BEST PARTY FACE in Baldur's Gate 3 - Bard Build Guide

all right hello my friends and welcome back to a character build guide for Baldur's Gate 3. today I'm going to be covering how to build the best party face for Baldur's Gate so what's a party face this is a character that's going to be doing all of our conversations in Baldur's Gate 3 you have to take every skill check and most conversation options with the exception of some story conversations with a single character whichever character initiates the conversation so it's really good to put all of our Charisma skills all of our conversation skills and as many other skills as possible on a single character at very high levels so that we can make as many skill checks as possible it's also really important to me that this be just a strong and viable build so it's a totally tactician ready build it will be really fun and really powerful to play through the game with in my opinion one of the best and most powerful builds that you can use as a main character build so absolutely recommended for playing the game alright let's get into it so first off this character is a gift Yankee I have a level 5 character here that I'm going to be demonstrating the build with that I've reset to level one but there are definitely some other options that you could use human or half orc will get you an additional skill proficiency because they have the bonus human proficiency or the half orc natural intimidation proficiency drow gets you perception for free and a bunch of other stuff wood elf is always a great choice and we are not going to need the racial armor proficiencies from githyanki so while that's also a good choice for the astral knowledge ability it's not as necessary as it is for some other character builds so because we're building a party face we are going to start of course with the Bard for our cantrip selection we're going to take friends and then the second one doesn't really matter although minor illusion is good um vicious mockery is just good to have magehand is good to have all of those are fine and then for our spell selection we definitely want charm person we probably want a disguised self because that helps you a lot in different no uh this guy itself is there oops but that helps you a lot in different conversations um and then speak with animals is really important if you're going to be a party face because of course you want to face with the animals as well and then I threw an animal friendship as a role-playing option but obviously there's better combat options like sleeper Tasha's hideous laughter or healing word or whatever for our ability point spread the most important thing is that we have 17 Charisma 12 dexterity and at least 12 wisdom but I went with 14 here because that will increase our Insight the most and insight is also a conversation skill and then our dexterity should be at least 12 because we plan to use heavy armor until you want the plus one bonus to maximize your AC the remaining odd point I threw into strength just because strength gains jump distance and carry weight at odd levels as well as even levels so it's the only stat that actually benefits from having an odd number in it all the others only care about even numbers for our skill proficiencies we are of course just going going to take all of the conversation skills so we've got deception intimidation performance and persuasion and we are getting persuasion and insight from The Guild Artisan background which is the one that I think you should probably take for this character although any background that gets you this combination of skills is going to be really good and since you can pick any skills with Bard it's pretty easy to manage a combination that works very well so that's our level one build let's level up and I'm going to show you how we're going to build this build over the course of the first five levels and then also a cool trick that you can do once you hit Level five just for fun all right so leveling up here and at level two we're actually not going to take Bard we're going to take a really powerful multi-classing option which most classes should consider I think and that is a single level in cleric this also has some additional powerful options for us because this will get us access to the thalmaturgy cantrip as well as the guidance can trip thalmaturgy gives you advantage on intimidation and performance checks we're going to be making a lot of intimidate and performance checks as our conversation skills and having an option to gain advantage on them you where you roll two d20s and pick the higher means that we effectively get a free for a can trip plus five bonus to those skill checks so that's an enormous boost to our ability to succeed on those skills guidance on every other skill is an extra D4 of course you can get this from an ally usually Shadow heart does a lot of guidancing in my parties but it's nice to have it on your main character as well so that you can use it in addition to one of her other reactions or if you just want to be self-sufficient or not bring another cleric then having guidance is really strong as well and then for our it doesn't really matter what we pick for our subclass I think there's a few options life domain is probably generically the best one level cleric dip because you get heavy armor and shield proficiency which will put your AC into the stratosphere um as well as giving you the disciple of Life ability which lets your healing spells do an additional Viewpoint of healing really powerful with the healing word spell which is what you usually want to be using as your main healing option it also has pretty good domain spells you'd probably want cure wounds and bless equipped anyways you could also go with Tempest or War for martial weapon proficiencies in addition to Heavy Armor Tempest is probably better just because fog cloud is a better domain spell than the others but the one that I'm actually going to pick here even though it doesn't give you heavy armor armor proficiency is knowledge cleric because what it does do is give you access to expertise into additional spells expertise is basically double proficiency so having Arcana in history with double proficiency for example gives you an enormous amount of additional utility even with eight intelligence we're still going to have pretty solid bonuses to these skill checks all throughout the game and of course there's some ways to increase our intelligence that we'll have access to for our prepared spells there's nothing that particularly matters at level one I think you probably want bless you probably want healing word but for the point of building the Ultimate Party face there's nothing that is particularly critical so that's our level two let's go back to Bard for level three and we don't really make any particular decisions here we already have all the spells that we want to have access to so we can grab I don't know something like um fairy fire or something like that anything is is fine here um replace spells you can use to replace if you took sleep for the early game you can use to replace sleep with a spell with better utility later on it doesn't really matter what we select here let's go to level four at level four we hit level three Bard and get to choose a subclass these barred subclasses are really really strong and in particular the one that we're going to pick and that I think is also just the strongest class in the game is the College of lore because we're a cleric we don't need the armor proficiencies from the other uh Bard classes so College of lore has no downsides and gives you a huge amount of bonuses including expertise with two skills for being a level three Bard and additional skill three additional skill proficiencies for selecting the College of lore this is kind of hidden in the level up screen you have to go back to level up Bard and then you do click skills and then we are going to select uh intimidation and persuasion for our expertise and then for our proficiency skills it doesn't really matter what we pick we could take for example sleight of hand and stealth and then perception is always nice to have so maybe go with something like that um that is mostly just whatever you need to fill holes in your party but the extra skill proficiency proficiencies will definitely come in handy one other thing to keep in mind is that it doesn't show the bonuses from having the expertise from knowledge cleric so don't accidentally select those skills again or you'll be wasting your skill proficiencies you just need to remember which ones you picked slate interface problem there but what can you do for the spell that we're gonna pick enhance ability is really good if you want to cast it on yourself this is usually better to get from a party member but you can use it on Charisma gain advantage on all your other skills but on all your conversation skills but of course we already have advantage on our intimidation and performance skills from the thermaturgy cantrip so we don't necessarily need this you could definitely just take a combat skill like cloud of daggers doesn't particularly matter and you'll want to replace a level one spell with a level two but both of those are kind of up to you finally at level five we hit fourth buffle Bard and the build fully comes online because we'll take whatever for our can trip and whatever for our spell the we get to take the actor feat actor increases your charisma by one which is why we had 17 Charisma so now we have a plus four Charisma bonus and more importantly gives us expertise in deception and performance so now we have expertise in every single charisma skill this is enormously powerful and will give us the ability to to succeed on pretty much every conversational check that we might have so let's take a quick look at how this looks all summed up so at level five when we get access to actor and our one level cleric dip our character has plus 10 this is with no items equipped or any any other bonuses plus 10 in deception intimidation performance and persuasion all the conversation skills we have plus five Insight which is pretty good and we could maybe boost that even higher um with some other potential options and you know we could use guidance and so on on that we have Arcana in history at decent levels and we have some other random skills that we are proficient in and can do decent values in with plus 10 to each of these skills our persuasion or are intimidate and perform checks are going to be rolling two d20s because of the advantage for an average result of 16 and a half plus a D6 from our bardic inspiration which we can cast on ourselves before we go into a combat and then use it for any uh before we go into a conversation and then use it for any checks that we might have to roll in that conversation um and then an additional 10 from our proficiency bonus for an average result of 30 which is enormous and then for our persuasion and deception rules we get guidance instead of tomaturgy so it's a slightly smaller bonus for an average skill roll of 27 and a half both of these at level five if we get guidance or enhanceability from other characters to give us advantage on the skills we don't have advantage to or guidance on the skills we wouldn't have guidance on if we're casting thomaturgy then we get our average result for all four of these skills up to 32 or up to yeah 32 and a half with a theoretical maximum roll of 40 at level five on every conversation skill obviously this is way more than you need to pass every single skill check in the game basically only natural Ones Will you fail on conversation skills with this build so it's really good for being able to see a ton of the story and experience the game with your main character succeeding on glibly talking your way out of violence and into situations and of course it's also a very powerful combat build being a full Caster with only a single level dip um and we'll get you through tactician however there's one trick we can do to optimize it even further now that we've hit level five I'm just going to talk to Withers here and reset myself back to zero and we are going to make all the same selections making sure we have all of this stuff as well but I'm going to change out one thing and that thing is that I'm going to unselect deception and performance as class as proficient skills and just put those proficiencies anywhere else follow the same level up path taking our leveling cleric we've got all this stuff you remember what spells and everything we're gonna pick go back to Bard I have to pick something here pick something here with College of lore remember that you have to go to the secret level up here and take intimidation and persuasion expertise and then we put our three proficiency skills into just anything else um oh I did forget to take uh knowledge cleric so you'll have to remember to do that of course um but we'll have Arcana in history as well and then finally at level four Bard when we get access to the actor feat you don't have to have deception and performance proficiencies in order to have the actor feat give you expertise in those spells so when you select actor at level four if you didn't take those proficiencies previously you effectively get two extra skill proficiencies so at level five we can respect ourselves and get two extra skill proficiencies giving us an enormous these should be plus fives but I forgot to take the knowledge cleric but giving us Proficiency in every intelligent skill every expertise in every charisma skill and additional proficiencies across the board we could have one more if we'd taken a racial race that gives us Proficiency in other skills or we could potentially with gith Yankee we could select acrobatics and then use our ancestral knowledge on wisdom every single instead of insight and then use our ancestral knowledge instead of wisdom in we could take acrobatics instead of insight proficiency excuse me and then use our ancestral knowledge class feature to gain Proficiency in every single wisdom skill giving us Proficiency in every single skill in the game proficiency or expertise with the single exception of one of Athletics or acrobatics so that's incredibly powerful we would have all the wisdom skills all the Charisma skills all the intelligent skills and let's say all the dexterity skills but just be missing Athletics all right my friends I hope that you have enjoyed this video This is uh I think a really powerful build and if you want to expand it further another thing you could do is take rogue rogue would get a single level of Rogue would give you expertise into more skills you could put that into insight for example and have Insight expertise um you will get expertise into more skills at level 10 Bard but obviously that's a ways off another option is a single level of wizard to gain access to every wizard spell I'll do a video on this as well but if you take one level of wizard on a full spell casting class you get all the wizard spells because they learn from Scrolls instead of from leveling up um or just could keep on going with Bard to get access to level 6 Bard spells with Bart 11 cleric 1 as your final class layout any of those is great and will be really powerful we'll see you through the game with all of your conversation skills doing excellently all right well anyways my friends hope you've enjoyed this video you can see me putting these optimization principles into action in my Iron Man playthrough of Baldur's Gate which is also going up on my channel so tune in to that episodes going up regularly we're playing a gif Yankee sorcerer with no reloads of any kind um which is really on tactician which is really fun and you can of course leave likes and comments and subscribe to my channel and I'll catch you next time cheers my friends Gigi

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 4,858

Keywords: Etarran, Cephalopocalypse, Baldur's Gate 3, Larian, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Build, Guide, Strategy, Tactics, Tutorial

Id: tSQFb1jyjYI

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2023