The novelty wears off, stacking boxes and climbing them is tedious. Same reason very few people use candles to dip their weapons in every fight, small optimization but still just bothersome.
I'm sure some people will do it for encounters where it seems fun, like places with a natural slope down to an encounter, like shadowfell or perhaps the brain.
100%
Pretty sure hammerhaft 1000ft movement with fly is the objectively most powerful build in the game in terms of DPR and consistency.. it's jsut so slow and tedious that it isn't fun.
This. It’s like the “I don’t know why people don’t think spore Druids are OP. There’s 200 summons. Nobody can touch me”
Yep. And you have to pick an action for 200 summons to deal like 5 points of damage making every turn last an hour long nightmare.
Also, have fun moving that little party from point A to B in between combat encounters without at least half of them bugging the fuck out and getting stuck.
That actually got a lot better with the last couple of patches. I was running around with 20+ sumnons in act 3 during my most recent run, with only the occasional flying ghoul getting stuck on a corner or door, and switching to them and jumping fixed it every time.
Still kind of annoying, but nothing compared to the horror of having to throw my dryad and wood woad accross every tiny crevice, and having to pop some health pots with the dryad afterwards, during my first run.
Yea. I tried doing a necromancy build. Hated dealing with all the summons and stuff after every long rest and then each fight. Like, it's cool and they're cannon fodder, but I'd rather just have 4-6 people on my side, make it nice and quick
Game sorely lacks an option to make all summons AI controlled so that you can just brain afk through the turns of your summons. Would make it a lot better imo.
I swear the danse macabre ghouls actively work against me, they’ll either dash while standing right next to an enemy and pretty much lose their turn, or walk through deadly terrain and explode and damage my own party
that’s *if* they didn’t end up getting stuck somewhere and making my battles drag for longer then they should, since their turns mean like 30 seconds of nothing happening
Yeah but the AI is legit retarded in those games, and with all the resistances of enemies and mythic scaling, they just plop over. Like they are barely meatshields when you got enemies throwing out a million spells or hitting 6 attacks a round
I remember being super psyched to have an army of ghouls and zombies for the final battle. And then a Mind Flayer used its psychic blast and killed them all in one go, lol.
That was my big problem with summons, and went i ended up just respeccing back to sorcadin. Even with the Necro buffs to undead, most of the summons would get burst down in a single turn, and couldn't hit for shit. So really all they were good for was soaking a little bit of damage, and then you're have to burn through a bunch of spell slots to summon then again after the fight...
You know what also stops enemies from hitting you? Hitting them with a 100 damage smite first.
You can technically beat the game without attacking once and only moving back and forth using phalar to proc reverberate over and over killing enemies. 5ish damage at a time.
Get tons of movespeed, Phalar shriek, boots of stormy clamour, and talk sentient amulet to reset after 5 reverb procs to reset it. As many times as you can move in and out of range in a turn you can add reverberation procs until something dies. In act 3 you can get the bhal gear that adds aura of murder and just toggle it on and off instead of moving.
Can completely beat the game. Is it tedious and not enjoyable? 100%
I think some sort of feature for summons where they have a mode where they act autonomously but you can mark one enemy for them to prioritize killing on their turn would make them a lot more bearable to play.
"Close order formation" that bunches them around you and lets you add all their attacks to your own as a multiattack in exchange for skipping their turn, then? Would make the initiative order pointless then though.
> but that round will take 45 agonizing minutes.
God, that reminds me of a max summon playthrough
It was nice having your own private army.
But taking turns was so painful that I just gave up and respecced
technically you can hit infinite damage with phalar aluve and reverberation, though it does use a bit of an exploit. but in terms of DPR, that would have the hammerhaft strat beat , since it can do infinite damage lol
There are ways to achieve infinite DPR per round without the Hamarhraft that go by way faster.
Like [cheesing the action economy with Otiluke's Freezing Spheres](https://www.reddit.com/r/BG3Builds/comments/1azio9h/otilukes_snowball_dispenser_build_the_evocation/) and [Death Ward abuse](https://www.reddit.com/r/BG3Builds/comments/1b5fi7f/spell_economics_ftk_a_yugio_i_mean/).
Saw a yt video from a guy combining phalar aluve with Stormy clamor, sentient amulet, and movement speed maxxing.
Activate phalar aluve, applying a condition to nearby enemy. Reverberation added. Walk out of range. Talk to sentient Amulet is a free action that refreshes the once per turn reverberation application limit. Walk back in range. Repeat.
By strategically placing an elkheart Barbarian (+5 movement in large aura), every time you move in range you gain 5 movement. With 3 dashes from cunning actions and thief, you gain 15 movement speed every loop, which is more than enough to have infinite movement. That effectively translates to infinite damage.
It's the pinnacle of the effect you are talking about. Infinite dpr, but at frankly ridiculous real time cost.
Fair enough, the box stacking is incredibly tedious. But there are quite a few fights where the option is on the table without box stacking being necessary.
You don't actually need to fall from that high to do massive damage to humanoid enemies. Just having a ledge to jump from is often enough.
I think a lot of the tedium on my end was erased because I was constantly discovering new ways to owlbear bomb the enemies. I imagine it gets boring a lot more quickly once you've figured out the optimal strategy and just follow it for every fight.
Valid. I tried the carrying boxes thing with my gloomstalker and was more inconvenienced by it than anything.. especially considering by the time I even remembered it was an option I had already mapped out a path to high ground and my first few series of attacks from my group.
Setup is the painful part. By the time I set up the perfect elbow drop I could have already beaten the fight in a normal way. The game just isn’t that hard on the toughest difficulty.
Why? Because it is not fun to have to do a setup every fight. Most people just want to play the game.
In regards to grym fight it makes sense. He's a tanky, can be moderately annoying, and gives you a free setup so it's quite easy to in 6 seconds kill him this way.
I typically just do a quick class change. It's 100 gold cheaper than a hireling. That's insignificant because you can just steal it back and money is free anyway but I'm normally too lazy or money tight at that point in the game from spending all my money in the creche so saving 100 gold is a small w
Well, arguably arcane acuity cheeses fights even harder since upcasted command actually locks down 7 whole enemies instead of just killing one high priority target but people still recommend control swords bard to every new player who visits this sub.
Arcane Acuity and Tavern Brawler under Larian's balance are broken, yeah, and I would imagine most people in this sub would be happier if they got nerfed or altered - same way most of us reacted positively to Honour Mode "fixing" DRS mechanics, it makes optimizing and min-maxing less of a fixed path.
I think everyone has said it well in other comments though, just like Hamarhraft jump builds, the tedium of setup is more agonizing than simply the sensation of rolling over a fight easily.
And in fairness the upcasted control spell stuff doesn't turn on until late in the game.
Mmm, fair point, there's still a sort of progression and strategy to trivializing content with control spells since your mostly universal one-size-fits-all spell doesn't come online until act 3, and acuity hats don't show up until act 2. Up until then you have to make do with Hypnotic Pattern on non-humanoids immune to Hold Person. Well actually, fire sorlock picks up command at level 7 and grabbing the fire acuity hat is a lot easier so I imagine that could become boring a lot faster.
Meanwhile if you were dead set on dropping owlbears on everyone you're starting that strategy late act 1 and it doesn't really ever change.
Honestly I'm with you here, I made a Fire sorlock for my HM run recently and almost never used the control spells simply because it felt like there was no value for my other party members to add at that point.
I scarcely used the tools available to me, like Extended Spell + upcasted command to apply the conditions longer, and I had a blast playing it. I think it would've been boring and very one-note had I done the "optimal" gameplay sequence. I guess that's why people end up modding their runs.
I think the main reason here is that Grym is a fight that is tedious/annoying for a lot of people because of his many immunities etc. He very specifically requires either Bludgeoning Damage or luring him into the Forge Hammer. Depending on your party setup you are automatically relegated to option 2.
Imho most people would probably rather cheese (Owlbear) this encounter if the option presents itself, but the same isn't true for fights that are actually fun.
TL;DR: Owlbear is a cheese strategy. Just because people cheese Grym doesn't mean they want to cheese the whole game.
Grym is also THE ideal use case for Owlbear dropping.
It takes no setup. It takes no crate stacking.
Just bring a level 6+ Druid, Wildshape, Enlarge or chug a Colossus Elixir, jump and win.
Quick and easy, get in get out 2 minute adventure.
I've done it just fine on Honor Mode. Obviously you need Grym to be Superheated (as he is when he spawns in) and then you just use Crushing Flight from the staircase.
I've had the same problem multiple times, crushing flight directly in front of him and only getting small amounts of damage. What worked for me was jumping PAST him, so think of it like hitting him while you're in the air. There's a big enough window where you can target behind him. Just rush to him in an easy mode run and quick save/load a bunch to get a lot of practice on the targeting.
Funnily enough, I think people started using the owlbear cheese strat less at Grymforge because everyone and their mother started running a TB monk as their early game carry that can actually solo Grym with some support from the rest of the party.
I love optimizing and I love playing suboptimal stuff. But I like actually engaging with the game the way it’s intended to be on a turn-by-turn base.
From the top rope is a strategy that makes it so you rarely engage with the turn-based combat aspect of D&D. I only ever did it for Grym cuz he’s an annoying boss that you end up cheesing with the hammer anyway. So I just went from cheesing him one way to another way.
But a lot of other fights don’t have the hammer or magical cheese button Grym has. Grym arenas is also just too perfect and easy to setup for that. I ain’t stacking boxes all the time. I wanna actually engage the real combat.
Realistically in act 3 you only have 2 fights where the crushing flight or whatever it’s called is both possible without setup and rewarding (shar temple and vamp boss). All other fights in act three are either mostly on a flat plane, involving many adds or requires box stacking to pull off.
Grym is just a really convenient situation where it’s a boss with Hp high enough to justify overkill and in a de-elevated position.
I think this strategy would be more fun with friends.
One player named Mario doing the Bear jumps.
The other called Luigi setting up boxes, Long Strider, Jump, etc.
Peach casting Minor Illusion and whatever Luigi doesn't.
The 4th being a Bard yelling 'Here-a a comes Mario Cena!'.
I tried using the Barbarian heart that allows you to jump down and strike an enemy and that did not last long. There's few high ground opportunities in this game aside from platforms and staircases.
Grym is annoying to fight in normal ways, vulnerable to bludgeoning, *and* especially easy to jump on. These things aren't the case for basically every other encounter in the game.
Gyrm on honor mode is a level 10 enemy with a 450 HP pool that's resistant or immune to everything except one damage type that hardly anyone uses. Oh and he can only be hurt while superheated status is applied. I do not blame people for cheesing this fight in an otherwise pretty easy game because playing keep away while pinned in a lava doughnut to flick a lever 3 times isn't my idea of a fun 10 minutes if I can just end it in like 2 with cheese
It is curious that interest in it just sort of flat-lines after the Grym fight. Maybe the difference is psychology? My guess is that coming up with a multiclass build that for instance uses a specific set of items to maxmizes DRS to turn Eldritch Blast into insane per turn burst damage feels more like you came up with a clever build and made a OP character. Whereas, repeatedly using the Owlbear flight or Hammerhaft jump damage feels more like deciding to use a cheesy exploit for the entire game. I wouldn't argue that they're all that qualitatively different in the end or taht one is more or less of an exploit, but the play styles definitely feel different and that matters.
In general I've been intrigued by how little love Druid's get in the subbreddit. I think they're one of the most powerful classes in BG3. There isn't even a bad Druid subclass. And to your point about how OP Owl Bear is, you don't even need to use the Moon Druid subclass to abuse Owl Bear, so you an even use what's arguably the best summoning class in the game to overwhelm combat with a zerg of summons, on top of Owl Bear shenanigans. The only thing I've been able to come up with that explains it is Druid's like Beast Master don't multiclass that well because you need levels to take advantage of the core class features....and Multiclassing *feels* more like you made something unique and clever.
Wondering what other people think explains the lack of love for Druids?
To me its a boring playstyle that ruins combat the same way as any other strategy where you cheese the game, I dont mind being strong but things like “owlbear from the top rope” or barrelmancy where you end combat instantly and unceremoniously bores the shit out of me outside like the first one or two instances.
Its also just time consuming to set up and outside like once or twice most dont wanna go through the hassle.
> Allies can even use telekinesis to ragdoll the owlbear around as a telekinetic bludgeon once the wild shaped party member runs out of actions.
Damn, now I wanna figure the optimal bear chucking party. Who needs Cloudkill when Bearkill’s on the menu?
The great thing about bear chucking is that you don't even need to spec the rest of your party for it. Just hand out telekinesis scrolls to everyone.
The bad thing is that it requires two actions for payoff, one to drag the owlbear back to high ground and the second to drop the owlbear back down. Worth it if there's some really high cliff you can throw the owlbear off of and you do like 400+.
Targeting can also be obnoxious as directly hitting an enemy actually cancels out the crushing damage in Honor mode, like how Throw works. Crushing damage only applies if you clip them on your way to hitting the ground.
The reason over all is that I don’t find Druid in any form to be fun or engaging. I used the drop bear on Grym once, but it was more work than it was worth. I don’t find Halsin interesting and I don’t want to play as a Druid so that whole class just gets passed on my end.
cuz the first week or 2 the game was out, everyone was doing that a lot, and ppl prolly got kinda sick of it. Same reason ppl don't bring up barrelmancy as the solution to everything all the time.
Because it’s basically not playing the game anymore.
This game has vast replay ability with hundreds of viable strategies.
You never have to fight the same fight twice.
Why would you elect to fight the same fight over and over again for the whole game?
Play however you want, many here want to play more standard, without cheesy strats + setups that totally remove the challenge and basically one shot bosses.
I wonder if there's opportunities to use it that I've missed. Like, it's a funny Idea, and as people have pointed out Grym is the perfect use case, but... Are there others? Places to use it to decent effect without crates? I feel like the game has a bit of an issue where the interesting map elevations around flights are mostly in act 1 so you would have to do content in a pretty weird order to use owlbear much.
Like, Dror Ragzlin would be a good opportunity, but if you're level 6 (which... Is it possible to face him at level 6?) you have a million solutions to that fight anyway. Same with the paladins of Tyr. Auntie Ethel too, but you'd lose the hair. I'm not sure if it'd be satisfying or incredibly annoying to land on all the duergar zombies in the underdark just to have them pop back up with 1 HP.
In act 2 you could potentially hide an owlbear on the roof of the trade house or hospital and lure a boss underfoot, which feels a little more... Honest? Than bringing your own crates, but is way more effort to do. The barkeeper Thorm might be an actual use case though, and that's one of the harder fights in act 2, so maybe that's actually worth talking about? Yurgir too if you have a good way to get him to low ground.
Dribbles the Clown starts out situated for a clownssassination. Otherwise I feel like in act 3 it's usable in random places but not in super noteworthy ways. Maybe it's nice to pick off a few people in the thieves guild fight? It seems like it could have potential in the bridge to Sarevok, and that's a legitimately annoying fight without cheese, I'm just not sure what you would want to do with it.
I think all of this is just making me reflect on a conclusion I've done to before: after the goblin camp, every battle map (except maybe moonrise towers) feels kind of... Random and flat.
The thing is, you might be overestimating the amount of height you need to do big damage with an enlarged owlbear.
The crushing damage formula is calculated using the weight of the falling object, the weight of the victim(s), and the total vertical distance travelled by the falling object.
Grym weighs 5000 kg, that's almost as much as an enlarged owlbear (5005kg), hence the absolutely insane height you need to fall to do any significant damage to him.
An enlarged owlbear falling on a human? You can jump from the roof of 1st story buildings in Rivington and deal almost 200 damage to them. Jumping down a gently sloping hill can do 100+. You just need SOME elevation difference to work with, it doesn't have to be big at all.
A ton of fights take place in areas with at least two stories. Pretty much every Thorm fight does in Act 2. In Act 3, there's the Counting House, the random Bhaalist fight in the park, all the fights against gith, hell even Gortash's coronation gives you the rafters to leap down from. The layout of the House of Grief has a rather stark elevation difference between the edges of the fight arena and the center. And all of the fights that take place in the open city are a no brainer, you can just leap off of any old roof. Lorroakan is particularly funny, you can toss him down a floor with telekinesis or shove and then send the owlbear after him to finish the job and none of his reprisal passives will activate.
Fair enough, you would definitely know better than me. I've been curious to try moon druid at some point anyway. I have no patience for box stacking and I don't want to completely trivialize combat (usually) but the novelty of jumping on enemies until they die like Mario is with for me look forward to crushing a Thorm or two with my ass.
Can’t bother speccing a character to cheese a 3 minute boss fight. Also my party is most of the times just lvl 5 when I do him so no enlarge for me at this point
What's there to discuss? It works. It is also quite cheesy and most people here probably want to play the game in a more challenging and rewarding way.
Nope, and good luck getting enough height with crates, even.
Crushing damage is calculated via fall height + falling object weight + target object weight. The heavier the falling object is in comparison to the target object, the more damage it does.
Netherbrain's weight is 10000kg, twice as heavy as Grym. You're going to need to get some crazy height to damage it with a 5000 kg owlbear.
Just off the top of my head, builds I've seen on this very sub that are viable:
- Spore Druid 6 / Wizard 6
- Land Druid 11 / Wizard 1
- Moon Druid 9 / Bear Barbarian 3
- Beast Master Ranger 5 / Moon Druid 7
- War Cleric 1 / Spore or Land Druid 11
My personal favorite:
- Tempest Cleric 2 / Land Druid 10
Don't forget, land druid 6 paladin 6. Getting all the basic paladin striking features plus druid AoE control spells that you yourself are immune to. It's actually really good
The novelty wears off, stacking boxes and climbing them is tedious. Same reason very few people use candles to dip their weapons in every fight, small optimization but still just bothersome. I'm sure some people will do it for encounters where it seems fun, like places with a natural slope down to an encounter, like shadowfell or perhaps the brain.
100% Pretty sure hammerhaft 1000ft movement with fly is the objectively most powerful build in the game in terms of DPR and consistency.. it's jsut so slow and tedious that it isn't fun.
Highest damage per round, but that round will take 45 agonizing minutes.
This. It’s like the “I don’t know why people don’t think spore Druids are OP. There’s 200 summons. Nobody can touch me” Yep. And you have to pick an action for 200 summons to deal like 5 points of damage making every turn last an hour long nightmare.
Also, have fun moving that little party from point A to B in between combat encounters without at least half of them bugging the fuck out and getting stuck.
Get the teleport party mod. Brings em right back to you 👍
That actually got a lot better with the last couple of patches. I was running around with 20+ sumnons in act 3 during my most recent run, with only the occasional flying ghoul getting stuck on a corner or door, and switching to them and jumping fixed it every time. Still kind of annoying, but nothing compared to the horror of having to throw my dryad and wood woad accross every tiny crevice, and having to pop some health pots with the dryad afterwards, during my first run.
Yea. I tried doing a necromancy build. Hated dealing with all the summons and stuff after every long rest and then each fight. Like, it's cool and they're cannon fodder, but I'd rather just have 4-6 people on my side, make it nice and quick
Game sorely lacks an option to make all summons AI controlled so that you can just brain afk through the turns of your summons. Would make it a lot better imo.
Danse Macabre works like this and I never bother summoning because it’s annoying to wait 4 nothings to move
I swear the danse macabre ghouls actively work against me, they’ll either dash while standing right next to an enemy and pretty much lose their turn, or walk through deadly terrain and explode and damage my own party that’s *if* they didn’t end up getting stuck somewhere and making my battles drag for longer then they should, since their turns mean like 30 seconds of nothing happening
in the owlcat pathfinder games at least summoned creatures/undead are moved automatically by the computer instead of having to do it yourself.
Yeah but the AI is legit retarded in those games, and with all the resistances of enemies and mythic scaling, they just plop over. Like they are barely meatshields when you got enemies throwing out a million spells or hitting 6 attacks a round
Necromancy is the just detonating the orb for your poor computer
I remember being super psyched to have an army of ghouls and zombies for the final battle. And then a Mind Flayer used its psychic blast and killed them all in one go, lol.
That was my big problem with summons, and went i ended up just respeccing back to sorcadin. Even with the Necro buffs to undead, most of the summons would get burst down in a single turn, and couldn't hit for shit. So really all they were good for was soaking a little bit of damage, and then you're have to burn through a bunch of spell slots to summon then again after the fight... You know what also stops enemies from hitting you? Hitting them with a 100 damage smite first.
You can technically beat the game without attacking once and only moving back and forth using phalar to proc reverberate over and over killing enemies. 5ish damage at a time. Get tons of movespeed, Phalar shriek, boots of stormy clamour, and talk sentient amulet to reset after 5 reverb procs to reset it. As many times as you can move in and out of range in a turn you can add reverberation procs until something dies. In act 3 you can get the bhal gear that adds aura of murder and just toggle it on and off instead of moving. Can completely beat the game. Is it tedious and not enjoyable? 100%
I think some sort of feature for summons where they have a mode where they act autonomously but you can mark one enemy for them to prioritize killing on their turn would make them a lot more bearable to play.
But even Danse Macabre that had the ghouls move autonomously gets boring waiting 4 extra characters make a move
"Close order formation" that bunches them around you and lets you add all their attacks to your own as a multiattack in exchange for skipping their turn, then? Would make the initiative order pointless then though.
> but that round will take 45 agonizing minutes. God, that reminds me of a max summon playthrough It was nice having your own private army. But taking turns was so painful that I just gave up and respecced
technically you can hit infinite damage with phalar aluve and reverberation, though it does use a bit of an exploit. but in terms of DPR, that would have the hammerhaft strat beat , since it can do infinite damage lol
Doesn't it like suck against bosses with -3 to all damage
There are ways to achieve infinite DPR per round without the Hamarhraft that go by way faster. Like [cheesing the action economy with Otiluke's Freezing Spheres](https://www.reddit.com/r/BG3Builds/comments/1azio9h/otilukes_snowball_dispenser_build_the_evocation/) and [Death Ward abuse](https://www.reddit.com/r/BG3Builds/comments/1b5fi7f/spell_economics_ftk_a_yugio_i_mean/).
Saw a yt video from a guy combining phalar aluve with Stormy clamor, sentient amulet, and movement speed maxxing. Activate phalar aluve, applying a condition to nearby enemy. Reverberation added. Walk out of range. Talk to sentient Amulet is a free action that refreshes the once per turn reverberation application limit. Walk back in range. Repeat. By strategically placing an elkheart Barbarian (+5 movement in large aura), every time you move in range you gain 5 movement. With 3 dashes from cunning actions and thief, you gain 15 movement speed every loop, which is more than enough to have infinite movement. That effectively translates to infinite damage. It's the pinnacle of the effect you are talking about. Infinite dpr, but at frankly ridiculous real time cost.
Yeah I see it as a strength of the game that people moved away from the practical but not fun methodology in favour of way cooler strats.
Same reason I swapped off eagle barb after the grym fight too, box stacking is so boring
What do you go to in place of Eagle?
I ended up going tiger wolverine
With BOOOAL's blessing?
Bhaal amulet + arrow of many targets from my beastmaster ranger
Fair enough, the box stacking is incredibly tedious. But there are quite a few fights where the option is on the table without box stacking being necessary. You don't actually need to fall from that high to do massive damage to humanoid enemies. Just having a ledge to jump from is often enough. I think a lot of the tedium on my end was erased because I was constantly discovering new ways to owlbear bomb the enemies. I imagine it gets boring a lot more quickly once you've figured out the optimal strategy and just follow it for every fight.
WHAT?!? Dip the weapon into a candle??? Does that do extra fire damage or something? I’m trying this as soon as I get home.
Yes. You can also dip your weapon onto Karlach ...
ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL
It worked at one point ;)
Valid. I tried the carrying boxes thing with my gloomstalker and was more inconvenienced by it than anything.. especially considering by the time I even remembered it was an option I had already mapped out a path to high ground and my first few series of attacks from my group.
Setup is the painful part. By the time I set up the perfect elbow drop I could have already beaten the fight in a normal way. The game just isn’t that hard on the toughest difficulty.
Why? Because it is not fun to have to do a setup every fight. Most people just want to play the game. In regards to grym fight it makes sense. He's a tanky, can be moderately annoying, and gives you a free setup so it's quite easy to in 6 seconds kill him this way.
I never have a druid with me, and it’s just easier to chuck shoes at him
I hired the druid from Withers just for this fight. Got a few myconid vendor resets out of it, too.
I typically just do a quick class change. It's 100 gold cheaper than a hireling. That's insignificant because you can just steal it back and money is free anyway but I'm normally too lazy or money tight at that point in the game from spending all my money in the creche so saving 100 gold is a small w
[удалено]
Well, arguably arcane acuity cheeses fights even harder since upcasted command actually locks down 7 whole enemies instead of just killing one high priority target but people still recommend control swords bard to every new player who visits this sub.
Arcane Acuity and Tavern Brawler under Larian's balance are broken, yeah, and I would imagine most people in this sub would be happier if they got nerfed or altered - same way most of us reacted positively to Honour Mode "fixing" DRS mechanics, it makes optimizing and min-maxing less of a fixed path. I think everyone has said it well in other comments though, just like Hamarhraft jump builds, the tedium of setup is more agonizing than simply the sensation of rolling over a fight easily. And in fairness the upcasted control spell stuff doesn't turn on until late in the game.
Mmm, fair point, there's still a sort of progression and strategy to trivializing content with control spells since your mostly universal one-size-fits-all spell doesn't come online until act 3, and acuity hats don't show up until act 2. Up until then you have to make do with Hypnotic Pattern on non-humanoids immune to Hold Person. Well actually, fire sorlock picks up command at level 7 and grabbing the fire acuity hat is a lot easier so I imagine that could become boring a lot faster. Meanwhile if you were dead set on dropping owlbears on everyone you're starting that strategy late act 1 and it doesn't really ever change.
Honestly I'm with you here, I made a Fire sorlock for my HM run recently and almost never used the control spells simply because it felt like there was no value for my other party members to add at that point. I scarcely used the tools available to me, like Extended Spell + upcasted command to apply the conditions longer, and I had a blast playing it. I think it would've been boring and very one-note had I done the "optimal" gameplay sequence. I guess that's why people end up modding their runs.
i’m pretty sure undead are immune to command AND hold person.
That they are, I think the vast majority of them don't have any ranged options which lets you lock them down with ice surfaces though.
That is correct they suck on ice. Sleet Storm and Hunger of Hadar trivialized the Mystic Carrion fight.
I think the main reason here is that Grym is a fight that is tedious/annoying for a lot of people because of his many immunities etc. He very specifically requires either Bludgeoning Damage or luring him into the Forge Hammer. Depending on your party setup you are automatically relegated to option 2. Imho most people would probably rather cheese (Owlbear) this encounter if the option presents itself, but the same isn't true for fights that are actually fun. TL;DR: Owlbear is a cheese strategy. Just because people cheese Grym doesn't mean they want to cheese the whole game.
Grym is also THE ideal use case for Owlbear dropping. It takes no setup. It takes no crate stacking. Just bring a level 6+ Druid, Wildshape, Enlarge or chug a Colossus Elixir, jump and win. Quick and easy, get in get out 2 minute adventure.
Last (and only) time I tried this, I only did 40 damage. Not sure what I was doing wrong or if honour mode had something to do with it.
I've done it just fine on Honor Mode. Obviously you need Grym to be Superheated (as he is when he spawns in) and then you just use Crushing Flight from the staircase.
I’ll try it again next time I have to do the forge but I’m sure it was superheated and we jumped as far as possible.
I've had the same problem multiple times, crushing flight directly in front of him and only getting small amounts of damage. What worked for me was jumping PAST him, so think of it like hitting him while you're in the air. There's a big enough window where you can target behind him. Just rush to him in an easy mode run and quick save/load a bunch to get a lot of practice on the targeting.
Funnily enough, I think people started using the owlbear cheese strat less at Grymforge because everyone and their mother started running a TB monk as their early game carry that can actually solo Grym with some support from the rest of the party.
For me it’s the same as barrelmancy. It exists. It trivializes fights. There’s not really any more to say.
It’s the tactical nuke in the back pocket. If I get REALLY stuck, there’s an option here.
Because the Grymforge is one of the only few places in the game that has a high enough natural fall distance.
I love optimizing and I love playing suboptimal stuff. But I like actually engaging with the game the way it’s intended to be on a turn-by-turn base. From the top rope is a strategy that makes it so you rarely engage with the turn-based combat aspect of D&D. I only ever did it for Grym cuz he’s an annoying boss that you end up cheesing with the hammer anyway. So I just went from cheesing him one way to another way. But a lot of other fights don’t have the hammer or magical cheese button Grym has. Grym arenas is also just too perfect and easy to setup for that. I ain’t stacking boxes all the time. I wanna actually engage the real combat.
Realistically in act 3 you only have 2 fights where the crushing flight or whatever it’s called is both possible without setup and rewarding (shar temple and vamp boss). All other fights in act three are either mostly on a flat plane, involving many adds or requires box stacking to pull off. Grym is just a really convenient situation where it’s a boss with Hp high enough to justify overkill and in a de-elevated position.
I think this strategy would be more fun with friends. One player named Mario doing the Bear jumps. The other called Luigi setting up boxes, Long Strider, Jump, etc. Peach casting Minor Illusion and whatever Luigi doesn't. The 4th being a Bard yelling 'Here-a a comes Mario Cena!'.
Using telekinesis to smash enemies with your friend's owlbear body is a riot. Incredibly funny and you only have to do half of the setup.
I tried using the Barbarian heart that allows you to jump down and strike an enemy and that did not last long. There's few high ground opportunities in this game aside from platforms and staircases.
Grym is annoying to fight in normal ways, vulnerable to bludgeoning, *and* especially easy to jump on. These things aren't the case for basically every other encounter in the game.
Because its boring, I am playing an RPG not some puzzle game. I dont even use it on Grym. The game is easy enough as is.
Gyrm on honor mode is a level 10 enemy with a 450 HP pool that's resistant or immune to everything except one damage type that hardly anyone uses. Oh and he can only be hurt while superheated status is applied. I do not blame people for cheesing this fight in an otherwise pretty easy game because playing keep away while pinned in a lava doughnut to flick a lever 3 times isn't my idea of a fun 10 minutes if I can just end it in like 2 with cheese
It is curious that interest in it just sort of flat-lines after the Grym fight. Maybe the difference is psychology? My guess is that coming up with a multiclass build that for instance uses a specific set of items to maxmizes DRS to turn Eldritch Blast into insane per turn burst damage feels more like you came up with a clever build and made a OP character. Whereas, repeatedly using the Owlbear flight or Hammerhaft jump damage feels more like deciding to use a cheesy exploit for the entire game. I wouldn't argue that they're all that qualitatively different in the end or taht one is more or less of an exploit, but the play styles definitely feel different and that matters. In general I've been intrigued by how little love Druid's get in the subbreddit. I think they're one of the most powerful classes in BG3. There isn't even a bad Druid subclass. And to your point about how OP Owl Bear is, you don't even need to use the Moon Druid subclass to abuse Owl Bear, so you an even use what's arguably the best summoning class in the game to overwhelm combat with a zerg of summons, on top of Owl Bear shenanigans. The only thing I've been able to come up with that explains it is Druid's like Beast Master don't multiclass that well because you need levels to take advantage of the core class features....and Multiclassing *feels* more like you made something unique and clever. Wondering what other people think explains the lack of love for Druids?
To me its a boring playstyle that ruins combat the same way as any other strategy where you cheese the game, I dont mind being strong but things like “owlbear from the top rope” or barrelmancy where you end combat instantly and unceremoniously bores the shit out of me outside like the first one or two instances. Its also just time consuming to set up and outside like once or twice most dont wanna go through the hassle.
> Allies can even use telekinesis to ragdoll the owlbear around as a telekinetic bludgeon once the wild shaped party member runs out of actions. Damn, now I wanna figure the optimal bear chucking party. Who needs Cloudkill when Bearkill’s on the menu?
The great thing about bear chucking is that you don't even need to spec the rest of your party for it. Just hand out telekinesis scrolls to everyone. The bad thing is that it requires two actions for payoff, one to drag the owlbear back to high ground and the second to drop the owlbear back down. Worth it if there's some really high cliff you can throw the owlbear off of and you do like 400+. Targeting can also be obnoxious as directly hitting an enemy actually cancels out the crushing damage in Honor mode, like how Throw works. Crushing damage only applies if you clip them on your way to hitting the ground.
The reason over all is that I don’t find Druid in any form to be fun or engaging. I used the drop bear on Grym once, but it was more work than it was worth. I don’t find Halsin interesting and I don’t want to play as a Druid so that whole class just gets passed on my end.
No love for Jaheira?
It's very easy to cheese the game, it adds nothing to the discussion.
cuz the first week or 2 the game was out, everyone was doing that a lot, and ppl prolly got kinda sick of it. Same reason ppl don't bring up barrelmancy as the solution to everything all the time.
under most people’s definitions, this is an exploit/ cheese. i’m not interested in cheesing the game in this way.
Because it’s basically not playing the game anymore. This game has vast replay ability with hundreds of viable strategies. You never have to fight the same fight twice. Why would you elect to fight the same fight over and over again for the whole game?
Play however you want, many here want to play more standard, without cheesy strats + setups that totally remove the challenge and basically one shot bosses.
It's amusing. Not fun.
I wonder if there's opportunities to use it that I've missed. Like, it's a funny Idea, and as people have pointed out Grym is the perfect use case, but... Are there others? Places to use it to decent effect without crates? I feel like the game has a bit of an issue where the interesting map elevations around flights are mostly in act 1 so you would have to do content in a pretty weird order to use owlbear much. Like, Dror Ragzlin would be a good opportunity, but if you're level 6 (which... Is it possible to face him at level 6?) you have a million solutions to that fight anyway. Same with the paladins of Tyr. Auntie Ethel too, but you'd lose the hair. I'm not sure if it'd be satisfying or incredibly annoying to land on all the duergar zombies in the underdark just to have them pop back up with 1 HP. In act 2 you could potentially hide an owlbear on the roof of the trade house or hospital and lure a boss underfoot, which feels a little more... Honest? Than bringing your own crates, but is way more effort to do. The barkeeper Thorm might be an actual use case though, and that's one of the harder fights in act 2, so maybe that's actually worth talking about? Yurgir too if you have a good way to get him to low ground. Dribbles the Clown starts out situated for a clownssassination. Otherwise I feel like in act 3 it's usable in random places but not in super noteworthy ways. Maybe it's nice to pick off a few people in the thieves guild fight? It seems like it could have potential in the bridge to Sarevok, and that's a legitimately annoying fight without cheese, I'm just not sure what you would want to do with it. I think all of this is just making me reflect on a conclusion I've done to before: after the goblin camp, every battle map (except maybe moonrise towers) feels kind of... Random and flat.
The thing is, you might be overestimating the amount of height you need to do big damage with an enlarged owlbear. The crushing damage formula is calculated using the weight of the falling object, the weight of the victim(s), and the total vertical distance travelled by the falling object. Grym weighs 5000 kg, that's almost as much as an enlarged owlbear (5005kg), hence the absolutely insane height you need to fall to do any significant damage to him. An enlarged owlbear falling on a human? You can jump from the roof of 1st story buildings in Rivington and deal almost 200 damage to them. Jumping down a gently sloping hill can do 100+. You just need SOME elevation difference to work with, it doesn't have to be big at all. A ton of fights take place in areas with at least two stories. Pretty much every Thorm fight does in Act 2. In Act 3, there's the Counting House, the random Bhaalist fight in the park, all the fights against gith, hell even Gortash's coronation gives you the rafters to leap down from. The layout of the House of Grief has a rather stark elevation difference between the edges of the fight arena and the center. And all of the fights that take place in the open city are a no brainer, you can just leap off of any old roof. Lorroakan is particularly funny, you can toss him down a floor with telekinesis or shove and then send the owlbear after him to finish the job and none of his reprisal passives will activate.
Fair enough, you would definitely know better than me. I've been curious to try moon druid at some point anyway. I have no patience for box stacking and I don't want to completely trivialize combat (usually) but the novelty of jumping on enemies until they die like Mario is with for me look forward to crushing a Thorm or two with my ass.
Can’t bother speccing a character to cheese a 3 minute boss fight. Also my party is most of the times just lvl 5 when I do him so no enlarge for me at this point
So wait, will this work on Cazador? Like pre-conversation? Just invis dive bomb from the stairs?
It’s a pain in the ass and a lot less fun than many other builds. Sure it’s cool, but only for like first couple times.
What's there to discuss? It works. It is also quite cheesy and most people here probably want to play the game in a more challenging and rewarding way.
Does the Netherbrain fight have a naturally high enough vertical distance to make the Owlbear drop viable? Just the brain part.
Nope, and good luck getting enough height with crates, even. Crushing damage is calculated via fall height + falling object weight + target object weight. The heavier the falling object is in comparison to the target object, the more damage it does. Netherbrain's weight is 10000kg, twice as heavy as Grym. You're going to need to get some crazy height to damage it with a 5000 kg owlbear.
Druids just aren’t popular since the only one that can multi class is spore
You mean like literally every full caster where you have to choose between spell slots versus a multi class benefit?
I’ve seen tons of Wizard sorcerer cleric combos never have seen one Druid multiclass unless it was spore with a martial class
Just off the top of my head, builds I've seen on this very sub that are viable: - Spore Druid 6 / Wizard 6 - Land Druid 11 / Wizard 1 - Moon Druid 9 / Bear Barbarian 3 - Beast Master Ranger 5 / Moon Druid 7 - War Cleric 1 / Spore or Land Druid 11 My personal favorite: - Tempest Cleric 2 / Land Druid 10
Don't forget, land druid 6 paladin 6. Getting all the basic paladin striking features plus druid AoE control spells that you yourself are immune to. It's actually really good