Players love to talk extensively about the strongest builds and best strategies in Baldur’s Gate 3, but a popular spell makes even the smartest players abandon all strategies.
Which spell is being talked about? It is about the Level 3 spell Fireball, which is available to wizards, sorcerers, clerics of the Light domain, Warlock of the Undead, and bards of the School of Lore.
The spell is quite self-explanatory: it allows you to unleash a beam of fire from your hands that results in a large explosion at a selected point. Fireball is therefore a spell that deals a solid 8D6 fire damage and gains an additional D6 with each spell level above level 3.
The spell is an extremely popular spell in the Dungeons & Dragons community and is often used as a meme when a previously thought-out and well-considered plan is destroyed within seconds by a massive fire explosion: simply because it feels too good.
Even the Baldur’s Gate 3 community, which is actually a big fan of intricate builds and strategies, must admit that Fireball is too great not to use. This is also evident in a meme in the game’s subreddit, which has already received over 10,000 upvotes.
Here you see the animated short film for Patch 8 of Baldur’s Gate 3:
Players don’t want to part with their beloved Fireball
What discussion arose from the meme? The meme, posted by SouthBendCitizen on Reddit, portrays a player in Baldur’s Gate 3 who wants to create a spellcaster character for crowd control. Spells like “Sleep”, “Crown of Madness” or “Hold Person” have no chance against the beloved Fireball.
This seems to be a well-known phenomenon among players, as they express themselves abundantly in the comments:
“The best form of crowd control is death,” writes lesbos_hermit (on Reddit), to which PopeGoomy adds: “You don’t need to control the crowd when they’re no longer there” (via Reddit).
In response to lollersauce914 (on Reddit), who suggests switching to crowd control with better gear in Act 2, the post’s author is not convinced: “I understand what you mean. But what if instead, once I have all the great equipment, I just throw a Fireball?” (SounthBendCitizen via Reddit)
How can one build a strategy around the beloved spell? The player malcorpse also doesn’t want to give up on his beloved Fireball, so he has come up with a strategy using another power source from the game to use Fireball as “crowd control”: “My Illithid powers only gave me the ability for a Black Hole so that I could gather everyone within range of a Fireball together.” (via Reddit).
And when Fireball doesn’t work, the player Binx_Thackery has a solution: “If Fireball didn’t work the first time, cast it again with a higher spell slot. Repeat this until the problem is solved” (via Reddit)
Players, and especially fans of Fireball, can be thankful that in Baldur’s Gate 3, no components for spells are needed as in Dungeons & Dragons. For a Fireball in the tabletop RPG, the caster requires not only some sulfur but also a small ball of bat guano. Perhaps for this reason, Fireball would have fit onto this list here on MeinMMO: 6 underrated spells that are much more powerful in Baldur’s Gate 3 than in Dungeons & Dragons
