Baldur's Gate 3 - Controller / Blaster Wizard - Class guide

hello and welcome everyone my name is Belco and today I'm gonna do another quick start guide with the wizard so this is going to go through the first three levels of wizard and how you want to potentially start your character to get a good build to get you through the first few levels and on to success towards the later parts of the game so the wizard is a spell caster and in terms of their role I often play my Wizards as more of a controller with a little bit of blasting so they're really focusing on taking care of lots of smaller enemies or taking enemies out of the fight completely they're not necessarily going to be my Striker doing sustained damage throughout the fight but they do have a little bit of power to finish off targets so with that all said let's take a look at the ability scores I'm obviously using Gail right here as my de facto wizard so these are some ability scores I would recommend for a base all-round solid build so I'm a human and that's important to note because that means I get access to Shields and light armor on my wizard which is not going to be true for every race so depending on your race you might have things look a little differently but I have my 10 strength 16 decks 14 Constitution 16 intelligence 10 in wisdom and eight in Charisma My Wizard isn't going to be a very good party face and it's not going to be great at persuading or intimidating or anything and that's totally fine but my dexterity and intelligence are high this is going to give me some bonus AC as well as better deck saves and it's also going to give me better initiative which is really important on a controller I want my wizard to go first as much as possible so that they can take advantage of having those high impact area of effect spells that take enemies out of the fight I also want a pretty good Constitution score because I want to maintain concentration on my spells which is really really important and obviously intelligence is going to increase the difficulty of my saves so it's going to make it so enemies resist my spells a little bit less so it's really important to Max this out as soon as possible notable Feats that you're potentially looking towards as well are going to be the resilient Constitution feed so it might be worth it to uh bump one of these up to something like this you could drop wisdom a little bit and bump up your Constitution take that later you could also do that on a respect later on depending on how you want to do things but getting that Constitution up a little bit higher is always great you also could consider doing that through your abilities course at level one uh just putting your Constitution to 16 instead of your dexterity and dropping this a little bit less this becomes even more viable if you're playing a race like a Geth Yankee or a shield dwarf that has access to medium armor proficiency because that way you're maximizing your armor class and you can avoid taking the Mage Armor spell as well so that'll be really nice in terms of maximizing your AC which having good AC also makes it so that you don't need to make as many concentration saving throws to begin with because you're just going to be hit less often so that's also really nice in terms of canned trips do you have options here I like taking both Firebolt and Ray of frost for the the various utility it is a larion game which means Firebolt has so many things to set on fire there's powder kegs Greece lots of little flammable bits and Bobs torches to light things like that so having Firebolt I find is just really nice to have and then Ray of frost obviously has a little bit of a slow to it it does a little bit less damage than Fireball but still solid damage and it also has the ability to sometimes knock enemies prone and freeze water so there are other utility uses here in terms of my third countrip slot I would say this is probably the most flexible depending on what you're looking to do so if you really want a light source you could use that here you could take minor illusion if you want to be sneaking around and things like that or magehand I find is actually useful in certain spots in the game with puzzles being able to press buttons and stuff from far away is kind of nice so there is some some use cases there but I like bladeward it is just a nice resistance for two turns there are places where you're going to want to use this but generally these are all going to be situational you could even take something like shock and grasp if you want your wizard to be able to escape melee attackers too so that's what I would recommend for can drips and in terms of your spells this is a nice array that gives you all the options you need to be a decent controller right from the start with a little bit of uh striking as well so magic Missile obviously is that single Target or even multi-target spell that has no attack roll it just does two to five damage per missile uh with three missiles so this is amazing all throughout the game it doesn't do a ton of damage but it's guaranteed damage and because you can always see the hit points of enemies it's really really useful so at any point in the game there's gonna be those enemies with two or three hit points left and you just send a missile at them if they you know if they're at four or five hit points you could send two at them and guarantee the kill it's always going to make sure you finish those enemies off and it's really really useful I've never sad to have magic Missile in my party there's almost every fight there's an enemy that just has that one HP that I want to finish off and it's great for that Shield is great as a reaction make sure you turn on the ability for reactions to be asked when to be used this gives you 5ac when you're getting attacked and obviously you just use it when that 5ac will turn a hit into a miss and then it has great value there it also lasts for the rest of the turn so back until you you take your turn again and sometimes it'll prevent two or three hits from hitting you and it can be really really useful it's also great for multi-classes and we'll talk about that a little bit later but Shield is a really really useful spell Greece has a ton of utility it's a nice little control spell really slows enemies down and it also makes them fall prone potentially there are going to be situations where you can knock enemies down and if you look at the initiative and plan ahead of time and you target an enemy that goes after your front line gets to go you could potentially give advantage to your front line because they couldn't get Advantage when attacking prone enemies so there's a little bit of a combo here and you might not think about it but it almost functions like a pseudo fairy fire that can grant your melee attackers Advantage if you're making those enemies fall prone also it works great as a kiting tool and a control tool just putting it at a choke point and making enemies have to waste their whole turn getting to you and it combos well with Firebolt to do a little bit of damage by letting it up all on fire on subsequent turns so fun spell it is really creative and really fun to play around with it is great sleep is once again a spell that doesn't require any rolling it works on enemies up to 24 hit points which is fantastic so level one to three it's going to Target plenty of things in various encounters and even late game think of it almost like a magic Missile in some senses when that enemy has 20 hit points you just put it on them you're guaranteed taking them out of the fight for a couple of turns and you can focus on clearing out the rest of the enemies also to note enemies that are asleep will take a guaranteed critical hit from melee attacks so this can be used to guarantee finish off an enemy because it'll also be having advantage to hit those enemies so it really makes them easy to hit it also should be noted that enemies AI tend to focus on waking up sleeping enemies so if you sleep an enemy that's way in the back line the front line sometimes will turn around and run back to wake up the guy in the back line and it functions as a sort of double crowd control in some situations it is important to also pay attention to the order of initiative so you're not wasting it by putting a Target to sleep that's going to be woken up before they take a turn Thunder Wave is really fantastic it's a huge knockback does a good amount of damage it guarantees half damage even if they make a save so similar to magic Missile sometimes enemies are low and this will just guarantee finish them off and it's really fun you can hit multiple enemies it can hit allies so just be careful with that and then Mage Armor is just almost like a wizard tax that you can pay if you don't want to have a race that gives you armor bonuses or the ability to wear armor in terms of armor proficiency it'll give you that 13 base AC plus your decks so with Mage Armor alone with this build if we have 14 in our decks we'd get up to 15 AC at level one which is really solid we could also even do something like this where we go back here and we can get up to 16 AC at level one and then because Gail's a human he could also put a shield on and that would be even better and then we pop our Shields belt and we're up 23 AC at level one um pretty pretty tanky wizard so obviously it's not going to be able to do that for very long because that would be all of your spells for one round and not necessarily the best use of your spells but there are some really cool things you can do in terms of defenses as well with a wizard so just thought I'd go over that onward to level two so obviously at level two we're getting those hit point increases we get another spell slot which is great we get some class features this is going to be based on our subclass so we won't talk about those quite yet and then we get two new spells so in terms of new spells at level two you don't necessarily need to worry as much compared to other casters when acquiring spells because you can get spells from Scrolls as a wizard but because we want to be a controller I would recommend fog cloud and Tasha's hideous laughter as good pickups but you're going to be able to get most of these spells eventually and then it's just about which spells you want to have prepared so this is a nice array in terms of spells giving you a wide variety of things you can do I would maybe drop Thunder Wave for Shield at level two consider adding more later you'll probably drop Shield spell within the next few levels put Thunder Wave back maybe and then as you're getting second and third level spells you're going to be dropping some of these as well but this is a good array gives you some nice AOE control here some good defenses and that ability to single Target finish enemies guaranteed this is a nice mix I would like to use but let's talk about the sub classes so the subclasses are really really cool and these give you some unique abilities that are going to change the way your wizard feels and each of these are paired to one of the schools of magic but there are some that are maybe a little bit more uh nuanced than others so evocation this is the blastery magic this is your Fireballs your lightning bolts all your big big booms so if you want to be more of a blaster this is a great way to go so obviously you get this event feature which is going to reduce evocation learning to uh 25 gold instead of 50. but you get the unique feature of sculpting spells so this means whenever you cast an evocation spell you no longer need to worry about allies being in the blast so when we're talking about that Thunder Wave for example you can just Blast away and it's not going to hit your allies when you're throwing a fireball you just Center it on your party you're not worrying about your allies this is really really useful for those blasters that just want to indiscriminately blast away so you're not going to do any damage to your allies this way and it is fantastic so this is a great option it's super solid for a blaster character not necessarily what we're going to go for with this build but it is very good AB duration is a little bit more defensive this is going to be for wizards that want to be a little bit tanky maybe there's some multi-classing here if you wanted to be a sort of a Gish build so sort of a fighter wizard that wants to be in the front line so you get this Arcane Ward and the way it works is whenever you cast a spell you get charges equal to the level of the spell and then as you take damage you have this Ward which reduces the damage whenever you take it and then it reduces the charge of your ward by one so as you're casting spells like shield and Mage Armor you're charging up your ward and then as you're taking damage it goes down so OB duration Wizards are just generally going to take a little bit less damage they're going to have this buffer on them that prevents them from getting hurt which is kind of nice necromancy is very popular obviously so once per turn when you kill a creature you regain hit points equal to twice the spell slot used Thrice if it's a necromancy spell so if you're killing people with those necromancy spells you're gonna get some hit points back um or just regular spells will work as well now there's not a ton of necromancy spells early on early on it's things like array of sickness which is a poison spell which a lot of enemies aren't going to be super affected by it is a con save as well which most enemies do have really high Constitution saving throws so it's not gonna be very effective and unlike a lot of spells you'll know this doesn't say it deals half damage when you miss so you know something like burning hands targets still take half damage doesn't say that for Ray of sickness so if you miss it does nothing which I never like taking spell slots that do nothing when they don't happen I I prefer spells that are kind of guaranteed to work or have a high chance of working um you know things like fog Cloud it works 100 of the time it's always great spells like even enhanced leap Works 100 of the time so uh personally I don't love Rave sickness but necromancy is is pretty good um later on but right away at level two it's not doing much for you conjuration is pretty cool so you get create water which is a really useful spell so we talked about combinations earlier with things like grease well getting enemies wet increases how much damage they take from lightning spells which is awesome and also means you can make ice surfaces with Ray of frost there's also plenty of times when it be useful to douse things with water and that can be really useful as well so being able to create water with conjuration is fantastic through enchantment you get hypnotic gaze so this is a single Target melee range hypnotic gaze and you can maintain it to extend the duration so this is really good for a controller and enchantment spells in general are going to be really good for those like mind controlling type spells so it is an interesting option there gives you another way to take an enemy out of the fight um illusion has improved minor Illusions so this gives you a bonus action and it lets you uh remain hitting while casting the spell the spell can be cast when you're silenced so this is really good for like being that Trixie kind of obviously Illusionist and illusion spells are also really good for controllers so this is kind of fun especially the fact that this is a bonus action it lets you cast other full spells and then do this as well and you can help you know group enemies together before you do a bigger crowd control when they're all grouped up and then finally transmutation gives you two alchemical solutions instead of one when you're combining so when you're making so you need to take medicine as one of your skills or you probably should if you wanted to do this it's really good there's a lot of useful um Alchemy recipes in larion games so don't sleep on this compared to something like the tabletop where you're relying on your DM for crafting larion has a very defined rule set for how crafting works so there is a benefit potentially for getting uh getting this as well and finally I I did skip over it you may have wondered that divination is one of my favorite my favorite uh schools and I almost always take this when I make a wizard on the tabletop because the the ability is just too good so portent is essentially your character gets to see the future so you get two random Portage dice during the day and you get to use your reaction to change the dice of any attacker or saving throw near you to one of your important dice so what you're doing is you're rolling ahead of time and you're getting two dice and because you get to choose when you can use it defensively or offensively there's so many great ways to use this so for example if you have a really high dice you could guarantee a hit with a really powerful spell so once again you have a spell let's say you do have Rave sickness for whatever reason you took it and you like it and you want to use it you can guarantee that it'll hit your Target by making sure that it has a high a high attack roll or sorry this is a con save so like on the the reverse of it rather is if you have a really low Port into dice you can guarantee the enemy fails their saving throw by saying I'm going to use this against you and they make their save and you use your reaction say actually no you roll the three and that's what you get to do with the Divine portents you just get to say no this is actually what the dice said um you only get two of them but they are incredibly powerful and as a controller it is amazing specifically those low rolls you're almost wishing for low rolls because then you just point at the boss and said yes you did fail your savings throw untouch's hideous laughter enjoy and you get to guarantee take them out of a fight and then at higher levels obviously when you're using something like hold person and you're making them fail they're saving through you get your front line in there and they're just guaranteed creating them all over their place it's fantastic so this is definitely great for that controlling wizard that I want to play that's going to absolutely take enemies out of the fight and those poor tents are gonna make sure my spells land or it can make sure my allies are are saving they're making their important saving throws or concentration checks or whatever it is it will be asking you a lot if you want to use your port and dice potentially so if you don't like that and if you don't want to bother with that maybe not the best but I I like portions so I'm gonna pick them so tashes is my spell and then I'm gonna take fog cloud and we'll go on to level three all right level three is we get additional spell slots so now we have some second level spell slots which are great we had to pick some second level spells now so obviously we can still pick first level spells but I'm just gonna frame this in that discussion around being that controlling character and then that bit of a blaster as well so I want to pick really high impact spells that are going to do damage over and over again or control a whole bunch of enemies so for me web is a fantastic spell it's a really thick web that's flammable and it slows enemies it's kind of like super grease in that way but it also can in web them with a if they fail their deck save so in webbed enemies they cannot move they have advantage or you all all your attacks will have advantage against them and all their attacks are gonna have disadvantage and they also have disadvantage on dexterity saving throws so it's really really powerful debuff two and web enemies it's gonna make all your archers and warlocks blasting them have a super easy time of hitting them and they're gonna do very little to you in return it also really slows big groups down and it covers a huge area it has that four meter radius which is massive so I love web the perfect spell for a controller and then in terms of blasting I love cloud of daggers you don't there's no saving throw you just put it out it has a fairly nice Circle to Target enemies it lasts for 10 turns it does 44 slashing damage the second you throw it down and it is 44 damage the second they start their turn so it actually does eight D4 damage which is quite a bit of damage compared to some of these other spells that you would get so like you know shatter does 3D age damage um but 8d4 is a is a little bit better so and it has potential to do even more than that because there's times where you can just you know use your front line to shove them back in or you know if you're doing a combo you can cast web and then cloud of daggers right on top of them and they can't move there's things like that that you can do so it's really useful so I think these two spells are going to be absolutely fantastic you can also do something with flaming sphere because you can conjure this and it does uh damage repeatedly as well you use your your turn to smash the spirit in the spear into people so it can kind of do that repeated damage it's just not quite the the same amount of damage as Cloud daggers this is a little bit more mobile and obviously it can light things on fire which is really good so in terms of being a controller though I think Webb is obviously the the best second level spell you can get um there are some other good options in terms of hold person for that single Target and it does combine really well with the portent that we talked about so guaranteeing they fail their save but web at level two anyways I find it's better just because you can hit more targets but as you get more spell slots definitely hold person is one that we'd want to pick up right away but we're Wizards so we're just gonna probably have all of these anyways but in terms of ones you're going to want right away those are the two I go for so with that said when it comes to which spells we want to prepare I'd probably drop sleep at this point and do something like that this gives me once again a nice variety so I have single Target I have a wee damage I have big AOE control I have a lower level AOE control I have my defenses still and I'm feeling pretty good about my wizard right now gonna be really useful in all sorts of combat encounters and I do have the intelligence and the skills to be a specialist outside of combat as well with my Arcana and history and investigation checks so that is the quick start guide for The Wizard let's talk about some multi-class options when it comes to multi-classing a wizard there are a couple of standout options that I personally like mostly in the fighter and the Rogue and specifically because both Fighters and Rogues have sub classes which also give you access to wizard spells so Rogues have Arcane trickster and Fighters have Eldritch Knight and what I would generally recommend end is either being a wizard with a few extra abilities from these if that's what you're looking for is a bit of a combo or you know being mostly a fighter or at least half a fighter and then taking wizard levels so one thing to note in Baldur's Gate is Wizards typically can only learn spells if they have the wizard level required to cast them but in balder's Gate the way Wizards work is they can actually learn any spell that they have a scroll to if they have slots as a character so that it's a subtle difference but essentially what it means is a level three fighter that's in Elder tonight with a level eight wizard could potentially learn more spells than they otherwise would I don't necessarily recommend doing that particular split but if you went up to five levels of Eldritch night so you could get your two melee attacks and then the rest into wizard you would be sort of that hybrid Gish character and specifically because you have wizard levels and you can learn any spell as you're progressing as you're unlocking your spell slots your spell casting would absolutely be behind a full Caster wizard but you'd have really powerful melee options you'd have amazing armor and you'd have way more spell slots than a pure Eldritch Knight so your ability to maintain spells like blur and shield and all that kind of defensive option spells you could be an incredible tank you'd be an amazing Frontline if you went fighter and wizard as a combo you'd want to start off I would say Fighter for the first few levels and arguably even your first five levels of fighter and then go wizard um but it with Eldritch Knight at three you would have a few kind of wizard feeling things out of the way and you could still even go for a DEX based build and be sort of a DEX based Eldritch Knight and use a Rapier and you can even wear heavier armor if you want and it would be fine I still like that maybe over some of the strengths based Aldridge Knight's strength base is fine because you're going to have plate mail and heavy armor and things like that but I like the the higher initiative and I want my wizard to go fast because you still have those opportunities where if you can act at the start of combat you're just gonna throw out that web before enemies are up in your face and it's going to completely change the course of the fight Rogues similarly they have some opportunities the only thing is Brooks don't ever get access to multi-attack anyways and you're potentially hurting yourself by multi-classing Rogue wizard it would give you a few extra spell slots but you're losing sneak attack dice essentially so there is a bit of a trade-off I would only ever do a dip maybe for expertise and a few proficiencies it is worth noting that if you went to level three and took something like Thief you would get that extra bonus action which having an extra bonus action as a wizard there's potentially some fun things you could do but then you'd be really behind on your spell progression so not the most powerful combo but it is pretty fun in terms of other classes you could look at something like cleric uh or Druid it's like a one level dip to give you access to different spells and because these are full casters you wouldn't even necessarily need to have the wisdom to use their spells effectively you could just focus on picking spells that don't necessarily rely on um on on using your casting stat and then it would just augment your versatility as a wizard which can be be fine but other than that yeah I don't have a ton of of uh recommendations in terms of mixing and matching with a wizard Paladin for divine Smite potentially but at the end of the day you'd rather just be a paladin sorcerer if you want that if you want those Arcane spells so wizard because they rely on intelligence they tend to want to be mostly wizard fighter obviously is is probably the most powerful dip because that second level you're getting action surge you get second win at level one which is kind of like a free potion you get the weapon and armor proficiencies at level one which is going to make you a lot more tanky and then you can become Eldritch Knight at level 3 which gives you a few extra spell slots so you're not super far behind on your spell slot progression um and then at level five obviously the second attack but you are really going to be mostly a fighter and then you can start taking wizard levels and then buy like level eight or nine you'll you'll be able to like you know sling fireballs and attack in melee and you'll be super tanky with shield and blur and things like that so you'll start coming online a little bit more towards the end of the game but it'll still be totally functional within the first few levels you're just definitely gonna play more like a fighter and yeah that is my overall quick start guide for the wizard The Wizard is a super fun and Powerful class I really like how much versatility you get through the subclass options of the wizard I didn't go into too much of that later stuff because it's just so much to talk about but I love divination I love the portents they're super good I recommend them no matter what you want to do with your wizard but obviously there's so much else you can do and uh yeah so thanks for watching once again I appreciate all the comments the likes the subs I'm still completely blown away by how many people are tuning in and you are all amazing I will catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: BulkoIV

Views: 2,889

Keywords: baldur's gate 3, baldurs gate 3, bg3, wizard, dnd

Id: vDS1CrFL4-k

Length: 28min 13sec (1693 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023