You can turn Baldur's Gate 3 into Arduous Gauntlets Done Quick, speedrunning its most gruelling dungeon using a basic 2nd-level spell
Hey, remember how much time you spent tackling Shar's Gauntlet in Baldur's Gate 3? The bloodshed? The tears? The gems? It's a real, well, gauntlet. But here's something to make you feel even worse about it: you could have skipped the whole thing using one level 2 spell.
Spotted by GamesRadar, BG3 fans are currently reckoning with the fact that they may have wasted hours of their life overcoming Shar's trials when they could have just (magically) knocked. No, really. Ordinarily, overcoming Shar's Gauntlet means enduring her three trials, gathering a bunch of umbral gems, winning numerous fights, and then finally broaching a gigantic door at the bottom of her temple that leads to your true goal: the Nightsong.
Or you could just cast Knock on that gigantic door and bypass all that tedious trial-gem-fight stuff. You've got places to be.
Knock is a profoundly basic second-level spell. Its purpose is simple: it unlocks things. Usually, that means the odd door or chest you don't have the skill or inclination to lockpick. But hey, that door at the end of Shar's Gauntlet is just that: a door. Sure, it might act as the key obstacle in a set of trials overseen by a literal god, but that just means it's a door with pretensions. Don't let its high opinion of itself bar your way.
This realisation seems to have dawned on the BG3 community in the last week or two. On Twitter, a BG3 fan going by clancadera provoked surprise, delight, and quiet rage in her audience when she posted how she had stumbled across the technique. "Last night I learnt that you can skip all the Gauntlet of Shar trials, if you use the Knock spell on the huge door to get to the Nightsong," she posted, attracting plenty of responses from players excited to use the trick in future playthroughs and at least one tearful response from someone who "just finished that dreadful trial yesterday."
But the trick's been making the rounds on BG3's subreddit, too. Eight days ago, a user named Loher413 posted a thread about discovering the Knock trick. "That means you only need one gem to complete the Gauntlet, in order to activate the elevator [that goes down to the door]," they wrote, "hell, there might even be a way to jump down."
Reddit's reaction was a bit more energetic. "Shadowheart is about to have a fucking aneurysm" reads the top-voted response, referring to Shadowheart's Shar worship and the fact she takes the whole gauntlet thing pretty seriously. Others worry that using the skip might prevent you from progressing Shadowheart's personal questline, but not to worry: just make sure you nab the Spear of Night from the Silent Library and you can carry on as if you didn't just treat her god's holiest trial like a Mario Kart level you found a shortcut in.