Baldur’s Gate 3 player one-shots bosses with the power of money

There are many ways to get more powerful in Baldur’s Gate 3. Levels can afford new spells or feats, and weapons or equipment can enhance your abilities. But one Baldur’s Gate 3 player has found power in the oldest source in the book: cold, hard cash.

BG3 player GoldenThane has made the rounds a few times now, showing off a strategy that’s let them one-shot some beefy bosses with the power of money. Where some players have fought tooth-and-nail to Eldritch Blast their way to victory, GoldenThane has devised a means of using one weapon’s special action and a whole boatload of cash to annihilate some of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s toughest bosses.

(A word of warning: I’ll avoid talking specific names, but if you want to click through and see these one-shot bosses in Baldur’s Gate 3 yourself, they do contain spoilers for the finale of Act 2 and Act 3.)

In their posts, GoldenThane has shown this working on both the final boss of Act 2 and one of Act 3’s bosses, the highest HP foe in the entire game. How do they do it? With a crafty rogue, a special weapon, and a pocket full of gold.

All that glitters

In Act 2, there’s a boss you can fight named Gerringothe Thorm, whose whole personality is cash. Take out this optional boss, and you can loot the “Twist of Fortune” mace from their body. It’s a decent enough mace if you don’t have the Act 1 superweapon in hand, but its key component for this build is the “Blood Money” special attack. If you’ve got Proficiency with the weapon, you can mete out this strike that deals an additional 3 Piercing damage per 300 gold that the target has on them.

Fallout players might have guessed where this is going. The idea is to pickpocket an enemy, but instead of taking things, put an enormous sum of gold in their pockets, and then Blood Money them—boom, cash money explosion.

For the Act 2 closer, GoldenThane had to drop about 15,000 (!!!) gold onto their person and then give them the golden dunk. This has some issues, of course; as GoldenThane discovered, each instance of 3 for 300 is calculated separately, so it’s not a very effective strategy against foes with armor that can reduce individual points of damage.

But, as shown by the Act 3 boss takedown, it can do some real damage if you have the determination. To take down the beefiest baddie in Baldur’s Gate 3, it took about 50,000 gold pickpocketed into their coffers before the big smack.

It’s a stark reminder that cash does, indeed, rule everything around us. And also fun to see how all these tools Larian has included in Baldur’s Gate 3 can interact and create fun, offbeat solutions. GoldenThane has also used another tricky method (big spoilers here for Act 3) for taking out other big bosses, this time not using the power of gold. But hey, if you’ve got the Twist of Fortune and 50,000 or so gold to spare, maybe this can work for you.