Had you asked me yesterday about the best Baldur's Gate 3 class, I might have picked Bard - versatile, swish, a solid support both in and out of combat - but that was before I discovered the ancient and honourable Larian discipline of barrelmancy. As the name suggests, it's all about doing mildly game-breaking things with barrels, crates and other heavy containers, by taking advantage of high strength, the Throw command, and the fact that Larian RPG characters can somehow fit items as big as they are into their inventories, without bursting apart like rotten haggis.
A straightforward tactic: consider lugging a few oil barrels into a throne room, and dropping them all around the resident big cheese before you confront him. Given reasonably careful distribution, it's possible to finish a whole battle this way in a single turn. Fortunately, while Baldur's Gate NPCs can be eagle-eyed when it comes to sneaking rogues, they're perfectly indifferent to people surrounding them with heavy explosives.
The above might sound simplistic, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. Barrelmancy is a practice - dare I say, an artform - that goes back to Divinity: Original Sin. Another classic tactic: put a crate inside another crate, fill them both with heavy junk and lob the resulting crate-singularity at enemies, who are instantly liquefied by the concentrated weight.
In Divinity: Original Sin 2, you could do this using telekinesis without breaking stealth, much to the horror and derangement of enemies. Imagine, if you will, living in a world where barrel-shaped neutron stars appear out of thin air to smash all your mates to atoms. Barrelmancy does have non-violent applications: you can also stack crates to boost yourself over what are
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