Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks Small questions about Nere fight and Ketheric Thorm

I put it in one thread because they are small questions.

1. Nere Fight
How is it supposed to go?

Before my first fight I had sided with the hired duergar who wanted to steal from Nere. But after I had blown up the stones before the entrance, the dwarfs and Nere immediately turned hostile. I panicked and threw fireballs and hit probably a gnome and perhaps an allied dwarf (but it seemed that all dwarfs were hostile from the start), so they all got hostile and I lost the fight (mainly because of the magma), embarrassing.
In the second trial after the explosions Nere came out and there was a dialog (as I had generally expected) before the fight started because I wanted to save the gnomes and get his head. The fight was boringly easy because this time the treacherous duergar helped me, and the gnomes stayed neutral. Stupid Gale and Wyll this time were a bit more cautious with their spells.
In my current new campaign I did not side with the duergar renegades but just freed Nere. Shortly after the entrance was freed by the explosion, all dwarfs and Nere turned hostile without further ado, there was no dialog. The fight with Nere and all dwarfs is interesting, but I still think the Gith fight is harder and the Ethel fight is more annoying.

Why does Nere get hostile automatically (sometimes)? Does not make sense to attack our party who freed him and is seemingly composed of true souls. Can he read our mind? Is it a bug?


2. Defeat of Ketheric Thorm
The game tells us that Thorm was once defeated by I did not find much about it in the Net. I'm no DnD player, do the mentioned forces ring a bell by experienced DnD players? Are the mentioned creatures usually related? Or can that be anything?

What kind of explosives you used?

If they leave fire surface behind and NPC steps into it (and believe me, they will) ... it and all its friend become hostile.

Personally i recomend Bombs, their Force damage makes no sense to me ... but they are clean.

Yes, I have now also arrived at Nere and found that the Deep Gnomes quickly become hostile. Larian hasn't even enabled a specific approach to solving this yet. You can kill some Duergar, but if you want to assassinate the guards and patrols, then immediately all Duergar near Thrinn become hostile and if you then fight them, the Deep Gnomes lose sympathy little by little until they also become hostile or are walking into aoes and become hostile. Game Over to save them... This means you can't clear out the Duergar beforehand to free only Nere and then confront him completely alone with only the surviving Deep Gnomes. Mad bcs bad... One would like to think that the Deep Gnomes would remain neutral as soon as we attack their slavers or even support us in doing so.

I used the smoke powder pouches I found in the hidden room. They (stupidly) leave a burning surface (what does burn, the stone?), it may be really as simple as that that Nere becomes hostile if he touches the fire. Maybe I was just lucky the second trial. As the game hints at using smoke powder to free Nere, Larian should take care that it's use cannot foul the quest. I will use bombs in the future (which are seemingly filled with inflammable smoke powder).

I don't know much about actual D&D... but the masks of maskmen can already be found in the game. They're part of the same faction as the hellbeast. They buff your strength when multiple people wear one nearby. I forgot what the forces are actually called when passing a history check. They're an elite force, though.

As someone wrote in another thread, immediately after the explosion, a Create Water spell is helpful, assuming you have a class or magic innate that can do that spell. Alternatively, throwing water bottles helps, but I'm afraid the impact will again do minimal damage and the Deep Gnomes will become hostile (I haven't tested it yet)....

Rumor has it that two smoke powder bombs would also do the trick (only force damage without aoe, I haven't tested it yet either).

We can discover the masked men are Merregons. The large hellbeast I'm not sure about. I do wonder whether we might get more of this story in the full release, particularly as it looks as though there's a part of Grymforge not yet accessible, ie the temple Nere was trying to get to when trapped by the rockfall.

I'm not sure whether you'd tried this fight with Nere pre patch 9, but I never had any issues with various NPCs going hostile before that release, though I think a few folk did report the odd problem. It does look as though something has changed in the most recent patch that has made this showdown in Grymforge far more frustrating, and I assume that's going to be fixed again by full release if not before.

The stone blockade has an effect where it can only be damaged when it takes at least than 22 damage from a single hit. It takes half damage from piercing, regular damage form thunder and bludgeoning, double damage from force and it's immune to all other damage types. So you can go the easy way and just blow it up with some kind of explosives, but then you risk injuring someone (which causes them to attack you). Depending on your party composition you often have at least one party member who can destroy the wall without explosives.
If you want to use explosives, you can set them on the ground and light them from distance. Then the npcs will walk away so it's less likely to accidentally damage them.

As for how the fight is supposed to go, I noticed the following options, depending on your actions:
- If you damage any npcs with explosives you'll have to fight everyone instantly, otherwise you'll talk to Nere before combat starts.
- It's possible to ally with the majority of the duergar against Nere and the remaining duergar.
- It's possible to free the gnomes and only kill Nere and the duergar. The gnomes are yellow during the fight in that case, so make sure you don't hit them with anything.
- There seems to be an option to side with Nere against the duergar, but I never tried that.