Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General My adventure through the end of Act II

I had awaken Art McCullough a while back and Halsin came to his bedside and learned about Thaniel's location. He then said to meet him by Lakeshore by Last Light but I went and did other stuff first which broke this quest. It's a problem a LOT of people have had. Halsin just shows up in your camp now and won't go to the Lakeshore point. There's only one workaround that apparently exists which is to kill Art McCullough (I used Crown of Madness on him so he became hostile and everyone helped kill him with no repercussions) then you can "Speak With Dead" to get the same info from him again which you then report to Halsin at camp and now he goes to Lakeshore.

This fight seems super daunting at first (SO MANY ENEMIES) but ended up not being too bad. Laid down dome Evard's Black Tentacles, and tossed around a few fireballs and made pretty short work of everyone along with my party attacks (my party is always my bard, Karlach and 2 randomly selected characters after each long rest so I get to play with all the toys, and this party had Astarion and Wyll).

Now that I had milked every square inch of this region for everything it had it was finally time to go to the Shadowfell. This time Halsin and Shadowheart were the two random selects (I would have taken Shadowheart anyways since this was a major mission for her storyline). Naturally being the good guys, we turned against Balthazaar and defeated him and all his minions. One of my favorite things to do is polymorph the big bad into a sheep so we can clean up minions while they bleat around helplessly and try to bite you for 1 damage for 10 rounds or until someone accidentally damages them and then finish them up last.

I convinced Shadowheart to let Nightsong go and then it was back to Moonrise Towers! Luckily for me, when I first reached Moonrise, I didn't know what to expect so I had used Gaseous Form to explore and map out the entire place. So when it was time to confront Ketheric, I knew a shortcut up to the top level. There was still 5 or 6 enemies between us the door to the roof where Ketheric was, so I gathered my party into a tight group, threw an invisibility potion on the ground between us all and we all snuck right past the enemies and onto the roof for the final confrontation (or so I thought). I was amused that though we were invisible, suddenly there we were in a cut scene but when the cut scene finished and the battle began, we were all invisible again and got a free round in. We won the battle and Ketheric fled down below.

We jumped in and followed him to the Mind Flayer Colony. Defeated all the undead in the Necromancy lab again with tentacles and fireballs. Use my Bard charisma to convince another group of lackeys that we were there to help defend Ketheric against these attackers that had attacked him, so we avoided that fight. Explored the whole place (again, or so I thought but I was impatient to get back to Ketheric to finish him), and then took the platform down to ACTUAL final battle with him.

Again, a daunting battle. He had Nightsong imprisoned again which would make him immortal so I knew I wanted to free her ASAP. I used an "Arrow Of transposition" to teleport myself right next to her, drink a Potion Of Speed and free her on the first round. Karlach went up left to take our a group of Necromites, Lae'zel went up right to hit a Mind Flayer and shove him off the platform. Gale stood back with our Fire Elemental buddy to cast spells and such. It was a tough battle with some close calls but we made it through. There was a lot of decided whether to concentrate on minions and such or focus on the big bad.

Back at Moonrise after the battle, I decided to look up if there was any way to go back to that colony as they had the brain reading apparatus and I had several brains I had collected in my camp trunk, but didn't have them with me in the colony and you couldn't fast travel or go to camp from the colony. There was one way back which wasn't an ACTUAL way back but an exploit using camera angles and a "Misty Step" spell so I did that to make sure I didn't miss any important stuff by not reading those brains (I didn't), but ALSO accidentally learned that I missed rescuing Zevlor in the colony because of my impatience and sadly you couldn't do that after the battle even if you used this unofficial way to get back in there. This bugged me. So I loaded up my save game from just before my battle with Ketheric. I rescued Zevlor and then fought Ketheric a second time though I bumped the difficulty down to the easiest on this second try as it was like 4am and I had already beat it once.

HOWEVER, on my second pass I discovered an EVEN BETTER plan that I WISHED I had used the first time. Same start with the Arrow Of Transposition and freeing Nightsong, but then I gathered everyone right on the platform in front of the big bad, and cast "Globe Of Invulnerability" from a scroll I had. So there we all were, invulnerable under a dome, just pummeling the boss while he couldn't touch us and his minions tried to assault us from range with no effect.