How to Get Auntie Ethel’s Hair & Best Choices to Select

Key Takeaways

• Obtain the Hag’s Hair from Auntie Ethel by keeping Mayrina alive and getting Auntie Ethel’s HP low without killing her.
• Choose wisely which stat to boost using Hag’s Hair, and prioritize your main character’s primary stat
• Use a mod to obtain multiple Hag’s Hair items for different party members, maximizing benefits across companions.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has a variety of different quests that can be completed during your run of the game. Among the most memorable is the Auntie Ethel / Save Mayrina quest, which is one of the more significant events to occur during Act 1. As you take on this Hag, multiple outcomes can be achieved depending on your decisions, but you may not be aware that there is also a hidden opportunity to obtain one of the most powerful buff items in the game, known as the Hag’s Hair.

In Baldur’s Gate 3, the Hag’s Hair is a consumable item that can be obtained from Auntie Ethel, depending on the choices you make during this early encounter. This powerful item, depending on the variation you choose, will provide a permanent +1 to either your STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, OR CHA. This is huge, as it can be paired with the Ability Improvement Feat to earn a maximum of 20 in your most important stat, all before completing Act 1 of the game.

Updated November 30, 2024, by Grace Black: Auntie Ethel is a boss that players will continue to face as they continue new playthroughs of BG3, or new players will encounter as they try out the game for the first time. As this is one of the most challenging early fights, as well as the only opportunity to obtain the Hag’s Hair item, this guide has been refreshed with all of the latest information and tips to point players in the right direction and ensure they make the best decision of which Hag’s Hair stat to prioritize. In addition to this, some important important regarding the encounter and Hag’s Hair regarding Paladin Oaths, choice selection, and the potential to manipulate more through mods have been included.

How to Reach the Auntie Ethel Fight

Head To The Gnarled Teahouse In The Sunlit Wetlands

Before having a chance to secure Auntie Ethel’s Hair in Baldur’s Gate 3, you will first need to initiate the Save Mayrina quest and make your way through the path out of Blighted Village, potentially fight a few Redcaps along the way, and then finally continue progressing towards the Gnarled Teahouse. In case you need the direct location of this building to help you find your way, then feel free to refer to the map screenshot below.

Initiating Auntie Ethel Fight

Once you’ve arrived at this location, you will find Auntie Ethel inside, either in her humanoid disguise or her true Hag form, depending on how her previous confrontation with Mayrina’s brothers went. At this point, you will need to confront Auntie Ethel and trigger combat by attacking her or demanding she release Mayrina.

While there is also the option to avoid conflict and let Auntie Ethel and Mayrina go, you will need to ensure you trigger combat and follow her down into her dungeon, as this encounter in Act 1 is the only opportunity to obtain the Hag’s Hair.

After taking a few hits, Auntie Ethel may turn invisible, and regardless will then progress to fleeing through the fireplace, which is a mirage, operating as a secret door to her lair. Once she flees, you can simply follow her down to her lair, where she will give you one final warning to back off.

Bypassing the Gnarled Door & Finding Auntie Ethel

To progress further, you will then need to work your way through a structure known as the Gnarled Door, moving deeper into the dungeon. To move through the Gnarled Door, the easiest method is to have a character with a strong INT skill talk to the door and succeed in an Arcana Check, which will reveal that much like the fireplace, this door is a mere illusion. The second option is to briefly equip a Whispering Mask from the table to the right, pass through the door, and quickly unequip it before Auntie Ethel uses it to take control of your character.

After passing through this door, you will encounter a group of individuals wearing Whispering Masks who have been taken over by Auntie Ethel. You can either sneak past them to initially avoid this combat, or face them in combat and defeat the poor souls.

You will now be in the final stretch of the dungeon before encountering Auntie Ethel’s fight and getting a chance to obtain her hair. Throughout this section of her lair, there will be noxious fumes covering the ground, and explosive traps. By using a Fire Spell or Cantrip, you can ignite these fumes temporarily.

This may cause some explosions to occur from the traps, so make sure your party members are a safe distance away. After igniting these fumes, you should be able to notice a vent in which the fumes come from. You can then throw an object such as a weapon, plate, or piece of unwanted armor onto the vent to block the fumes completely, enabling your party to pass through. Repeat this process as needed for each section of the dungeon, until you finally work your way down to the bottom and initiate combat against Auntie Ethel.

How to Get Auntie Ethel’s Hair During the Save Mayrina Fight

Get The Hag Low Without Killing Mayrina

The most important thing to consider when initiating the fight with Auntie Ethel to obtain her hair is that you will need to keep Mayrina alive throughout the fight. When the combat kicks off, Autnie Ethel will light Mayrina’s cage on fire, so you will then need to throw a vase of water at the cage or use a Spell such as Create Water to extinguish the flames.

The next time Mayrina will be put under threat is when Auntie Ethel clones her, forcing you to pick one of the two to attack. Luckily, if you hover over the real Mayrina, she will have a water icon under her name, still drenched from the fire that you put out. This will safely let you know which Mayrina to attack, and which to spare.

During the Auntie Ethel fight, you will need to attack the Hag and get her HP very low. You should aim to get her to around 10 HP without killing her, then ensure you have one or more party members within her melee range. At this point, if you need to get through the rest of your companion’s turns, you should focus on healing or skipping their turns entirely, as killing Auntie Ethel will lose your chance of obtaining the powerful Hag’s Hair item. On Auntie Ethel’s next turn, she will approach the nearest companion in a cutscene, trying to intervene before she’s killed off, and make a deal that if you let her escape with Mayrina, she will give you a power – her hair.

At this point, you will have three options – refuse, agree, and get the Hag’s Hair, or succeed in an Intimidation Check to convince her to give up both Mayrina and the Hag’s hair. To obtain this buff item, you will need to either swap Mayrina or take your chances at the check, so this may influence the character that you choose to position in the melee range of Auntie Ethel.

An important thing to consider for those playing Paladin Tavs, or who may have respected their comrades into Paladins, is that this method can cause certain Oaths to break, turning the character into an Oathbreaker Paladin. If you’re going for a specific build that revolves around the key assets your chosen Oath supplies, then you will want to avoid Oathbreaking, as this locks you out of using such abilities, and buying back your Oath can be a pain.

Prior to Patch 7, players could simply use another character to interact with Auntie Ethel, but his will now still trigger the Oath to break. Instead, you can get around this by having the character not be involved in the combat at all, Invisible/actively hiding, or by being Silenced. Many Paladins have the Silence Spell naturally, so you can simply cast it upon yourself during combat, and this will prevent you from being included in the conversation/scene in which you haggle Auntie Ethel for her hair.

Best Choices to Make When Selecting Auntie Ethel’s Hair, Explained

What Stat Boost To Choose

When selecting an option for Auntie Ethel’s hair, there will be six different selections to choose from:

• Strength
• Dexterity
• Constitution
• Intelligence
• Wisdom
• Charisma

You will only get one choice when it comes to Hag’s hair, meaning that just one of the characters in your party can consume the item. For this reason, it is often the wisest choice to prioritize the character you will be playing the most, which in most scenarios, will usually be your custom Tav. To make the most of the opportunity to improve one of your stats, you will achieve the most long-term benefit from picking the stat which is your character’s main priority. You can then take an Ability Improvement Feat to reach the maximum points of 20 for that stat in Act 1, which is a huge long-term improvement that will make your character that much more efficient and powerful.

To make things easier when considering your choices, feel free to refer to the list below, which aligns all Classes to their most important stat. This stat is determined by what weapons they use, how they deal damage, or the Spellcasting modifier that a character may wield. It’s important to note that while Constitution is one of the most important stats for many builds, it is rarely the primary stat that the build revolves around. Improving CON will increase your max HP while forgoing this choice to improve your primary stat will increase both your damage output and outcomes of ability checks associated with this stat.

While the choices above are the best overall choices for each Class, there may be some niche scenarios in which you decide to opt for another selection, depending on your Race and Subclass. For example,
Rogues rely on Dexterity
for pretty much their entire combat playstyle, and their greatest strength as lockpickers, pickpockets, and trap disarmers. However, the Arcane Trickster Subclass also uses INT in addition to DEX, for Spellcasting. If you plan to primarily be a melee Spellcaster, then buffing your INT is always an option – particularly if you plan to make the most out of melee Cantrip mods, such as Booming Blade and Green Flame Blade, with the use of Patch 7 in-game mods.

How to Use Hag’s Hair to Maximize Your Primary Stat Early

Depending on your starting stat alignment, you can now combine consuming Auntie Ethel’s hair with an Ability Improvement feat to max out your primary stat, which is a huge asset for not just Act 1, but the remainder of the game. In the case that your stats aren’t aligned properly to achieve this, you can always respec them with Withers. To achieve a maxed-out primary stat, you will need to ensure the following:

• Your primary stat has an initial number of 17 (use +2)
• You take Ability Increase Feat at level 3 and opt for +2 on your primary stat, making it 19
• Lastly, consume Auntie Ethel’s hair to make this stat 20

In the case that you choose to respec your character, the +1 buff from Auntie Ethel’s hair will remain, unlike Ability Improvement bonuses, which are reset upon respec. For this reason, it’s a good idea to select the hair for a stat you know your character will be utilizing, based on their Base Class, rather than Subclass or build approach – unless you have a very well-thought-out plan for the longevity of the game.

How to Get More Than One Hag’s Hair

For those who are struggling to decide which character to use the Hag’s Hair with, or simply wish to exploit this power up across multiple Tavs or companions, there is one way to do so – the Extra Hag’s Hair mod. The Extra Hag Hair mod, available on Nexus Mods, adds one copy of all different Hag Hair options to the player’s inventory, enabling them to make use of each one across their party members, rather than simply picking out just one from the bunch to consume. This mod can be imported and registered to the in-game mod manager as a third-party/external mod by importing it/writing it to your game with BG3MM.