You can make one of Baldur's Gate 3's hardest fights easier on yourself—all without sacrificing one of the game's best cutscenes and an award-winning performance

I'm getting close to wrapping up myBaldur's Gate 3 honour mode playthrough—all I've got to do is not beef it on the last couple of deadly fights and I'm there. In the interest of survival, I've been skipping a couple of key story beats. 

I have a cosy setup that works, and I can't be bothered to wrangle Larian's fiddly inventory system to make carbon copies of my party members on other companion NPCs. But rounding out Act 3's final few fights, I hesitated—I really wanted to see Astarion's quest line through a second time. Spoilers for Act 3 and Astarion's story quests to follow.

Cazador is a bastard. And I don't just mean that in terms of how awful of a presence he is in Astarion's life—his boss fight is also a massive pain. There's a skeleton mage who will hobble your party with spells, a bunch of ghouls who can paralyse people, and you need to flatten the vampire in a few turns or he'll become even deadlier.

What's more, bringing Astarion along for his story quest makes things a hell of a lot harder. The moment the fight starts, he's yoinked to the other side of the arena and restrained. In a fight where you need as much help as you can get it's a major pain.

Narratively, in a story where you can reload a save, this is great. But if you're desperate not to wipe and forfeit your golden dice, it's a nightmare. Also if you do the fight without Astarion he can get (justifiably) angry at you for stealing his final blow. You're also robbing yourself of one of the game's most cathartic scenes—one that puts a capstone on Astarion's beautiful tale of escaping the abusive grip of his former master.

So what's a grimy power gamer to do? Turns out you can have your cake and eat it too, mostly. Here's a quick step-by-step list of what I did, though I'm certain I'm not the first to discover this:

The game shrugs its shoulders at this point and assumes that—since Astarion's there and you're clicking the coffin—he must've been there for the fight. He appears shirtless and begins