If there’s a ridiculous way to overcome an obstacle or win a fight, Baldur’s Gate 3 will probably give players the options to actually do it, and it won’t take them long to try. The latest example revolves around a tower of crates, the magic spell Crushing Flight, and a five-ton owl that’s shaped like a bear—familiar to D&D players as the creatively named owlbear—and can deal over 1,000 damage in a single strike.
The community is calling this advanced technique “Owlbear from the top rope,” and it was recently shown off by Twitch streamer Ellohime, as first spotted by IGN. “Just knowing weight/height fall dmg exists has creative implications, have fun with that,” they tweeted on August 10.
Here’s how it works.
- Stack a bunch of crates to get the high ground
- Have your druid shapeshift into an Owlbear
- Use magic to enlarge it even more
- Cast Crushing Flight to turn gravity into a weapon while negating fall damage
- Drop the absolute unit onto an unsuspecting enemy
Because Crushing Flight scales the drop damage to the character’s mass, you can throw up some really big numbers this way. Ellohime’s test hit over 800 damage. Reddit user Fishbleb managed to get all the way up to 1,170. “So you are telling me that after I spent countless rounds going all unga bunga on that robot that I could have solved it by sitting on it?” wrote one commenter, referring to the fight with tanky boss Gyrm. “As the Treefather intended,” wrote another.
One of the beauties of Baldur’s Gate 3 is how rarely it tells the player no, what are you thinking, please don’t do that. It makes its fantasy world double as a magical laboratory where players can run all sorts of tests to try and uncover its secrets and break it in the process. Hopefully, in that spirit, “Owlbear from the top rope” doesn’t get nerfed. It’s not hurting anyone, at least no one who didn’t already have it coming.