Rocking and Rolling EVERY ACT As A LONEWOLF Bard On TACTICIAN! - Baldur's Gate 3

can a lone wolf Bard rock and roll their way through every Act of balers Gate 3 on tactician difficulty well it won't be easy he'll meet groupies and haters alike but it certainly will be interesting before we get into all that though first the rules rule number one no other party members that have their own detached portrait summons and temporary companions such as Sovereign glut are a okay number two no multiclassing we're barred and nothing but barred baby number three no using ilth powers whatsoever since I want to show off just how Wild we can get with our own power number four no respecing we got to plan out our build well and any mistakes in that process we're going to stick with number five no Barrel mancy that includes chest mancy as well to block doorways and other such nonsense number six no saving in the middle of combat we're going to put ourselves to work for our victories number seven no karmic dice this is to make the combat more of an authentic DND experience and get true r G and finally number eight no changing the difficulty at any point this is a tactician run after all without out of the way on to character creation we start off by choosing half orc for our race since they make the best rock stars and the extra melee crits and survivability certainly doesn't hurt either since a little further down the line we'll end up as a college of Swords barred next up is the class I let you all vote on which class you wanted to see for this video and as the title of the video suggests we ended up with Bard for our starting cantrip we go the vicious mockery and friends cuz you know Bard and for our starting spells we end up with Thunder Wave long Strider sleep and Tasha's hideous laughter for a nice mix of damage utility and crowd control and of course our most important choice is our instrument and we choose the core of any medieval band the hand drum our background of choice is charlatan since the proficiencies it gives are just too good to pass up and every musician has a Sinister side as you know since we're planning on being more at the Forefront of the fight we pump up decks and our ability scores end up looking like this our Bard also gets Proficiency in slight of hand perception deception intimidation performance and persuasion screw Jack ofal trades we're master of all we make our character look beautiful with some flowing locks an immaculately sculpted beard and some gloomy eyeshadow to match his gorgeous face then we give our magnificent musician a name fitting his status and send Bartholomew on his way our misplaced Minstrel awakens on the nautiloid after a wild night out with one goal in mind to get rid of the tadpole implanted in his head because unbeknownst to his adoring fans Bartholomew can't actually practice at all if someone else is listening we start by trying to get off the nautiloid and along the way we meet our first groupy laelle who is so overwhelmed by our stardom that she jumps off the nearest cliff leaving us to clean up the remaining fight which goes by easily enough deeper in the nautiloid we find behind the helm where we can use the controls to escape unfortunately there's some fighting already going on so we do our best to pick off the baddies for a bit of experience as we run along to the controls once done we activate the uh tentacles causing the ship to teleport and land softly and gently on a beach and with that our new tour of the sword Coast begins shortly after landing on the beach we find some intellect of hours hanging out in the crash site we get the jump on them and manage to take out one of them right away and the other one Falls just moment later continuing our search to find anything worth finding we do stumble upon a free pile of XP in the form of a lone mine flare just waiting to be stabbed and a little down the bend we find another adoring fan who really wants a high five from his favorite drummer though he gets a little clingy afterwards so we just leave him to his swirling abyss and go on our merry way as we look for a safe place to hunker down we find some wannabe tomb Raiders hanging out discussing the differences in their height we're kind enough to let them know that there's some bad Juju coming out from the nautiloid and they should really get going and in so doing we get a natat 20 on our very first roll they get spooked and bounc leaving behind enough experience to hit level two level two grants us song of rest which is essentially an extra short rest each long rest Jack of old trades which adds half our proficiency bonus rounded down to every ability check we're not already proficient with and we get another spell learned in the form of featherfall for a bit more utility along with another first level spell slot to go with it now that we're more powerful than ever we get ready to uh trip and fall into a pit whereupon we get discovered by the rest of the Tomb Raiders who are very ready to murder us and do so in a matter of moments giving us our first death in this series but it was really super close I swear so we went back and tried again and fine okay maybe it wasn't that close moving on we continue looking elsewhere in the forest and stumble upon a group of goblins attacking a druid Grove and naturally mainly cuz we were in the near vicinity and already spotted by the goblins we decide to join the fight as the fight breaks out it's chaos on both sides but zor breaks out his own musical instrument and makes this fight a breeze Bartholomew does his own bit of heroics here and there but for the most part the baddies are cleaned up by the NPCs and we are welcomed into the Druid Grove with open arms as the rock star we are there's lots of talking to be done here in the Grove and tensions are high between the teelings and Druids but we meet a fellow Bard in the form of Volo save a child from the worst character and most importantly meet everyone's favorite blacksmith Damon Damon always drives a hard bargain but for now he sells us the first long-term staple of our build the hunting short bow this plus one short bow grants us advantage on Old monstrosity enemies as well as lets us cast Hunters Mark once per long rest for a bit of extra damage on every attack which will be very good for us as we'll be attacking a ton once everything is all wrapped up in the Druid Grove we go back to the tomb but make sure to use a different entrance not cuz I'm scared or anything it's just closer a on entering we flip on turnbas mode and loot the sarcophagus for the key to let us deeper in and as we get running from the traps we slip yet again thankfully this time we can just walk it off before we wake up Withers and his skeletons we loot this dude's sword so he'll be stuck throwing rocks in combat as the fight starts we go first and run inside withers's little hide away for a safe spot to cast protection from evil and good since I forgot to beforehand what should be a pretty easy fight goes south pretty fast when our concentration gets broken and we get pelted down by attacks one after another resulting in another death for round two we make sure to cast protection from evil and good beforehand and we stealth to start the fight with a surprise round as well we start poking them down as they all Dash to get line of sight on us and once it rolls back to our turn again we take another pot shot and start to move into withers's crib Unfortunately they go all VAP n fog clouding us on their turn and break our concentration immediately after little do they know that this fog cloud is our new best friend we run inside the room heal up cast protection from evand good and then just kind of chill because they refuse to move into their own fog Cloud they get whittel down bit by bit as we shoot them from our safety bubble but eventually the cloud does just naturally wear out though by this point we're in a much better spot then the enemies old Dash inside in a nice big Clump so we blow them up with a Thunder Wave to weaken them followed by a potion of speed and another Thunder Wave to return most of them to their Eternal Slumber and the last one goes down just a second later we then meet Withers our number one Stan who follows us around and stares at us while we sleep as we're gallivanting through the grassy greens we meet the literal devil Raphael who offers to make a deal with us which is how you know we've really made it as a rock star unfortunately when we accept the deal he just acts like a bad date and tells us we're not desperate enough then we at last make our way to the blighted Village which is overrun by goblins who evidently aren't acquainted with our music as they threaten to murk us but we throw our weight around and they leave us alone afterwards this little conversation bumps us up to level three and with it we get our subclass the College of Swords this subclass grants us the ability to finally use our Bic inspiration dice in the form of flourishes which gives our attacks a variety of effects from boosting our AC attacking multiple times with one action and even shoving enemies we also gain proficiency with scimitars and medium armor expertise with deception and persuasion a new fighting style for which we choose two weapon fighting and a new spell learned cloud of daggers which is such a good spell alongside two level two spell slots once we're inside the Village proper we meet some more goblins but this time they're torturing a possible mixtape recipient so we get heated and tell them to clear off before rescuing our newest fan nothing like the power of music to bring a community together we continue on to the goblin Camp after but man I could swear we're forgetting something oh well along the way we come across these bozos who be convinced that their leader summoned us and their response is to make us cover our faces with a war dung which is C certainly an approach to welcoming your boss's guest naturally there's only one appropriate Way Forward for Bartholomew with the fight breaking out on our first turn we shoot their Ward drum with a defensive flourish to boost our and prevent reinforcements before Hunters marking one of their Wars and running for cover most of the enemies waste their turns dashing to get us except this guy who summons yet another War so he's got to go first before we can get him he runs up to high ground and lands a brutal shot breaking our concentration before he gets got for good on our turn a couple enemies follow us up onto the high ground and start swinging away on us while most of the others just stand about unable to reach us even with ranged attacks thankfully a group of enemies on High Ground means Prime Thunder waving material and one of them gets sent flying to their Doom while we sprinkle in the odd healing pot to stay in tiptop shape it's not much later that the other one falls to the old one two and the rest of the fight goes easy enough I mean what's the worst that can happen right oh okay thank God we're a half workk and a half workk that's a wizard with a bow at that we take out both with one shot thanks to slashing flourish letting us Target Two enemies and the wars just growl at us as they get pelted with arrows till the fight is over all in a day's work unfortunately before we can make it into the camp we're beset upon by yet another star struck groupy who says something about our life being in danger unless we take her with us I don't know man she's a little clingy so we tell her to bug her off once that's out of the way we finally arrive at the goblin camp and there's a party going on but before we can get to partying we talk to Priestess gut who goes to her room since she wants to talk to us in private about mayhaps getting rid of our unwanted mental Voyer with her out of the way it's time to get wild we get a little tipsy Freer pal Volo who's found himself imprisoned here and he very ominously says he can't wait to pick our brain then we find out Bartholomew is secretly hot and join a weird masochism cult which grants us levar's love as a permanent Boon normally this lasts until we die but if we die we have to reload anyways so this is extra permanent for us and it wouldn't be a Rockstar's night out if we didn't didn't also get an ill-advised tattoo the partying jogs our memory and we head back to the Village to go recruit some ogres into fighting for us in the future thankfully they're super into our new tat which makes not being eaten easier and we're able to convince them to join us in the future when we uh blow their bone horn before we can get around to destroying the establishment of the cult we want to make a quick pit stop down to the underdark and to do that we've got to make our way past some creepy crawlies we deal with the first group easily enough but Mama spider and her children are a different story even though we take care of the queen with a well-placed void bulb the little fellas make short work of us round two goes much worse because we don't make short work of Mama this time and she pulls the old Uno reverse on us third time is the charm as they say another successful void bulb knocks the Spider Queen into the pit for an insta kill and even though things get a bit touch and go we get a well-placed thunder wave to finish off the two little ones as we settle down for the evening Volo meets us at our camp and lets us know he can probably just stab the mind FL parasite out of our skull we think that sounds pretty metal so we give it a go unfortunately we do end up losing just a bit of our eyeballs but we end up with a cool replacement one that gives us the ability to see invisible things and Volo takes a bow and heads off to act three feeling nice and rest as we Plunge Into the Depths of the underd dark and make our way to the mikid Colony where we meet everyone's favorite ring selling shopkeep Darth who sells us the costic band another long-term stable of our build that grants us a nice plus two acid damage on every attack simple but who could ask for more with a power up in hand we go back to the party at the goblin camp and meet up with gut who offers us a drink and I mean how can we refuse it's a party unfortunately our tolerance ain't what it used to be and Bartholomew goes down for the count as it turns out gut is a huge fan and tries to keep us captive we do our best to break out but it just doesn't work out thankfully an even crazier groupy of ours shows up just in the nick of time to deal with her and set us free and just as Bartholomew planned no less that's leader number one down our next victim of choice is Menara we try the old luring her to a ledge and Blasting her off with thunderwave trick which she really doesn't like so we just go with plan B property damage we wait for her to walk over to this shabby bridge and shoot it out from under her causing her to do a goofy little Scooby-Doo fall to her death and that's leader number two dealt with but we had an eyewitness right here and we brace ourselves for a fight as they call us out on breaking the bridge seriously you care more about the bridge good Lord this is Amazon levels of not caring about your workers well moving on last but not least is the world's worst spellcaster draw Raglin we try the Thunder Wave trick on him too but he just really isn't impressed and is quite vocal about his distaste this fight is a tricky one for sure but like all problems it can be solved with a song we play a little jig to lure every everyone in the room over to this pit blow up another Bridge which really pisses everyone off down an elixir of bloodlust and get the Thunder Wave of a life time taking out Mr Raglin and most of his goons in one fou swoop the fight as you can imagine ends mere moments later with the goblin Camp all cleared out we go back to the underd dark to track down the adamantine Forge which unfortunately requires taking a boat that's heavily guarded by some dgar we convinced them we mean no harm before just walking down to their boat and setting sail the Grim Forge right under their noses and this place is so pumped to see us touring here that it gives us enough experience to reach level four just for showing up with this level up we get light as another can trip to help prepare us for the next ACT where it will be very handy another spell in the form of hold person to help us with some single Target situations down the line alongside another second level spell slot we also get our first feet and decide to roll with a plus two to our decks from an ability score Improvement putting it up to 19 boosting our ability to deal damage as well as avoid damage Bartholomew isn't quite ready to face everything going on here just yet so we head back to the surface to get some power boosts our first boost comes in the form of the best boy scratch a huge morale boost and an absolute necessity for this build we can't get through the game without him for our next major power up we have to head deep inside the monastery past the Risen Road and into the ganki crash naturally we take the scenic route to get there once we arrive at the monastery proper to get inside we have to fight our way through a veritable moshh pit of drunk Cobalts we do get the surprise round on them which gives us time to prep a cloud of daggers right in the doorway and they just shred themselves running through it this fight doesn't press us too much and before you know it it's just Bartholomew and a pile of corpses as any good Mosh Pit ends after that it's just a matter of walking down some stairs and we get greeted by some gith once inside who after a bit of persuasion let us meander about freely which means we get to talk to the true gith waifu AAC Nira she sells us our next power up the knife of the undermountain king this plus two short sword reduces our crit threshold by one and when we roll two damage or less on any damage die we get to roll the die and take the higher result it also gives us advantage on attacks against obscure targets but this is currently bugged and it isn't working properly either way an insanely good item and I can't believe you can just buy it for cheap now that we're better equipped we go back to Grim Forge to deal with the absolute cultists and their dwar workers our first attempt goes south pretty quickly but Bartholomew always got a backup plan this time the backup plan is to encourage the working class to rise up against the authoritarian regime that keeps the common DW guard down in the mud and all it takes is blowing up one scrying eye once done we free the leader of the cultist who's been trapped behind some Boulders and then the fight breaks out and all our groupies rally to our side it's a pretty chaotic fight as allies go down left and right but so too do the enemies with this many allies on our side though this fight is mostly just about keeping ourselves alive which only gets scary when we get disarmed dropping both of our melee weapons on the ground thankfully we can deal with this Lon wear bothering us quickly with our bow after a few very long rounds of combat The Last Enemy goon Falls and it's just near the leader left but with this many groupies on our side can't put up much of a fight before he too gets dealt with but we learn the hard way that the regime never changes no matter who's in charge and right after the fight we get accused of stealing our own Scimitar that we picked up off the ground we try and bribe the guard accusing us but they would rather have our blood than our gold so we show them what for since no one else is watching when all is set and done we end up with enough experience to hit level five granting a nice power Spike by increasing our proficiency bonus to plus three bumping our inspiration dice up to d8s instead of d6s and letting us recover them on long or short rests and we get a new spell plant growth for even more AOE crowd control and we swap out sleep for stinking Cloud to double up on that we also get two level three spell slots to go alongside our brand new spells we said about grabbing the materials needed to make our adaman and gear in the Forge and our first mold needed the scal male mold is being guarded by a few sets of animated armor who pick a fight with us when we approach these guys are tough cookies but they only have a plus one to their con saves so on our first turn we go in for a Thunder Wave to try and knock two of them into the lava below Unfortunately they both make the save so we settle for a quick bonus action flourish most of them Miss on their turns but one of them gets a brutal crit taking us down to half HP we're determined to make Thunder Wave work though and with a well- angled position we managed to knock one of them into the lava below and we down a health pot to almost full heal right after the antagonistic armors spend their turns missing us and when it comes back to us we manage to Thunder Wave two more onto the low ground which doesn't kill them but it makes the rest of the fight way easier especially once we give the remaining friend the old rasle dazzle with a mobile flourish off the cliff after that it's just a matter of picking the remaining two off one by one we make sure to grab the mythal or they were guarding just behind them as well since we'll be needing that in just a bit unfortunately it's time for the hardest fight in the entirety of Act One the magma meit fight since we know what's Comon we do our best to plop down a cloud of daggers though I misremember where they spawn and none of them jump into it not that it really matters since our concentration gets broken by an instant heat metal which also causes us to drop both of our swords after surviving the atrocious surprise round we go for a big old Thunder Wave which somehow results in a net positive of magma meths in this fight cuz this fight was designed despite me we do our best to run away but it doesn't really matter since they can fly and catch up to us regardless on our turn we go for another Thunder Wave which almost kills poor Bartholomew as the methods blow up on him so we try and Misty step to safety Unfortunately they get us good with a heat metal for some fun unavoidable damage to kill us attempt two starts off with a similar lack of care from the methods as this time they disregard our stinking cloud and instantly break our concentration likewise it ends with another extra hot heat metal just for us before round three we juice up with an elixir of blood lust to tilt the action economy a bit bit more in our favor and we plant a cloud of daggers where we know at least one of them spawns but when the fight starts our concentration gets broken once again on the first possible hit of the surprise round they land a bunch of blows and take us decently low but when it gets back to us we get a killer Thunder Wave followed up by another Banger thankfully the other methods that spawn halfway into the fight have to wait around before they can get a turn and we're able to take out two more with a slashing flourish and on our next turn we're able to finish off the final two with yet another range slashing flourish God that felt good I know I do a good job at repressing it but if you believe it I do not like these methods we grab our mythal ore as a reward and move on though we decide to go beat up an old lady before taking out Grim as a break from this lava filled hellscape to prepare ourselves we use a spell scroll found earlier to summon this little fella who goes by the name shovel shovel is our new number one groupy and has the pretty cool ability to turn invisible so he's going to be following us around for a little bit then we continue down the road where we you find the old lady in question being berated by two young men you may ask yourselves what this poor old woman did to deserve such treatment but I'm sure it becomes clear when I tell you that she is a Bartholomew hater she actively Burns our albums when she comes across them anyone so malignant has got to go we travel to her little tea house in the swamp and find that she has tricked the younger sister of those young men into also being a Bartholomew hater to break her out of the spell we tell her the truth that Ethel killed her brothers in response Ethel drops her disguise of the surrounding area and herself turning the swamp into a uh swamp but evil and also summons a few red caps to come beat us up which they do quite handedly next time goes a lot better though cuz only two decide to show up for the fight at the beginning eventually the other two do show up but they're so far away that by the time they get here we've already managed to pick off the first two the other two that show up are Mages and they get a scary Hold person off on us which is normally quite deadly when you've just got one character but shovel is here to save the day taking out one of them and the other one goes down just a second later we go into eel's basement to track her down and along the way beat up the Mindless drones who desperately try and resist the enforced barthol you hate and now that we're down at the bottom where Marina is being imprisoned we down an invisibility pot pull the switch to free her and thanks to volo's eye spot the invisible ethyl we start off the fight with a ranged flourish double shot right into her and then proceed to get hit by every single Ray of sickness and instantly die before we get a turn so it might be good to go in a bit more prepared we cast protection from evil and good to give her disadvantage on her attacks against us down an elixir of poison resistance so that if she does hit she does half damage and to top it off we also coat our bow and drw poison to knock her unconscious if she fails a save round two kicks off with a huge crit with our slashing flourish and even though Ethel looks like she's ready to throw hands she is in fact secretly sleeping so we get another colossal hit off on her before she summons all her clones bones due to our earlier prep work we're able to survive the onslaught of attacks and with one more attack we knock her below 30 HP and even though she's asleep she wakes up just to surrender she offers to give us a plus one to any ability score of our choice if we let her keep Marina but we tell her all of our fans are ready to attack her unless she gives us both and she believes us I mean who wouldn't and for our bonus we take the plus one to dexterity to go up to a 20 total and a plus five modifier capping us out already at level five with all that done we're feeling ready to take on Grim we head back to the forge pop in the mold and the ore pull the lever to lower the platform and spin the lava valve and who should come popping out but the big man himself the head hono of the Grim Forge it's boss fight time Bartholomew and shovel versus grim and this is a doozy of a fight Grim is immune to most types of damage unless he gets super heated in the magma at which point the big V has got vulnerability to bludgeoning so we start off by moving the invisible shovel next to the Hammer lever so he's at the ready then we with a potion of Glorious vaulting that we took earlier hop over to lure the construct to the center it works all according to plan and we get a colossal hit off on Grim by slamming the hammer for 156 points of damage which attracts the attention of magma methods we blow lumps bone horn to even out the tides with our own groupies and get to making some evasive maneuvers while we wait for Grim to get superheated again the ogrs get to work dealing absolutely zero damage to Grim while cooking themselves alive which is always fun though lump does take out one method a few turns later and Grim shows another magma meth what four and things are looking pretty good unfortunately Grim isn't falling for our tricks and refuses to walk under the hammer again but does start chipping away at us with this huge AOE stomp eventually we get another hit off with the hammer for another huge bit of damage but it all goes to heck when he lands a Wombo Combo that kills both shovel and lump and triggers our half or feature we do our best to lure the boss back to the center but we get got with another stomp to finish attempt one attempt to unfortunately goes much the same way but you know what they say third time is the okay it's going to be like that huh round four kicks off and we do the old jump into the center to lure Grim over trick before shovel pulls the lever to give the construct a rough wake up call as the big guys riding on the floor we blow lumps bone horn yet again to add some more distractions to the fight since we're very scared of this boss and they uh certainly keep him occupied but it's not really helping our game plan since he just wanders off like really wanders off where is he going well that felt a little pointless but there goes all the ogres now that they're all dealt with grim finally makes his way back to the center of the arena and we're able to get another Hammer fall off which conjures up the magma method straight from the pits of hell so we down and elixir blood lust to take them out without losing our flow too much back on our turn we used two slashing flourishes to take out all but one of the magma methods Grim takes this personally and beats the ever loving life out of us putting us into quite the pickle since now now we need to deal with the meit otherwise we will guaranteed die to the heat metal and we also need to heal up to survive Grim's Stomp and preferably also lure Grim to the center of the Arena it's a lot to do but we start by Thunder waving the magma method and prey it gets knocked away so it corpse exploding doesn't kill us then we Missy step to The Far Side of the Arena using near boots followed by throwing a potion of healing at our feet to top us up it all works out perfectly when Grim stops right on the center of the hammer and we get a long range shot on the lever and we finally finish off the fight unfortunately shovel did not survive the fight RP shovel our rewards for this fight are the adamantine scale male and adaman simitar both of which will be replaced pretty quickly in act two but for now the scale male is 16 AC medium armor that caps our deck's bonus at plus three reduces old damage we take by one gives us disadvantage on stealth crit immunity and when we get hit by a melee attack our attacker gets sent Reeling for two turns which reduces their chance to hit us and for all intents and purposes the simitar is just a plus one simitar for our uses at least since we're all kitted up we've got one last thing left to do in act one time to take out the leader of the gith in the monastery we head back to the crash and negotiate passage to where the Inquisitor and his cronies are hanging out and it's here we meet vth the ultra hater a false god who demands worship from everyone she asks us to go into the artifact and kill our Dream visitor but I mean who could hurt such a pretty face so instead as we leave the artifact a fight breaks out and this is an insanely difficult one we've got five highly mobile GI that can all Jump Around The Arena like crazy their leader can use his mind steel link ability to reduce RAC and grant us vulnerability to psychic damage which is extra bad since all the others deal bonus psychic on every attack not to mention the two mesque ones that deal boat loads of psychic damage out the wazu and to top it off the marshals can use a reaction to reduce the damage of any physical attack we land all in all a real nightmare and even though we were able to bring them down at just two enemies left pretty often we still died over and over until eventually I decided to stop bashing poor Bartholomew's head against the wall and come up with a new plan we know our hero is already a master of so many different things but what if he were to become a Pokemon Master as well we catch wind that someone is transporting a master ball through the Risen road so we make a quick pit stop and sneak past all the chaos going on around it to yoink that bad boy before going into The Inquisitor fight we juice up by dipping our weapons in Poison we've also got our blood lust Elixir still going from the Grim fight and a permanent bless coming from somewhere honestly ly I have no clue and for certainty sake we use a scroll of blur on ourselves to give enemies disadvantage on attacks the fight starts and we use a range slashing flourish to almost kill one of the Mages before Downing a speed pot to do another slashing flourish finishing them off and injuring another which grants us yet another action for a third flourish to finish off the other one one of them lands a good couple pot shots on us which breaks our concentration and when it gets back to us we heal up before running away and using our last bartic inspiration to finish off the guy that broke our concentration with two enemies left we use another action to throw our Pokeball and summon a spectator right in their midst since we've got our boy pulling aggro we're able to cast cloud of daggers to deal some AOE and the fight kind of splits from here with one enemy going after us and The Inquisitor going after The Spectator as it turns out though our Pokémon is quite the H homey and when it sees us in danger finishes off the opponent we were fighting leaving just The Inquisitor left we do our best to land pot shots but it's kind of just a waste of time I honestly probably should have just been spamming clouded daggers The Inquisitor takes out the spectator soon after and now it's just up and him left and we are feeling the pressure it gets very close when he brings us down to 1 HP but we use a cloud of daggers to bring him nice and low and at the start of his turn it shreds him to dust o we not even close baby now that this place is all clear we finally get our reward the strange conduit ring this little fella is one of my favorite rings in general granting us an extra 1 D4 psychic damage on weapon attacks so long as we're concentrating on a spell and ideally we'll always be concentrating on a spell well worth the suffering if you ask me and just like that act one is dealt with Bartholomew's next stop in his tour of the sword Coast is the shadow cursed land so we head off to Grim Forge and leave to exit act one there our musical Maestro enters the shadow cursed lands at last and before we go any further we make sure our light can trip is active since the darkness in this place will damage us if we don't have a light source and now that we're a bit more prepared we wander towards the direction of what could possibly be conceived as a path where we come across some Harpers wandering through the darkness who upon seeing us are so Star Struck that they just stare at us like a Kingdom Hearts character for 20 uninterrupted seconds seriously I timed it before one of them get sent off into the darkness to go get ambushed and just like that our first fight breaks out this fight does not go off to a good start with all three shadows that go before us lunging at us and Landing quite a few blows one of which is a strength drain which as the name suggests lowers our strength by three causing us to become encumbered and if it gets to zero we instantly die Although our HP is is the more pressing matter after sending a bunch of equipment back to the camp to become unencumbered we use Misty step to teleport to the middle of our gang hoping these folks won't mind dying for us and we heal up by throwing a potion at our feet as well the round passes by pretty uneventfully and we get the opportunity on our next turn to introduce the Shadows to our favorite hit single cloud of daggers to start shredding away at them unfortunately the first one that goes out of the group manages to break her concentration so the other two can escape safely and one of the Harpers Falls a moment later when it gets back to Bartholomew things are feeling decently dire so we use a defensive flourish to finish off one of the shadows and boost our AC before healing ourselves up some more thanks to our bloodlust Elixir another round goes by with all the NPCs beating each other up and we manag to get an opportunity attack to finish off the undead Harper on our turn we use a couple slashing flourishes to take out some more of the Shadows one after another and things are looking much better though another one of our Harper allies dies a moment later we then use Hunter's Mark on one Shadow and a slashing flourish to hit the other two since concentrating on a spell increases our damage thanks to our Strange conduit ring but unfortunately it's not enough and both shadows live with a sliver of HP so we run behind our meat Shield I mean our Harper pal and just like that another one bites the dust a moment later thankfully we managed to get a shot off on one of the Shadows which finishes it off and triggers the elixir of blood lust into a cloud of daggers on the remaining two which gets rid of one right away and gets the next one right as it starts its turn honestly a way scarier fight than it had any right to be and if it w't for the groupies and all the Buffs we had carry over from the last act we definitely would have got got a scary precedent to start off act two to say the least with that out of the way we carry on to the last Light in where we meet the rest of the Harpers who feel very murdery towards us but thankfully one of our fans speaks up on our behalf and tells jira the leader here that it would be a crime to stop our tour she acases and we get free roam of the in's grounds where we get a bunch of powerups our first two are found from Quarter Master tally the cloak of protection and the Yuan on scale mail the cloak of protection grants us plus one to our armor class and saving throws not the most interesting effect but boy is it good and the uan scale mail is medium armor with a base AC of 15 and it allows us to add our full dexterity modifier which basically makes it 20 AC and de boot it also gives us a plus one to our initiative roles all around a solid upgrade then we Meander our way to the best shopkeep Damon in order to turn in some infernal iron so he can make us some flawed hust gloves and so we can buy The Thorn blade from him the flawed held us gloves for all intents and purposes grant us an extra 1 D4 fire damage and a plus one to our strength saving throws as well for another nice boost to our damage well the thorn blade is a plus one Scimitar that lets us cast in snaring strike once per long rest and more importantly when concentrating on a spell we Grant an extra 1 D4 poison damage to all our melee attacks for yet another boost to our damage needless to say this was quite the good shopping trip for us before we leave the in we have a quick chat with jira who mentions they want us to go Infiltrate The Enemy HQ and see what's up and before we go we should chat with Isabel upstairs who's safe and secure and nothing bad will happen if we go talk to her either way we put that off for later now that we're all kid it up we start heading out of the inn and as it turns out one of our fans has set up an ambush on some cult members who keep interfering with our work so we follow them to the Ambush site and get in position whereupon we meet a dder with a special lantern that keeps the shadow curse at Bay a pack of cultists and just because we can we convince the dder to give us the lantern which he isn't too happy about because it means he'll die terribly and then we launch the Ambush anyways so we can test out our new and improved gear the fight kicks off and we fire a wicked slashing flourish taking out one of the goons and seriously messing up another then we go down and whack another dude with our bonus action for an offhand swing one of our buddies gets a nice Firebolt to finish off the cultist we weakened as well though the enemies ain't just sitting by the one we were fighting rages and Reckless attacks and gets a nasty crit hit off on us taking out a bunch of our HP and the drider also gets a crit to kill one of our allies before jumping to us seeing that we're a bit surrounded we Misty step up to the roof and fire down another slashing flourish to kill one of the dudes and soften up another just enough for everyone's favorite Firebolt cast and homie to finish him off when it gets back to us we cast a cloud of daggers on both the Barbarian crony and the drier to continue damaging them but they both run out soon after and before you know it the dder is right on top of us Bartholomew goes for the Thunder Wave to try and fling the arachnet adversary off the edge but unfortunately he makes the save this lady does manage to shove him though which is honestly kind of incredible and then she dies terribly but still impressive really wanting to get this dder away from us we go for a mobile flourish in the hopes it knocks him off the roof but he's a stubborn old fellow and refuses to go anywhere he does in return get a mean multiattack on us dealing a ton of damage and breaking our concentration which as you remember means we do much less damage on our attacks as well we go for the Hail Mary mobile flourish which unfortunately misses and a moment later our last remaining groupy goes down to the Barbarian which really puts us in a tight spot another signature cloud of daggers gets upcast it to a level three spell slot on Bartholomew's turn and this is enough to finish off the Barbarian and deal some Hefty damage to the dder who unleashes a multi-attack which thankfully all misses then we miss yet another mobile flourish and get whacked with a crit on top of another blow which brings us down to a measly 2 Hp and right when all seems lost the mobile flourish finally lands with a crit of our own and sends the drider flying down taking good Lord 71 points of Fallen damage this guy's got to go on a diet but the fight's not done yet though it's nothing an upcast a cloud of daggers can't fix see you later nerd oh all in a day's work you know oh my God what okay oh my God fight's not over uh what do we do let's go with another mobile flourish which thankfully hits now that the drer has way less AC since it's Undead dealing another big chunk of damage it then spends its turn running into our cloud of daggers where it promptly dies hopefully for good at the start of its turn good Lord now that our heart attack is over we set about looting the moon Lantern which is running on a living pixie who we set free and she is such a big Bartholomew fan that she grants us a bell that protects us from the shadow curse a moment later we Meander across the bridge towards moonrise towers and we hit level six level six grants us a pretty hefty power Spike we get counter charm which is a pretty lackluster ability that grants us advantage on Charmed and frightened effects for a few turns at the cost of an action and more importantly we get extra attack as a subass feature granting us an additional attack each time we take the attack action doubling our weapon based damage output to top it off we get another spell learned shatter alongside a new third level spell slot and we also replace feather fall for knock since we have feather fall Scrolls and potions and knock is is a nice occasional utility spell before we head to moonrise we want to make our way to the Mason's Guild and as we're in the middle of heading there we get jumped by a bunch of hooligans hanging out in the Town Square this really isn't the most interesting fight as they're all pretty generic goons but that makes it all the more embarrassing when we eventually get our butts kicked by them granting us our first death in this act yikes next time though we just sneak around and arrive at the Mason's Guild basement no problem once inside we get into another rather uninteresting fight with some resident Shadows this really isn't the most challenging fight either so it's nothing a few good sword swings can't fix our reward for our troubles is the helmet of Arcane Acuity yet another insane item power up for our build this helmet makes it so whenever we deal damage with any weapon we get two turns of Arcane Acuity capped out at seven and for each turn remaining we have a plus one to our spell attack roles and spell save DCS which means if we stay on top of this we basically just got A plus s to both which is just so absolutely insane and as a treat it also gives plus one to dexterity saves this little fella sticking with us for a while now that we're all Juiced up we feel more comfortable heading into moonrise Towers where we meet Krick thorm the head hono around these parts who seems to be just a wee bit Immortal which might be a problem thankfully and I can't believe I'm about to say this he doesn't seem to recognize us and so we managed to infiltrate without being spotted even if it is hard not to Proclaim to the world who we are after all that drama in the center room we head upstairs and meet zerel and she begins to suspect us so we distract her with our natural charm which works like a well like a charm she also lets us know that balazar a lead member of krick's Mary band is on some super secret mission in the maum to the north and needs some help with that we've got a goal in mind but before we get around to heading there we've got some side quest in AO first on our list of side quests is talking to the master of the Tollhouse Garen go thorm who really hopes we've got a new album for her unfortunately she seems to want our record to go gold before she'll let us pass we do our best to confuse her with a lie but she sees right through it and a fight breaks out as it turns out she does more damage the more gold we have and we find that one out the hard way dying in a matter of moments thanks to Our Success after doing our best DJ khed impression we start atemp two in much the same way since I forgot to put the gold away beforehand so we take a quick break to do some inventory management cuz who doesn't like doing that in the middle of fights we heal up a bit and fire a few shots off at one of the visages that act as Jerry's goons we manage to take it out and when we do the Big G also loses a ton of HP which means if we take out just the little guys the big guy goes down too on our next turn we Missy step to the roof and heal up using our potions so we don't insta die to the next hit the enemies get their turns and all the visages have this little AOE that does guaranteed damage which chips us down quite a bit especially when Garen goth Thor comes in with a big hit too feeling a little overwhelmed we down a potion of invisibility and Scamper into the darkness in a cool way though and the enemies quickly lose track of us which breaks initiative Bartholomew starts the fight back up with a cloud of daggers in a spot that will hopefully hit a bunch of the little guys but Jerry doesn't take too kindly to that our turn is next though and we use a couple of slashing flourishes to weaken enemies for our cloud of daggers to take him out which it does do for one of them since they're all surprised and just standing in place then we drop The Banger of a Lifetime by Thunder waving the big boss off our roof dealing a truly absurd amount of damage and taking her out of the fight for the foreseeable future after that it's just down to picking off the remaining visages which go down without a contest one by one and then we end it with a six shot through the roof on Garen goth herself granting us a bunch of XP and a bajillion gold as an extra reward we make a quick little pit stop in the center of town to get us some revenge on those Hooligans from earlier and it goes way better this time we don't even die a little bit side quest numero two has us going to the house of healing where we find yet another thorm this time going by the name malice which I mean Dr malice really anyways Dr malice is demonstrating on a living person how to use a scalpel to all the nurses who he's teaching which is um I don't I don't know if I'm allowed to show this naturally he's a bit much for Bartholomew and seeing as how the last thorm was very murdery we decided to get ahead of it this time by convincing him to get under the scalpel to which he is surprisingly receptive oh I get the feeling Our Hero's next album is going to be a little messed up to wash away the wo and dark thoughts we head to the Local Tavern where we meet fald Thor these guys are everywhere who pours us a drink and offers a toast now I like the occasional drink as much as the next guy but this is a little much we do our best to fake drink in it but the bartender Catches Us in the act and our Rockstar gets into a good oldfashioned bar fight much to our grin Theobald is immune to all physical damage and he has a boatload of HP the only way to remove his immunities is to deal Elemental damage to him and get him to throw up on you for a ton of damage not ideal so a plan starts to form we make sure he keeps his distance while we deal with all the other bar patrons and start heading outside once that's done a misty step onto the roof takes us to relative safety assuming our positioning isn't terrible and Phase 2 begins phase two consists of dropping a gnarly Cloud kill using a scroll on the bloated bartender and then spending years repositioning and moving it on top of him every turn to very very very slowly Whittle him down he does vomit on us through the floor at one point which is kind of baloney if you ask me but it does mean if he does that one more time he'll black out for a turn either way we keep up the cloud kill plan until eventually when he gets decently low we intentionally move to the edge to get within vomiting range where he does just as we hope and knocks himself out leaving us an opportunity to continue our extermination of the thorm family line since getting drunk didn't work out we settle for moving on with our lives and heading to the mausoleum where we encounter the literal devil who still refuses to make a deal with us but does warn us about another devil lurking inside mayhaps if we kill said devil Raphael will finally make a deal with us and we'll become famous even more famous so we eagerly johned inside once in the Thor Mausoleum we solve a puzzle real quick head down an elevator and and solve another puzzle then we take a side passageway leading us to a cloaker who lets us take out half its HP before it actually decides maybe it doesn't want to get put down without a fight but by then it's too late when we get inside the next room we meet some Undead being puppeted by balazar who's a bit of a potty mouth but understandably so since we're getting ambushed by Char's groupies this fight's got a bit of a gimmick with these umbrell Tremor spawning enemies each round unless we take them out but since we took the side passage way there's some more of about thear goons that reinforce us from the main hall even though we do a decent job of taking out the umbrell Tremors at first it very quickly gets out of control for us and the enemies eventually get the best of us so this time we prep with a protection from evil and good to make things a bit trickier for them on our first turn we get rid of one of the umbrell Tremors then down an elixir of blood lust with the goal of taking out as many as possible on this turn then another slashing flourish to take out two more and we learn the hard way that they count as objects and as such don't trigger elixir of blood lust but honestly this fight is a bit of a wash we take out Tremor after Tremor before most of them can spawn any enemies and we actually end the fight with some skele goons still remaining on our side when the fight ends we're immediately greeted by flesh balthazar's baby brother as well as balazar himself who we convince to land flesh to us for the rest of the dungeon as we explore some more we also find least expected a plus two short bow with the ability to fire a blinding shot and this bad boy is a surprise tool that will help us later so keep it in mind more importantly we we find a kitty who we follow to a big old pile of bones and it's here we meet your gear the devil Raphael warned us about and sure as shoot your gear can smell Raphael on us too thankfully this man recognizes stardom and wanting to impress us belts out his own song he's working on but it's definitely not the best we tell him the only way he's coming back from that is if he kills everyone who heard it and starts fresh so he gets rid of his cronies and unfortunately Nessa too we try our best to convince him to take himself out since his singing isn't a front to the concept of music and we want to impress Rafi but he doesn't buy that one and a fight breaks out and he starts off by Landing a couple of hits on us one of which is a crit and then just turning invisible so on our turn we steal a play from his book and go invisible ourselves with a potion a couple turns later we spot him thanks to the invisible seeing eye we have and break our invisibility with a pair of slashing flourishes dealing some chunky damage Bartholomew slices and dices in melee now that we're here healed up a bit thanks to potions but your gear quickly makes us regret that with some heavy hits fired in return procing our half work feature and dropping us to 1 HP the emergency Sirens are going off so we ring the bell to summon flesh which we really should have done earlier and Misty step out of Dodge before firing up the healing potion yeen machine your gear does some hinks on his turn and goes invisible so on our turn in order to find him we do this neat little trick where you can use your movement line in order to find a spot you can't move to and that's where the invis ible fella is you still have to actually hit him though flesh and our diabolic detractor keep duking it out and we keep missing So eventually we decide to just whip o all reliable to guaranteed hit him and oh my God I I guess our words did get through to your gear well with that dealt with we grab the umbrell gem he was protecting and move on to get the other three umbrell gems that we need it's just a quick J through some trials the first of them is the soft step trial all we need to do is to get to the gem without being spotted by the roaming Shadows so we start up the trial do a bit of sneaking Misty step close to the end and lockpick the final door then we grab the gem easy peasy and get out of there our next trial is the self-same trial and for this one all we need to do is defeat the enemy that has been sabotaging Bartholomew the most himself thankfully he's a pushover and goes down easy for another umbrell Jem acquired the last trial is the faith leap trial a dark room with an invisible path to the other side the answer of how to navigate this is on the floor at the start of the room but who needs that when you've got a potion of Glorious faulting and the jump button before we continue on we still have the problem of dealing with balazar and his band of Undead and before we deal with balazar we have the problem of dealing with flesh to solve that problem we head down to this pit of skulls and summon a rat who is secretly a small piece of a man who was split into many rats we start a fight kill the initial rat and summon a horde of others in the process we make sure to summon flesh as well and get out of the way for the rats to have a field day on on him the only rats we have to worry about during this fight are these pink ones who explode when they die and put everyone around them to sleep and sooner than you can say dear God that's a lot of rats have I thought this through flesh is down for the count eventually the rats are all dealt with and the justicier man who has turned into them reappears and is ready to throw hands but boy howdy does he really throw hands he puts us to sleep seemingly just a style on us and then one shots us with a blight The Encore goes much the same way while we wait for flesh to die which he eventually does do it just takes a while a long while the main difference is afterwards we stay posted behind a cloud of daggers and fire shots at Rats from behind it that way if they get too close they'll just die to the cloud it works better than we can ever hope since the last rat runs into the cloud of daggers which causes the ratman himself to spawn there in Rat form and also instantly die before he becomes a man again saving us quite a headache the classics are Classics for a reason what can I say now that baby brothers out of the way it's time to get rid of balazar though he's got this funky little habit of drinking a potion of speed to rumble you instantly so before the fight we make sure to pickpocket it away from him once we're in position we get the drop on them by firing a slashing flourish at baly triggering a fight and surprising all the ghoulish goons in the process he does get to go first and lands a ray of sickness dealing a bit of damage but on our next turn we fire off an insane machine gun of shots Downing the stolen speed pot in the process to add insult to injury on B is turn a very scary cloud kill gets dropped on our heads taking us frighteningly low and we retaliate by breaking his concentration the oldfashioned way rip Bozo after that we just clean up the remaining Ghouls and with some smart thinking they don't pose a threat and go down really easy before we get to freeing any Immortal beings from their Eternal prison and starting the world's greatest battle of the bands we do a little bit of sabotage on some of the Denis of moonrise to thin out their forces and a buff we really can't ignore is the one we get from talking to Isabelle who is safe and sound on her balcony in the last Light in so Bartholomew goes to have a calm and normal chat with her to get that sweet sweet necrotic resistance as a fun little side note this girl is fold's sister can't you see the family resemblance anyways we have a lovely chat with her and nothing bad happens at all and oh my God it's flaming fist Marcus coming to kidnap Isabelle oh no Isabelle's got paralyzed by one of his demonic goons oh no again Isabelle got kidnapped by one of his demonic goons well nothing like a second attempt to really get the blood flowing and she got captured again Having learned from our mistakes in the previous two attempts bartholomeu is more than ready come attempt three with a pre-cast at guidance to activate our concentration based items and a bloodless delir in hand we kill one of the Flaming fists fish foes then we try using a gaseous form scroll on Isabelle but apparently she's not considered an ally and yeah I get that so we settle on getting another one of the fiends before throwing an invisibility pot on Isabel who is instantly revealed by ourselves H I just I don't even know what to say is he got to keep her alive somehow though so we tell ncus a silly little joke which has him rolling on the floor with laughter for the rest of the fight since our spell save DC is ridiculously high Isabelle almost does something useful when she turns the fiends but she immediately undoes the effect by hitting one of them causing it to turn around and paralyze her which might honestly be good since it keeps her from getting into more trouble thankfully the world's greatest B is here to save the day and with a couple good shots and a few good swings all the demons upstairs get merked a couple more rounds and all the ones downstairs get got too all that's left is Marcus who still can't get over that joke and I mean if you were there you'd probably feel the same it was it was really great to die for some might say and at long last Isabelle is safe assuming she remains a lifelong fan after all that now since Bartholomew has salon 's blessing granting necrotic resistance we're feeling ready to go free the Night song we pop open the door with the umbrell gems take the slow and spooky descent into the shadow fell and wake up in the world's most metal prison at level 7 to no less with this level up we get access to fourth level spells for which we take confusion to hopefully deal with larger crowds of enemies since that's what we struggle with most and we get a single fourth level spell slot to go with it we also take the opportunity to swap out plant growth which has been very disappointing for blindness a spell that allows us to make enemies blind and isn't concentration I cannot possibly overstate how important this spell is going to be so keep an eye on it and now we're going to go free the Night song we get to the bottom and meet the source of cath's immortality a demigod who's the daughter of salune who terribly misconstrues our Noble intentions we're just looking to create the sickest collab album in the nation Bartholomew and the Harpers featuring The Night song she says she'd be happy to work with us for just a bit but first she needs what everyone needs now and then a warm touch from a friend and just like that Dame aen is freed and moonrise is quaking in its boots as the Harpers who see her passing are inspired to action time to take out Krick once and for all Bartholomew rallies alongside all six of our allies at the Tower and the final battle of the bands breaks out after a short bit of dissing each other that's right it's Bartholomew and the Harpers versus and the goons this battle as always is pure chaos we do our best to pick enemies off with our bow jira plops down an impressively poorly placed ice storm before charging in while zerel CES the rest of us jira for her efforts gets taken out in the very first round which has got to be some sort of record for a legendary hero the rest of our allies do their best but their best is not the most impressive thankfully zerel takes a break to bully her own underling for not keeping up the temp Tempo regardless of how good our allies can shoot they do a great job acting as living Shields I mean look at them go on our turn we use confusion to try and disrupt the enemies and we managed to get two of them caught up in it Zell included before running outside and closing the doors as we're thinking of what to do on our next turn Quarter Master tally has enough of waiting around and joins the fight as well her courage Spurs us on and we decide to cast stinking Cloud which weirdly enough only covers one side of the door but at the very least causes some folks running through it to lose their actions with the fight moving outside we get ready to initiate our survival plan as we continue firing pot shots into the crowd of enemies taking one out then we Missy step up to a nearby balcony where most enemies won't be able to reach us next round we get a beautiful cloud of daggers on a large group of enemies shredding away at them unfortunately our hero Quarter Master thally succumbs to an eldrich Blast from zerel soon after we managed to take out one of the cronies below but now most of our enemies are awkwardly crowding behind the opposite side of the wall where we can't reach them so we do something that could get bolem you cancelled not knowing what else to do we summon scratch on the other side of the cloud of daggers in the hopes it would lead enemies outside and into the cloud Zell however barely even moves and just blows him up with a shatter oh this is getting brought up at my next therapy session the fight turns into US raining down arrows into whatever foe decides to wander outside in the next few rounds leaving just four enemies remaining afterwards zerel among them with the help of a featherfall potion we break the awkward ceasefire by jumping down and dashing towards the bridge then the goons very thoughtfully run directly into the cloud of daggers and even stop inside of it so we spend our next turn weakening them so the cloud finishes them off when they start theirs again which works on one of them and further weakens the rest from here on out it's just picking off the remaining enemies as as they fail to reach us well we kite them towards the bridge till eventually even zurell is dealt with the battle of the band's Victory goes to Bartholomew and the H well just Bartholomew now time to head inside and oh my God there's still people in here what the heck we start a fight with them summon a fan of rock music get brutally electrocuted almost kill ourselves via guardian of Faith Misty step to safety turn invisible watch our newest groupy crumble under the pressure and heroically Retreat the warden remains ever Vigilant watching for our return so we sneak up to her get the drop on her but somehow no one else and start swinging away in an attempt to build up our spell save DC before the rest of the enemies catch up to us we only manag to get two stacks of Arcane Acuity but we bite the bullet down a potion of speed and pray for Thunder Wave to work and Miracle of Miracles it actually does since since the warden was the only tough opponent out of the group the rest of them go down a moment later all that's left is dealing with this joke of a necromancer and her skeletons and we're up to the roof awaiting us at the top is Papa Thor himself who's more than a little upset that we revoked his immortality we do our best to intimidate him into surrendering but unfortunately he's got nerves of Steel Dame alen shows up anyways to whoop cath's Dusty booty and gives a rallying war cry before the fight breaks out proper on our first turn we use all of our Bic inspiration on slashing flourish after slashing flourish to take out the Necromancer in the center of the arena and that's really the only threatening enemy that was here the necrit spend most of their turns missing us or doing pretty negligible damage all well cath gets beat up pretty bad by aen as she starts off with a heavy crit we make sure to thin Down The Horde so she can keep the beat down going on Papa uninterrupted and for the most part that's how the fight goes by although aen really isn't a fan of the whole her doing a Beat Down Part since she much prefers to miss her attack attacks instead either way just a couple turns later and a cloud of daggers causes Krick to trigger his cutscene and wouldn't you know it D Lin is just as bad in the cut scene as she is in the actual fight having been free for all of 5 minutes she quickly gets slammed down and recaptured when catrick teleports both her and himself to safety somewhere below the tower the fight gets cleaned up and we get ready to go plunging after them Bartholomew jumps down a suspicious hole and lands in a m flare Colony below and it's in here that we find a room full of Undead fiends out the wazu unfortunately for us we need something on the other side of the room so we pick a fight with them and get to it we start off with a third level cloud of daggers on the death Shepherd in the center since this guy is the Lich pin of the whole operation with his ability to resurrect any of the other enemies that get killed and even summon new ones this does result in a rather insane dog pile being formed around us but it's nothing a misty step can't solve followed by a fourth level cloud of daggers right into the middle of all of them if you can't tell I I really love this spell we keep moving down the hallway and lure a bunch of them through the cloud of daggers which is just so satisfying then a Thunder Wave gets used to blast back some of the horde encroaching upon us the death Shepherd by the way is taking his sweet time getting over to us and mostly undoing our work along the way eventually we get to this spot and we're able to buy some more time with a Thunder Wave to push enemies away and a cloud of daggers to get those who remain our concentration gets broken right after though and it's clear something's got to give since this strategy isn't getting us anywhere so on our next turn we use a defensive flourish to boost our AC and a slashing flourish to trigger the elixir of blood lust and as we're looking for what to do next we notice that Thunder Wave can blast enemies into this pit here where the death Shepherd might not be able to reach them and like that a glimmer of hope is found but we learn the hard way that hope is a fleeting thing when the death Shepherd resurrects a winged horror that was flung off the cliff which is just plain cheating if you ask me to make matters worse the zombies get a great round with a crit followed by a couple of of hits that triggers our half work feature and we're looking extra dire needing to make some big plays we kill a zombie with our bonus action so we have two actions slam down a couple of potions to heal up and completely whiff a Thunder Wave we run away a bit more and take a nasty crit on the process and a winged horror also lands a hit on us taking us down to almost zero HP regardless we managed to make it to next round where we defensive flourish and pick off some more enemies to try and boost our odds of survival and bartholomy remembers that one really funny joke that took Marcus out of the fight so we give it a whirl on the death Shepherd but he doesn't find it nearly as funny somehow we managed to make it to the nest round and trash's HIIT his laughter again and this time it actually works from here with the Eternal tide of enemies being resurrected finally staunched we can pick off the enemies one by one until it's just us and the death Shepherd left and we show him that pits do in fact mean that you're dead and gone with a Thunder Wave our reward for this fight is a puzzle but Bartholomew is secretly G gig a brain so we solve it with ease and our reward for the puzzle is a brain in a jar which once hooked up to a disembodied head we can speak to after speaking to it we're able to unlock the gith zarai Mind barrier a permanent buff that grants us advantage on intelligent saving throws for the rest of the run which is going to be amazing in parts of act three especially at last we descend to the depths of the colony where we find Krick talking to Orin and gorash the other two big bads who with the power of some super cool rocks are able to control the absolute herself we find out is a nether brain thankfully they dip out taking the nether brain with them leaving Krick chilling by himself with a mind flare some necrit some intellect devourers as well as alen in the back corner being held captive we fire off a shot to start the fight and oh wait sorry never mind cath's got a monologue first okay now the fight starts on our first turn we down an invisibility potion Scuttle over to where the Night song is imprisoned and free her yet again the first phase of this fight really isn't too hard with the exception of the mine flare so we take it out pretty early on and poke down some of the other goons here and there and shoot Krick as he moves about awkwardly on the center platform until we send him into phase 2 where a literal god of death turns him into his Avatar oh boy phase two Phase 2 is a bit of a nightmare with a bone chill aura that prevents aen from getting back up once she's knocked down a beam that deals unavoidable damage and has a chance to frighten us as well as a map wide AOE that damages us and pulls us toward it should we fail a save and to make matters worse he can heal himself by eating his goons which also unlocks the ability to cast finger of death an insanely High damaging spell this fight took absolute ages we tried a bunch of different strategies use different Elixir try different weapons but we just kept dying until right before I was about to give up and go back to an older save to grind out more levels we decided to give it one more try before the fight we make sure all of our Buffs are in order the main difference being that instead of an elixir of blood lust we're using heroism which grants us 10 temp HP and an extra 1 D4 added to all attacks and saving throws we're also using the bow we picked up earlier least expected since it has a plus two modifier and a blinding shot and we've already used Hunter's Mark from our other bow this long rest and to top it off we've got protection from evil and good to give all our enemies disadvantage on attacks against us and we're immune to being frightened by them we start off the fight and Blaze through phase one bursting down the mine flare and taking out Krick who's High AC matters less thanks to an added oil of accuracy granting us a plus two to hit with our bow then we throw down some haste scores to give us an extra action and try and blind Merkel whose legendary resistance doesn't work on the spell for some reason unfortunately he saves regardless to increase our damage a bit more we coat our weapon in an oil of combustion at this point too which causes fire explosions when we deal fire damage to this Target on his journey blast is a little with the old fear Ray but we're immune to getting frightened thanks to the aformentioned protection spell and our concentration gets a nice Boost from our elixir on our next turn we finally land the Blind and this does a ton for us it prevents Merkel from using the fear Ray on us gives us advantage on olar attacks and to top it off prevents him from consuming any of his goons which means no healing and no finger of death so we just spend the round shooting him down with every bit of damage we can muster and maintaining the blindness with both our spell and the blinding shot until he is nice and low whereupon we unload our last couple slashing flourishes that we had been saving and with the help of a potion of speed finally finish him off and it definitely didn't take three whole hours with him out of the way we grab his shiny Rock for our collection reunite Isabelle and aen and their duet in a touching moment and at last move onto the road to balers gate where the final spot of our tour awaits our journey continues as our weary hero gets some much needed rest on the road to balder's gate he does have a show to prepare for after all but some clingy stands find out where he's sleeping and jump him in the middle of the night thankfully they left the portal they arrived from open as a convenient way for us to escape so as the fight starts we just Dash and Misty step and completely ignore all the GI who showed up to try and gank us and we wind up in a veritable acid trip with our Dream visitor calling for help as we rush to save our handsome short King we first have to fight through some of the GI who are getting ganged up on by a group of friendly intellect devourers who very quickly get blown up by the invading astral monks though on our turn we get some wild couple of crits to take out the first of them and the remaining one takes out our last intellect ing pal before getting likewise destroyed by bolamu we jump down to the Giant floating God skull while questioning if this isn't one big fever dream and meet a friendly mind flare getting trounced by a whole bunch of gith trying to free one of their fellows who is imprisoned to make matters worse this mind flayer who calls himself the emperor is actually our Dream visitor which is just uh I miss our short King already anyways we decide to help him out and jump into action to defeat the gith the fight starts off and after one of our Brainiac pal goes down we learn the hard way just how tough these guys are as they bully the beesus out of us and our first attempt goes down fast for attempts two we prepare a little bit more by Downing an elixir of Hill giant strength and pre-c casting Guidance with the idea of just yeading the gith into the abyss and we start off the fight only problem is when we press the throw button we have disadvantage on throwing them because we're too close which is an interesting problem to have when throwing someone so we settle for a defensive flourish followed by a reg stab to deal some damage and boost our AC by four then the enemies sh through the devourers before landing a couple hits on us breaking our concentration and lowering our damage since the thorn blade and strange conduit ring will no longer be active thankfully the emperor lands a nice stun and this time we seiz the opportunity to take out one of the gith and heroically hide behind him while using a potion to heal up our haters really don't want to see the next Bartholomew album though and with a series of blows take us down to next to no Health hold person us and then Fireball us triggering our half work feature which strangely enough breaks us out of the hold person realizing things are desperate we blast a couple of them back with Thunder Wave to this obviously open Edge before Downing a speed pot to finish them off with another before the game reveals just kidding there actually is a wall here as such we can't get both but we do manage to get one and by some small miracle the next couple attacks miss us and we make it to the next round we then hit the enemy next to us with an offhand attack to top off our Arcane Acuity stacks and then cast blindness followed by throwing a healing potion and an invisibility pot so we don't have to deal with all this nonsense for at least one round our former dream visitor stuns one of them during this time and we break our invisibility by finishing him off with a couple slashing flourishes and a defensive flourish we also take another speed pot so we don't lose our next turn the emperor is really proving his worth though with yet another stun leaving room for us on our next turn to drop a sick cloud of daggers and finish off the last GI our reward is a whole bunch of exposition that basically amounts to the emperor telling us he's super justified in manipulating Us by pretending to be our Dream visitor and the GI he has imprisoned is orus a prince who is the source of our protection from the tadpole in our heads he also offers us another tadpole but we don't even want the one we do have so we yeat it off a cliff and move along to our real reward upon hitting level eight we get a fifth Bic inspiration charge which is phenomenal and we also gain access to another spell for which we choose invisibility to help us in any stealth missions and as a desperate ghet out to jail free card alongside another fourth level spell slot we also take the war cter feat which gives us advantage on any concentration saving throws and lets us cast shocking grasp in place of our normal opportunity attack absolutely huge for us going forward as we're much less likely to drop spells the next morning we continue on the road to Ballers gate where we end up in Rivington a small town just on the outskirts and are immediately beset upon on by a young fan who complains about a dead mother or something I don't know we give her our signature to make her day and continue on as it turns out the circus is in town so naturally we Mander inside and when we stumble upon a meth don't worry not the magma kind who offers to make a statue of us how could we refuse and only for the measly price of 5,000 gold when we get back to Camp our statue is already there te- posing in all its birthal mu Glory an extremely worthwhile purchase just for the Aesthetics not to mention it gives us the sweet Stone features permanent buff a buff which grants us an extra 1 D4 to all of our saving throws and attack rolls forever kind of wild and well worth the do then we're back to the circus where we see a wheel of chance game with a slimy looking Jin running the show to make sure he can't pull one over on us first we steal his Mage hand ring and then chat with him to give the game a shot we find out the poor bloke is obviously hard of seeing before giving the wheel a go and winning the jackpot on our first try unfortunately this results in him getting pretty heated and accusing us of cheating resulting in us getting teleported to a dinosaur filled jungle however we're not too stressed since we can just turn invisible loot the jungle for all its worth throw ourselves into the dinosaurs just a little and get out through a conveniently placed portal at the far end of the area one such piece of loot we managed to get was the band of the Mystic scoundrel this bad boy makes it so whenever we hit a creature with a weapon attack we can then cast any illusion or enchantment spell as a bonus action this of course Works crazy well in conjunction with our Arcane Acuity allowing us to cast spells that will disable whole groups of enemies as a bonus action a long-term stable that will be replacing our costic band and before we leave the circus we also paint our faces with clown makeup cuz well why not though it uh really doesn't show up well continuing our journey we follow the road to the city proper and find out its closed since Gort is in the midst of getting coronated as Arch dukee we do our best to convince the guard we belong but it doesn't go well so we do what any rockar would do in this situation we down a potion of flying and simply phase through the drawbridge now that we're inside the Fortress we meet Lord Enver Gort who looks like he's still stuck in his MCR phase and despite being surrounded by people he openly talks of his villainous plans and offers to team up with us if we take out Orin for him we of course have no problem with at least pretending to be buds for now but if we're to throw the concert of a lifetime we'll still have to take him and his steel watch out at some point to ensure the authorities don't stop us from partying like the world is ending but for now we've earned entry into the city at last and we head straight to everyone's second favorite armor vendor gloomy Fenton who sells us the armor of agility the armor of agility is medium armor with a 17 base AC that lets us add our full Dex mod to our Armor class which means with our cloak of protection and our Dex mod at plus 5 our BAS AC is now 23 in addition it doesn't impose disadvantage on stealth checks and it gives a plus two to every single saving throw we make for a crazy allaround boost to our survivability un fortunately we end up a little short on money so we look for the most expensive building nearby to Rob and wind up meeting this bozo from act one in front of Sorcerer sundrees And even though we're the one with the clown makeup on he still manages to make a bigger fool out of himself by demanding to know where the Night song is oldwell refusing to look Us in the eye but we tell him we never even found the Night song and he kind of just buggers off leaving behind a whole mountain of experience now that he's out of the way we head to the top of the tower where we meet the head hono loakin who is absolutely Star Struck by us and let us just wander about his Tower freely which is very poorly thought out by him since this results in US stealing every single thing that isn't bolted down and oh boy is this man just rolling in the dough we're talking magical artifacts and super powerful spells out the wazu one of the books that we steal the thiate Codex does curse us but after casting remove curse that turns into a permanent buff that gives us 20 temp HP after each long rest so not really a curse and after having our fill of gold and valuable artifacts we walk out the front door and head straight to everyone's first favorite armor vendor Damon who sells us the legacy of the Masters and the boots of persistence the legacy of the Masters is a pair of gloves that gives us a plus two bonus to attack and damage roles with weapons and a plus one to our strength saves basically just giving us more reliable damage in general and the boots of persistence are boots that gives us a permanent freedom of movement and long Strider meaning we can't be slowed by difficult terrain can't be magically paral ized or restrained and gain an extra 3 m of move speed and we gain a plus one to Our Deck saves to boot pun intended but we can't be a rockstar without having a memorable look so we get our clothes nice and dyed to match our Vibe and then head to a local Salon to get our hair cleaned up and Dy that too and now we're really ready to take on the city with that it's time to go out on the town and show off what we got naturally that means we're going to go down to some hidden docks and interrupt a gang fight to test out our new magical gear barthol you find finds a couple of gangs easily enough and after getting called mean names we get into the fight now I'm not going to lie most of this fight gets pretty well solved when we drop a fourth level cloud of daggers on five whole enemies but we do also get to do some pretty cool other stuff like attacking an enemy and bonus actioning out a vicious mockery this fight is pretty easy though especially when we realize just how useful it is to be able to hold person multiple enemies as a bonus action even if some of them manage to make the save and after we learn that the fight gets cleaned up nice and quickly we do some other Meandering about too we solve a murder mystery by murdering some mysterious folks get the moves put on us by the emperor add to the sewers and definitely did not die to random angry homeless people and meet a mud wizard who we convince we mean no harm which is just enough to bump us up to level 9 level 9 bumps our proficiency bonus up to plus4 increasing most of our roles by one and we also get our first fifth level spell dominate person we also swap out long strider for hold monster at the same time since both of these spells can be cast as a bonus action thanks to our newest ring and long Strider made redundant by our boots we also of course get one fifth level spell slot to go along with our newest spells and another fourth level one too during our gallivanting of the city we find good old Vol who thanks to all your comments I now know is not a Bard but a wizard and he's all tied up and strapped to a bunch of explosive barrels that are about to be set on fire by an Angry Crowd naturally we decide to rescue our homie and the fight starts and uh what the heck I uh okay anyways the fight starts and we break the chair Volo is tied to freeing him in the process then we whack one of the dudes with a defensive flourish to boost up our AC and bonus action HIIT his laughter another person to take them out of the fight most of the enemies miss us but one gets a nasty crit taking out about half of our HP on Bartholomew's turn we use our bonus action to hit an enemy to stack up Arcane Acuity and drop a sick Thunder Wave on three of the enemies sending all of them to the Briney deep next round a defense of Flur gets used to make sure we survive and an upcast a hold person takes out two more enemies out of the fight and from here we're pretty much in the clear although one does manage to break out pretty quickly still it's nothing that we can't clean up with a good few stabs and as we're learning with the helmet of Arcane Acuity and the band of the Mystic scoundrel were kind of a crowd control machine with Volo nice and safe we have a quick chat before he tells us he'll meet us at our camp later after we know our homie is sequestered away we get a little silly and head to the local bank where as it turns out the head clerk is a big Bartholomew fan and gives us a temporary Vault pass to let us in so we abuse his good faith and rob the bank for all its worth I mean honestly though what are these people expecting like there's not a single guard in this place and most of the security measures can be turned off by shooting a button it would be rude of us not to Rob them it does make a bit more sense when we find out the guards are being occupied by other robbers but we take care of all of them quickly enough and prove that Bartholomew is the superior Thief elsewhere in the city we stumble upon Marina from act one who's taken it upon herself to hunt down Ethel once and for all since this will net us a great reward we offer to help her out along the way we get into yet another bar fight which is becoming a bad habit and also find Ethel's secret hideout and uh free some of her stands from their poor decision-making skills a moment later we get enough experience to hit Level 10 which gives us quite a hefty power Spike our B conspiration dice go up to a d10 instead of a d8 we gain expertise in two skills slight of hand and performance about time for the latter we also get a new cantrip for which we take minor illusion to help distract folks if need be a new spell learned in the form of hypnotic pattern for some massive CC as a bonus action alongside another fifth level spell slot to go with it and to top it all off we take blur and counter spell from our magical Secrets feature which allows us to take two spells from any class list both of which will be insanely valuable Tools in our kit for keeping ourselves alive making most fights significantly easier now that we're nice and powered up we go into the Ethel fight with a protection from evil and good active as well as a poison resistance Elixir to make sure this fight is a breeze there is a gimmick to this fight but before that don't worry I did Brew the potion to make Ethel throw up the child who has been living inside of her stomach which yeah she's not a fan of go figure anyways we got to take out the mushrooms scattered throughout this room otherwise Ethel will keep coming back to life whenever we kill her and we've also got to take them out in one turn each since they fully heal each round the fight doesn't stress us out too much though with protection from EV and good all of her attacks have disadvantage against us and for most of them even if they do land we have resistance thanks to our Elixir the only thing we need to watch out for is insect plague which shreds through chunks of our HP but it's nothing a healing potion can't fix either way we take out the mushrooms decently easy with the help of some slashing flourishes stop some insect plagues with our brand new counter spell find out there's some hag specific vicious mockery lines and send Ethel the same way as the dodo we get a reward once we talk to Marina in the form of the phas semblance amulet this amulet is pretty straightforward in that it gives advantage on all mental saving throws that's wisdom Charisma and intelligence we won't be using this for the rest of the game but it will be a staple of our build for most of what remains still in search of the best place for our Big Show we swing by the SAR Palace and I um I don't think this is going to be it guys there's just a little bit too many bats but I've heard it's a great space for hosting big parties so let's take a look around oh my God it's the furry vention but my goodness this place is rather roomy either way we pre-cast blur and on our first turn we go for a defensive flourish to make ourselves nigh and killable with an AC of 27 and all enemies have disadvantage on attacking us and we just kind of watch as the convention goers spend an eternity missing us that's pretty much how the whole fight goes but with a few well-placed spells and a couple good wax we wrap this all up so we can take a proper Gander at the rest of the venue as we look around the place we find has got quite the spacious basement and who should be waiting down here but the man of of the house Cazador SAR who is more than a little peeved that we interrupting his own show the first attempt of this fight goes extremely poorly since I had forgotten to turn counter spell back on after turning it off earlier which means Bartholomew ended up taking a full force blight to the face which got rid of most of our HP and broke our concentration on our pre-cast a blur and then a couple of healing potions decided not to work since we were standing on stairs leaving us nice and low for a ghoul to come in with a crit to finish us off not a good time all around our next goar around starts much better since we're able to counterspell the blight that got us last time now that we're actually in the fight it's worth mentioning cazador's gimmick that being his ritual sources who are all being drained around the arena he starts with seven of them and for each one he gets additional temp HP and extra necrotic damage on every source of pain he inflicts upon us not to mention some of the ritual sources Grant extra bons like plus 5 to AC or health regen each round so on our turn we move over top of one of these sigils which gives gives us the benefits of that one ritual Source instead of him and we shoot a bat to trigger our elixir of blood lust before we use a defensive flourish as well as a few more shots on one of the fellas being drained to hopefully interrupt the ritual most of the goons spend their turns dashing on up to us with the exception of chatter teeth who uses eyebite in an attempt to knock us out if that goes through the fight is instantly over so we try and counter spell which fails but luckily we still succeed the saving throw this does mean that Cazador gets to cast BL on us again which we really can't do much about and that also breaks our blur as always baramu starts by sacrificing a bat to the bloodlust Elixir and then we use our bonus action to drop a fat confusion on the majority of the Arena followed up with a beautiful Thunder Wave taking two werewolves off the edge being confused however is apparently just code for acting completely normally since most of the enemies just run up to us and attack us anyways which is very cool and papar continues to be little more than a drain on our spell slots not wanting to have to deal with chatter teeth at the same time we use the majority of our turn and a couple of slashing flourishes to take him out afterwards oh oh no I uh I forgot about this cador becomes the vampire ascendant since we didn't take out any of the ritual sources in time which gives him a permanent 710 extra necrotic damage on every attack massively increased move speed AC boosted by five and he heals 7 d10 at the start of all of his turns oh yeah and a permanent legendary resistance which means plus 10 to pretty much every saving throw well nothing to do for it now we continue forward with a defensive flourish using up our last baric inspiration and after gaining an extra action thanks to blood lust we thunderwave a good majority of the enemies off the edge and we sprinkle in some healing since we will really need it another blight gets sent our way but it doesn't really matter how much damage SAR can do so long as we keep counter spelling back to us and we send yet another ghoul off the edge leaving just a werewolf and the vampire ascended himself as the main threats here despite legendary resistance being a thing we managed to get a blindness off on the head honcho too which honestly isn't really that great since he can still just move up to us and cast a spell anyways but we at least get advantage on attack roles as long as it's active either way next turn a final Thunder Wave is used to take care of the werewolf and we are now awfully low on spell slots we also run up to Cazador and give him a quick little whack before using a scroll of hideous laughter to preserve our spell slots for more meaningful uses he does save unfortunately another round goes by meaning another counter spell gets used just to stay alive and since hide's laughter had a 70% chance to succeed according to the game which in retrospect I don't think it was counting legendary resistance we decide to give it another go on our next turn anyways it doesn't work so we vent by burning away most of the bats since they've been pecking away at us Papa blood sucker uses one more call lightning and we say good riddance to our final spell slot to counter spell it Bartholomew really has had enough of these bats though and blows the last of them up with an alchemist fire now it's just us and the big man himself so we decide to change that never too late in the game to bring in the groupies using a scroll we summon a diva to help whoop this Undead booty from here on out the fight is pretty straightforward cador drops a big spell on us then we use whatever potions we can to heal up and after summoning another Ally in the form of a flame Elemental we just Whittle away at his health it takes a long time but we mix in some more spell Scrolls here and there to speed things up and we manag to outpace his healing enough to finally take him out after what feels like ages now that's how you put on a show Cazador though we ultimately do decide against using this venue for any future concerts our real reward for this encounter is raps CID rap city is a plus one dagger that gives an extra plus one bonus to attack rolls damage and spell save DCS for each foe killed with a Max of plus three this does reset on a long rest but during the time of recording this you could stack this up by destroying anything with a health bar even boxes which is what we usually did and and you can consume these Stacks to use an extra special move of your choice though we never used any of them since they're really not worth it plus as an extra bonus if we hit an enemy while hiding or invisible we have a chance to inflict the bleeding condition not that this was useful either regardless this item is worth it for the plus three to everything alone since it makes our spells even harder for enemies to resist and we'll be replacing our Thorn Blade with it since our search for a venue was a bit of a bust we decide to turn our attention to the problem of the police we can't have them showing up and ruining everyone fun after all so we head to the steel watch Foundry in search of a way to disable them once inside we meet gandhian zanner tubin a gnome who helps build and maintain the steel wash from him we learn the Gnomes that are keeping this place going are being held against their will if they try and Break Free the explosive collars around their necks will detonate killing them all and to make matters worse their families are being held prisoner in an underwater prison called The Iron Throne if we save them Mr tubin and his Pals here will help us tear down the popo so it's off to the watery depths with us we managed to find the submarine that they used to transport prisoners to and from the Iron Throne pretty quickly and use it to head there ourselves along the way gorach lets us know he's been pirating our music this whole time using lime wire and we're no longer besties naturally this enrages Bartholomew not the bestie thing the pirating thing and once inside he gets to freeing as many people as he can which as it turns out is not very many people we do get a couple here and there freeing some from their cells with a bow shot and others just by running up and pulling the lever including some guy called the Grand Duke I don't know he sounds important but he can't be that important since he gets merked in like 6 seconds regardless we managed to free a decent chunk of Gans and get out of Dodge before the whole place gets blown Skyhigh or ocean deep I guess now that we've gained some more devout groupies we head back to zanner to tell him the good news and find he's in the middle of getting yelled at so we start our Revolution right then and there we start raging Against the Machine with a good couple Flacks to one of the baddies and then cast blur on ourselves to stay nice and safe and as the NPCs start beating each other up we quickly realize that the gandan we just worked so hard to get on our side are really not that great the main thing we're afraid of in this fight is the enemy spellcasters who can cause us to take unavoidable damage and some of them also have an aura of Terror which gives us disadvantage on attacks and saving throws so on our next turn we hit one of them breaking their concentration on spirit Guardians and find out the hard way that we are not immune to our own hypnotic pattern which makes a lot of sense honestly but either way it still breaks the concentration of all the goons so it's not all bad unfortunately all of our allies get got during the next round and in the middle of all of it one of the baddies initiates the destruction sequence of their bomb necklaces now we could try and stop it to save the gandan downstairs and have them join us in the next fight but if they're anything like these guys it's probably better to focus on saving our own Hide And since we we don't have to focus on saving the little guys anymore the fight gets way easier we drop a big old hypnotic pattern which takes most of the enemies out of the fight for a couple turns followed by a cloud of daggers which shreds away at a large group of them and then a good few melee stabs to finish the job before we head to the basement we make sure to uh speak with zanner one more time to figure out how to disable the steel watch for good once we make it downstairs a fight starts with the rest of the foundry who are thankfully all injured from their tussle with the gandan that were working down here Bartholomew does what he always does when overwhelmed cast blur and he stands in the corner our biggest concern the spellcasters is largely mitigated when one of them cast silence in a massive area surrounding us which means this fight is just a matter of us defensive flourishing keeping blur up and slowly whittling away at the enemies it takes a long while but it is sped up with the help of a bloodlust Elixir until eventually it's just us and two Hellfire Watchers left the only problem is these guys as the name suggests spew hell fire at us which deals a boatload of unmitigable damage even resistance and Immunity has no effect which is a little scary for us and at one point we get brought quite low because of it realizing we need to reposition and find a safe spot we prepare an arrow of transposition to shoot ourselves up to safety and despite the preview saying it will land Us in the rafters when we fire it this happens I was more than a little upset so we downed a potion of speed to cast invisibility which broke initiative allowing us to leave and rest up as well as cash in our newest level up upon hitting level 11 we get a six level spell in the form of Autos irresistible dance for some high-end crowd control the buys us at least one guaranteed turn of safety and we also swap out confusion for Glyph of warding since confusion has been ridiculously lackluster and we could really use some more reliable AOE damage especially with varied damage types and of course we get a six level spell slot to go with our new spells now that we're feeling more powerful we walk back downstairs and finish off the remaining Hellfire Watchers who low up when we bring them even moderately low which seems like a bit of an overreaction if you ask me after resting up Downing an elixir of bloodlust and pre-c casting blur on ourselves to make sure we don't get hit we head to the final room of The Foundry where we Face three Hellfire Watchers and a steel Watcher Titan we spend our first turn just building up our Arcane Acuity and boosting our AC with a defensive flourish as well as a few other hits and the Titan tries to cast Hellfire curse on us which would give us disadvantage on any physical saves since that's not something we want to deal with and we don't have any other uses for a counter spell we'll pretty much be using our reaction on this every time once it gets back to Bartholomew we cast chain lightning using a scroll since all of these enemies are vulnerable to lightning and it deals an absurd amount of damage so much damage that one of them starts to self-destruct on their next turn and we get the chance to mobile flourish another one into the self-destruction radius barely but it works also worth mentioning just how great warcasters opportunity attack is in this fight because of the lightning vul unability anyways the Hellfire Watcher blows up which causes the other Hellfire Watcher to start blowing up while the Titan cowers for its life and initiates the world's most telegraphed attack with only one Hellfire Watcher left we just cast a couple lightning Glyph of warnings on it until it decides to end it all to then we just rinse and repeat with the Titan itself for quite a few turns I'd even go so far as to say quite a many turns until it too initiates the self-destruct sequence whereupon we heroically run into the other room and shut the door behind us before hitting the end turn button and watching The Experience roll in we also make sure to pick up gter male before we leave which is a really good bow that we can't really use since we don't have proficiency but it is still a surprise tool that will help us later then we do our best heroic run to escape The Foundry before it blows up all in a day's work now that the popo is out of the way we still got to take out gourash to make sure they can't rebuild so we head to the top of his keep pre-cast blur and go into the fight with an elixir of bloodlust active to boot this fight shows off just how dominant we've become the goons are more of the same from the steel foundry and we can take them out nice and quick and with a bonus action upcast at hold person the whole fight becomes easy mode and we get to pick up some grenades here and there for later use as an added bonus although one gets blasted right into some fire and instantly blows up almost one-shotting us but other than that the fight goes down without a cinch gach doesn't even get to phase two after he goes down we steal his cool to show our adoring fans later and we take the chance to head back to camp and party hard once back in Camp we realize that Orin has been neatly stacking letters on the floor and buried in these letters is an invitation to join a record label naturally we jump on the opportunity and all it takes is killing a Celestial and bathing in the blood of Innocence which for the music industry is actually surprisingly tame well here we also buy the vicious short bow a plus two short bow that makes it so when we crit we deal an extra seven damage nothing too wild but it'll be our main bow for the rest of the Run since it works nicely with hold person and hold monster which we can cast as a bonus action unfortunately once we get to the scene of orin's celebration party the mood is kind of in the dumps and we find out Orin has kidnapped one of our groupies and is holding them hostage naturally this cannot stand so she turns into a giant uh thing and we draw our blades this fight has quite the obnoxious gimmick Orin herself has 12 stacks of Unstoppable which reduce all damage she takes to one and prevents her from being moved against her will and she gets all of these stacks back each round so long as the goons around her are casting this ritual the main problem with that is all of these goons also have Sanctuary on them which means you can only take them out with AOE this combined with the fact that Orin herself is a monster that can attack something ridiculous like five times in a round and she starts with two thugs helping her out regularly results in us getting got over and over and over again on our sixth attempt we finally figured out a strategy that might work so we give it a go before the fight we Cod our boat with crawler mucus a poison that requires the target to make a dc13 constitution save or become poisoned and paralyzed we also go in with an elixir of heroism active too to help with saving throws mainly since we keep getting knocked prone or stunned by the enemies Bartholomew gets first in initiative and starts with an arrow of many targets to max out our Arcane Acuity and we get Orin as well as a couple of goons Afflicted with the crawler mucus then we drop at Tasha's hideous laughter on Orin which completely lays her out making sure she stays out of the fight even if the poison wears off finally we fire off a slashing flourish on the last goon that can still move about and start chipping away at her Unstoppable she tries to stun us which thankfully fails and then runs up to get nice and close which gives us the chance to bonus action stab her to bump of Arcane Acuity followed by a Thunder Wave sending both her and an unfortunate ritual Caster off the edge we rinse and repeat for literally everyone else in the arena sending them off the cliff and taking our time since orang or just cannot break out of our hideous laughter due to our high spell save DC from Arcane Acuity and Rapid after that we spend another small eternity blasting down orin's Unstoppable Stacks using the odd spell scroll here and there to make it go a little bit faster and when every stack is dealt with we perform a rendition of everyone's favorite Thunder Wave to finish the job our reward is another Shiny Rock to add to our collection the freedom of our groupy and her unending adoration as well as bloodthirst blood thirst is a plus two dagger that reduces our critical threshold by one allows us to cast true strike once per long rest as a bonus action and when wielded in the main hand gives any enemy we stab with it vulnerability to piercing damage this is an extremely good weapon and we will use it at some point but not just yet before we wrap up our tour of the city we've got a few more things to do to to start we unveil a hidden passage in the prison of worm's Rock then we solve some puzzles and after that we hit Level 12 level 12 is our final level and with it we get our final feat we end up taking resilient which is a feat that gives us plus one to any ability and Proficiency in that corresponding saving throw since we're struggling with wisdom saves mostly we select that we also learn one final spell in the form of dissonant Whispers it's nothing fancy but it does have a chance to fear enemies and Deals a decent bit of damage plus we can cast it as a bonus action which is the main reason why we took it with that out of the way we head to the final portion of this hidden passage where we find a big old dead dragon and just behind it the Helm of Balin we yoink the helmet and for quite a while consider putting it on as our main helmet obviously we don't want to get rid of our helmet of Arcane Acuity but in between sessions larion actually changed the way the condition works now Arcane Acuity Stacks up to 10 instead of seven however when we take damage from anything we lose two stacks of it this makes it a lot harder to keep our Acuity up in fights against spellcasters or large groups of enemies in general so we consider swapping it out but ultimately decide to use our helmet of Arin Acuity for the majority of the rest of the game then Bartholomew goes to investigate the dragon corpse which as it turns out is not as dead as we would hope from this Dragon we learned the emperor was once his friend back when he was known by his mortal name balerin as in the founder of the city balerin but now there's some Bad Blood between the two and the dragon tries to take their rage out on us I'll spare you the Gory details of this fight since it really is just rather tedious none of our CC spells work on this dragon and he only has two attacks which never do enough damage to seriously hurt us once we down an elixir of lightning resistance unless you count his super AOE attack which we can just avoid by hiding in this building so the fight turns into an hourong SLO of us shooting him for barely any damage well he does the same to us until we finally take came out next up we end up going to a self-help Clinic to help us deal with our record label contract falling out and all the emotions that follow where yet another cult resides in their basement like this is just getting out of hand who is building all of these cavernous underground spaces anyways a fight breaks out because we don't have some girl named shadowart with us I I don't I don't even know who that is so we get to defending ourselves from these wacka Doodles the first time goes pretty poorly since they can just blind Us by casting darkness and then stop us healing with a bone chill so we can't do much when they eventually take us out luckily for us we picked up a steel Watcher helmet from The Foundry before blowing it up which grants his immunity to being blinded amongst other things and with the help of that helmet blur and an Elixir blood lust the second attempt goes way smoother after we clear up the cultist we get to raiding their basement for anything good and find a mirror of loss which allows us to after a few successful checks Trade A minus two in one stat for a plus plus two and another we trade in our intelligence for a boost to our dexterity bumping it up to 22 and increasing our modifier to a plus 6 regardless of what we chose to trade in we can still just take a long rest to get rid of the debuff while keeping the buff remember if you're feeling cursed just take a nap since the record label deal fell out and so did our attempts to learn how to deal with our tangle of emotions we meet up with Raphael who has been teasing us with the idea of making us famous this whole playthrough this time he actually follows through though and as a signing bonus he offers up the hammer of Orpheus to free the fellow being held prisoner by the emperor so we don't have to deal with his creepy tentacled butt anymore and oh my God we just signed our soul away uh time to go to hell and get our contract back and as it turns out hell is actually pretty easy to get into so long as you've got a book telling you how to do it and a pouch full of all the ingredients needed for the ritual once inside the House of Hope We Meet the titular hope who asks us to free her from Raphael's abuse and gives us a nice disguise to meander about the the place without getting caught bartholomy puts the disguise to work and gains access to Raphael's private budo where we meet harap and Entertainer who happens to look a lot like Raphael himself things get a little bit frisky but we get cold feet and the fight ends up breaking out instead it's not a very hard fight even though we start off just a little bit naked but it does result in pretty much everybody in the House's main floor except for us getting killed and after the fight we just heal up using the fountains and the budo which gives all the benefits of a long rest now that the path is clear we're free to loot the house including grabbing our contract you know if it's this easy to break a deal with the devil everyone should do it we also grab the Amulet of Greater Health which sets our constitution to 23 massively increasing our Max HP and giving us advantage on all Constitution saves as well making warter a little bit redundant but still this amulet is extremely worth it also worth mentioning at this point we swap over to using bloodthirst on our main hand and the knife of the under Mountain King on our off hand since the changes to Arcane Acuity make wielding Rap City a little bit Overkill as well a really big bummer happened here though and my recording audio ended up breaking so we'll just have to jam out to the soundtrack for the rest of this video either way we jump down to the basement where we get into a tozzle with hopes guards but they go down nice and quick and we free her using the oric hammer before we start heading out of the house on our way out the Master of the House returns just before we manage to escape and he is a little less than pleased with all the hinks that we' been up to so a fight breaks out and this fight's got a doozy of a gimmick scattered throughout the room is four Soul pillars and for each one active Rafi gets a bonus 1 D12 fire damage on all his attacks and a plus three to all dexterity checks and saves and he can also use an action to heal from them each turn while they also give Soul charges which fuel his extremely powerful spells and on top of oh oh my God no no we're not doing this again Raphael no no no no this is Bartholomew show uh okay fine but keep it in the background anyways we really have to deal with these pillars but first we got to deal with these goons so we start off the fight with an arrow of many targets to boost our spell safe DC and then cast hypnotic pattern to disable half the room including Raphael himself on hopes turn we use her revoke guest status ability to guaranteed banish your gear out of the fight permanently and on our next turn we do a bit of a repeat of the last one with another arrow of many targets to boost up our Arcane Acuity before finishing off Cilla and casting a hypnotic pattern to stall the fight a little bit longer to laying Rafi yet again the remaining goons blast hope down pretty low so on her turn she makes the ultimate sacrifice stepping into the middle of the room and using divine intervention to blast the enemies with a bunch of radiant damage unfortunately for her all the enemies reflect radiant damage then we shoot a smoke patter Arrow at an enemy which blows up the soul pillar behind them and unfortunately doesn't trigger our Mystic scoundrel ring for some reason which we were really counting on so we down a potion of speed and decide to go for triggering our elixir of blood lust to max out our action economy we fire two sets of slashing flourishes off at one of the goons and despite a 95% chance to hit we miss two times just not our day then this donkey face comes around and disarms US causing us to drop our bow Raphael finally gets a turn and blasts us off the screen well dealing tons of damage and a couple of the other enemies land some more hits too things are looking extremely dire for us so we go full deep defense mode with a defensive flourish and a blur to make sure nobody can hit us we also use a Thunder Wave to try and fling them off the edge but they've got wings so they just teleport right back up though we do take out one in the process just from damage with our remaining action we heal up and get ready to weather the storm and with all this prep we managed to make it to next turn but now we're even more surrounded so our last bartic inspiration gets used on a defensive flourish and we scadaddle out of the way and cast a glyph of Waring to take out one of them and chip away at the rest as it turns out though this doesn't trigger elixir of blood Lust For some reason we've still got our extra attack though so we stab one of the goons to finish them off and while it does trigger our elixir of blood lust it also bugs out and consumes our bonus action for some reason which means we have to run away throw down a healing potion to top up and then throw down a speed potion using our last action so we don't lose our next turn on Rafael's turn he walks outside the room and cast a spell on us which we counter spell so we don't have to worry about healing up next go around and on our turn a plan starts to form as this golden opportunity presents itself this turn though we just Thunder Wave most of the enemies away to bias some breathing room and throw a couple smoke powder bombs at the nearby pillar next turn however we shut the door leaving just two fish fellas in the room with us then we use the only Scroll of Arcane lock we have to seal off the room for 10 whole turns we use the rest of our turn to finish off the two goons locked in here with us and get to destroying the pillars once that's done we down a potion of angelic Slumber which knocks us unconscious for two turns in return for giving us the benefits of a full long rest obviously not something you'd normally use in a fight but this is not a normal fight then we equip gter male the bow we got from the steel Watcher Titan earlier like I said we can't really use it but we can use the celestial haste ability from it which is just like a potion of speed but we don't get lethargic after we swap out our bloodlust Elixir for an elixir of heroism too at this point since bloodlust is no longer necessary and once we cast the celestial haste on ourselves the fight resumes it picks up again with us defens of flourishing and finishing off the remaining Campion and stabbing Raphael just a little bit too as a treat our devilish host tries his best to ravaging Inferno us for a few turns while we keep whittling him away but it really doesn't work out for him as we use counter spell after counter spell eventually our haste is about to run out so we go for a hideous laughter on Raphael and it actually works and it doesn't just work it pretty much takes him out of the fight for the entire rest of it we go out of the way to finish off the last imp and then it's not hard to take out Raphael over the course of a few turns with of course everyone's favorite Bartholomew hit single cloud of daggers and just like that we finished our last major challenge of the run on our very first try and have freed ourselves from our end of the contract now we're off to the nether brain so we can finally be free of it and our tadpole so we can finally practice in peace before our big concert we try and destroy it with our cool rock collection but it doesn't work out and now the nether brain is free and it's going to make sure no one ever listens to our music again by destroying the whole city thankfully the emperor shows up to save the day and whisks us to safety unth thankfully the emperor showed up and he keeps acting like he owns us so we tell him to bug her off and he dips to join the nether brain as a Bartholomew hater so we free orus who turns into a mind flayer to help us deal with the losers wrecking the city along long our way to the nether brain we encounter an army and slaughter them really quick and I know I know don't worry it's okay they didn't listen to our music anyways then we climb up the nether brain's brain stock where we encounter the emperor once and for all and he summons this dude who is 100% not our Dream visitor I have no idea who this man is but I don't like him anyways the fight starts and we get orus to use a dimension door scroll to teleport us to the ground and get channeling our cool rocks to create a portal into the psyche of the brain then we down a potion of speed to give us an extra action which we use to summon some groupies as distractions before moving on and casting globe of invulnerability to keep us protected well channeling the plan doesn't work out perfectly it gets a little bit interrupted but eventually we get it back on track and the portal opens up once it's open Bartholomew jumps inside and regroups with orus who cast Fierce perilous Stakes on us which gives us 15 extra psychic damage on each hit we heal 2 d8 on each hit too and we score a crit on a 15 or higher at the cost of becoming vulnerable to all damage for the next three turns so we ZIP down the melee range and stab the brain with our dagger giving it vulnerability to piercing before flying back up with the help of a previously taken potion of flying to get some high ground and we simply rain down a few slashing flourishes which deal a um a decent amount of damage if I do say so myself weakening the brain enough to decide its fate once and for all with the brain vulnerable there's a terrible moment where Bartholomew contemplates using his power to enthrall everyone in the world to become an avid groupy of his but he decides to earn his Fame instead I mean who wouldn't want to be a Bartholomew fan after this instead we take out the Elder brain once and for all crashing it into the ground freeing ourselves of our parasit so we can at last practice in peace and creating if not the world's most memorable concert at least it's most memorable light show goodbye balamu party hard my dude wherever you end up up thank you all so much for watching this doozy of a video of Bartholomew's tour across the Forgotten Realms here's the stats for every act for those of you who stuck it out to the end I really can't thank you all enough don't forget to like subscribe and let me know your thoughts in the comments uh look forward to our next run too which is looking like it's said to be a lone wolf monk until then I hope you all have a great day and a very special thank you to the Channel's Storyteller tier members bunny Warren and player five I couldn't be here without you guys

Channel: TheTruant

Views: 35,871

Keywords: baldur's gate 3, bg3, DnD, Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeons, and, Dragons, Lonewolf, Solo, Tactician, Hardest difficulty, fighter, eldritch knight, throwing, throwing weapon, larian, larian studios, twitch, youtube, live, hardest, difficulty, act 2, act, act 3, bard, swords, college, can you beat, beating, winning, destroying

Id: 1qUF2G5O80Q

Length: 110min 26sec (6626 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023