Baldur's Gate 3 Guide: Early Companion Tips Everyone Should Know

following our Baldur's Gate 3 video talking a bit about optimal party composition and what makes a good party in Baldur's Gate 3 I thought it'd be a fantastic idea to talk a bit about early game parties in Baldur's Gate 3 what they look like depending on the companions that you bring and kind of show you guys some real examples of how you would put a party together you know depending on what characters you bring what they might look like as well as some other recommendations about how to handle those characters and please keep in mind that this video is aimed at beginners I've simplified things a lot in order to make it easier for people that are not familiar with DND and this is not like the only way you can put parties together but I think it'll be the least complicated for new players to the game that are just getting their feet wet so that they're not like overwhelmed with all the class selections and mechanics of this game what those things said let's get into it so hopefully you watched our previous video but if you didn't just to catch you up a little bit I've essentially divided each class in this game into one of five roles or more than one of five roles if they're good at more than one of these These are combat Specialists dialogue specialist utility support caster and offensive caster when you take a look at your companions they all fall into one or more of these roles carlak is a combat specialist because she's a Barbarian so is lysel because she is a fighter Astorian is a rogue and he could also be respect into dialogue if he wanted to give him some Charisma because he does have proficiency and dialogue checks shadowheart is a trickery cleric who is your support role and she has a little bit more of a focus on stealth than maybe other clerics would you can absolutely respect her into a different domain of cleric if you want in fact I will talk a little bit more about this later in the video will is a warlock making him good at dialogue and casting ranged offensive spells and also decent at combat because of Eldritch blast and Gail is an offensive Caster wizard although you can kind of you know give them some utility spells as well although I think I wouldn't recommend that to a new player simply because they may not be familiar with the Spells and it's probably best if you're bringing Gail just to focus on offense there are of course other companions you get in the game but we're just talking a bit about early game party composition and these are the earliest companions you can get so we're going to be focusing on them because it'll be some time before you can recruit other Companions and one thing I'm going to suggest that you do to these companions no matter which companions you bring is that you respect these companions to better optimize their ability scores and their skill points and you could do this not very far into the game probably in the first hour or two you'll run into an NPC named Withers who will go to your camp and then you can talk to him there he's an undead guy very hard to miss and once you've done this you'll be able to respect anyone in your party including yourself and you'll be able to change these ability scores and skills to what you want and I highly suggest doing this once you know what your companions are going to be once you've got a good group like you're pretty set on those characters that way you can optimize them collectively instead of like changing one and then realizing oh actually don't like this guy let me go bring another one and change that that'll save you gold and stuff like that so try and optimize once you've got your entire party together at least for the early going to the game that would be a good moment to go and respect and I've laid out for you some optimal ability score spreads for each of these characters you'll notice I have two for shadow heart depending on whether you want to make her dexterity or strength but all the other ones I've just given you one these are very good for the early goings of the game and you'll notice immediately that I have even ability scores for every ability here and let me explain why that is and the reason I've done that is because ability scores in Baldur's Gate 3 only improve at every even number that means that if you have 12 wisdom and 13 wisdom you still have only plus one to your ability score of wisdom 13 effectively did nothing for you and you'd be better off going 12 or 14. and something I want to mention is that you cannot get higher than 17 in a given ability during character creation or during respect and 17 is kind of wasted here because again you have the same ability score at 17 as you do at 16 but it costs a lot more ability points to put into it to get to 17 so you're sacrificing potential gain from another ability in order to get effectively nothing keep in mind that you can respect in this game so you might as well optimize for now and then when your ability score improves at like level four or something like that then you can go ahead and re-optimize if things are a little bit different or maybe you pick up some gear that improves your ability score by one maybe you respect at that point to pick up one more point so that you are then at an even number with that piece of gear and I also want to talk a little bit about the classes of each one of these characters or more specifically their subclasses if you don't plan on changing their class I don't plan on changing their class I just respect them to optimize their ability scores and to optimize their skills for what I want them to do but I'm not planning on changing their class now I might change their subclass in the case of Shadow heart we'll talk about that but I still plan on taking them as the class that they are we will talk a little bit about why you might want to change their class later on but for now let's just talk about about you know what subclass you might want to choose for them if you plan to you know leave them it's the same class so taking a look at a story in first I recommend either taking assassin or thief and I think assassin is to play early on whereas thief might be something to explore more thoroughly when you're considering multi-classing when you have a lot more levels on you like maybe mid game but let me explain why I think assassin is the way to go early on the biggest thing is really that you gain advantage or a story will gain advantage on his attacks on the first round of combat against enemies that haven't taken their turn yet so this is really important right because there are two ways for Australian to gain sneak attack he either attacks with advantage or he attacks an enemy that's standing next to another friendly Target while this means that he's automatically going to have advantage against any enemy that hasn't taken a turn on the first round and he doesn't have to do anything like he doesn't have to be hidden he doesn't have to be invisible they don't have to be standing next to another friendly unit or anything his just first attack will always sneak attack in combat pretty much against the majority of enemies so that's really huge it makes it very easy to play a rogue and gain you know that sneak attack damage without having to do anything complicated so moving on to shadowhart if you plan to bring Shadow heart in your party I kind of recommend switching away from her trickery domain and into something else and what that's something else is will kind of depend on how you want to play your Shadow heart whether you want to be more of an offensive spell Caster or more of a warrior type character but moving away from trickery I think is a good play here and there are a lot of good domains you can pick Tempest or War if you want to be more of a martial character or you can pick light if you want to be more of like a damaging spellcaster moving to liezel I think Battle Master is really the way to go on lysel particularly early on in the game it'll increase her damage through superiority die allowing her to deal more damage with her attacks and Champion is kind of boring early on in the game honestly because a lot of its effects are passive so you really don't do anything other than just blue and attack every turn whereas the superiority die from Battle Master will give you different things that you can do that really you know change combat a little bit for the fighter and Eldridge Knight is a little bit more complicated for new players and I feel like it develops and gets stronger further on into the game so I think if you want to play an elder tonight you would probably be better respecting into that with lizel later on in the game but sticking with Battle Master earlier talking about Gail I recommend going with evocation early on in the game and that's simply because what this is going to do is it's going to make it so that if you AOE with a spell any of your friendly units caught in that spell take no damage and that's just easy like you don't have to then remember where to position your characters particularly your melee characters make sure they're out of the way so that you can Fireball successfully Etc you just use them and you're fine so if you want to you know an easy time early on evocation is the way to go then you don't have to worry about that a lot of the other schools have things that you know you have to like remember to use them particularly good in different situations and the reason I like evocation is because you just take it they forget about it then you don't have to worry about aoing your teammates on will will is the fiend by default and I recommend just sticking with that the fiend is probably the strongest combat of the subclasses for Warlock and it has a lot of good bonuses so if you're playing well just keep them as the fiend it's a good way to go so for Carlock I recommend going one of two different directions if you're like a brand new newbie and you know nothing about Barbarian but they seem fun take Berserker and increase your strength when you get to level four and take that up to 18. if you're kind of like a medium-ish newbie I would say maybe take wild heart and then when you get to level four take the great weapon Master feat and you'll basically have the same amount of attacks as per Circle when you do that but you also hit incredibly hard when you do so one's a little bit more advanced and doesn't really take shape and so level four and the other one would be good earlier on so some general tips here before I give you some examples of party compositions with them Carlock and lizelle are both combat Specialists so I don't recommend bringing them both in the same party it will make it more challenging to fulfill the other roles so try to pick one of these two if you're gonna bring either of them and try not to bring both of them if you can avoid it another thing is that Astorian is the only utility character early on in terms of companions that you can recruit so if you don't bring a story in with you you will likely have to handle the utility roll yourself for your character that means that you will likely be playing a rogue Ranger or Bard again you don't have to do this but if you're talking a bit about optimization you'll definitely want someone doing that it's probably going to fall to you so row Branch or a barber good choices if you do not bring starting along and Shadow Hearts in a bit of the same situation right like if you bring her along you've got a support class but there is no other support class if you don't bring her which means that it will probably fall to you and you're probably gonna play like a Bard cleric or Druid and especially like if you don't bring a Starion and you don't bring Shadow heart Bart is a really good choice for you because you can play support and utility with hard with no Shadow heart you're probably going to play a barred through it if you bring will in your party then you don't need a character that specializes in dialogue since will will handle this for you but if you don't have will you'll need somebody to take care of that and that's either going to be you and you'll be playing probably a paladin barred sorcerer warlock since they all have high Charisma or you could play a charisma-based rogue if you want or you could respect uh Astorian into Charisma and make him the face if you want those are really your options there I personally am a huge fan of handling my own dialogues with my own main character so I like playing these classes anyway so I probably won't bring will in my group and I do know that Paladin Bard Source or warlock are amongst the most popular in the game and I think it's for that reason and if you bring Gail in your group then you have the offensive Caster role you know covered but if you don't then you're either going to want to take will to help cover that role or you're going to want to be an offensive cash for yourself means that you'll probably play a wizard sorcerer or Warlock and something similar like if you don't have Carlock or lifestyle in your party like if you're running without any of them you will want to take a marshall-based class you'll want to take either fighter Ranger Paladin monk Barbarian one of those if you're not bringing Carlock or lifestyle so let's take a look at some examples here and keep in mind that Carlock and lizelle are pretty exchangeable in terms of their class role so this would apply no matter you know which one of these two you're bringing but if you're bringing karlak or leizel and you take Astorian and will you'd want to choose a cleric Druid or Bard in order to pick up a support class because you don't have Shadow art if you are taking Carlock a story in a gale though or lysella starring and Gail you would want to choose Bard in order to pick up a charisma-based class to handle dialogues and also fulfill the support role at the same time because no Shadow heart if you're taking karlak or lyzel and Astorian and Shadow heart you'd want to choose warlock or sorcerer in order to handle the dialogue functions of the group and the offensive spell casting and if you take something like karlak Gail and will you'd probably want to choose Bard in order to pick up support and utility since you're lacking a utility character and a support character since Noah starian and Shadow art so I hope you can see how that works it's very easy to do once you get the hang of it and you should be able to do this yourself but in case you are still struggling I'll have a full list up on the screen here of all the different compositions that you can have during the beginning parts of the game using these six characters so that you know exactly which classes to choose from depending on which composition that you have I hope you guys found this video useful this is the last video we're gonna do before we actually use real live game footage at the launch of the game and get into very specific guides with very specific things from the game showing them actually in game as you'll be playing them so I hope you guys are ready for that we are going to have a lot of them we'll have class guides we'll have a race guide we'll have combat mechanics guide beginner guides everything that you can hope for I wanted to wait to do all these guides those specific ones because I want to have the actual in-game footage and I also want to make sure that nothing has changed because I could put together a lot of those guides now but some of those things will likely have changed in the full version of the game and I want to make sure that everything is as accurate as possible if you guys have further questions let me know in the comments below [Music] [Music]

Channel: Fextralife

Views: 439,063

Keywords: baldurs gate 3 character creation tips, baldurs gate 3 party composition, baldurs gate 3 guide, baldur's gate 3 party composition, baldur's gate 3 guide, baldurs gate 3 gameplay, baldurs gate 3 things to know, baldurs gate 3 tips and tricks, baldurs gate 3 beginner tips, baldurs gate 3 tips, bg3 companion guide, baldurs gate 3 tips for beginners, baldurs gate 3 beginners tips, baldurs gate 3 beginners guide, bg3 companion builds, baldurs gate 3 classes

Id: NI8mh-qAX74

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023