Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Spoilers - Golem Underpowered

We often talk about homebrew resulting in creatures being OP in Bg3, however I am concerned that the Adamantine Golem in the Grymforge is significantly underpowered.

For the record here are the stats on this thing.



It's a CR 25 creature that never breaks down or degrades in any way. Its trample attack is 14D10, it is practically immune to magic. It gets two attacks per round at +18 to hit that do 10D10 +10 damage per attack.

I get the need to make it vulnerable using the Lava, that is fine. However, the Lava would not degrade its ability to one shot two players per turn if they get near the thing.

Despite all this it's still totally killable at full power under the conditions of this encounter if players can move quickly as its max speed is 20 feet per turn and the Forge Hammer hits for double damage if you get him under it.

Hopefully we will see it at full strength under a higher difficulty setting.

I very much doubt it. At the level you are it makes no sense to be fighting an adamantine golem. It is one of the strongest magical constructs in the lore. Also any iron or adamantine golem are immune to fire in there for lava should do nothing to it.

You doubt what? That there is an Adamantine Golem? have you not made it to the new area?

Here it is. It is 100% an adamantine Golem

Underpowered or not... Kiting is not fun at all and this is exactly what the encounter is designed for.

It would be harder and probably more interresting without the lava and the lever and the threatened thing.

I can't imagine what happened in their heads...

- oh lava, players will be OS so most of the time they'll have a hard time to engage in melee !
- oh yes and make him resistant to everything so players will have to attack in melee !
- oh and add a threatened mechanic so players will be able to easily kite the boss !
- and create a condition with the lava so players will have to kite the boss into the lava !
- and add a tap for the lava so every two turns the players will have to open it !
- oh yes, and add a lever so players will have to kite it once under the big hammer or he'll become immune to everything !
- This sounds so fun ! I'd really like to play this combat !

No Larian, this boss mechanics really sucks and does not make any sense.

I apologize I think you misunderstood my meaning. I meant I very much doubt they are going to implement the adamantine golem properly. There is no chance of defeating it at this level if they did. I was pointing out that they should have one there or we should not be intended to fight it. I have not reached that section yet so I don't know the context of the battle but I can't imagine any real such battle being possible and therefore the enemy shouldn't be there or the goal should be to try to escape from it instead of fighting it.

Challenge 25 does sound like something you really dont wish to meet on level 4. O_o

Also where exactly is the thing? O_o
I searched whole new area (or at least i thought i did) and didnt meet it.
//Edit:
Update > found it ... tough bastard.

Just a quick info regarding the stat block in OPs post: this seems to be unofficial content. Afaik there is no Adamantine Golem in 5e so far.

Yeah I noticed that. However, it appears to be a relatively faithful adaptation of the 3.5 stat block. The conversion can be tough but what I can tell you is that an adamantine golem is much stronger than an iron golem which we do have stats for in 5e. A level 4 party would definitely be screwed by this without a lot of AI cheese.

See here: https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/iron-golem

Just some additional info - Adamantine Golems cost about 500,000 gold to create. In order to make one a high level spellcaster loses the ability to cast spells forever in the process of creating it. They weight something like 32,000 lbs.

A group of level 4 players would die instantly to this monster. Only an extreme scenario would result in them winning, escaping or surviving.

All true, I just wanted to provide information, since OP is playing homebrew (even a potentially adequate one) off as fact. As far as the monster statblock goes: its a construct that was dorment a very long time. So one still can play it off as worn down but still powerful at the point we meet it.

Dormant*

Except in all previous descriptions of this monster they make a point to say that Adamantine Golems don't break down, they self-repair and they are notorious for standing the test of time. If we are going to talk about Homebrew then we should at least have a reason why this particular homebrew is such an inferior version. It would make more sense to say it was an Iron Golem, or a Steel Golem that was badly made.

It seems that Larian love cheese. They introduce OP foes and than they have to implement hombrewed things to make it possible for the player to win. Maybe if they stop to implement OP foes would make it possible to win without homebrewed rules / and feats.

Thank god that the navigation of our party is so wunderful.

What I was saying is that the statblock does not say its a golem. There are a few lore books ingame and I dont recall that they referenced the construct as a golem, too. The ingame statblock certainly does not. Its just a construct with an adamantine shell.

But to the point: I played the fight yesterday and it really is too gimmicky. An encounter at this level with that much outright immunities (even after being weakened by the lava) is simply just a bad faith DM. This encounter is not doable without preperation especially for it or the use of meta-tools like the "examine" function.

Lets have a quick look at the statblock of a little friendly monster called Tiamat:


That is a CR30 avatar of a literal god. A diddly robot is now immune/resistant to more damage types than her? It is just over the top.

I don't disagree with you overall, but the statblock does identify it as a Construct. Which would make it a Golem. The abilities list the Adamantine Skin and describe it as being made 'entirely from adamantium' - this is bad wording BUT there are no two material golems - you wouldn't have a part iron Golem and Part Stone Golem.

My issue is that we are burning a CR 25 creature here at level 4. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. An Adamantium Golem could wrestle a Tarrasque.

But that is the point: not every construct is a Golem. Just go to DnDBeyond or something and look up all the constructs. There are a lot of robots and other constructs in the game, that are 100% not golems. IMO this is just a homebrew construct boss, so not an Adamantium Golem. Also again: the Adamantium Golem in 5e is not a CR25 creature. Because it does currently not exist in 5e. We don't know what it could or could not do in this system.

Cool, nice find. So it is meant to be an Adamine Golem. Seems lile they are doing the "worn down" approach to it then.

I thought it was a pretty good fight - really didn't want to get in melee range from it as it would have surely killed me, it was pretty obvious that we needed to use the forge to kill it, and it offered a little extra challenge with the magma mephits.

Quite similar to some real D&D games I've played where the key to winning was figuring out how to weaken the boss before attacking.

It was a pretty interesting and difficult fight, but I didn't buy it as an adamantine golem. At level four we should be running scared from pretty much any golem aside from a Flesh golem. This is like if you faced a Balor in the Nashkel mines in the original game.

The Adamantine weapons and armor are pretty underwhelming too though. So perhaps Larian has a different idea of how good adamantine is supposed to be then is generally assumed to be in the realms.

Weird that we'd get access to Adamantine weapons and armor before mithral or any of the other exotic weapon and armor materials like glassteel, darksteel etc. The way it's hyped up in the questline though makes it sound like it's supposed to be something truly special though-even got drow coming all the way from Menzoberranzan to search for the 'lost technology' of adamantine manufacturing (which itself is a little silly since the drow are well-known for working with the metal)

+1 ...
First i heard about adamantine (i believe it was in Chubblots datamining video) i was like "Wait, if we get our hands on such serious stuff as Adamantine on level 4 ... what would we be wearing after?"