Baldur's Gate 3 Guide: Optimal Party Composition

in this Walter's Gate 3 video we're going to be taking a look at party composition following our series on the different classes and their comparisons helping you narrow down your class I told you guys that we'd be working on this video and on this video I want to talk a bit about what makes an optimal party in Baldur's Gate 3 and how to get a good combination of characters that will have you prepared for every situation and this is not always an easy process right there are a lot of things that go into this primarily what class are you going to play what are you playing and what would fit well with the build that you want to play this is most important in my opinion because obviously you should play something that you really want to play and in my opinion fit the classes around you so that you enjoy your gameplay experience but besides this the next most important thing is what companions are you bringing and how do they fit into this so maybe you have like two or three companions that you really like you really gravitates for their personalities you played them in Early Access or you just know that you like them or maybe you're playing through act one and you've gravitated towards them from what you've seen so far and you want to keep them in your party and something to consider too is that you can respect your companions so you know if you have a couple that you really like but you don't have the greatest party optimization you could always change them into different classes or you could always change your class to fit their classes if there are other classes you'd like to play as well I personally don't think that I'm going to change my companions classes because I think they were designed to be the class that they are and we'll talk a little bit about how you might fit them into your party if you're not going to change your class because if you could just change the class to them it's not so hard to come up with a good party optimization in my opinion okay those things being said let's get into the optimization in the party composition itself first thing I want to talk a bit about is class roles so essentially what we're saying with class roles is that every class in Baldur's Gate 3 is good at one or more things some of them are only good at one specific thing like combat others are good at combat and dialogue some of them are good at you know skill checks outside of combat and dialogue and what I've done is I've come up with five arbitrary groupings and taken all of the classes in the game and put them into these categories of what they are good at and the reason I've done this is it makes it much easier to see what you're missing and it makes it much easier to solve the puzzle of party optimization when you can look at these groupings and see what you're missing from each group you can kind of easily decide okay these are what would work well here and I think any group that's optimized will have at least one character that covers these roles now there are five roles and four character slots in your group so you'll have to have at least one character that doubles in two of these different roles or you could have one character that's good at three roles and then you could have two characters that fill in the other roles and you could have another character that does whatever you want but in my opinion an optimal party will cover at least all five of these roles so let's take a look at what these rules are first we have combat specialist this is any character that excels in martial combat with weapon this means that they attack with bows they attack with swords they have sword and shield attack with maces they have daggers Etc they are a martial focused class and if you look through the list of classes that I have here you'll also notice that I've included warlock here with an asterisk and there's a reason for that and this is because warlock isn't necessarily a martial class and you'll also notice that I have warlock included in offense of the spellcaster group because it can cast offensive spells as well but why I've put it here is because it uses elrich blast just about every turn in combat particularly when it's not casting spells and Eldritch blast operates very similarly to a weapon attack it attacks the armor of the target just like a weapon attack it uses Charisma for its attack role instead of strength or dexterity though and once you've taken an upgrade with one of the Eldritch invocations it will also add its Charisma as its damage to the damage role of Eldritch blast and at level 5 it will actually cast two Eldritch blasts kind of like the way you know a fighter or something would gain an extra attack instead of extra attack the Warlock will just be able to Target two different characters with elder Splash or the same character twice so while this character is also considered a spellcaster it can kind of fall into this category because it's going to be doing this attack regularly and the damage of Eldritch blast is somewhat comparable to a weapon attack and next we have dialogue Specialists this is someone that's going to handle most of your dialogues in the game they're going to have most of your conversations they're going to ace your conversation skill check so that you can get the outcomes that you want in the game every party can benefit from one of these and I think you'll have a better experience if you have at least one of these and if you look through the classes I have under this section you notice that 4 out of five of them use Charisma for their spell casting modifier and that's because Charisma also increases their dialogue skill checks so there's a natural Synergy between them and using dialogue as well so they're not only going to be good at other things but they'll also be good in dialogue and the reason I have Rogue here with an Asterix is because Rogue has Proficiency in every dialogue option but they don't typically use Charisma however you could give your Rogue Charisma and make them better at dialogue checks so or you could give them expertise on dialogue checks even if they don't have Charisma and they would still be pretty decent so if you want to make like a wiley cutting Rogue you absolutely can I don't think from a combat perspective they'll be as optimized as maybe one of these other four classes but they can still fulfill this role if you want to do that and then we come to utility utility are basically characters that have a lot of skills they're fantastic with skills they got a lot of skill proficiency that Aid them outside of dialogue and outside of combat that doesn't mean they can't be good at combat or good at dialogue it simply means that they have more skill proficiencies than just about any other class of the game and these are the characters that are going to disarm your traps and pick your locks and you know perceive hidden doors and you know know the history of places and bought things Etc so you definitely want to have at least one of these in your group in my opinion because you're going to miss out on a lot of things in this game if you don't maybe you won't detect indoors or maybe you won't be able to disarm traps or pick that lock and see what's in that chest or pick that door lock and get into a room and see what's inside this can be very very helpful in your playthrough and you'll at least want one character covering this role and next this brings us to the support role or the support caster and generally speaking these are casters in the game that have magic that buff your teammates debuff animes or also heal you or support you in some other way with skill checks I've delineated them and separated them from offensive casters who were primarily you know aiming maybe to deal more damage in combat it's not always true again there are subclasses in these divisions that can kind of change the focus of these roles but but as an overall whole I think you'll see that the delineation here makes a lot of sense and support casters are going to do things like use guidance to help you you know nail dialogue checks or skill checks or they're going to make sure that you are blessed so that you can all hit your attack rolls easier or maybe they're using their bardic inspiration to you know increase your attack role or to increase your role outside of combat or maybe they're using like healing word to pick you up if you got down or if they heal you before you die with a bonus action and then fling other some other spell in combat so there's a lot of things that support casters can do but generally speaking they're gonna this role is focused on helping and aiding the team in any way they can and dealing damage secondary to doing that and then in the last row we have offensive caster and here you'll find casters that are more focused on the offensive side of things you know freezing enemies in combat so they can't do anything or dealing high barists of damage with like Fireball or something like that where they're more focused on wiping out the enemy than supporting the team so the Crux of the situation is that you have five rolls but you have four characters so you need to somehow cover all five of these roles with four characters which means that you're gonna need at least one character that is good at two or more roles and we're gonna go through some examples on how this will work but I do want to emphasize that out of these five roles probably the two most important ones are a dialogue specialist and a utility character because dialogue is simply extremely important in Baldur's Gate 3 and I don't think you're gonna enjoy the game as much without a dialogue specialist you do not have to have one but I do believe you will have a better experience if you have one and utility will simply open up so many things outside of combat that you may miss or may not be able to participate in you don't take a utility Focus class so essentially what I've done with these groupings is I've created a tool for you to figure out what's a good party combination for you and we'll do an example here so let's say you decided to be a paladin paladins are both combat Specialists and dialogue Specialists they excel in combat and they also are very good at dialogue because of Charisma and their proficiencies in dialogues so you've got those two roles covered immediately so now you move down to utility and you can see that Ranger Rogue and Bard are one of your options here so let's say you decide to bring a Starion and he's going to be a rogue so that's your utility cover so now you move down to support caster and we you have Druid cleric and Bard here we know shadowheart is a cleric and you like Shadow heart so you decide to bring Shadow heart as well so that's your support Pastor cover so then you get down to offensive caster and you have warlock Sorcerer And wizard here let's say that you decide to take Gail and Gail is going to be your wizard so that would make your party makeup of a cleric wizard Rogue and Paladin that is a strong makeup for a party and I don't think anyone argued that is a pretty well-rounded group and we'll do another example here but we'll do this one in a different way let's do this one assuming that you know what companions you want to bring but you don't know what class to choose based on those companions so let's say you're going through a good playthrough and you know you want to bring karlak who is a barbarian Shadow heart who's a cleric and you want to bring will who is a warlock so this means you have a combat specialist in karlak and Wilkin sort of also double on this you have a support and Shadow heart and you have a dialogue specialist and an offensive Caster in will that means all you're missing at this point is utility so you would probably want to make a ranger Rogue or barred character to fill in that utility slot and now as I mentioned you don't have to do these things but if you're talking a bit about having optimization those would be the best matches for this group makeup and we can do another example of this for instance let's say you're going to do another playthrough and you decided that you want to bring lizelle Astorian and Shahira is your companions liezel is a fighter starring as a rogue and Jahira is a druid so that would cover your combat specialist your utility and your support leaving dialogue and offensive Caster this means that you're going to want to fill in dialogue and offensive Caster with one character which gives you the option of warlock or sorcerer since both of these can handle these effectively because they use Charisma for their spell casting so you can see how this works and it's a tool to help you determine what would you know best fit into your group and you know sometimes it doesn't work out that way maybe the companions you want to bring for instance if you take the last group Lizella story into hero but you swap out jihira and you put in minthara who's a pal now you're lacking support and offensive casters and there's no overlap between these in my lists so you can only get one of them well maybe when you're taking a look at the character that you're gonna make maybe you decide to pick a druid and maybe you try and pick like a subclass that's more offensively minded or maybe you pick cleric and a more offensively minded cleric to try and help fill both roles like you don't obviously have to do that but knowing that that's kind of what you're missing from your group you could use the subclasses of that character to try and augment that for instance you probably wouldn't want to take like a martial Bard like College of Swords or College of Valor in that fourth thought because you already have two characters that are good in combat both lysel and mintara so you can see how even when things aren't perfectly optimized you can kind of then use maybe like the subclass to help augment that and kind of fill in those gaps and another tip that I want to suggest that's very particular to Baldur's Gate 3 that may not be as particular if you're playing tabletop is that try not to stack characters with the same abilities meaning like don't make like four strength characters or three Charisma based characters and I can give you an example that works really well here if you go to the dialogue specialist section you'll see Bard Paladin Warlock and sorcerer listed there this party grouping is actually perfect it fits all the roles it has utility as support as offense and it has combat Specialists the downside is that all four of these classes use Charisma but what happens in the game if you start getting gear that's like oh gives you two extra Charisma or gives you one extra Charisma what class do you give it to if you all use Charisma and you're gonna you know have a character that's Charisma based in that case that's not getting optimal gear and it's not going to be geared as well as your other characters whereas if you have different ability scores for instance a character that's good at strength or one that's good at dexterity and one that's good at Charisma and one that's good at wisdom or intelligence when you get like a wisdom gear it goes to the wisdom character and when you get a strength piece of gear it goes to the strength character it's easy to sort out nobody is gimped because there just isn't enough gear to go around you don't have to have spread out so that you never have any overlap but I'm just suggesting that try not to make any more overlap than you can and one last tip I want to give you is that if you're playing multiplayer try to make sure that each character has some sort of specialty outside of combat and the reason that I say this is because there are a lot of classes that are good at a lot of things and it can be really boring for that one player who doesn't really excel at anything outside of combat like maybe they're a fighter for instance outside of combat all they do is listen to dialogues that other people are doing another player is picking locks and disarming traps and another player is doing all the trading and he's talking to the players and finding you know hidden passages for people to go through and exploring and that one character is just sitting there not really doing anything so try and design characters when you're in multiplayer so that everyone can do something outside of combat it will make their experience more fun so I hope this video has helped you get some information and even if you aren't creating an optimal party I hope you can see why I've suggested the things that I have and I hope the information itself helps you make decisions about your party composition that benefit you and make your playthrough more enjoyable [Music]

Channel: Fextralife

Views: 495,807

Keywords: baldurs gate 3, baldurs gate 3 beginners guide, baldurs gate 3 tips, bg3 tips, baldurs gate 3 party composition, baldurs gate 3 classes, bg3 guide, bg3 party composition, bg3 party members, bg3 party comp, bg3 party build, bg3 party formation, bg3 party management, bg3 companion guide, bg3 companion builds, bg3 companion classes, bg3 best team comp, bg3 best companions, bg3 best class, baldur's gate 3 party composition, baldur's gate 3 guide, baldur's gate 3

Id: 9-EZaeWzc5Q

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023