If there is a patrolling guard past some chasm or whatever, when they get close, jump into turn based and try a shove off the edge as they pass it. They won’t register a failed shove as an attack and will just tell you to back off. So you can keep trying till you get them. Thin out a few guards before a fight.

Might be common knowledge now, but I was playing with a friend the other day who never thought of it.

I refuse to throw someone off a cliff, they have things to sell!

I have 2 patterns, that sort of overlap, depending how the fight is going. I have my paladin and Karlach up front. I have shadowheart just a little back usually next to my “option” character (4th slot rotates out a lot based on needs, but usually Frost mage Gale)

Example, use someone to cause a giant ice slick on the enemy, right in front of my front liners. Then use shadowheart to possibly throw an Insect Plague on top. They have a heck of a time getting to me, and if they do they get to meet a paladin who’s really hard to hit (decent AC + light cleric shadowheart) and Karlach with aspect of wolf means there’s a beatdown right there. This pattern works really well for the most part, there’s always exceptions.

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Wall of fire has been great to me, as well as Thunderwave. My Warlock has it, my Astarion has it, my Shadow heart can summon a Djinni with it, and then Karlach can just throw almost any size monster off a cliff with her hands.

Honestly environmental kills trivialized a couple boss fights thus far.

Any persistent AoE damage spells seem to be extremely good, especially if you can set them up in a choke point and continually shove enemies back into them. Hunger of Hadar, Wall of Fire, Cloud of Daggers, Spike Growth, etc.

Spells that reposition enemies can also take the place of shoves: Thuder Wave, Eldritch Blast with repelling invocation. You miss out on loot if you kill a boss this way, but sometimes the cheese is too delicious.

Spirit Guardians has been good to me. Sometimes I just have Shadowheart cast it and spend her action dashing through all the enemies on screen.

Would definitely recommend giving Astarion the Thief subclass for the broken bonus action economy. It meshes well with his vampire bite ability.

For raw damage output, I don’t know if anything’s topping the Open Hand Monk + Tavern Brawler Build. Run STR instead of DEX, dip into Thief for an extra bonus action, and use some of the tons of unarmed attack bonus gear that the game throws at you.

My favourite tactic is based around Hunger of Hadar, a Warlock spell that creates a zone that a) deals damage to everything in it at the start and end of its turn; b) is difficult terrain (aka slows everything down); c) blinds everything in it; d) best of all, has no save. Plonk it down in the middle of the enemy team, use another control spell to slow everyone inside even more, use shove/repelling blast/whatever to push anything that’s made its way to the edge back to the middle. Wait for everything to die, rinse & repeat.

But the greatest cheese in the game must be casting darkness (or shooting arrow of darkness) on your own party. As long as you’re inside the cloud you are basically untargettable by spells and ranged attacks - and the enemies don’t seem to be smart ebough to be throwing Fireballs on just any weird clouds they see. On your turn you just need to step out, cast/shoot, step back in. The only way they can get you is if they come inside the cloud with you (aka in range of whoever is on blender duty, Lae’zel or Karlach like this posting a lot), and the AI gets a bit confused when it can’t see you so it’s not a sure bet that they’ll even try. It’s a thing of beauty.

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I like my ballistic missile Karlach: she’s built for speed. A ring of speed (+3m), aspect of speed (+1.5m), fast movement (+1.5m), longstrider (+3m, so 18m base speed), and boots of speed (bonus action for twice the speed, so 36m). This allows her to go absolutely anywhere on the battlefield and kill the target. With a potion of speed it’s even more ridiculous. She’s the MVP of the group.

My paladin on the other hand is the immortal pillar of the group: armour of persistance, shield, ring of regeneration, cloak of displacement, and defense fighting style. Nothing can hit him. So he can grind any fight and revive who needs to be. He is the backup piece, when Karlach can’t do fast enough.

Of note was the slow spell during my playthrough. This was the best controle spell I could use, because the area it can affect enemies is absolutely gigantic and it completely neuter the enemies. I didn’t use it all the time though, only when a fireball or wall of fire wouldn’t do it. Globe of invulnerability was also key for some encounters.

That’s the height of my first playthrough. I’m not the optimizer kind though.

Keep in mind this is theoretical, so assumes perfect setup + max damage rolls

Hasted sorcerer attacking a grouping of five enemies

• action 1: throw a bottle of water at them

• action 2: twinned spell Chain Lightning

• initial targets hit once, doubled for wet (80x2=160)

• each enemy aside from the initial two targets is hit twice, doubled for wet (80x2x3=480)

• (very) theoretical max damage of 640 for one spell slot and 6 sorc points

Meta it is not, due to the very specific use-case and the setup required, but it’s a great opener or closer, and I pretty commonly hit +200/250dmg using this. Cleared every single ad in the >!Orin!< fight in one shot this way lol

Another fun build I just tried out in my friend’s game

Paladin/tempest cleric

Moving parts are as follows

• Thunderous Smite (spell slot)

• utilize Destructive Wrath to ensure max damage roll on the thunder damage (channel divinity - short rest)

• use Luck Of The Far Realms to ensure crit (long rest)

• use Divine Smite on Crit for more booku bux (spell slot)

Haven’t played w this one too much, for stats you’ll want to dump CHA tho, weird for a paladin build but the important bits of this build don’t involve the actual spell effects for paladin so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in terms of efficacy though, at level 7 I did 120 damage in one attack lol.

my friend and i have been using summon spikes with hungar of hador on top of it. my friend also summons a whole god damn party with his druid to drop more spikes on the ground