Baldur's Gate 3 - Scout/Striker Rogue - Class Guide

hello everyone my name is Balco and today I wanted to do another quick start guide for the Rogue in Baldur's Gate 3 so whether you're looking to start a fresh campaign as a rogue or you're looking to bring Astorian into your party to fill that role for you this is the video for you so as always I'm just gonna go over the first few levels to give you sort of the overview of how the class works so you can make decisions for yourself on how you want to build out your Rogue character because Baldur's Gate 3 does sort of hide the way some of the Mechanics Work and the Rogue is no exception to this and there's a lot of changes from the tabletop version of the game so if you're coming from fifth edition to Baldur skate 3. there's a lot of things for the Rogue that have changed and some of the things have stayed the same but are still kind of hidden in the UI a little bit and I I definitely notice a few changes that felt felt a little weird but some that felt really really cool so we'll talk about the Rogue in depth in this video first up let's talk about the rolls a rogue is going to fulfill in your party so outside of combat they make fantastic Scouts and because they have access access to expertise at level one they make fantastic party faces as well and they have quite a few other skills they can take but generally speaking really looking at that ability to deal with traps and if you would like potentially deal with social encounters as well inside of combat Rogues make fantastic Strikers meaning they aren't the character that's going to deal a lot of single Target damage and unlike some other classes they aren't really relying on limited resources to do this and depending on the subclass you take you can do a ton of damage on a rogue and depending on your build and they function both as melee or ranged characters and whether they're melee or range they still are going to have fantastic Mobility because of some of the features they unlock in the first few levels and on top of that because Rogues unlocks so many unique features within the first three levels Rogues are one of the fat like one of the best classes for multi-classing and a lot of cool multi-class builds will take two to three levels of Rogue because they get some really powerful and unique Rogue features and unfortunately Rogues don't necessarily gain a ton by going really deep into Rogue levels but if you want to stay as a single class for your playthrough of the game then I absolutely recommend doing that because they are totally fine you don't don't have to worry but if you do want to make some really powerful multi-class builds we will talk about that towards the end of the video so let's talk about sneak attack in Baldur's game 3 sneak attack takes an action and it's using a finesse weapon when you make an attack with advantage or if you have an ally within 1.5 meters and you don't have disadvantage on the target this is going to come up in a few situations so for example if you are in melee range and you have an ally next to your enemy but you're trying to shoot them with a crossbow you would have disadvantage on that attack because you're using a ranged weapon in melee combat so you can't use a ranged sneak attack and melee for example however you would be able to use your melee sneak attack so Rogues do have the option to either sneak attack melee or ranged but unlike in 5th edition sneak attack lets you use it once per round so it doesn't matter if you're hitting them with your action or a offhand attack so in ball in fifth edition when you make a weapon attack you can use your bonus action to make an offhand attack if both weapons are light and that means that if you miss with your first attack but you hit with your second because you haven't used your sneak attack for the round yet you could still apply your sneak attack damage which is why dual wielding short swords is totally fine for a rogue and it actually lets them land that sneak attack more consistently in Baldur's Gate 3 you only get that one a chance per round so sneak attack is still good and it is really powerful and at low levels you will one shot things with this ability but it is a little different than the tabletop version and next we're going to talk about ability scores and proficiencies so let's talk about these skills that you get access to and then we'll go back and talk about maybe which things you want to consider in terms of ability scores so you get obviously all the dexterity based uh skill proficiencies available so things like the acrobatics the sleight of hands and the stealth and so I've picked up all of those right away I like Athletics because it lets you shove and resist being shoved and depending on which rogue build you take you do have access to so many different bonus actions and because shoving is a bonus action this could be a really useful way to make use of it and there's an argument to be made for having a little bit more strength on your Rogue than you otherwise might think I also just like having investigation a little bit and I put one of my expertise points into perception and I you'll notice I have a plus six in perception because I am investing in wisdom on this particular character specifically because for my Scout I want my character to be able to find the traps and the secrets and as they're scouting ahead that's something that they can do and then obviously things like slate of hand and stealth they're going to be pretty good at without expertise but even then I'm putting the expertise insulated hand because I want to disarm traps I want to pick pockets I want to pick locks and that's what I'm going to be doing with my rogue so that's that breakdown there in terms of your actual ability scores you do have quite a bit of Freedom so dexterity is really your primary attribute as a rogue it gives you that attack and damage bonus with your your finesse weapons so that's going to be your rapiers your short swords your daggers Etc and it's also going to be for your crossbows which are going to be generally what you want to be using because sort of the best bang for buck but you can also use short bows and there are some pretty nice short bows in the game and if you're a high elf you also get access to Long bows so Astorian has a bit of a bonus there so you actually can get some pretty nice bows for your Rogue if you're building this way and this gives you some options to be a very powerful ranged strike here otherwise the ability scores can really depend on what you want to be doing with your character in the long term in terms of a multi-class or thinking about skills so obviously I'm putting a little bit more into wisdom here because like I said I want you to be a scout but you can absolutely consider dropping things like intelligence and Charisma because for me um this is not my tab asterian will not be having too many conversations so I don't really need him to have any Charisma obviously Rogues make fantastic party faces and you could considering you know flipping this around and putting your charisma much higher that's totally fine I might consider putting a little bit more into strength just for those extra jump distance and that extra shoving I think that's really really fun in Baldur's Gate 3 and it's something that's different from the tabletop so having a bit more strength is fine and then obviously I'm playing on tactician I I think that's a really fun way to play the game but you don't have to so I like having Constitution be pretty high I like my characters to survive taking a lot of damage and my dexterity is obviously at that 16 as well I've also had people say they like to put their dexterity something up to like 17 and this would be totally fine as well this gives you access to potentially taking a half feet at fourth level which is a very viable option it also allows you to take an item that's available relatively in early on in the game there's there's an opportunity to increase your stat points a little bit um with some of the story items I don't want to get into too many details but this is totally a viable strategy as well so we'll leave it like this for now and we will go on to level two so Rogues get a ton of cool abilities right at level two specifically we're talking about using your bonus action in some great ways so you have cunning action for both hide and cutting action Dash and cutting action disengage this is going to let you use your bonus action to either easily get out of melee combat um or really just reposition around the battlefield without provoking opportunity attacks so getting into that position where you can get your sneak attack or just getting away from enemies so you can make your range sneak attack Dash gets you doubles your movement for your bonus action so this is going to let you really get into position um it it gives you an incredible amount of Mobility so you can kite enemies almost infinitely and there's a lot of power in that and then cunning action hide this is also an ability that you can feel free to abuse there are plenty of encounters where a single Rogue will completely decimate the entire encounter by just sneaking ahead hiding in the shadows and like using their action to take a shot hiding in the shadows again rinse and repeat and the enemies just cannot find you but I typically don't like to play that cheesily but with two levels in Rogue you can cheese so much and it is it is really fun sometimes to do just kind of as a challenge to see how far you can get and Rogue because of these cunning actions can absolutely do some incredible things that no other class can do this easily which is why a level 2 dip in Rogue is an often a very popular dip because getting access to these is amazing and we're going to go on to level three and talk about some even more really cool abilities that you get because Rogue has a ton foreign so level three you have a few different subclasses available we're going to talk about the Arcane trickster first because it has the most to talk about um with the Arcane trickster you automatically get the Mage hand can chip and it is a little bit more special as a as a rogue because it's invisible but I don't find it to be too useful it's kind of cool and there's some neat things you can do with magehand in balder skate 3 and it is nice you also gain a few other can trips I've talked about these in some of my other videos starting already has uh the flame Bolt from being a high elf getting blade Ward could be really nice obviously friends is fantastic if you are the party face and then situationally you have so many different options shock and grasp is fine uh that you have Advantage if creatures are wearing metal armor and then the target can't use reactions they're situations where you absolutely can use this and there's some really fun things later on if there's enemies that have counterspell for example you can have your Rogue shock and grasp them and then you have your Caster throw off a really big impactful spell and they're not going to get counter spelled you can do some things like that Ray of frost can be fun for creating some frozen surfaces and things like that obviously minor illusion for distracting you create a little illusion so if you're going to be sneaking ahead and you want to position enemies around you can do things with minor illusion bone chill is fantastic giving disadvantage um on attack rolls to Undead this is a really really powerful there's some scary Undead enemies in the game and this almost makes them trivial so it is really really useful I had a comment in one of my other videos about like yeah bone chill don't forget it's really good and I agree it is good there's just so many so many things to talk about um acid splash I find is not as amazing it is it is um an area which is which like it's a bubble um and then poison spray is a lot of damage but it's a con safe so I don't love this and uh this this is a nice range but I find the damage isn't great and honestly you're probably not going to be considering too many attacking hand trips because as a rogue your actual attacks are going to be doing so much more because by third level you have two D6 for your sneak attack plus a D6 for your short sword or whatever you're using so would you rather be doing like a d8 plus 2d6 or 3d6 worth of damage or 1d6 worth of damage um it definitely seems like you are more uh Ben it's more beneficial to take some of these now blade Ward is probably not necessary for a rogue you have other ways to reduce your incoming damage but especially if you're scouting you can like turn this on and then engage um I I just take it as something to have but there's there's other options there's lighting options as well if you need it true strike is a trap don't take it it's not very good it requires concentration the only argument you can make is as a rogue specifically if you are um you know trying to attack outside of combat as much as possible you can just turn this on and then you're guaranteeing that sneak attack but a lot of times if you're attacking an unaware Target you already have Advantage anyways so you don't really need it um yeah maybe this like true strike might have the situation if you're trying to Ambush somebody who's aware of you who's not hostile because you want to be evil I guess um but yeah cat trips are fine let's go on to spells so spells you'll notice here um as a Arcane trickster you're sort of locked in to enchantment spells and illusion spells so most of these are enchantment and then you have like the one illusion spell uh disguised shelf could be kind of fun there's some fun RP things you can do with it but all some of these other ones are pretty good obviously early game sleep is super powerful but we're already level three to become an Arcane trickster so it loses its Effectiveness slightly but I still find there are situations at all levels of the game where you have one or two enemies that have low hit points and sometimes just you know being able to guarantee take them out of the fight for the two rounds is fine and the AI loves waking up sleeping enemies so you can use this to your advantage by putting disc enemies asleep and some of those other enemies are gonna waste their turn waking them up and it almost takes like multiple enemies out of the game however as you get later and later you're gonna have ways of dealing you know 15 20 damage per attack and you have your Fighters and Rangers and paladins dealing multiple attacks with an action so this becomes a little bit less valuable because 24 hit points with the first level spell slot ends up being not very much later on um cash is hideous laughter however is really good it is a wisdom saving throw and it just puts the target out of commission and especially as an Arcane trickster you don't have too much you need to be concentrating on so having something like this where you can just put a Target out of commission and deal with another Target on the subsequent subsequent turn is kind of nice um blinding enemies is okay it's kind of similar to The Sleep In terms of the hit points the way it works and I find that color spray typically as you go through the game doesn't work as well if you want to charm I find friends Works a little bit better so for me I might take something like Tasha's hideous laughter and I might take sleep because I don't necessarily want to be using disguise person and I think this is fine there's going to be a situation where sleep is still useful at certain points in the game just to like take out a couple low health or weaker enemies just guaranteed and touches hideous laughter has has uses as well especially once you take that enemy and knock them prone then you can follow up later by giving yourself advantage and you can kind of you know Wombo Combo that way and same with sleep once you put an enemy to sleep you're guaranteed that you have advantage on them with a melee attack and you also are guaranteed to crit them with a melee attack um which becomes very very powerful okay so in terms of your expanded spell list here is where things get really interesting so you have so many so many options um so this is where it's actually pretty difficult in terms of making a choice obviously a few are not going to be necessary so things like expeditious Retreat you already can do this as a bonus action so you don't really need that you could have taken all the disguised self and color spray and charm Etc already you might consider something like find familiar this would let you set up sort of additional targets for sneak attack so you just have an additional Ally that you can control and summon at the before combat and then they can uh help you trigger your sneak attack and that could be useful a lot of times they're just going to die in a single hit though but it is useful at all stages just to draw the ire of your enemies um and oftentimes they do have really fantastic movements you can kind of just keep them in the back and like bring them as you need um and that's fine fog cloud is great for obscuring areas you know gives you something to hide in Greece is fantastic it really slows creatures down makes them fall prone which opens up advantage on melee attacks for sneak attacks on subsequent turns that can be great I also really like Shield you can use your reaction to gain a ton of armor and sometimes having that on your Rogue could be really really useful uh I think Thunder Wave is super fun as well it has a really nice AOE and I find in combat situations there's often that cluster and you can position it sort of Pixel Perfect in Baldur's Gate 3 and it and really get it into a position where you're hitting you know two three enemies quite easily without hitting any of your party members and you can get them off your friends it does okay AOE damage you know it's a very minor amount of blasting in the early game you're not going to get too many spell slots as an Arcane trickster so you're not gonna really be doing a ton of spell damage with this but it is useful I also have a real soft spot for magic Missile specifically because like you see the enemy hit points and there's been way more than one time where enemies had like two hit points left or three hit points left or a few really low Health enemies and just being able to send a couple missiles and and take them out of the fight feels really really good so I I like I like magic Missile um as as an Arcane trickster it is you know that guaranteed finishing off enemies that's really fun so I might probably in my my top choices would be something like fog Cloud grease Shield or magic Missile depending on kind of what your party needs and I find because I already have a little bit of crowd control here maybe I'm gonna go for something like magic Missile and that would be what I would do for the Arcane Trickster now let's talk about some of the other things so as we already talked about the invisible Mage hand that has additional things and you get the free image hand um and you get the spell slots now Thief Thief is crazy in Baldur's Gate 3 and it's because they have such a simple and ridiculous feature and it is fast hands you gain an additional bonus action so many classes love bonus actions there are so many cool things you can do with bonus actions there's some really cool spells that take bonus actions having more bonus actions is awesome if you're dual wielding you can make offhand attacks with your bonus off with your bonus action so this as a rogue at level three you can now be making three attacks and with Certain Magical weapons even though you don't get to add your dexterity modifier to the damage of offhand attacks you still can be doing some serious damage with those offhand attacks and you might consider putting that magical weapon in your offhand because you're really trying to land that effect on it and you're not necessarily worried about adding the raw damage because you're already going to hit that with your main hand anyways and now you're getting that bonus fire damage or psychic damage or whatever it is multiple times if you're offhand so this is really really powerful it's really really good you can use your cunning action in conjunction with this so you can make a main sneak attack you can use an offhand sneaker tag and then you can use a disengage and then just book it or you can disengage Dash and just like go to infinity and beyond so super super fun super powerful there are so many crazy combinations with other classes even that want to be using bonus action so like you know bards and monks have all sorts of fun things they can be doing on bonus actions um yeah you you can do a lot of stuff with this I'm excited about it I'm not gonna say anymore Second Story word um is less exciting there are less exciting things to say about this you just don't take as much damage when you fall down which is pretty rare it does let you jump from Fairly high heights um and that that can have value there are some areas in the game where uh I mean if you don't have feather fall and you don't want to take it you can just take like one or two points of damage and just jump down there and but you will fall prone um otherwise like yeah you might get knocked off buildings especially if you are using your cunning action dashes to get like way back in the Enemy Lines and like climb up on things to take out archers and stuff like that you might fall a few times but it's this isn't the make or break it's it's not why you're becoming a thief it's definitely getting that additional bonus action which is fantastic in terms of the Assassin the Assassin also gets some fantastic features that cannot be understated so um the Assassin initiative so assassinate so in combat you get advantage on attack rolls on enemies that haven't taken a turn yet so you want to act you know the very start of your initiative but you're a DEX based character you have great initiative so that is what you want additionally any successful attack rule against a surprise creature is a critical hit so this kind of combines into not only are you going to have a critical hit you're you're going to have advantage on that attack roll and it's going to do a ton of damage and additionally because you get advantage and always as when you're attacking surprise creatures [Music] um your sneak attack that is having a really good time here with your range sneak attack typically all those dice are going to be doubled so this is where you get hilariously huge damage Dice and if you want to have extra fun you can make your tab a half orc Rogue and double roll your dice for your crossbow as well and then you're going to be doing you know at level three something like 2d8 plus 4d6 damage on that opening attack and those are the kind of numbers that instantly end the encounter with with your surprise attack right so very very fun um and because you this this is like to add insults to injury um because the intention of the Assassin is you are generally going to be the one opening up the combat with that like Omega ranged sneak attack to just kills something as soon as it comes to your turn initiative typically when you do that when you open up a combat in Baldur's Gate 3 with an action on the first surprise round your action is already spent but assassins get their action and their bonus action immediately restored so that they can do it again so they can almost immediately kill two enemies right at the start of the fight super powerful super fun feature and obviously because you get all these incredibly powerful features right at level three Rogues are so great for multi-classing we're actually going to talk about that right now so as I mentioned Rogues are great for multi-classing because you get so many of those powerful options right away so if you're thinking about being an assassin for example a great multi-class for a rogue is something like a paladin so specifically getting and I would arguably start Paladin and then take the Rogue a little bit later potentially respect because whenever you're taking a marshall class as part of a build it's usually recommended to sort of rush until level five because that way you get access to the double attack feature so two attacks for the action which is really powerful but because if you want it to be a a thief or something that has all those bonus actions you sudo are getting multiple attacks anyways there's potentially some exceptions um but still I did want to just say that before I talk about some of these other builds because a lot of the combinations I like are involved like fighter Paladin Ranger for example um you might want to consider going those classes 2-5 and then getting your few levels of Rogue so depends on kind of what you're doing and specifically with those classes as well would give you access to those additional weapon and armor proficiencies and that might change how you do things a little bit but probably not too much you're still likely if you're going Paladin and you want to be an assassin you're likely going to be using a Rapier and a shield potentially and really what you'd be you're focusing on is that initial strike with your crossbow potentially to open it up but then you're getting into melee and in that first round of combat if you can sneak attack with your Rapier and get a Smite as well those are Big Dice so it's getting that guaranteed critical taking advantage of the Paladin's Divine Smite feature along with the Assassins uh guaranteed critical in the first round of combat um that combination is absolutely devastating and if you addition in addition if you wanted to be a half orc to get that Savage uh bonus where you're getting an initial weapon dice um that is a really really powerful build that is you know focusing on sort of the One-Shot eliminating enemies on the first turn of combat that could be really powerful and kind of fun Fighters also con uh are a good combo with that because you can have um you can take a Battle Master fighter and there's ways to sort of give yourself Advantage with fainting attack with your Maneuvers um but then you should be noting it's you can't because sneak attack takes its own action it's there's some anti-synergy there but being a champion is kind of cool because you have a higher crit uh crit rating you crit on 19s so you do your sneak attacks are critting twice as often um and that's definitely worth worth something um and then for the ranger you and it should be noted both paladins Fighters and Rangers are also going to give you that additional um specializations you can take uh on a ranger or fighter like two up in fighting or you could take the archery style to get additional accuracy things like that and the ranger can also give you access to a few more spell slots which if you are an Arcane trickster that's can be kind of nice just like expands the the spell casting a little bit but Ranger also gives you access to things like Hunter's Mark so if you're a thief and you have all these bonus actions you can use one of your bonus actions for to apply Hunter's Mark and then use your other bonus action to make a offhand attack against the Target that has Hunter's Mark on it and your main hand attack sneak attack that has Hunters Mark against it and now you're doing a lot of damage so the ranger Thief combo is pretty cool specifically for things like Hunter's Mark and if you are going for the Beast Tamer um you get this additional Target we've already talked about how that's really useful for a rogue to have that companion to be an additional Ally that can grant you opportunities to use your sneak attack so that can be really really fun as well and then Rangers also just have a nice little spell list that sort of complements the Rogue and some of your favorite terrain things can be kind of neat as well so I definitely like the the Paladin Ranger or Fighter um a multi-class combo with a rogue specifically five levels in any of them would give you that second melee attack so when you use your action you can get a second attack and that's really really nice additionally um you could consider maybe taking a few levels of wizard obviously if you're going Arcane trickster they are an intelligence based Caster so you'd want more intelligence um you'll notice all the Spells I recommend taking though didn't really care about intelligence so there are opportunities to make a build that's an Arcane trickster that doesn't really care about intelligence and just takes things like Shield or magic Missile or you know sleep Tasha's hideous laughter however does care about saving throws so you're gonna want more intelligence and you would definitely bump that up and as with a few levels of wizard you could be sort of a you know Arcane Trickster to three and then the rest of your levels into Wizard and you're gonna be more like a wizard that can also just like sneak attack once they're out of spells and periodically as they're concentrating on other things it's not the most powerful build but it is a really fun build to sort of be this like sneaky spell Caster you can also if you're really committed to being the the Arcane trickster at nine levels of Arcane Trickster when you're hidden and you make uh you cast a spell on an enemy that is unaware of you they have disadvantage on the saving throw which is actually an incredibly powerful effect so if you wanted to go really deep into Rogue to level 9 Arcane trickster and then the rest of the way into wizard so the last three levels as wizard that would actually give you access to third level spells which you could do things like hypnotic pattern at that point if you're opening a fight with a well-placed hypnotic pattern and everybody has disadvantage on their saving throw that's a pretty good way to start things off so there are some powerful combinations but obviously that's like an end game build and if we're talking about powerful things the 12th level Caster can do they could probably do something a little bit better than that but it is something to that you can do as a rogue so I I did want to mention it um and yeah obviously the bonus actions we've talked about combine well with a class like monk potentially it's going to take advantage of bonus actions or even barbarians barbarians can make a lot of use you use one of your bonus actions to fly into a rage and if you're a frenzied Berserker you can then use that bonus action to make an extra attack right away and then having cunning action to move around the battlefield to get into range to make all those attacks can be great um you would probably even consider uh going for more of like a strength build with this though and maybe just before going just like just kind of ignoring that you have sneak attacks sometimes and like maybe once in a while you'll you'll pull it out with a arranged weapon um but generally speaking getting access to all those bonus actions can be really cool so yeah I think we'll we'll leave it there I've I've talked quite a bit of all the fun things you can do there's obviously so many more any class that wants to take advantage of having lots of bonus actions will love multi-classing with the Rogue and in general the Rogue is a really fun very iconic class from Dungeons and Dragons and thanks again for watching I appreciate all the comments and responses and the thumbs up to the videos and I will catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: BulkoIV

Views: 727

Keywords: baldurs gate 3, baldur's gate 3, bg3, rogue guide

Id: JPO_b-Cova0

Length: 32min 36sec (1956 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023