A Baldur's Gate 3 player has found a 'weapon' so deadly that it breaks the game's turn-based combat system, letting you defeat almost any enemy by simply waiting them out.
This article contains spoilers for a Baldur's Gate 3 side-quest.
If you head to Cazador's Palace in Baldur's Gate 3, you'll likely come across a locked door emanating some seriously bad vibes. A necrotic aura is leaking from the door, dealing substantial damage to anyone who stands in it. Unfortunately, in order to progress the quest, you'll likely need to get through that door, where you'll find the source of those rancid vibes.
The grisly discovery is that the source is the corpse of a dead child, Victoria. In my playthrough, I used Shadowheart to remove the curse so that my party could even be in the same room with Victoria's body, but as I've come to learn over the past few weeks, the 'normal' option is not one that every player opts for.
In a post on Reddit, one player confessed that "being a normal Tav I immediately put [Victoria] in my inventory, left the palace and went to camp where I deposited her in a dark corner for future use."
It doesn't seem like it took long to make use of their new tool. Dubbing it the 'VictoriaBomb', the player says they recruited it for the tricky Steel Watch Foundry mission, which pits the player against several of the game's towering automata in what was one of my favorite boss fights. I felt pretty pleased with myself as I stunlocked the Giga-Watcher out of its defensive moveset with the lightning magic that it's weak to, but again, that's the normal way to play. Our Baldur's Gate sadist decided to unleash VictoriaBomb.
All that necrotic damage might make pretty short work of most enemies (bar a few undead who might have natural immunity), but our hero realized that VictoriaBomb was even more powerful than they thought: My turn comes around and [I] notice her curse doesn't adhere to turn-based combat, instead it hits everything in its AOE every few seconds." Coupled with the self-destruct protocol embedded in the watchers, and the chaotic fight was over in moments, with the player's party not making a move after that initial throw.
The creator of the VictoriaBomb initially joked that they'd "sequestered her away in my camp for future use, before confessing that "I know it's absolutely broken," and that they intend to reload the Foundry fight to do it "fairly." I'd say that almost anything in Baldur's Gate 3 is fair play, but anything that somehow circumvents the game's turn-based system does fundamentally ruin what D&D is supposed to be, so this does seem to be an exception I'd make to that rule.
Coincidentally, throwing random stuff around in boxes is a great way to trigger Baldur's Gate 3's worst ending.
