True Solo Tactician – Raphael – Hope Saved, No Consumables/Summons/Cheese, LVL11 – Baldur's Gate 3

Soloing Raphael on the hardest difficulty, saved Hope, no friendly summons, no consumables, no gear swaps, only level 11, no Illithid powers. This is the culmination of this solo tactician run, and will likely remain this build’s highest achievement for me.

This all began in act 1, when I first solo-ed Grym on this build. That is when I realized how cleanly it can be played, and just how much power it possesses when piloted properly. I took full advantage of the build’s high AC and hyper-mobility, even in Raphael’s mid-sized boss room. While a lot of it necessarily boiled down to the high AC, burning spell slots for Shield procs and a high HP pool combined with Tiefling fire resist passive, the mobility allowed me to do some interesting tricks with the pillars. Mainly, after some experimentation, I noticed several things about Raphael.

The first one was the most obvious: killing pillars and allowing him to go into his ascended form (a.k.a. Devil Trigger) was a death sentence. Even with my tiefling fire resist, he would consistently 2-shot my 158 health. So, if I wanted to face him head on and not resort to lengthy kiting/LOS/hide-and-seek throughout the whole palace, I needed to kill him while he had 27AC and constant healing from all the pillars.

This is easier said than done, and I quickly realized that burning even 2-3 turns of haste on wiping out his adds before focusing on him would mean I’d run out of haste right as he reached 100-150 hp. And then, he would simply outheal my DPS because I always had only a 50% chance to hit. And because he’d outheal my DPS, he would whittle me down bit by bit, death by a thousand cuts – or, in this case, a thousand 10-20 damage fire spells. So, once I spent a turn killing Yurgir, my only shot was to then pop haste and tunnel-vision Raphael until he died.

The next thing I noticed was that, if he was far enough away and I LOS-ed him using a pillar, he would be FAR less likely to cast any of his big fire spells, but would resort more to summoning adds and casting his firebolt cantrip. The firebolt was not a dex save, it was an AC check, so it always missed. The adds were very weak and could be ignored.

And the final thing I noticed was that, if he was not at the sides of the room, I could stay next to the pillars and have a SLIGHT elevation advantage, boosting my hit chance against his AC from 50% to 60%. This last one is a big deal, and I tried my best to continue to kite him in such a way as to keep him on the low ground, and to keep myself near the pillars.

All in all, this was surprisingly a very technical/skill-based fight due to the restrictions/handicaps I placed on myself. I enjoyed every failed attempt I made, and the kickass boss music continued to make the experience, as grueling as it was, enjoyable. In total, I honestly only needed about 5-10 tries, but each of these 5-10 tries took at least 15 mins. So, yeah, it still took a while. But once again, I had lots of fun with this. This remains my favorite boss in this game, both mechanically and aesthetically.

00:00 – Start
20:08 – Build Info (previous armor was Reaper’s Embrace)