Are you wasting your companions? | Baldur's Gate 3

as you're making your way through the story of balers Gate 3 you'll most likely find yourself picking up a few more party members than the four you're limited to in your actual group I say most likely because some of you are going to end up accidentally killing a ton of critical MPCs and missing out on potential allies how do I know this that's not important don't worry about it having these extra party members means you'll be making choices about who you want to travel with and even potentially swapping party members in and out of your group based on either abilities you need for certain situations utility you can use for upcoming areas or even just to mix things up a little bit while you guys are out on the road but what if I told you that these benchwarmer characters that you're not currently adventuring with can still benefit your group in a few key ways how in the world is that possible stick around and I'll show you welcome back Travelers I'm I'm glad to see you made it I'm Colo and today I have a balers Gate 3 tip for you that you might find interesting and hopefully you'll find it useful there are certain spells in the game that will give your characters Buffs or items that will last until long rest this essentially makes these spells a one time per day cast set it and forget it situation you cast it once you don't have to worry about it until you do another long rest then you'll cast it again some of the Spells are self cast only which means that the person casting the spell is the one who is going to be the one receiving the benefits of it however there are a few of them that can also be cast on other people those are the kind we're going to be talking about today these spells range an effect from long Strider which is a very powerful movement speed increase to Aid which will increase the maximum health of everyone in range when it's cast most players are going to go out of their way to make sure their party learn earns at least a few of these spells just because of the utility and different options that they offer you if you're willing to spend a few extra seconds in Camp when you long rest you can save your group a couple of spell slots by having one or more of your benchwarmer characters cast these buff spells on your party before you leave Camp I'm showing a few of the spells on screen but there's actually a few more in the game I'm just highlighting some of the ones that I think are the coolest so definitely keep an eye out for spells that don't require concentration and last until long rest and the reason why I say don't require concentration is because if the buff requires concentration and you cast it on somebody and then remove the spellcaster from your party they instantly stop concentrating on that buff and you lose it so concentration spells won't work for this situation I also got my hopes up about a couple of spells that I thought might work on this list as well including daylight and odol Luke's freezing sphere because I thought it would be cool to enchant somebody's weapon with daylight and have them walk around with the sun shining in their hands all day or with the freezing sphere you would basically be able to have all your Bench Warmers be Wizards and create a ton of frost grenades that somebody could carry around and just chuck all over the place I understand why these items only last for a certain amount of time but it would be fun if they didn't one unfortunate thing about this process is that the companion AI is going to fight against you sometimes while you're trying to cast these Buffs you'll move them over to be closer to the group to be within an area of effect buff and as soon as you unselect this person they'll start walking back towards where they're supposed to be it's annoying but it's to me it's worth it for certain circumstances it's worth it the reason why Aid and heroes Feast are both so popular is because where they increase maximum health of your group and both Buffs stack together you can actually get a 32 point Health increase for every member of your party including summon minions and everything even if you're not summoning minions having 32 Health added to all four members of your party that's massive cuz I mean at endgame at 12th level some of your characters are going to have right around 100 maximum health so 32 is huge it's a huge increase so you know just keep your eyes open if you see a spell that lasts until long rest and doesn't require concentration check it out you might be able to use it like this the one spell that I tested that I think has the highest gamebreaking potential on this list is warding Bond the rest of the video is going to be about this spell specifically I wanted to make sure everyone knew about the other spells and how good they are because some of them can offer some really strong results like we discussed before but warding bond is something else entirely this is a spell that all clerics receive at third level when you cast the spell on an ally both the caster and the target of the spell are going to receive different Buffs the person who you cast the spell on is going to receive a buff that will grant them a plus one bonus to Armor class and saving throws what that means is that they're basically just harder to hit with all attacks and it also grants them resistance to all damage for anyone who isn't aware in balers Gate 3 and in Dungeons and Dragons resistance means half damage taken so you get 50% damage reduction from all damage types just for having warding Bond cast on you clerics get this at level three how in the world is a 50% damage reduction allowed for the entirety of the game well let's take a look at the buff that the Caster of the spell receives a character who cast warding bond gets a buff that states creature is bound to an ally each time the Ally takes damage the creature takes the same amount of damage okay this puts things into perspective a little bit the target of the spell has all their damage taken reduced by 50% but then the spell Caster of the warding bond also takes that damage whenever they take it it's still a really good spell and in theory it still reduces the overall damage of your group because it increases the armor class and saving throws of the Target by one so technically they should be taking less damage good deal so why was this worth making a video about specifically for this spell well I tested out some pretty degenerate stuff by combining spells and effects I made a 11th level abjuration wizard with one level in warlock for the armor of agathys spell for a quick rundown on why I built my character this way let's take a look at Arcane Ward which is the defining feature of the abjuration wizard is a passive buff the wizard gets when they pick the abjuration subclass it grants you a magical Shield that gains charges as you cast abjuration spells the amount of charges your ward can have maximum is two times your character's wizard level so if your wizard is 11th level like mine is the Arcane Ward will stack to a maximum of 22 charges if it's 12th level it'll be 24 the amount of charges the Arcane ward has represents the number of damage that it's going to reduce when you take a hit so let's say you have your Arcane Ward stacked up to 20 charges and you take a hit for 30 damage the ward is going to reduce that hit by 20 damage because you had 20 charges your character is going to take the remaining 10 damage and then your Arcane Ward is going to drop down to 19 charges it only ever loses one charge per time that it gets hit so the next hit your character takes is going to get reduced by 19 damage and then the ward will drop to 18 now let's take a look at why Arcane Ward works so well with Warden bond for this we need to take a little bit of a look into how resistances and damage calculations work in the game so let's look at that real quick when your character gets hit the game checks to see if they have any resistances before the damage actually lands your warding bond has guaranteed resistance to all damage types so when it checks for resistance it is going to find one and then the remaining spillover damage is what what gets calculated into the Arcane Ward which you can stack into the 20s like we discussed before so let's go back to the previous example we used same numbers and everything your wizard takes a hit for 30 damage and has a Arcane Ward stacked up to 20 except in this scenario they also have warding Bond on them giving them resistance to whatever damage type it was that caused the 30 damage we didn't even talk about that that 30 damage gets chopped in half to 15 and then 15 damage runs head first into an Arcane Ward that mitigates 20 damage and you take zero damage none and guess what happens when the wizard takes zero damage the cleric that cast warding Bond also takes zero damage and that's another part of the situation that we need to talk about now the wording on the spell warding bond is very important here the Caster will take the same amount of damage that the target of the bond takes so if your wizard is taking zero damage hits and ones and twos after they mitigate it with their Arcane Ward your cleric's going to survive back in Camp for a long long time and the entire time they're alive in Camp they're acting as a 50% mitigation to all damage for that wizard what happens when they finally do die the effects of warding bond will go away when the character dies and your or wizard is going to lose their 50% mitigation after like 200 hits because most of the time in this abjuration wizard scenario you'll be taking hits for zero damage and so will your cleric how bad is it when your cleric dies in town you talk to Withers you pay him 200 gold he'll have your cleric ready to cast another warding bond in no time 200 gold man that's a lot I don't want to be wasting all my all my gold Colo every time I try to use your stupid plan I hear you I get it the cool thing about Withers is that he just has no FS to give yes he charges you 200 gold per resurrect and 100 gold per resp when you go talk to him but you can just stand behind him and pickpocket all your gold back from him he'll catch you a 100 times he doesn't care he's like a proud father just waiting for you to steal it properly he's like oh yeah you can do it kid you got this he charges you money just to troll you he doesn't actually care he doesn't want it he doesn't even like money at all he just likes taking your money now earlier on for some of you astute listeners you might remember I mentioned that I took a single level in warlock for the armor of Agatha spell why did I do that this is another ridiculous interaction with this and even if you don't do the warding bond combination even if you skip this entire warning Bond situation an abjuration wizard combined with a single level of warlock for armor of agius is also very strong so this is something you might want to listen to also the armor of agius spell grants you temporary hit points and while you have those temporary hit points anytime a enemy attacks you with a melee attack and hits you they will take cold damage in retaliation the spell is going to lash back out at them and hit them for cold damage so you can upcast it to give yourself more temporary hit points and upcasting it also increases the retaliation damage that it does you can upcast it Grant yourself like 30 hit points and also if you never actually lose those temporary hit points then every melee attack against you will trigger a 30 damage cold retaliation 30 damage is a lot of damage so all in all to recap the whole video keep your eyes open for spells that don't require concentration when the Caster uses them and they last until long rest because these can be used by your benchwarmer characters to help out your actual party in game terms you can squeeze a little bit of power out of those extra characters just by taking an extra couple of seconds less than a minute every time you long rest you will get really fast and efficient at doing this grouping your party members up casting the Buffs you need and getting out of town just make sure if your group uses a lot of summoned minions make sure you summon all of them before you start casting these AOE Buffs because they'll benefit from a lot of them too so that's it's just extra Health to add to your party if you thought this video was interesting helpful or entertaining why not drop me a like And subscribe to the channel if you want to see more content like this and be sure to click the notification Bell if you want to be notified when I upload other videos if you want to support my work even further check out my patreon which I'm going to link in the video description down below I appreciate all the support you guys have been giving the channel it's been greatly appreciated for sure did you learn anything new from this video have you come across any other crazy spell interactions while you've been playing balers Gate 3 if so please let me know down in the comments I love hearing about stuff like this from you guys that's going to be it for this video though Travelers I appreciate you watching it all the way through I'm glad you got to see me and do your best to stay alive until next time see you

Channel: Panic Rolling

Views: 36,029

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Id: 8F-dZ7nDnKo

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023