Baldur’s Gate 3 player shares clever trick to protect Halsin’s portal easily

Emily Stander
Thaniel in Baldur's Gate 3

Protecting Halsin’s portal in Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the sequences in-game that players have had a difficult time getting past, and one got so frustrated they had to think out of the box to manage it. 

The Shadow-Cursed Lands in Baldur’s Gate 3 has a different tone from the rest of the game. The hovering threat of death in the air is the most obvious thing that sets it apart, but mostly, it’s the kind of enemies you come across and how you need to deal with them

One of the pivotal moments of Act 2 is when Halsin asks you to defend the portal to the Shadowfell while he looks for Thaniel. This quest is the one you follow if you want to lift the Shadow Curse, and if you fail, well, the lands will remain as they are and Halsin dies.

One player got so frustrated with the fight that they came up with a whole new method to protect the portal. In a Reddit post titled “If this doesn’t work I’m committing Netherese Orb Blast,” ‘Ok_Banana_5614’ shared a picture of how they had built a wall out of chests and boxes in an effort to make it difficult for the waves of enemies to get through to Halsin’s portal. 

It ended up working beautifully, especially because enemies did tend to get stuck behind the wall of chests without being able to damage them. 

“Occasionally one would attack a chest for 0 damage or a raven might fly up to the portal, but because I casted darkness around it, they just sat in place doing nothing,” the OP explained. 

Baldur’s Gate 3 players in the comments loved that the OP thought this up in the first place. “This is rad, I love this community, always thinking outside the chest,” one player commented. 

Others were concerned that it may not have worked because of the teleporting ability of the shadow creatures alongside the crossbow-wielding rangers that come to attack you. The OP was able to abate these concerns, though, saying that Darkness is what ultimately saved them. 

Darkness is a Level 2 spell that inflicts Blindness on anyone who enters the cloud, and this in turn makes it really difficult for any enemies to take their full movement or make meaningful ranged attacks. 

The other reason players loved this method was because protecting Halsin’s portal proves to be a difficult fight to manage for anyone who tries it. 

“When I found this fight, I restarted it several times (even taking mage mercenaries to be able to deal as much damage as I could at all),” one player explained. “And then the timer went to zero….. And the fight didn’t end. It didn’t even end after one more surviving turn. As a result, I gave up.”

Whether you’d like to try this method once you reach this point or check out more interesting techniques to get past difficult fights in Baldur’s Gate 3, we’ve got you covered. Check out how to beat Auntie Ethel and why you shouldn’t use the ‘Gale bomb.’