Baldur's Gate 3 - Don't Miss Out On These Feats? (Beginner's Guide)

in today's video i'm going to talk about feats not that kind happy holidays let's jump right in [Music] the first thing that i have to answer before we go over all of the feats individually is what exactly are feats the easiest way to describe feats are that their special talents often times passive talents or areas of expertise that your character can unlock at specific levels these levels are 4 8 12 16 and 20 but it doesn't seem likely that we'll be reaching levels 16 or 20 in baldur's gate 3 at least on official launch in early access the current max level is 4. so this is when you get your first chance to pick up a feat if you so choose at the same level that you can choose a feat you also get the option to simply take an ability score improvement which allows you to increase one ability score by two or two ability scores by one each so if you choose to take the ability score improvements you cannot take a feat and vice versa you really cannot go wrong with taking ability score improvements especially at levels four and eight and level four in early access is a really great opportunity to increase your character's primary ability score to 18 giving you that plus four modifier and many times this will be more beneficial than many of the feats that you can pick up but with that said that's also quite boring and we're not boring are we feats can be pretty damn fun and they can also be really good as long as you know what you're getting into i also want to quickly point out that if larian studios decides to add the variant human race into the game with that race you'll actually be able to choose a feat right away at level 1 in character creation and then of course again at 4 8 and 12 if you so choose there's also many feats that are currently missing from the game so expect more choices on the game's launch so i've reached level 4 with my strength based ranger and as you can see by default the game puts you on the ability improvement and if i were going to not take a feat i would bump my strength up by 2 and then i have a strength of 18 with that plus 4 modifier like i said before it's never a bad idea to take the ability score improvements especially at levels four and eight when you're trying to get that ability score up to 20 as fast as you can but in this video we're of course taking a feat and the first feat available is called athlete an athlete allows you to increase your strength or your dexterity by ones you're basically getting half of that ability score improvement and the other half of this feat makes it so that when you're prone standing up will use less movement so in balder's gate 3 when you get knocked prone which can happen from various reasons when you stand back up it automatically uses up 50 of your movement bar i believe it's 50 and then for that turn you only have half of your movement bar to to move around or jump or do whatever you're going to do if you take the athlete feet it only takes up about 20 percent of your movement bar i don't know if that's the exact statistic but somewhere around 20 percent instead of 50 so overall this feat is pretty underwhelming um but if you somehow build a character to where your strength is at 17 and character creation and everything else is even and you just need one point to boost it up i guess you could consider taking athlete the next feat on this list is called defensive duelist and this is a reaction that you can toggle on and off in the bottom right of your screen if you have it toggled on if you're attacked by a melee attack the game's going to use your reaction to temporarily increase your armor class by two in doing that will of course make the melee attack against you more likely to miss and two is a pretty significant increase now there are prerequisites to this you have to be using a finesse weapon so rapier scimitar short swords daggers to name a few just look for weapons with the finesse property and also you have to be proficient in those weapons so this feat is really only good for melee focus characters that want to use finesse weapons now also keep in mind that you only get one reaction per round of combat so if you're surrounded by multiple enemies you only get to use defensive duelist on one of the attacks coming at you i can see this feat being really useful with perhaps a dexterity based fighter you're going to have even a higher armor class for some of the attacks and fighters usually go for a high armor class and this just makes it even better overall it seems like an okay feat as long as you have a specific class meant for this feat next feat is called dual wielder and it's one of my personal favorites the first thing that dual wielder does is it gives you a plus one bonus to your armor class while you're wielding a melee weapon in each hand so a permanent plus one basically because for the most part you're probably gonna always have a melee weapon in each hand with a class like this but the main use of this feat is it allows you to now dual wield weapons that don't have the light property so if you don't have this feet you can only dual wield weapons that have the light properties so short swords daggers scimitars to name a few and if you take this feat you can now dual wield all of the one-handed weapons in the game no two-handed weapons and those weapons include maces long swords axes or one-handed axes really cool weapons that look really cool and most of these weapons are also going to offer an extra d2 per weapon in potential damage that you can do because a lot of the light weapons are either 1d4 or 1d6 while the one-handed weapons that don't have the light property are usually 1d8 now technically speaking you're probably better off taking this feat later on in the game and instead taking the ability score improvement to either boost up your dexterity or your strength which is going to benefit you probably more often than using the dual wielder feet but if you just want to have fun and wield these badass heavier weapons in each hand and also have a higher potential damage which i love doing stuff like that this is a really really cool feat and i recommend you guys trying it for those of you guys that love dual wielding next up is the mighty great weapon master feet this is also one of my personal favorites along with dual wielder and of course this is mainly for those of you guys that are going to be wielding heavy melee weapons or two-handed weapons now the first benefit of the great weapon master feat is that when an attack with a melee weapon scores a critical hit or kills a creature you can make another melee weapon attack as a bonus action so if you get a critical hit or you knock a creature to zero health the game automatically allows you to use your bonus action to do another attack and this is this could be potentially really powerful even though critical hits um and life-ending hits are more situational i guess you could say and don't happen that much they do happen sometimes the unfortunate thing is that this currently does not work in early access at least in my testing i couldn't get it to work it wouldn't give me the bonus action i my bonus action showed but it wouldn't let me take another hit i also want to mention that the first part of this feat when it actually is working in the game it benefits all melee weapons not just the heavy melee weapons but the main use of this feat is using heavy melee weapons such as great axes your two-handed weapons um great swords glaives and also pikes and hellbirds i believe and when you're wielding those weapons if you toggle great weapon master on because you can toggle this on and off in the bottom right of your screen you get a damage increase of 10 if you land your melee attack and this comes at the cost of taking a minus five penalty to your attack roll so you're more likely to miss your attack but when you do hit you get a damage increase of ten not one d10 just a straight up ten this is really really powerful since the minus five penalty to your attack rolls is also pretty significant you want to look for ways to offset that a little bit by either getting advantage when you're attacking or simply using blasts from a cleric in your group which will give you a plus two to your attack rolls making that minus five a minus three now this feat is not for those of you guys that break your keyboard every time you miss because you are going to miss more often but statistically speaking this damage increase of a solid 10 on top of your weapons damage is going to outweigh the misses you're going to get more benefit out of this than what you might think now if the variant human becomes available at some point um like with the dual wielder feet this is a great feat to take right away at level one if you know you're going to be a two-handed wielding fighter or ranger and also keep in mind that if you do it with the ranger you also have hunter's mark so that's even more damage on top of that and that's what i'm doing with my particular build with this character right here all right the next feat is called heavily armored and this one does have a prerequisite and the game actually says the prerequisite is having proficiency in survival i think that's an error the real prerequisite is supposed to be having proficiency with medium armor so you can't take this if you don't already have medium armor proficiency if i choose this perk and i'm playing as a character like gal who doesn't have medium armor it just says you need proficiency in survival i think this is just an early access unfinished part of this feat now the heavily armored feet will obviously give you proficiency and heavy armor so you can wear heavy armor and get that plus two proficiency bonus and it also increases your strength by one this feat really isn't good for early access and the reason is we don't have a big selection of heavy armor in the game um really the heavy armor that you're going to find in the first 90 percent of your playthrough is going to be 16 armor class and with heavy armor you don't get to add any modifiers on top of that 16. now medium armor you'll find medium armor fairly early on in the game if you just strip it from laselle and that gives you 15 armor class but you get to add a maximum of plus two from your dexterity modifier so most of you guys that use medium armor will have 15 plus two which equals 17 which is higher than that 16 that you would get with heavy armor now there is heavy armor later on in grim forge that you can make that gives you 17 which then equates to the medium armor but still at this point in early access there's really not much of a point in taking this when you can just achieve the same thing with medium armor and you already are going to have medium armor efficiency before you consider taking heavily armored feet so largely useless at this point of early access after heavily armored is of course lightly armored and lightly armored gives you proficiency with light armor and also you can increase your strength or dexterity by one now it's important to keep in mind that there's only two classes currently in early access that don't have the light armor proficiency and that is the wizard and the sorcerer and the wizard and sorcerer also get the mage armor spell which gives your armor class a boost to 13 plus your dexterity modifier so for the most part this is really not going to be useful until we get better um light armor in the game so mage armor gives you 13 plus your dexterity modifier so it'll probably give most of you guys a 15 or a 16 um armor class while the best light armor from what i understand currently in early access is also 13 it's studded leather plus one and then you get to add your dexterity modifier to that as well so you're already going to be able to achieve this armor class number with your mage armor spell but if you don't want to waste that spell slot on mage armor every time you come off of a rest i guess you might want to consider taking this but it doesn't really seem worth it in my opinion not yet next up are the magic initiate feats and you can choose between magic initiate cleric druid sorcerer warlock and wizard if you choose this feat it's going to give you two canned trips and also one first level spell from the chosen class associated with the magic initiate fee so if you're playing as a druid and you choose magic initiate cleric you then get to choose two can trips from the cleric spell list and these cantrips can be used as much as you want they're just regular cantrips and you also get to choose one first level spell now the catch with the spells though is that you only get to use them once per long rest they don't cost you a spell slot so it is fairly limiting now another thing you have to keep in mind with the magic initiate feats is that the spells that you learn are powered by the spell casting modifier from that class so if you choose magic initiate druid the cantrips and spells that you choose are going to be powered from your wisdom modifier and if you're playing a class that has a low wisdom that doesn't line up with the druid you might not be taking full advantage of the power behind those spells so i guess ideally you would want to choose two classes that line up so the warlock and the sorcerer both use charisma so you could choose magic initiate sorcerer if you were already a warlock or vice versa and also the druid and the cleric both use wisdom and when multi-classing is implemented in the game this is going to open up far more options in regards to this i don't know if this feat is really worth it for most of you unless you have a solid plan and one great thing that you can do just to give you an idea is to be playing as a sorcerer and then take magic initiate warlock um and then you can take eldritch blast which is a great can trip and the main spell that you want to take with this combination is hex which gives you an extra 1d6 necrotic damage on top of your attacks on an enemy and the sorcerer can learn a spell called scorching ray which fires three rays of 2d6 fire damage and with hex that one d6 is going to be added onto each of those rays you're kind of making uh it's it's like a mild version of multi-classing in a really really powerful combination but generally speaking unless you just want to have fun and try another spell i don't really know how good this is except for the combination that i just told you about one more quick thing to keep in mind is that your modifier doesn't matter for some of the spells such as jump uh feather fall and find familiar so just keep that in mind if you really need a certain spell you don't really have to worry about what modifier it scales off of and the next feat is called marshall adept so martial adept allows you to learn two maneuvers from the battle master archetype which is a subclass of the fighter and you get one superiority die to power them and that will replenish after a short rest so basically you get to use well you have the option to choose between two maneuvers and you get to use one of them per short rust with the class that you take and honestly with the verticality in this game i can see this feat being pretty useful if you take pushing attack which makes your melee attack not only deal more damage but it also knocks an enemy aback and you can also do it with a ranged attack too and when you push enemies back in this game oftentimes it leads to them falling to their death especially on the githyanki encounter even if they don't die you're doing massive damage by knocking them off a ledge so this feat can be pretty useful i would consider taking it with a class such as the ranger to expand more upon their uh martial capabilities because the ranger doesn't really have that much i guess you could say or you could take it with the battle master if you're already a battle master to get another superiority die and have more choices for your battle maneuvers or perhaps as an eldritch knight to expand upon their martial capabilities but overall considering how limiting this is you can only do it once per short rest and it's not even guaranteed to work when you do it because if you use pushing attack the enemy does a saving throw to possibly prevent being pushed back that's pretty limiting which makes it really not as good as it could be i guess you could say but uh it could work to your benefit all right now on to a feat called mobile and mobile increases your movement speed by i think 10 feet is that what it says right here 3 meters or 10 feet it also makes it so that the dash action will no longer be slowed down by difficult terrain that might be in front of you from the environment or may perhaps the enemy put down something on the ground but i think the best use out of this or maybe tied with the movement speed increase is that after you make a melee attack on an opponent it's going to make it so when you move away from them even if you miss that melee attack that enemy is not going to be able to take an opportunity attack on you so if you do this with a rogue and you take a melee attack on an enemy you can simply just walk away you have that increase to movement speed and you also still have cunning action dash you can move pretty much anywhere on the freaking battlefield that you want if you have a feet like this i'd say it's a pretty good feat if you're playing a character that is engaged in a lot of melee combat and moving around the battlefield is is something that's really really important to you um this feat has a lot of power behind it you're going to be quite the uh the monk i guess you could say the monk class might be coming next next up is the moderately armored feet and like heavily armored and lightly armored this time it gives you proficiency in medium armor the prerequisite should be having light armor proficiency so you can't get this feet unless you already have light armor efficiency but like the heavily armored prerequisite it's showing as needing survival proficiency i don't think that's right i think it's an error in the game and it should be fixed by the time the game comes out along with gaining medium arm efficiency you also get to increase your strength or dexterity by one now the only two classes that can really benefit from this feat currently are the rogue and the warlock who already have light armor proficiency which should be the prerequisite but don't have medium armor efficiency um keep in mind that the gift yankee race and the shield dwarf race allow you to get medium armor efficiency in character creation if you do play those races and then you won't need this feat but the for the rogue and the warlock this can allow you to really boost up your armor class especially if you put on a shield because you can get that 15 armor class from the githyanki armor you get to add plus two from your dexterity modifier and put a shield on the warlock and the rogue i'm not sure if you'd want a shield you'd likely be dual wielding with the rogue but you can get some pretty high armor class numbers for those two specific excuse me two specific classes if that's one of your goals with those characters so probably not a bad feat if you have a plan and you really care about having a high armor class number next up is the shield master feet and of course you're only going to consider this with a character that uses a shield and the shield master feet is going to be something that you can toggle on and off in the bottom right of your screen there's probably no reason to not leave it toggled on if you do take this fee the first part of this feat is that it gives you a plus 2 bonus to dexterity saving throws when you're wielding a shield and dexterity saving throws usually happen with some of the spells in the game so if an enemy shoots burning hands at you your character's gonna make a dexterity saving throws to reduce the effects of the burning hands another common example of a dexterity saving throw is the spell fireball when that comes at your character or if you shoot it at an enemy the enemy does dexterity saving throw and they succeed they only take half damage so the other part of the shield master feat is that if you succeed in that dexterity saving throw you take no damage from the spell so like i said a lot of the spells even if you succeed you still take half damage from that spell now you're gonna take no damage at all but because this is really highly situational i don't see why anyone would really take it unless you had the variant human and you could take it right away with your tank shield character and character creation to make you more tanky but as of right now it's probably better to just take the ability score improvement or take another feat so kind of underwhelming because it's so situational the feet underneath shield master is called skilled and it's pretty self-explanatory you get proficiency in three skills of your choice so maybe you have a party where you're lacking in certain skills this feat can make up for that obviously this feat is only for those of you guys that really really care about all of the skill checks that you can have in the game like the religion checks or lock picking and stuff like that because like with most of these other feats you're probably better off taking the ability score improvement or taking a feat that's more combat focused so some of you guys might consider this especially in early access when you're just trying to explore all the content perhaps you'll take this but generally speaking there's probably better ways to gain more skill proficiencies by creating a party that has a wide variety of skill proficiencies and the second to last feat is called tough which increases your hit point maximum by two for each level so an early access max level is four so you're going to have eight more hit points per class that you choose this feat for as a squishier class with generally lower hp like a wizard or sorcerer on the classes that have six hit points to start out this will probably equate to more of a percentage of an increase in health while the characters that have one d10 or 10 hit points to start out like a ranger or a fighter this isn't as much of a percentage increase it's hard to determine whether or not this is a good feat or not because you can always take the ability score increase and put it in the constitution and every time you boost up your constitution modifier you get another hit point per level so it's half as much as tough but with concentration you also get other benefits such as being able to hold concentration better on spells that require concentration so i don't know it seems like a good feat perhaps it's hard for me to really judge this one if you really want to get that extra hp i guess you can could consider taking it depends on how you have your ability score set up and stuff like that and the last feat currently available in early access is the weapon master fee which allows you to increase your strength or dexterity by one which is half of the feet so if you have a character that has an odd number and strength or dexterity you could consider taking this and also you get proficiency with four weapons of your choice it sounds exciting but i don't see the need for four weapons to be honest with you keep in mind that the ranger and the fighter already have martial weapon proficiency so this feat is basically useless for those in some of the classes that you play you don't really care about your weapon most of the time wizards warlocks and sorcerers your weapon doesn't matter because you're focused on spell casting not all the time there are ways to do cool builds and i know some people are going to say hex blade warlock and stuff like that but generally speaking just make sure you know what you're doing before you take this feat the only class that i can see it really benefiting in early access right now is perhaps the cleric because the cleric has kind of a struggle over what ability scores you should invest into so a cleric obviously uses wisdom as their primary ability score and then you want constitution and dexterity most classes want constitution and dexterity but then if you want to have good damage with your melee weapon as a cleric you kind of run into that issue of how much should i invest into strength because strength is therefore going to take away from con dexterity and wisdom but now you can do a dexterity build cleric and basically dump strength and instead take proficiency with the rapier which gives you that damage boost up to 1d8 making your cleric more powerful in melee combat so if you if you're doing a dexterity based cleric you're not going to be able to use any weapons above 1d6 but if you have a finesse weapon of rapier and you use it with this feat you take rapier then you can get that damage boost and also you could take um heavy crossbow proficiency with this too so then you boost your clerics range damage and also their melee damage so yeah this could be useful i think they changed shadow hearts ability scores up in patch six so she's not as funky with her ability scores but it could be useful for shadow heart or clerics in general or if you're playing something and you really just want that proficiency in a certain weapon that you don't have just have fun it's not always about optimizing everything but that'll be it for today's video thank you guys so much for watching i know this went on fairly long but i wanted to talk about each of these feats and i appreciate you guys hanging out through this video as i talk about them kind of off the top of my head as opposed to the more scripted content that i typically do if you have any questions put them below in the comments uh i'll try to answer them myself and of course other people in the community will probably be excited to help you out because feats can be a little bit confusing like i said when in doubt go the ability score improvement but early access is about having fun and when the official game comes out um feats are probably going to be much more useful especially if the variant human makes it into the game and then you also have to consider multi-classing though which is a topic for another day happy holidays i screwed up the andy catch you on the next one

Channel: WolfheartFPS

Views: 196,207

Keywords: baldurs gate 3, baldurs gate 3 gameplay, baldurs gate 3 review, gameplay, review, baldurs, gate, bg3, baldurs gate 3 early access, baldurs gate 3 feats, beginners guide baldurs gate 3, feats, early, access, baldurs gate 3 update, patch, combat, guide, baldurs gate 3 classes, races, wolfheartfps, wolfheart fps, larian studios

Id: j_wXb8iQl4I

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 24 2021