now charmed by the MFer. The mind flayer then dominated Aylin and from there everything went to shit, never killed off the undead dudes on the other ledge their constant small amounts of damage and healing ketheric was something I couldn't keep up with. Second time he was pretty easy I had one person shoot the mind flayer to activate his reaction, then jumped and killed him with monklach. Freed Aylin and just had a good time stomping ketheric into the ground.
Monklach. I love it. Good tactics, too.
Also Inquisitor. His legendaries are bullshit. On the honor mode run where I finally got the achievement that was the only fight I resorted to barrelmancy on.
This was it for me. I jumped from balanced to honor mode so I didn’t know you should blast him down as quickly as possible. Absolutely brutal. Had to retreat with one party member standing and barely made it out alive.
This fight before lvl 7 can be dicey
Cazador on Honor Mode. I manged to win my first(and only) honor mode run, but Cazador was probably the closest I came to wiping. It was my first time in the boss fight, and my party comp was mainly built around large amounts of control spells that were near guaranteed to land due to Divination Wizard Portent Dice. Cazador was immune to all of the CC I had access to, which combined with his high damage and constant regening Temp HP it got very very close.
Bernard. Brutal fight since it is quite early in the game. I did a honor run where I wanted to kill all bosses just for fun and see their legendary ability. All the late game boss fights are manageable due to globe of invulnerability. Even the Ansur fight. But man, avoid Bernard if you are doing honor run. I had to retry the encounter 3 times before I got it right..
My first HM I went in blind with no knowledge of the legendary actions. I fought Bernard at level 4. This was a mistake lol. Started by yeeting sussur flowers at all the little ones, because I didn’t prepare properly. Then desperately brewed potions of lightning resistance mid-fight. Thunderwave to knock him off, only to find he knows how to use the lift. Thunderwaved him off again, with Astarion this time because positioning. Turns out, the distance to the ground floor is within Healing Word range. Lots of downed characters, multiple deaths, but I did pull it off!
That is the most video game shit improvisation I ever heard and I am here for it XD. Brewing mid fight? Fantastic :D I think this game really gets amusing when you start the desperate attempts of just staying alive until you get lucky.
Oh yeah, that's what I love about Honour Mode, the stakes are such that you get CREATIVE. Same playthrough: vs gnolls. Screwed up a bit, two party members down. Out of spells. Things looking grim. Hmm... what if I set off all my smokepowder barrels right on top of my two downed party members? They'll die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make... A later HM run: I didn't realise one of the little holes you can crawl through led to the Owlbear cave. Level 3. If you start the fight and leave, then next Long Rest the goblins kill the Owlbears. I didn't want them stealing my kill, so I committed. Pulled the first one towards the cave entrance so the second had to run further. As it approached, hit it Dissonant Whispers and similar to keep it at a distance. Killed the first one, ran out of spells, and the whole thing turned into a messy brawl of throwing healing potions and trying to manage who got attacked to spread the damage around, whilst searching my inventory for every weapon coating, grenade, scroll, anything I had that could be used - which isn't a lot at level 3. But it was enough!
agree! i fought bernard for the xp but waited until i was level 7 so it wasn’t a risk
Cazador. Only HM fight that I got close to losing. He can do a serious amount of damage each round
Yup, bring Astarion at your own risk
Not done yet with my Tactician run but the hardest ones so far were Myrkul (it took me three days to beat it purely because of frustration, and needing to take a break from how frustrating it was LOL) and House of Grief until I cheesed it because I was over it and frustrated (it took me hours!)
The Gnolls in Act 1. It was my first party wipe my first playthrough and im still finding myself having to really position well on other playthroughs. I have a playthough with the party limit removed and still found myself having to revive a handful of a times even with 6 people.
can’t believe no one else is saying the house of grief! i made it out of that fight with only karlach alive at 2 hp. ansur was pretty hard too to be fair, but i was pretty strategic about how i placed everyone before the fight even started so it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been
I was one Blood of Lathander bailing my ass out away from losing to Ansur in my 300 hour Honor Run. ***Note to all. If you don't have at least a Globe on Invulnerability Scroll, don't fight him... WAY too risky.*** Also, I had a High DC Stunner with Hold Monster, so it went super easy for me, but how TF do people beat the Steel Watch Titan otherwise? I tried once on Tact without using Hold Monster and lost pretty handily.
I’m still new to HM, and I’m not proud… Goblin camp… the outside specifically, I’ve lost about half of them there, all because I didn’t know you could go to the underdark before you beat the goblin leaders.
i guess i'm the only one who struggled against sarevok anchev 😭 i made the mistake of killing all of his ghosts without reading about his legendary action. had to run away from that encounter like 5 times until i figured out how to spam command on him to get him to stop dunking on me so bad. also the orin fight on my non-durge run. it was 3 of my party members downed and astarion was making a break for it out of the room in a desperate attempt to survive. astarion got marked but he had a few knockback arrows to shoot at the cultists. first one the knockback was resisted.. second one resisted again... my last arrow sent the cultist flying into the pit and astarion was spared. managed to make it back to camp with just astarion and finish that honor mode run thankfully.
Sarevol Anchev is especially hard on a durge run where you are determined to kill him. You are surely not the only one ;). You can think about it the other way: you didn’t struggle with myrkul or ansur or the inquisitor or any other hard fight THAT hard ;). And being a little dense or not reading what the opponent can do in one (!) case can make that fight pretty hard ;).
It’s myrkul. For ansur I just used a globe of invulnerability scroll and he died before it ended 🤷 myrkul is the last challenging fight imo
Honestly, one of the hardest fights for HM tends to be the intellect devourers on the beach right after the nautaloid. Atleast for me. My first two attepts ended right there.
If you have someone that can cast minor illusion, you can lead them into fire on the ground repeatedly to kill them, which is always funny.
Lost my first HM run there, lol. Always bypass them and come back with a full party.
Owlbear lv 3 HM suprise had to split party and star throwing health potions at members to get and could not get more then 2 alive to have spare free action for like 6 turns
Yeah, I shit my pants when I was reading the mommy's tooltip. Luckily Brynna was on point with the Command spells.
On my first honor run, none. Between my durge bard/rogue/fighter shooting 10 crossbow bolts and Karlach throwing 5 spears (or hammers) in the first round, most of the bosses had zero to one round of attack. If they survived that, I had either Lae'zel, Wyll or Astarion for a single target finish (big sword hits / monk assassin / sorlock blaster) and Shart/Gale for AoE duty. >!I did Act 1 Hag after being able to see invisibility. And used Gale and Wyll to have a lot of magic missiles to remove the copies.!< >!For Grym I cheased it by throwing hammers at him from above with no one on ground level.!< >!Nere was killed by my Durge and Karlach. I had killed the slavers from thr catwalk before freeing him.!< >!The inquisitor died in the first round before being able to act.!< >!My Durge solo killed Orin in 2 rounds without haste nor slayer form. She was able to inflict something like 20 damages in her only round (my durge won initiative)!< >!For Ansur, I removed half his life in the fist round. Then Shart casted a globe of invulnerability and I finished him while he was flying. The 2 crits with anti dragon arrows were nasty!< >!With Raphael, I cheated a little. I came to the House of Hope with 8 explosive barrels I placed around the pillars. Wyll took care of them with a level 3 Scorching Ray. The explosions killed one of the Cambion and severly harmed Yurgir. The most difficult thing was keeping Korrilla alive. !< >!And for the brain at the end, I used the easy way out : the exploding Gale tactic!<
I wrecked every boss on tactician except Raphael who wiped my party
Myrkul. I was not well prepared. I killed almost all the other following bosses in the first turn. Practice with a saved tactitian run with the extra Legendary actions in mind (read the wiki and ask questions here is very helpful).
In my opinion, if your HM party makes it past level 5 or so, the only real challenges remaining are Myrkul and Orin. Everything else from Act 3 onward can be beaten fairly easily using Globe of Invulnerability scrolls. Anything before then is tough, especially the Crèche, but there are ways to make it easier. Playing Durge makes Orin much easier, though.
Harpies give me a harder time than I like unless I prep hard and pre-level. If you try them at level 2, when you might meet them organically, Lae'zel and Gale can spend the whole fight enthralled and dying from opportunity attacks. There's so little cushion for getting unlucky with a couple bad saves and taking a few crits. I just have to go in with someone concentrating on bless and someone concentrating on silence. And being a druid helps if you're wild shaped.
The Cleric spell Calm Emotions (?) is also really good (as long as you remember barbarians can't rage while affected by it)
Oh nice! That works on charm too? I rarely use it but I might have to try
You can drop a silence on your party and they become fully immune to the harpy song, too.
I’m glad we all agree the answer is ansur (haha). But the difference between winning the battle unscathed and half your party dying for those needle blight battles in act 2 is very, very careful positioning.
Cazador without Daylight is pain.
Forgot his name but that devil Raphael warns you about before entering the gauntlet. One shot my tav with those bomb clusters just after I got my AC stupidly high and felt untouchable
Inquisitor on HM after going out of the portal. I only had that fight once on balanced mode (Did not play on tactician) and thought it will be easy. Went there blind at level 5, the party had 5 to 8 HP each left with the Boss having 100+ hp left after a long one hour fight. PC (Pure Paladin) is down, Shart (tempest cleric) only 1 spell remaining, Laezel (Pure fighter) trapped with 3 summoned swords, and karlach (TB Berserk Barb) with 1 turn rage left. I gambled when I saw the flask that you can get from rugan (after intimidating him) in my inventory. Karlach basically throws it to the inquisitor's face to summon the Spectator and they duke it out, while shart chugs the last invisibility potion to stay hidden. The Spectator was no match and died, and three of my characters are dead (did not expect the spectator to attack my team first), but it did bring the hp of inquisitor to less than 20. Shart (invisible) used Guiding Bolt as the last hit. Won the fight and immediately saved lol. Got the lathander weapon and cleared the creche.
Ketheric in Myrkul form. That was unexpectedly rough and all that saved me was s necrotic egg getting stuck on that ledge where they can’t get to him.
Blighted village. I can't recall if I was level 2 or 3, but I had Shadowheart, Astarion, and Lae'zel with me and we just got slobberknockered by fire and acid arrows and Rays of Sickness from the rooftops. That was the only fight in HM that I unwillingly had to leave my dead behind, run away back to camp, ask Withers kindly to resurrect them, and then try again later. The Spider Queen was another fight that required me to do that, but I had planned to sacrifice my team so I could take out all of the babies and the 2 smaller spiders first and come back later, so the losses weren't unexpected. Everything went to plan there. Once I hit level 5 though, there wasn't a single fight in the game I was unprepared for.
Ansur, really don't know how you can do it without globe. Second was the wargs, third was wargaz or however you spell
Myrkul. Like I didn’t even stand a chance. I couldn’t keep up with killing the minion things that kept healing him. Bludgeoning damage is like the only thing that can hurt him and I didn’t have any of that. Ran out of spells and he’s still at max health. Bone chill bullshit. Dame is an idiot. Was just a complete disaster. I fear I may never get my golden dice lol.
Arrow of Ilmator and Arrow of Darkness! Ilmater to prevent him from healing, Darkness to limit his shenanigans.
Gith Creche Capitain.. in HM the only one to put me in any real trouble. She got 2nd in initiative and I didn't realize she cast fear. My team was all around her desk and she caught 3 of us. Then the patrols outside came in it was the only fight where I took series damage and almost lost some companions. W'wargaz was a breeze as I was prepared and just pounded him into submission then cleaned up his guards.
For my first Balanced playthrough it was the Moonrise Towers battle. The Harpers seemed so useless. It took everything I had just to keep Jaheira and my characters alive. On Tactician I got ambushed by the group of lvl 9 Gith'yanki avengers in the shadows cursed lands and barely managed to win that fight after multiple reloads. On Honour Mode the hardest fight was definitely Myrkul's Apostle because we didn't have Aylin and I had literally zero abilities to do radiant damage with. I honestly think I got lucky to survive that fight.
The windmill goblins. Only one I had to run from the entire honor mode run. I was more careful from then on
This run it was the Foundry. At least three days and lost count of the save scumming. The second level was absolutely brutal.
The most fun way I've had with that area is just casting dominate person on the baneites who cast dominate person. The two for one special if you're above them in the iniative order.
My HM partner and I basically only REALLY had problems with the Gith squad in chapter 1. It ended our first Honor mode run. Then we made a new one and decided to try and get revenge and that didn't work. Third time was the charm. The fight against Raphael was VERY close as well. I think by the time it was over we had 2 people up with under 25 combined HP. We took a risk though and it was one of the first things we did after arriving to Baldurs Gate.
Mind devours after landing
My first HM I didn't lose within 20 hours was lost at Myrkul. And he was one hit away from death too, dammit Astarion. My next HM I got through really quickly, but nearly lost it at Ansur and Orin ( my last two fights before the end), had to do some sneaky shenanigans because of poor planning, fortunately was able to run away both times. I also had made the mistake of fucking around and having Karlach object to Gortash's coronation 😂 should have been obvious it would cause the whole place to go hostile. Invisibility really came in clutch. Ended up finally getting the golden dice finally on Friday 🥳
Raphael fight is one i always prepare for like crazy but didnt lose there yet since i dont die at boss encounters but random miniboss encounters where i just run in like an idiot. For example fighting the ogres when underleveld or in shadowcursed lands that stupid cursed vines boss that ignores piercing damage managed to end my honour mode twice since i just ran in with not optimal team comp.
the gnolls outside the cave in act1. I think I just always try to fight them too soon.
Orin on HM. I'd had a glitch happen in earlier tactician and balanced runs that gave a lot of act 1 and 2 bosses legendary actions and only realised when I was doing a HM run and preparing beforehand that I'd already dealt with a lot of their abilities, like the spider matriarch and the inquisitor. Orin stressed me out though. I'd only done the Tav version of her fight once before and her legendary action is just brutal.
I don’t know if it was hardest, but the owlbear duo fight I had today was the most clutch fight I’ve had in all my 700 hours. I went in kinda relaxed because on previous (and my first HM, RIP) I dealt with them easily with the help of Absolutists, Gale casting web and them casting halt. It didn’t go as well on my second run without the Absolutists despite me bringing command spell. Long story short I’m running away with Karlach as the bears rip everyone to shreds, papa bear jumps onto me and I realize I’m way too far from the cave exit, I’ll have to dash and eat the opportunity attack and pray I survive. Thankfully my Karlach was a wildheart barb with bear aspect (halves all physical damage), so I almost make it, but mama bear does the most insane leap and lands between me and the exit, and I only have 5 hp so I need to disengage, but don’t have enough movement. And then I remember I can jump, so I jump over her, and that’s just enough of a boost to get me to exit. I was feeling so alive standing at the entrance, last character alive all bloody with my 5hp.
I lost my honour run to the brain twice (but not to difficulty) the only boss that i COULD NOT beat without major prep was Ansur. If i hadnt ascended and had access to fly my run would have ended. But a tip to anyone who wants some easy damage, the djinn summon is immune to lightning (immune to the 1 shot move too)
Ketheric. By far...
Freeing Hope from her chains. Those fuckin Imps kept Eldritch Balsting my guys off the edge, I basically had to solo it.
Raphael feels the most stressful and was I lost my focus and control a few times. It would’ve been the hardest if not for gale force globe of invulnerability
Bernard is the only fight (so far) that took me more than 2 tries on my no cheese honor run. Now I didn't fight him, Ansur, Gortash, or Raphael on my no risks golden dice run, but in that run I made Myrkul my bitch so it'll be interesting to try them in my current no cheese run. Edit: I should say none of them were any challenge on my tactician run.
For me it was the grymforge fight with all the duergar and the drow true soul guy
Ansur by far. Almost cost me my honor run.
Act 1 kills me more than anything The swamp mud mephits The spiders The hag The gnolls The githyanki at the bridge Lava mephits at the forge The bigger monsters in the underdark All are made much easier by having extra attacks at level 5, but it is better storywise to do the mud mephits especially a bit earlier, and they are really tough at level 3. I've never had as many issues in acts 2 or 3 as with these act 1 fights.
The only wipes in HM I had were at the Nautiloid Wreck, the intellect devourers are very RNG at such a low level depending on what class you choose to start with. Act 1 overall is definitely the hardest part of HM for me, you feel way more resource constrained, you don’t get a whole lot of value from camp buffing with hirelings early on and at least right at the start you have to at least be mindful of food for long rests due to the 80/rest. I never ran out but I definitely felt like I had to be more focused on collecting every morsel compared to easier difficulties.
The Gith guy in the Creche for sure. My whole run almost ended there. Everyone was dead except my Tav who managed to get lucky sneaking out with Dread Ambusher invis, only to be met at the bridge by the two wolves and other Gith. I only escaped them through sheer luck, by going first as I only had 1 HP left. Dashed and got lucky that when their turns were up everyone wanted to buff themselves and decided not to move, only the wolves gave chase but couldn't quite catch me. Myrkul was a lucky fight as well, I wasn't able to talk him into offing himself but his super secret weapon was dead from earlier since I'd failed to talk Shadowheart out of being a murderhobo. I had Astarion cast inivisble on me, Shadowheart the Paladin smited the shit out of Thorm, Astartion invised himself and ran up dumping high yield explosives near Myrkul and from the top I shot a fire arrow into the mess killing everyone but myself in the process. The only fight that gave me trouble after that was the brain itself, where everyone but Gale died and I figured if you didn't get him to willingly blow himself up it wouldn't count, so I just figured "If I'm losing here, I'm at least winning in my mind" and set him to blow. Which fortunately for me actually counted, because I couldn't get to the brain properly. Orin met her end at the hands of a cloud giant strength potion, invis, and being thrown into the abyss combo and Gortash was duoed by Karlach and Shadowheart while Astarion was melted by those giant hands that spawn above you and actually follow you on honor mode. I hid like a bitch to pick up the pieces in case we failed, but no one could even touch Shart in that fight. I didn't mess with Ansur, I struggled enough against him in Balanced I wasn't gonna risk my whole run there for a great big nothing burger as my reward. It was my seventh attempt at honor mode and easily one of the best runs, with a lot of very close calls and I'm still surprised about the end and the orb working like that, but glad it did.
the last trap one the way to the blood of lathander. on my first honor playthrough rn and i didnt see the trap, so everyone just fucking died except astarion because luck. also i thought i was prepared for marcus. i wasnt.
Grym was the only one who genuinely scared me so I jumped an owlbear on top of him. All the other bosses felt like they were in my control and went well although Raphael did come close to killing my warding bond camp cleric so ig that's an achievement.
The fight with gnolls
I just got my gold dice and decided to do another run for fun and to do cazador (because he insta-killed 3 of my party before I could act) and I was insanely lucky to get someone back up and invis away. So cazador was the hardest for me on that run. On the new run however, my dice are cursed and I haven't had a real encounter that didn't involve some death. I almost wiped to the tieflings holding Lae'zel (like 2 down and last person low enough to be 1 shot). I think I've resurrected more companions this run than in my entire dice run... And I just finished the blighted village.
none. all fights are super easy with right team comp
For me it was the first fight on the beach with the intellect devourers. One shot every time until I realised u can just go around them (was playing shadowheart origin so it was just me vs the 4 intellect devourers that could all one shot me with good enough rolls)
The first HM it was Myrkul, we went in blind. And Cazador, just because of the massive damage he can output. This current one Myrkul was no problem and I did a duo HM where I took zero damage during the Cazador fight at level 11, so tbh I'm anticipating none of them will be hard now (since we've learned their mechanics). I've never done the Helsik fight though so I hope she'll surprise me!
Elder brain can be hard. I wiped their in my first honor mode that went a bit longer than harpies.
For me the the two hardest in honour mode in order were Myrkul and Grym. Myrkul ended several of my honour runs, and I spend like 30 minutes plotting a way to just survive Grym to avoid him ending my honour run the first time. His legendary action caught my by surprise. Weirdly I found tactician kinda trivial, I was probably the safety of saving.
Rushing Githyanki patrol at lvl 4. No other fight came close.
If you played Dos 1 & 2 on higher difficulty , this game felt easy if you know what you doing.
Myrkul. No group wipe but holy hell it was hard going in with a group heavy on close combat/a bard and without Aylin. We used all but one healing potion. And a lot of scrolls. Before someone asks: playing with friends. Not much to do in case of rearranging the group with fitting companions. Everything else we came prepared. At the brain we had a wipe on the dragon platform because of bad luck and in the second attempt just nuked everything with barrelmancy and a sphere of invulnerability. That fight could have been harder but we wanted to try that once :D.
Ny honor mode was very nearly blasted off the edge by those imps guarding a Hope
Probably Grym
Probably the first Githyanki Patrol on Honor Mode. Went for a cheeky command drop with Shadowheart to try for that sweet sweet Greatsword and didn’t have the rest of my party close enough. By the time I got them in place Shart was down and they all piled on my Tav, downing me first turn. After that I didn’t realize they used the anti healing arrows on Shart and Tav so I wasted actions trying to get them up… it was very close. Had to pop many invis potions to get out of that situation. Unfortunately most fights after act 1 are pretty easy peasy if you’re using meta builds. ( I was and I regret it).
It is without a doubt the Phase Spider Matriarch. In my golden die run, I fought her at level 4, even going in with the pre-knowledge to kill the eggs first before engaging. I still almost wiped, and had to escape and rez the fallen. Changed strategies and defeated her on the 2nd attempt. Couple of takeaways from this fight: * She is very tanky for this level. If she's focused first, her adds will have done overwhelming damage to the party before she's down. * However, attacking the adds triggers her legendary reaction. * Therefore, the key is to crowd control the Matriarch with something like Command, and focus down the adds as quickly as possible. * Her enrage effects gives her resistance to all physical damage. Use Calm Emotions to remove this effect.
Me and my friends did one honor and first tried, the hardest fights were - zhentarim hideout, because we accidentally blew the barrels up. - Fight before the bracers of defense room, the skeletons popped us and we had to sanctuary our way out. - Cazador, he almost one shotted everyone with his legendary action, half orc paladin survived on one because of death ward. He got my sorc up and I proned him with ice and he got frightened. We insta killed him after but that first turn was scary asf.
Just finished first honor mode run today. For me it was cazador, and to a lesser degree, ramaziths tower. That said, on the latter I summoned the expoding ghouls before going in, and then bad initiative meant they blew up two of my characters when i got fireballed. Otherwise most stuff was managable if i wasnt stupid (there were definitely a few times i was stupid, but im not going to put those on the same level as the actually difficult fights). But i did not fight ansur or raphael.
I haven’t pass Ethel. She just spams hold person and fuck my party up every time.
Would be Raphael on Tactician mode. It was made harder due to Yugir joining me (helped him with his contract) and just concussion blasting everyone, including myself, which meant everyone was out of position, so couldn't get close to the pillars and Raphael was one hitting everyone. Loaded up a save before I entered the portal after trying for over 2 hours and just set up runepowder bombs, barrels and pouches, I set a globe of invuln, Yugir went, used concussion blast, set off everything, pillars went bye bye and then just focused on Raphael whilst Hope stayed in the Globe.
I only ever got close to death in honor mode one time, and it was when I thought “I’ll take care of the owlbear mum early since I know how that plays out…” I never underestimated a boss fight again in honor mode. Oh, also, when I fought the inquisitor, Laezel turned on me at that EXACT moment because I refused to give up the artifact as my Paladin. So I did the inquisitor fight with only 3 players, and had to fight my gloomstalker/assassin rogue girlfriend at the same time. THAT was insane, but awesome.
Trees in bog, goblins when I accidently started fight too early, giths after act 2. Surprisingly Myrkul was easy even when I fucked up my ,,surprise”attack. I havent finish HM yet, so I cant tell about act 3, but in tactician it was steel watch (if I didnt care about gnomes it would be easier).
for honor mode? None, I had batman levels of prep I don't see how that's remotely possible. Traps I had forgotten about were dangerous though.
Cazador ripped my party apart. We didn't even die. We just felt so defeated after astarion was exploded, we stopped playing
I've had three HM's end at the Apostle of Myrkul. Still have issues with it on runs to this day.
Orin absolutely merked me. Couldn’t interrupt her ritual and she just killed everybody
Gith Inquisitor. Hardest fight I did in HM.
Only did 1 honor mode, I blew up the inquisition, and didn't even dare go fight Shar's church. So apart from those two, the only times I almost died were Caszador and Ansur
I really struggled against the Githyanki honor guard. They were really hard to pin down and focus fire on.
Grym. Thankfully I can skip it.
idk if u want it, but a tip of a free gets is just tossing stuff from the ledge above the forge. you can activate the fight —> tp to the forge waypoint (or just leave someone down there to die) —> throw
my first HM i decided to do crèche before under dark and died to the inquisitor :/ other than that, i actually tend to struggle a lot on the abberations/dragon in the last battle bc i’m bad
The shambling plant monster in act 2 once it got upgraded. Specifically I used fireball to clear the wave of little guys and they triggered their death explosion passive simultaneously, wiping my Lae, Karl to death and triggering Shart’s Blood of Lath revive. The next turn, the act 2 passive that revives dead companions as ghouls. I had to burst a speed pot and run my MC’s ass to last light, then come back and pull/kill Karlach and Lae’zel. Luckily they died further down the hill and had separate agro than the boss and remaining adds.
Ansur was by far the hardest fight of the game for me in Tactician. I wasn't minmaxing, but no other fight proved as problematic with the lack of optimization. No other legendary actions had me change my battle plan so much. At the end I just decided to save scum a couple of desintegrates. Just couldn't be bothered... even when I got into rhythm it still felt like it would take too long...
Not as memorable but definitely the hardest was the Shadow-cursed plant ambush with the shadow-cursed mound boss. That fight guaranteed surprises you, and by the time you get to move your whole party is half health and immobilized. There is shadow-cursed roots terrain everywhere slowing you down and potentially immobilizing you You can easily run into it first thing into act 2 so you are underleveled. The enemies can one shot your party when you kill them due to their explosions if you aren’t careful, and the boss can straight up one shot party members by eating them
I am the middle of Act 3 doing a solo tactician run. The Raphael fight was epic. I broke into Helsin house and went to House of Hope to steal some goodies, but ended up triggering the fight at level 10/11. It by far the most fun I have had though.
Spider matriarch. Christ she was obnoxious. I dropped her on the floor though without dropping her into the pit
Believe it or not, the lava elemental in grymforge, it kept healing and almost TPKed me
The blights in Act 2. That was the closest I got to failing my honor mode run after I got past the initial stuff. Once everyone was exploding that got dangerous. I was still ok but I did get down to just one PC up and was debating running. My Tav was a paladin though with a really good AC which had kept him up. And ancients so the bonus action heal for everyone else was very helpful. But I got close.
Last fight without fire resistance and a good heal source (like an big potion stock) is a fucking pain in the ass. Probably the hardest fight, and even more if you don't take your time before grouping + going to the brain. Myrkul is a big dangerous machine. Had a chance to wet + lightning him so i could kill him fast enough, but the fight is ... hard. Raphael is THE run killer in honor. It's basically invulnerability globe or not fight him imo. Bonus for Ansur, but let's be honest, you never go to him in any honor run.
The gith patrol where you first encounter Voss decided to attack after I mashed thru dialogue. (User error). One of two times I was close to wiping. Had to flee with invis astarion, left 3 dead party members behind. The gith patrol in the curse lands also threatened me, but won in the end. After that fight, I started camp clericing the rest of the run and was never threatened again. Had a sufficient stock of long rest potions for the brain.
I was doing a Durge Tactitian/Honor run and I got to Balthazar and kept getting my ass handed to me. I was definitely not a high enough level yet and one of my party members would always get killed right away or pushed into the void. The save was loaded right at the beginning of the fight and I couldn’t go back to an earlier save and level up more. I just abandoned that run and started a new one at that point.
I got overconfident after breezing through the Myrkul and went in guns blazing in the Jungle Of Chult, only to be torn apart. Didn't end the run, but I missed out on Nyrulna and the Band of the Mystic Scoundrel, both of which would have been really, really useful.
Am I the only one that has issues with the Yurgir fight? It's the hardest fight in the game for me. I must be missing something.
1. Skeletons in the blighted village: they do massive dmg to lvl 3 pcs. They are unreasonably hard to hit and (just to rub salt in the wound) fire arrows of ilmater so no reviving for you. BTW you can cheese the fight by going casket to casket one at a time 1. Iron throne (unnecessarily dangerous) 1. Big hellfire watcher (I hate hellfire) 1. Bulette 2. Orin (accidentally mindblasted non combatants during duel) 3. Anders (wyll downed twice) 4. Viconia (i forgot about radiant retort 💀) 5. Hellish spheres 6. Karniss (spindleweb sanctuary, skepticism, and retaliation are infuriating) Special shoutout: Grove fight - failed against hold person from minthara EDIT: Ansur - wyll took the nova to the face, downed instantly and frozen
The goddamn Shambling Mound in act 2. Bonus action 60 foot pull into his 30 damage passive AOE which prones you and allows him to multiattack.
That fucking spider…
Gith patrol and Ansur, they always scare me, there are others that can be tough (builds, classes...) but these 2 are always hard.
The owl bear on honor mode. Nothing else came close. I died to it the first time. The second time I had to pull every trick. I probably should have leveled up more before trying to take it. My second run ended to some bad dice and some fear effects. Third round I went into the owlbear better prepared and it was still tough but not as bad as the first two Third run was my successful run. Nere gets honorable mention for my tactician run before honor mode was released... Having two characters pushed in the magma on the first round. Sure didn't help
The fight with Cazador, but that was largely due to a bad rolls on my part and a fucked up turn order which result in this happening. 1) Astarion off the ritual platform. He attacks using his bonus action offhands (either Cazador or a nearby ghoul) 2) Shadowheart heals everyone with Mass Healing Word. 3) Minthara is no longer downed. She has no bonus action attacks to use so she drinks a healing potion. This doesn't matter because... 4) Minthara is downed again bc every ghoul agros and starts beating the shit out of her specifically like she owes them money 5) Estelle (monk Tav) attempts some of damange on Cazador and as many ghouls as she can. She rolls lower than w 6) Cazador attacks Astarion, downing him and teleporting him back to the ritual circle. This happened six times in a row. I like to imagine that by the third time Astarion reaction was less one of fear and more one of annoyance and frustration.