BG3 Fighter vs Paladin vs Cleric - Which Baldur's Gate 3 Class Should You Play?

in this Baldur's Gate 3 video we're going to be taking a look at the fighter Paladin and cleric classes and this is the third video in a series where we take a look at a group of classes to help players narrow down which classes they want to play in Baldur's Gate 3. and you might be seeing this video going why the heck are you comparing fighter to cleric I don't think anyone is confused about whether they're playing a fight or a cleric these are very different and there are a couple reasons for this first I wanted to make a video comparing Paladin to cleric I feel like players coming from other RPGs might be trying to decide if they want to play one of these two classes they have Divine spell casting both of them and there are similarities between these two classes so there might be people out there wondering hmm which one of these do I play and second there's definitely going to be D fans out there that have narrowed down their choice to fighter or Paladin so I wanted to do a video about that as well so it just seemed like consolidating those two separate videos into one video might be the easiest way to do it and if you're someone who wanted to see a video comparing fighter Barbarian Ranger something like that where you know these are all Marshall classes that can mainly in combat don't worry I still have a video planned to do that as well there might be a little overlap with the fighter from here but we'll be looking at it in a different angle in that video right comparing the things of fighter to those in a different light and I might make a video as well comparing cleric to Druid the two wisdom spellcasters in the game because I know a lot of 5V players that need some freshening up or you know are Vaguely Familiar with these from playing Early Access might want a direct comparison to these two classes as well okay so looking at cleric fighter and Paladin during character creation you're going to notice immediately that clerics have less Health they don't have heavy armor proficiency and they don't have martial weapon proficiency Fighters and paladins have all of these things they have the same proficiencies so coming down to proficiencies and health Paladin and Fighters are exactly the same cleric being slightly behind them in terms of the amount of HP and proficiencies that they have and this generally puts clerics at a little bit of a disadvantage compared to these classes in martial combat because they don't have martial weapon proficiency they're going to deal less damage in martial combat than these two other class unless they choose the war domain as their subclass which will give them heavy armor proficiency and martial weapon proficiency at level one so if you select this during character creation you will actually be about on the same level of these minus a little bit of Health the very beginning at level one when it comes to saving throw proficiencies clerics have wisdom and Charisma just like paladins and Fighters have strengthened Constitution Constitution is arguably the best overall proficiency to have for saving throws since a lot of spells Target those and wisdom is also very very good so these kind of come out about the same give or take each of these three classes gets to pick two skills so they're not like a huge skill Advantage I will mention that clerics can choose persuasion Fighters can choose intimidation and paladins can choose intimidation persuasion this is not particularly important on clerics and Fighters since they typically won't have a lot of Charisma but paladins use Charisma for their spell casting modifier so intimidation and persuasion is good to know because they can use them very effectively in dialogue scenario so if you want to play a character that is dialogue focused but also kind of a warrior in combat or a holy Warrior Paladin is a very good choice for that okay those things being said let's take a look at the fighter first and sort of see what separates them from the other two classes particularly Paladin so Fighters at level one get to choose from one of six fighting styles and what makes them different than the Paladin or Ranger besides the fact that these two classes get to do this at the second level is that Fighters have access to all six fighting styles while Rangers have access to four of them and paladins have access to four other ones there's some overlap between Ranger and Paladin here but Fighters can choose from any of the six that they wish and these fighting styles range from making them better at archery using bows making the better at dual wielding weapons making them better at two-handed or sword and shield and so you can kind of have a focus for your fighter starting at level one that doesn't mean this is the only way the fighter has to play because they will more than likely still use a bow and some sort of setup for melee but it will help kind of hone in on what you want your fighter to be really good at and Fighters have a class feature at level 2 called action surge which allows them to take an extra action in combat and this is not a bonus action or anything like that you just click it you gain an extra action and why this is particularly strongest for two reasons first is is that Fighters gain an extra attack at level 5 and they gain another extra attack at level 11. this means that when they use the attack action during their turn they'll actually gain an extra attack once they're level five they'll be able to attack two times but only if they use attack as an action and then once they're level 11 they'll be able to attack two additional times if they use attack as an action but when you use action surge you're allowed to use attack again as an action which then refreshes these bonus attacks so at level 5 you would actually be able to attack four times in a turn after action Surge and at level 11 you'd be able to attack six times if you used action surge which is a lot of damage to say the least but this isn't the only reason that action surge is so good a lot of classes will dip into fighter a couple levels to pick this up in order to be able to cast an additional spell in their turn for instance take sorcerer as an example Sorcerers can use Quick and spell metamagic if you saw our sorcerer wizard warlock video to make a spell a bonus action so they could theoretically cast three spells if they make a spell bonus to action cast a spell with their action and then use action Surge and cast another spell that can be extremely deadly and setting up like a huge first turn of combat where you can really turn the tide of a deadly battle into something that's very very manageable and at level 3 fighters are gonna pick a specialization this is either going to be battle master champion or Eldritch Knight and Battle Masters get better in combat by using something called superiority dice which are kind of like a resource that Fighters can use to improve the damage of their attacks but also add additional effects such as frightening targets pushing them back knocking them down disarming them while they're doing this at the same time so this allows them to be even more effective in combat through various effects like this Champions on the other hand are improved in combat by having a higher critical range meaning that instead of having to roll a 20 in order to critically strike they can roll a 19 or 20 in Critical Strike to get Critical Strike damage and then also at level 10 they're going to gain another fighting style so they could spit you could specialize in one at level one and champions will be able to get another one at level two so maybe you took archery at level one but you also want to pick up like dual wielding or dual wield or something like that at level 10 to be able to do a wield more effectively Champions are also going to gain that benefit and lastly we come to Eldritch Knight which is sort of a hybrid between a fighter and a wizard it gives you access to some wizard spells not a lot of them but some of them and allows you to cast spells and be a fighter in combat so if you want to play like a hybrid type class then this would be something that you would want to focus on and the spell casting ability of the Eldritch Knight is intelligence so just like Wizards you'd have to have some intelligence to you know cast hostile spells very effectively otherwise you can focus on self Buffs or group Buffs and you don't have to worry too much about intelligence and before we get into Paladin one thing I really want to mention about the fighter is that they're very versatile in terms of range from melee combat they can do either effectively and they can either be a strength fighter and fight predominantly in melee range or they can be a dexterity fighter and fight at range and also use finesse weapons and melee combat to do more damage kind of dual wield or something like that so the way you build your fighter is really up to you you could go sword and shield you could go two-handed and play like a strength fighter or you could go like predominantly range to go something like dexterity and maybe dual build also they really have the flexibility to go either way and you could build a dexterity or strength fighter easily so moving along to Paladin paladins have more of a focus on spell casting than Fighters do unless a fighter takes eldrich Knight howdens are just going to cast more spells by Nature because no matter what Paladin you're playing you're going to game spells and they also have a little bit of healing built into them because of their class feature lay on hands which allows them to heal another character you know for a little bit every so often so at level 2 paladins gain their fighting style and they have a selection of four fighting styles available to them they are missing notably archery and 2f and fighting so they're not going to get better with their fighting style at you know using a ranged weapon like a bow or crossbow and they're not going to get better at using two weapons so those two play styles are not something a paladin is typically going to use that doesn't mean you can't use them but generally speaking if you would like to use one of those two play Styles you would probably be better off going with a fighter or Ranger so this kind of Narrows them down to like a sword and shield play style or maybe like a single sword or a heavy weapon like a great sword style of play that's typically what you're going to see paladins using and they also gain spell casting at level 2 Divine spell casting which uses their Charisma modifier as I mentioned earlier so again this goes really well with other classes you know I want to talk about multi-classing that use Charisma like Bard warlock sorcerer all these classes use Charisma so they're not bad pairs to pair with a paladin and also if you're wanting to play a character that's very good in dialogue particular early with persuasion intimidation Paladin is not a bad choice because they're going to have high Charisma and they have access to those skill proficiencies paladins also don't gain as many spells as cleric does and to give you some idea of a direct comparison at level five paladins will have four level one spells and two level two spells where clerics will have four level one spells three level two spells and two level three spells so paladins won't even have access to level 3 Spells at the same level so clerics come out ahead in the spell casting Department although paladins do have a decent amount of spells and perhaps the thing that Paladin is really known for in bg3 and d d is its Divine Smite ability which allows them to expend a spell slot to buff their next melee attack for substantial damage and I mean it's a lot of damage and each level of spell slot that you expend increases the amount of damage that it does the paladins can not only cast spells with their spell slot but they can also boost their melee damage significantly so they have the option to do either one and the thing here that I want to draw your attention to is that Divine Smite only works with melee weapon attacks it does not work with ranged weapon attacks so unlike some other games like pillars of Eternity or something like that where you could play a ranged Paladin you're not really going to be playing a ranged Paladin in bg3 because you're going to want to take advantage of divine Smite it's one of the best ways to get damage on your Paladin which means you need to be in melee range and at level 3 paladins are gonna make a sacred oath which is how they choose their subclass and a few things are going to be determined by that sacred oath and one of these things is the channel of divinity abilities of the Paladin each Paladin has two different Channel Divinity abilities where they kind of channel the Divinity that their oath is to and get some sort of effect for instance oh the devotion they have sacred weapon which Buffs their weapon to deal increased damage or they have turned the Unholy which turns all the undead around them driving them off so that they're not attacked by at and these are going to change from Paladin to Paladin depending on you know what oath you take the oath they choose is also going to determine some of the Spells they get outside of their spell class kind of like the way warlock would so if you want some different spells you might choose an oath based on those spells and to give you kind of a rough idea without going through all of these oath of devotion gives you like Buffs protection and Mild healing type spells both of the Ancients gives you like nature spells some of these spells are from the Druid list and oath of Vengeance gives you like a lot of control and utility spells and lastly the thing that your oath does is it determines the actions that you'll predominantly be taking in your playthrough paladins are bound by their oath so the choices that you make in dialogue or the decisions you make throughout the game if they counter to that oath will actually break that oath and then you will technically become an oath breaker Paladin which has its own you know spells it has its own channel Divinity Etc and its own class features so you if you take an oath you're gonna have to follow those or you're gonna become an oath breaker and then obviously if you break any of those O's you'll be an oath breaker and then you don't have to worry about the oath anymore and you can play a paladin and have the abilities of the oath breaker and one thing I want to mention or get into real quick before we get on to cleric is that paladins also gain extra attack at level five so at level five Fighters and paladins both have extra attacks so they deal about the same amount of damage in that regard however keep in mind that Fighters will gain a third attack at level 11 although that's going to be quite a ways through the game whereas paladins can buff their damage with Divine Smite from Level 2. so I think overall paladins are going to have a generally higher damage output than Fighters but keep in mind that Fighters can use action surge to gain up to four attacks in one turn so Fighters can have extremely high burst for one turn and that will outperform up I called in but just generally over the course of a battle a paladin will probably outperform a fighter until you get to that third attack and paladins have more utility in the form of spells they can cast healing Buffs damage spells Etc so there is that as well but keep in mind this comes with the drawback that paladins have to follow a specific code or they become an oath breaker and Fighters do not so if you're a player who doesn't really know what you're going to do when you go through the game and you want to be completely free to do whatever you want in every scenario and you're not bound by a good or bad playthrough then fighter might be a better option than Paladin for you so this takes us to cleric and as I mentioned before clerics are a little behind Paladin and fighter with their proficiencies they don't have heavy armor they don't have martial weapons so if you want to play like a martial cleric you definitely need to pick up some proficiency you could do that from the war domain you can do that with specific weapons through races or you can multi-class with another class and pick up some proficiencies if you want to do that you're just trying to build a marshall cleric and clerics are also Divine spell casters they have more spells that they'll learn than Paladin they can cast more spells than Paladin they can cast higher level spells than Paladin so generally speaking they're just going to be a better all-around spellcaster and their wisdom is their spell casting ability modifier unlike paladins which use Charisma so they're a little bit different in that regard and also that makes them a little bit worse in my opinion not even a little bit significantly worse at dialogue checks because you're not going to get the extra points from Charisma into your dialogue so paladins are going to be much better in dialogue than clerics so if that's really important to you you know that's one Edge that Paladin has over Claire so during character creation you're going to choose the domain of your cleric and this is going to influence the way your cleric plays throughout the game and it does that in a couple ways first it influences your channel Divinity just like Paladin's clerics gain Channel Divinity abilities and what these are is dependent upon the domain that you choose for instance if you choose life domain your channel Divinity can be used to heal your group or if you choose the war domain your channel Divinity can be used to improve your attack role your domain is also going to influence the spells that you gain outside of the cleric spell list and it's also going to influence the ones that you will always know that you haven't prepared just like Wizards clerics need to prepare their spells from their spell list in order to use these in combat they can know a lot more spells than what they have prepared so you're going to have to select the ones that you want and depending on the domain that you pick certain spells will always be prepared for you outside of the other ones so for instance if you choose like life domain the bless and cure wound spells will always be prepared for you on top of whatever other spells you can prepare they don't take up prepared spell slots you will always be able to cast those spells prepared or not and if you choose light domain you'll always be able to cast fairy fire or burning hands whether you have them prepared or not those are just a couple examples but you get the idea and your domain is also going to influence some of the class features that you gain for that specific domain as a cleric so your domain is going to influence the channel Divinity ability or abilities that you have those are going to be different from domain to domain the spells that you gain and also the ones that are always prepared for you are going to change depending on the domain and then you're also going to have unique class features I'm not going to get into all of these domains in this video because there are seven and also because we haven't seen all of them to know exactly if they follow the handbook or not but I will get into a few of them to give you an idea so the light domain specializes in fire effectively they're going to gain a lot of fire spells so if you want to be like a fire focused lyric then the light domain is a good choice for you their Channel Divinity ability deals AOE damage deals radiant damage and an AOE around them so that increases the amount of damage they can do because of that ability and at level 8 you're going to be able to add your wisdom modifier to the damage of any clerican trip that you use in cantrips or level 0 spells that can be used once every turn so this is really really strong right so if you use something like sacred flame you're going to be able to boost the damage of it a lot making it a lot closer to like a regular weapon attack in terms of damage they also gain a lot of fire spells as I mentioned they gain burning hands they gain flaming sphere and scorching Rey they also gain Fireball so again if you want to focus on Fire Light would be the choice for you and if you choose the life domain your heels are going to be stronger each healing spell you cast will be stronger than other domains your channel Divinity is an AOE heal as I mentioned before at level 6 when you cast a heal on another Target you'll actually heal yourself as well but for a lot less healing and at level 8 you'll actually increase the damage that you deal with weapon attacks once per turn by a bit of damage so that will improve the damage you deal as well and this isn't melee weapon attacks either this is any weapon attack so this could be a bow or you know some other ranged weapon if you want and the last domain I want to talk about about here is the war domain this isn't the full version of the game I got to see it a little bit when I was playing with Larry and I messed around with a little bit but I don't remember all the nitty-gritty details and I wasn't you know level 12 so I didn't get to see like all the passage that you gain so I'm going to use the book as a reference here but assuming it's similar or same to the book The reason I I want to talk a bit about war domain is it sort of brings the cleric closer to the fighter and Paladin in terms of their martial prowess so you might be wondering well can I play a cleric and get closer to that even if it's not as good that's why I want to talk a little bit about this one so as I mentioned earlier when you take word domain at level one you gain martial weapon proficiency and heavy armor proficiency so this puts them up with Paladin and fighter in terms of proficiencies instantly and they also have another class feature at level one called War priest which makes it so that when they use their attack action and combat they can use their bonus action to make another weapon attack this gives them actually two attacks at level one compared to fighter and Paladin that have one so they're actually better than fighter than Paladin in terms of what they can do in combat at level one and War domain clerics can use this ability up to their wisdom ability modifier number of times before they long rest if I'm not mistaken I can't remember exactly how many there were but I think that's right the reason that's important is that because Fighters at level 2 will gain action surge that they can replenish on short rest and at level 2 paladins will also gain Divine spite which they'll be able to use two times so at level two it sort of evens out so these four domain clerics will be ahead at level one which lasts for like 20 or 30 minutes of the game and then they'll be about on par with paladins and Fighters or you know the level two part of the game but the thing is is that Paladin will start to pull ahead here as they gain more spell slots allowing them to use Divine Smite more often and Fighters will stay about on the same as the war domain clerics until they hit Level 5 where they gain extra attack paladins will also gain extra attack at level five so they're both going to become incredibly stronger with their martial capabilities at level 5 whereas cleric doesn't gain that extra attack at level five even if they're award domain so War domain clerics are going to be close to fighterson paladins early on in the game but they're gonna fall further and further behind as the game goes on and their Channel Divinity will allow them to connect more in combat by giving them a bonus to their attack role and also at level 8 they'll gain Divine strike which will increase the damage that they do in combat with a weapon again melee weapon any weapon and this is really one of the best strengths of cleric in my opinion is that they have more flexibility in what they can do they can be a melee cleric and use Touch range spells they could be a ranged Clerk and use range spells they could be a range Clerk and use buff spells there's a Paladin's pretty much going to be a melee fighter that goes into combat and you know uses their spells probably outside of combat most of the time or uses their spell slots for divine Smite because keep in mind with a paladin that they gain an extra attack at level 5 if they use their action for an attack but if they cast a spell with their action they don't gain an extra attack so they'll probably use their you know healing spells and buffing spells or whatever outside of combat and then use those spell slots for divine Spike inside of combat I think that's really that separates cleric a lot here is they they can play at range they can make a bow using cleric you know play dexterity wisdom stay back range things down cast spells where they can go sword board go in and attack in melee combat use Touch range spells so before we wrap up this video we'll talk a little bit about multi-classing and I've mentioned some things before but Paladin is predominantly going to be multi-class with other classes that are Charisma based this is barred warlock sorcerer any of those three classes is going to go really well with Paladin talk a little bit about fighter you might multi-class fighter with Rogue for the same reason to gain an extra bonus attack particularly if you're like a dual wheeled fighter so you can gain attack with main hand attack with offhand with your bonus action attack with main hand with your extra attack attack offhand with your second bonus action that might be a good way to make like a dual wheeled fighter you can multi-class with wizard or sorcerer to pick up some spell casting a lot of time like Wizards or Sorcerers like to take a couple levels of fighter to gain action surge or maybe three levels to pick up Eldritch Knight if you're a wizard so that's also an option with fighter and a lot of people like to multi-class with Fighters well just to pick up some proficiencies so if you need some proficiencies dipping one level into fighter is not bad keep in mind you gain a fighting style at level one so that's also a huge buff to something like maybe like a rogue that might want to pick up like archery or something like that and cleric when it comes to multi-classing has like a broad spectrum of classes it can multi-class with and even though it's wisdom you might you know multi-class it with Ranger is not a bad option you might multi-class it with wizard in order to you know pick up some spells a lot of wizards will take like a level or two in cleric if they pick up some spell lists and also keep in mind that like you could multi-class it with fighter to pick up extra attack maybe take like five levels of fighter to get extra attack especially if you took War domain which would then allow you to use your attack action and then get an extra attack at level 5 of fighter and then also use your bonus action for an attack so and then you can action search there's a lot of good combinations with cleric usually you're going to be mixing to pick up some martial capabilities to give you something to do when you're not spell casting so that wraps up our video on fighter palette and cleric I hope it made sense why I put these three in a video it would have been two videos that I just kind of was trying to make into one for the sake of time um I do plan to do like a fighter Barbarian Ranger video I think to compare those three classes and I do think I'm probably going to do a druid clear comparison and probably also like a barred warlock comparison trying to get all these things done before we get to the launch of the game so we'll see how much time we have but if you guys have suggestions if you have feedback please let me know in the comments below [Music]

Channel: Fextralife

Views: 215,029

Keywords: bg3 fighter vs paladin, baldurs gate 3 paladin vs cleric, baldurs gate 3 paladin vs fighter, baldurs gate 3 paladin or cleric, bg3 fighter build, bg3 fighter guide, bg3 fighter battlemaster, bg3 fighter multiclass, bg3 fighter rogue, bg3 paladin build, bg3 paladin oathbreaker, bg3 paladin oath of the ancients, bg3 paladin oathbreaker build, bg3 paladin multiclass, bg3 cleric multiclass, bg3 cleric guide, baldur's gate 3 fighter, baldur's gate 3 paladin, baldur's gate 3 cleric

Id: ZJOyAETJcwM

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023