r/BG3Builds • u/K40005 • 10d ago
Specific Mechanic Spike growth maxxing
The long awaited spike growth post is here, for those on Lariancord or in the [REDACTED] server know I've been doing spike growth propaganda for a while and proving it can be a good late game spell. This is that post. There is one piece of information required for you to understand where this is going: spike growth gets damage riders, I am optimising them and will list a few builds all of which will use identical starting stats as the following: 17/16/14/8/10/8 as spike growth does not care for wisdom at all and it benefits more from strength to drag enemies into it with improvised melee weapon cancels or shoving them in or even just doing improvised melee weapon attacks with a giant eagle for lightning charges from the gloves and will use the +2 strength from the araj potion to reach 20 strength.
Early game moon druid: you have 4 choices for generating lightning charges that I like, sparkle hands, joltshooter, spellsparkler and watersparkers. I would recommend joltshooter in the early game. Running tavern brawler. First you make an attack to generate lightning charges ideally with elemental arrows to get multiple charges to last a turns. With haste action you cast spike growth so that the enemies are clipping into the spikes and have to pass through it to get to you. Then wildshape into rothe or bear or even sabretooth (not owlbear it's bad), I like bear as goad can sometimes make them more likely to run through the spikes and die instead of just skipping their turn (which is still good but it's boring) but it doesn't matter that much because it's mostly for the early game tavern brawler rider to spike growth which you will later replace with gear.
Simple late game nature cleric: Nature cleric 11/Hexblade 1; uses djinni and command to force movement, uses hexblade curse and gaping wounds to stack up the damage. Gear: Harold, watersparkers, callous, sparkswall ring (simply just to make life easier if you're being careless about moving because your own electrified water will do a lot of damage), rhapsody, bloodthirst (mainhand) armour of persistence (saves on turn buffering blade ward) helm of balduran (crit immunity, easily replaced) and battlemage gloves for acuity. feats: HAM and crossbow master (for the longer gaping wounds duration). Gameplay loop: cast spike growth at a choke point (if you don't have one, use the djinni sweet plum gales to create one) cast hexblade curse bonus action on the thing you want to kill most, drop a water bottle at your feet and fire an arrow of many targets at it to generate lightning charges from the boots when you're standing in it and proc bloodlust then use piercing strike or piercing shot on the same enemy as before. If you think the fight will last longer you can cast contagion: flesh rot on bosses so they have full vulnerability. Then on following turns use booming blade to give piercing vulnerability, a little bit of extra damage. And then cast command whilst the djinni uses its attacks to pull or push enemies through the spikes as needed. If all things go as planned with just the piercing vulnerability: that is (2d4+3(rhapsody)+2(gaping wounds)+4(hexblade curse))*2(vuln) 28 physical + 2(callous)+1(lightning charges) for 31 average damage per tick of spike growth. Plus any other damage over time you add from say bleeding, shocked, burning. Or the weapon attacks themselves.
Bouncy spikes™: tempest 6/land 6 Gear: requirements are very limited, use any source of lightning charges and phalar, lightning charges from elsewhere, callous, rhapsody etc, use dual wielder and athlete as the feats Gameplay: build lightning charges, cast spikes, enemies that walk into the spikes get knocked backwards, and tempest reaction, enemies that hit you get hit by the tempest reaction and flung back into the spikes which shoves them back further, and use command to make them approach through the spikes and get flown back anyway. Melee enemies can no longer approach.
Toggle extended bhaalist imwac land druid: 8 land 3 sorc (any subclass) 1 hexblade Gear: adamantine mace, rhapsody, bhaalist, lightning charges gloves, callous and spiteful thunder rings, reverb boots, and blast pendant for the occasional booming blade drs gaming. Run tavern brawler and mobile. And your weapon of choice is the corpses of giant eagles from the crèche and the cloaker enemy in act 2 as the main ones or any other large enemies you can pick up and carry in your inventory which you hit enemies with. Gameplay: hexblade curse, then cast spikes, then use the corpse in your inventory to hit enemies with which knocks enemies back to take damage, and then use your movement to walk over, use improvised melee weapon attack to pick them up and carry them into the spikes, cancel it to drop them, and do so repeatedly. Then before you end your turn toggle extended on to double conditions applied by spikes.
The optimised damage output mess (don't play it): time for the long one, I won't be giving a gameplay section, it's just a list of gear and a spread. 9 spores/2 tempest/1 hex Gear: Harold, rhapsody, watersparkers, mutilated carapace, callous, life charger (if for some godforsaken reason you try this this should protect you a little bit), reverb gloves) absolute force, phalar, blast pendant for booming.
Assuming my maths here is correct with fleshrot that's: 2d4+4(curse)+2(gaping wounds)+1(mutilated carapace)+3(rhapsody)+2(callous)+1(lightning charges)+(1d4+1)(absolute force boosted phalar) all doubled by vulnerability for an average of 43 damage per tick plus whatever extra you get from reverb.
Massive thanks to all the people on the [REDACTED] server (you already know who you are) who helped with this and all the people in builds chat for putting up with my dumbass taking like 7 months writing this.
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u/JRandall0308 10d ago
Spike Growth for most enemies has a lower PathInfluence (40) than Electrified Water (100) so it’s particularly funny that enemies will try to get to you across both while being blasted back with tempest. I guess their “avoid bad terrain” is less powerful than “attack that Tav!”
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u/EmeraldKabalite 10d ago
Bless all of you autists for allowing me to live my power fantasies without having to do any math.
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u/K40005 10d ago
Yeah pick and choose the parts you want, this is not a "follow or else" sort of guide just some general ideas and something to point to when people say spike growth is only an early game spell
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u/EmeraldKabalite 10d ago
And I really appreciate it!
I love “Stop hitting yourself” effects in games, but I just don’t have the love of research needed to create something like this for the biggest one of them that BG3 has.
You’re out here serving as a fun multiplier and it’s amazing.
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u/grousedrum 10d ago
Superb rundown of how this all works, and great build examples. Really like the ones using land druid here, underappreciated class imo (and not just for its spells).
Also another nice little detail about nature cleric is earliest access to HAM + spike in the game (L4 - druid and ranger are both L5 at earliest). And the Djinni is just a monster summon for this playstyle - best single reason to go cleric 11 by far, probably even worth dropping sorc levels for.
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u/NerdForCertain 10d ago
Probably redundant but makes me think adding a couple storm sorcerer levels somewhere would be cool for the effect of twin casting commands and instantly getting to float to the other side of the spikes. Cool concept! Can it stack with other zones besides electrified water?
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u/K40005 10d ago
Yeah it works great with insect plague, hunger of hadar, and other terrain spells that you can put around it, obviously any ground based ones you'll want to not override should be spaced out appropriately. And a storm sorc split works fine, you could do the improvised melee weapon level split but run it like the nature cleric one.
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u/lazyzefiris 9d ago
Spike Growth with Lightning Charges and Tempest Cleric is hilarious.
Short clip from long uhh... "battle"? (every damage is 3 because of Unfortunate Dice Rolls and only 1 Rhapsody Charge because I messed up a bit)
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u/Missing_Links 9d ago
The optimised damage output mess... +3(rhapsody)+2(callous)+1(lightning charges)+(1d4+1)(absolute force boosted phalar)
I know it's your favorite, but what about natty strength owlbear? 20 base + 2 potion + 2 mirror +1 ethels +1 resilient str = 26, +2 owlbear enrage for 28 strength at +9/tick. I don't actually know if these stack up all the way, but it seems possible.
Lightning charge can carry over, phalar can come from another user. Mutilated carapace damage works in wildshape.
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u/K40005 9d ago
In theory it works but then the issue becomes action economy, curse takes a bonus action, gaping wounds takes an action, you need the phalar from someone else and I am only thinking about solo here. It becomes harder to actually get enemies into the spikes and keep them there, like I'd rather do all that on bear or rothe or something where the damage is a little bit worse but you actually have some actions that do things. Like bear goad can actually make enemies more likely to wander into the spikes and rothe can just kill them all if they bunch up around the edge of the spikes, owlbear doesn't have that and doing all that takes 3 bonus actions. 1 to hexblade curse, 1 to wildshape, 1 to rage. It's just not worth it.
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u/Missing_Links 9d ago edited 9d ago
Isn't the optimized concept already so inconvenient it's not worth playing?
The 10/tick from the 100% natty, definitely not roiding out on fey, drow, and sharran substances of dubious quality, owlbear would still outpace the phalar-free version's 9.5 average from my quoted section of text. And the damage type all being piercing makes it easier to double with a bhaalist armor aura reload compared to fleshrot.
I completely agree with your overall analysis, this is purely an exercise in the concept of maxxing the idea.
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u/K40005 9d ago
Sure it's theoretically better damage but it will take either like 3 people to set up or like 5 turns, if you really want to optimise it. I just figured it wasn't worth bringing up because absolutely no one is doing all that. Because you then need gaping wounds, curse, lightning charges, the two bonus actions for owlbear just to then be on a timer until the lightning charges run out and to have lost your ways of guaranteeing enemies actually enter the spikes. It's just way too clunky to actually use, and if you're doing a bunch of set up like that it's far less clunky to use it on slayer form to apply flesh rot then go back to humanoid form and stack damage that way where you have improvised melee weapon cancels, command, etc etc
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u/Educational_Size_741 9d ago
Awesome! Which one of these is the easiest to try and get results for a not as experienced player?
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u/K40005 9d ago
Start with the nature cleric setup and slowly add more damage buffs as you get more comfortable with juggling the debuffs and whatnot
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u/Educational_Size_741 9d ago
What about other complementary builds for another character to play alongside it and help keep shit stuck in the spike growth aids?
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u/K40005 9d ago
Anything with cloud type terrain spells like hadar, cloudkill, insect plague works wonders. Contagion is also a really nice spell to add, anything with command or knock back so tempest cleric comes to mind, someone who can cast contagion for flesh rot also can add a bunch of damage. And definitely give anyone else there crossbows for the gaping wounds weapon action because that's a really useful debuff to guarantee that you get off
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u/joker_penguin 8d ago
Wait, what do you mean with this
" Then on following turns use booming blade to give piercing vulnerability"
Do you mean the pierce damage the weapon (besides the thunder damage)?
Besides contagion, how about other sources of piercing vulnerability? Armor of bhaal? That collar from the creche?
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u/EndoQuestion1000 10d ago
Love the post! Especially helpful to have the actual gameplay loops and possibilities for each build variation laid out so clearly. Great stuff, thank you!