Whether you’re playing solo or with others, Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t ever stop surprising you with its many twists and turns. Oftentimes, these twists and turns focus on providing you with alternatives to combat scenarios, and your encounter with the humongous Thisobald Thorm in Act 2 is a prime example.
Prominently featured as part of the game’s (arguably) most straightforward quest, Thisobald Thorm is the son of Ketheric Thorm, and the master brewer at The Waning Moon bar. Thisobald is also, as should be self-evident, a mutated undead monstrosity that will give you a run for your money if you’re not prepared to handle him.
Unsurprisingly, getting into a veritable bar brawl with Thisobald is easy. The fight itself, however, is quite the opposite, and it requires some clever strategizing to cut the undead down. Down below, we’ve got some must-know tips on dealing with Thisobald Thorm in combat, but there’s also a way to deal with him and his undead patrons differently…
Fighting Thisobald Thorm in open combat
As we suggested above, Thisobald Thorm is a powerful undead monstrosity that will be extremely resistant to most regular kinds of damage by default. As soon as you enter The Waning Moon, Thisobald will invite you over to exchange stories and drink up, and refusing to do so will quickly result in a fight.
Thisobald is, of course, surrounded by an entire menagerie’s worth of undead that will assist him in combat, but your main goal should definitely be to whittle the big centaur-looking fellow down as soon as possible. There’s a trick to this process, too. By default, Thisobald will be completely immune to all of the following damage types:
- Bludgeoning
- Piercing
- Slashing
- Thunder
Obviously, focusing on other damage types will show results, but you might also notice that Thisobald will occasionally chug down some of his concoctions. That’s your cue to the winning strategy in this fight. You want to stack up as many of the following damage types on Thisobald to get him drinking as much as possible:
- Poison
- Radiant
- Ice
- Fire
- Necrotic
After drinking several times in a row, Thisobald will receive the ‘Blacked Out’ debuff, which completely revokes all of his resistance and makes him far more susceptible to damage.
To summarize, then, the winning tactic is to duke it out with regular undead mooks and stack specific damage types upon Thisobald until he gets Blacked Out. After that happens, point all of your guns at the mountain of flesh and let loose. When you’ve got the rhythm of this fight nailed down, you’ll get Thisobald sorted out in no time.
Beating Thisobald Thorm without combat
As fun as dealing with Thisobald in a bar brawl might be, there is a devious way to kill the boss without lifting your blade at all. This is, in fact, the best-case scenario for characters that aren’t overly combat-oriented, and it’s extremely satisfying in practice. As you might already suspect, it’s got to do with Thisobald’s initial offer for you to drink together.
To avoid fighting Thisobald Thorm, accept the undead’s offer for dialogue, and regale him with stories of your previous adventures. This triggers a dialogue sequence that calls for you to successfully pass three subsequent Constitution checks, and the tricky bit is that they escalate in difficulty. The first check is 14, the second is 16, and the third is 18. If your character is good at Sleight of Hand, you’ll also have access to a DR 18 SoH check where they’ll pretend to drink to avoid the Constitution checks.
This is important because failing Constitution checks means getting drunk, and getting drunk means you’ll have substantial Charisma and Dexterity checks, both of which you need to successfully pass the Performance checks that come after Constitution checks.
Another important tidbit here is that, depending on your previous accomplishments, you may have a harder or easier time getting through your dialogue with Thisobald. More specifically, you’ll need to select two separate accomplishments while drinking, and some of them come with lower difficulty ratings than others. Ideally, you’ll have completed the following achievements:
- Discovered the Selunite outpost in the Underdark
- Explored the Arcane Tower
- Defeated the Bulette
- Destroyed the Lava Elemental from the Adamantine Forge
- Saved Mayrina and killed Auntie Ethel
If you haven’t gotten around to completing at least some of these events, you may have a harder time completing Thisobald Thorm’s drinking challenge, as all the other options have higher difficulty ratings to contend with.
Whichever adventures you end up re-telling, successfully mowing down DR checks one after another will eventually result in a funnily unceremonious death sequence for Thisobald, which is as fitting an end for the creature as any.
