The Self-Same Trial in Baldur’s Gate 3 is the second challenge of the Gauntlet of Shar. This will test your fighting skills and ability to adapt to unforeseen situations. In this trial, you will fight the exact duplicate copies of your party members, along with the spell, skills, and feats.
The higher your stats, the more powerful your shadow combatants will be. Defeating yourself sounds easy on paper, but this is one of the most challenging trials in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Self-Same Trial location
You can find the Self-Same trial near the Soft-Step trial at Gauntlet of Shar. You can only reach here after going through Thorm Mausoleum in Act 2. Completing these trials will grant you the Umbral Gems needed to open the door to the inner area so you can proceed with Shadowheart’s companion quest and the main story.
How to complete Self-Same trial in Baldur’s Gate 3
In the Self-Same Trial, your whole party is mirrored along with their abilities. It is wise to ungroup your party members and use only one or two. Once you have decided your party choices to start the trial, go to the sacrificial bowl and sacrifice your blood. You should not worry about it as it takes only 1HP.
Allow Shadowheart to shed her blood for you, increasing her affinity for you. After shedding the blood, you will notice that the gate to the main trial has opened.
Enter the room; if you have chosen only one member from the party, you will find their counterpart at the upper stairs section. You can go and kill him.
This fight is a mirror match, meaning the opponent fighting you will have all your strengths and weaknesses with additional HP. Your duplicates always start the fight invisible and hiding. It is best to cast the See Invisibility spell before engaging in combat.
However, if you take all your party members, the group distribution of the enemies will be as follows.
- One enemy will be hiding on the right side of the stairs.
- Another enemy will be on a platform on the Left side of the stairs.
- There are two on the top upper section of the stairs.
Enemies here will enjoy the high ground benefit. Each party member should attack their counterpart. But you can always attack someone else, too. We strongly recommend not bringing a party member with access to spells like Fireball, or this will be catastrophic. To tackle this fight, follow these steps.
- As soon as you enter the room, enter the turn-based mode.
- Enter stealth and move all your characters behind the enemies.
- Surprise the enemies as soon as the fight starts.
- Use Shadowheart’s radiant magic spells like Guiding Bolt. This is of utmost importance. As all enemies are shadows, they will take massive damage from this strategy.
As you defeat the last duplicate, it will drop an Umbral gem, and the Killer’s Sweetheart will be the loot. The ring allows you to land a critical hit on your next strike after killing a creature.
How to Cheese Self-Same Trial
There are two methods that still work after patch 6 to cheese this trial.
- Remove your armor and clothes after sacrificing the blood. As you enter the trial chamber, all your duplicates will be naked, with nothing to protect them. Before engaging in combat, enter turn-based mode and equip your armor again.
- The second method is the best one. Ensure all your party members, except Shadowheart, stay in the hallway and do not enter the room with the Shar statue. Once the trial starts, use a lockpick (DC20) to open the gate and enter the trial chamber. It is now a 1v4 fight with your team against the Shadowheart clone.
Is the Self-Same Trial bugged?
There are a few bugs as well that some players report while completing the Self-Same trial in Baldur’s Gate 3. In the first one, after using spells like Banishment, the companion and the clone disappear, and you can’t get the Umbral Gem or Orb after killing all.
The possible solution for this bug is not using spells like Banishment. Another bug some players report is losing the weapon your party member or clone dropped. Players were not able to pick up or find the dropped weapon. There is no proper fix for this as it is an error from the developer side, which they will fix in an update.
There is one more bug in which you get a message that an Illithid/tadpole parasite is inside the corpse. That is not true. You see this message because the game thinks the main character with the parasite died. But the one who died is a copy of the main character.
