CRITICAL HIT ON A 12 - Mortal Reminder Great Old One Warlock Build | Baldur's Gate 3

fellow eldrich blast enjoyers did you know that as a spellcaster you can get the widest critical hit ratio in the game naturally getting Critical Hits on a spell attack roll of 13 and as low as a 12 while hiding hail Adventurer my name is motus and I'm going to walk you through this great old one warlock class build this character can be great for Honor mode and even has the potential to solo honor mode if you wanted to try it this build is a little bit more specific than my regular videos we're going to take a carefully crafted concoction of class levels items and Feats with the right gear and abilities almost every one of your alrich blasts will be a critical hit that also Stacks reverberation and mental fatigue and doing widespread frightened crowd control with the goo warlocks mortal reminder feature you'll be able to hide in clouds of Darkness to avoid damage while picking enemies off one by one with eldrich blast and freezing them in place with the frightened condition let's get into the breakdown I like to think of the patron of the great old one warlock being the Tad wo or potentially the Elder brain itself that actually makes this build work for just about any of your companions so long as you have a tadpole digging around in your brain this can be the build for you naturally that also makes it good for a Tav but I actually like to run this character as the dark urge it works as a great way to rebuild your power after your Amnesia and I definitely encourage leaning into your ithd powers we can pick just about any race all the normal good ones would be fine like a full or half wood elf as modi's teelings and Dr also get a casting of darkness which can be a core part of the build so getting a free cast once per day is a really synergistic Choice gith Yankee's astral knowledge and Misty step are great on a main character and especially on warlocks who want to have Misty step but don't really want to use their spell slots to use it durar invisibility halfling luck all great abilities it doesn't really matter what you choose I'm going to stick with the default white dragon born for durge mechanically dragon born is probably the worst overall race but literally anyone is viable for subrace I'll stick with white for frost breath and resistance to cold damage and for class we're not actually going to start with warlock if you're fine with respecing it Withers a whole bunch of times I'd probably encourage taking at least about your first six levels in Warlock and then respecing into a multiclass later but for the purposes of a video I'm going to assume that you're not going to Respec at all we're going to be taking levels in fighter Rogue and Warlock and something to keep in mind while leveling up a character is that when using items with spell save DCS the class it uses to determine the difficulty check is the last new class you've taken not necessarily the last class you took a level in but the last one that you've added overall to your character which means we want to be taking warlock last so of those three classes it's the only one that uses Charisma as its modifier and I've read apparently that for some reason mortal reminder works the same way so it's really important that everything we do uses Charisma so we're going to start with fighter mostly because this will give us Proficiency in Constitution saving throws which are used to maintain concentration on spells and warlocks will almost always be concentrating on a spell and it also gives us Proficiency in all weapons and armors for whatever equipment we want to equip we'll start with the ability second wind for a small heal that'll help us through the early game and for fighting styles we're going to pick def defense once we pick up our first level in warlock we're going to be sticking to Eldridge blast through the whole game so we won't be using any of our weapons to make attacks although we will be dual wielding so if you want to occasionally make an off-hand attack you could take two weapon fighting especially if you're planning on wearing clothing instead of armor as a dark urge we start with the haunted one background giving us Proficiency in medicine and intimidation any background is fine just pick whatever fits your roleplay for your character but if you're looking for something with the most mechanical benefit I'd suggest taking one that has a lot of Charisma based skills like intimidation persuasion and deception and then for our ability scores we're going to clear out this I'm going to move my plus two bonus down to Charisma and leave the plus one bonus in Constitution there are two slightly different ways you could take your stats I like a more balanced approach for the main character in a playthrough so I take my dexterity to 14 this will give us a plus two bonus to our AC with certain armors as well as giving us a plus two to initiative and dexterity saving throws which are pretty common then we'll also take our constitution to 14 this will give us a half decent pool of hit points and help us save on Constitution saving throws to maintain concentration over spells I think this character is fine having an eight intelligence then I'd take wisdom up to 12 wisdom is a really important saving throw there are a ton of debilitating effects that Target wisdom so I try to at least not have a negative modifier in it but the plus one can actually go a long way then we can take Charisma up to 17 normally I don't plan builds around taking The Hags hair but this character is only going to get two Feats and I think we have uses for them outside of ability score modifiers so I really recommend starting with a 7 Charisma here and bumping it to an 18 with that item with our high Charisma stat it shouldn't be hard to get then we've got two points remaining you could put them in strength it can be a little Annoying not being able to get around the environment or if you really like skill checks I'd take intelligence up to a 10 so that you don't have a negative modifier in that now alternatively to midax a little you could take those points out of intelligence and some points out of wisdom to bump Constitution up to a 16 or even dexterity if you prefer but like I said I like being a little bit more well-rounded as a main character so I'm going to keep my stats like this then I'm going to pick a couple of skills we got medicine and intimidation from our background sadly fighter doesn't give us any other Charisma options but I'd probably take acrobatics so that you're not too easily pushed around and then either perception or Insight if you want to have an easier time either in certain conversations or in discovering things in the world on a solo run I'd probably take perception but I prefer adventuring with the party so I think I'll rely on another character to have a high perception check and instead take Insight confirm this and we can move on to level two now at level two I'm going to immediately start going into other classes the next class we need levels in is Rogue at Rogue level one we get sneak attack which we are basically never going to use since we'll be eldrich blasting away but if you do decide to make an offhand attack then you have it but our skill choices here are important multiclassing into Rogue we get to pick one additional skill as well as our two expertise skills so we're actually going to pick up stealth here cuz we eventually want to be able to hide every turn so i' put our first expertise in stealth as well and our second one in intimidation making that the main check we'll use in dialogue now I would plan on eventually getting the half ilod power that gives you expertise and intimidation persuasion and deception in which case you could Respec later to get rid of this intimidation expertise from Rogue or if you plan on not getting it I would maybe not actually take stealth here and take deception or persuasion but as long as you have one really good dialogue check that should be enough that's selected we can move on to level three now we're going to take our first warlock level the nice thing about warlock is we're going to be taking eldrich blast obviously and canri scale up with our character level instead of our class level so even though we're speced into three different classes now Aldridge blast will still get its increased number of beams at level five and level 10 so for our cantrips we're going to take eldrich blast and then I'd get rid of Blade Ward here and probably take friends now you do have to be careful who you cast this on because some characters will become hostile once they realize you've cast it on them but it can be really helpful in certain dialogues especially if you intend on fighting the creature anyway then for subass we're going to be taking the great old one the Mortal reminder feature makes it so that when whenever we get a critical hit creatures around the Target have to make a wisdom saving throw or become frightened until the end of their next turn and this is what we're going to be building critical hit chance for the frighten condition in balers gate is a little bit stronger than it is in fifth edition it just gives them a flat disadvantage to attack rolls and their movement drops to zero this is going to work really great with the reverberation Stacks we add on later and we're even going to throw in some mental fatigue to make it even harder for creatures to make the saving throw then for our first level spells I would probably take hex and armor of agius hex will give us a nice damage boost in the early game as well as a debuff to certain ability checks but it's worth noting that this does not affect saving throws it's kind of common for people to think that this debuff saving throws but I can assure you that it does not then armor of agathys is just a really nice defensive spell to have it scales really well with our warlock spell slots and it's a great use of a leftover spell slot immediately before a short rest although we'll probably replace it a little bit later now for level four and we're actually going to take a second level in a class we want our second warlock level as soon as we can get it for your spell at this I would either take Tasha's hideous laughter as some pretty solid early game crowd control but arms ofar can also be useful we're a ranged character so we don't want any enemies close to us but if you do find yourself surrounded then arms of fedar can both do some good damage and it prevents targets from taking reactions so it can also help you get out of a bad situation this is more of a niche pick and I think thematically I like tacha's hideous laughter a little bit better as a way to mess with other people's minds then we get to pick our first two eldrich invocations and of course we're going to take agonizing blast and repelling blast these are the core features of any warlock adding our Charisma modifier to the damage that we do and the ability to push the targets we hit with ELD blast then like any learned spell Caster you can replace a spell but at this early stage we're not going to do that now this is where I kind of want to start focusing on building our critical hit chance as well as making sure our Feats don't come too late in our build at some point we're going to be taking spell sniper but I'd like to do that with our second feet and we have to take it as a warlock because the can trip will Scale based on the spellcasting modifier of the class that takes the feet so in order for it to scale with Charisma we have to take it as a warlock so for now I'm going to switch back to fighter and we're going to take this to level four fighter for that feat at level two we get action surge which is great on literally every character in the game nobody's upset with that one now at level six we get to pick our fighter subass and I'm going to take champion this improves our critical hit Chance by one and it applies to all attack roles including our spells so at this point we'll be critical hitting with eldrich blast on a roll of a 19 and if you also grab the knife of the under Mountain King in act one you'll be able to crit on an 18 now level seven will take our last fighter level this lets us take a feat and there are a few different options here you could take ability score Improvement to max out that Charisma with Ethel's hair you can get to a 20 here alternatively you could not worry about Ethel's hair and take an actor this will give us expertise of deception and performance this is a great alternative if you're not taking the half ilod skill but we only have a plus two dexterity and we don't have the space in our equipment to take any initiative boosting gear so I would actually take alert winning initiative is really important especially on this character where we want to get our setup going as soon as possible that's often going to involve casting darkness and hiding and this character is a little bit squishy although we can be wearing heavy armor so you do not want to get surprised I think this is our best overall option now at level eight we're going to go back into warlock I think there's a few key features here we want to pick up before we go back into Rogue levels as well so at level three we have second level spells now and here I think is important for basically every character to have Misty step that can take it you want to avoid having to use a warlock spell slot on Misty step but it's an important tool to have access to too when you need it then we also get our packed Boon and here I want to take pack of the Tome we will be wielding weapons for the critical hit chance reduction but we won't actually be making attacks with them so we don't need to take pack of the blade you can get Shovel as a familiar so you also don't need pack of the chain I think that picking up guidance from pack of the toome is hugely important it's even nice to have on more than one character on your party it's pretty unlikely we ever cast vicious mockery but Thorn whip can actually be nice to have to potentially pull enemies into hazardous effects and if you have a character within 5T of you giving you disadvantage on your Al blasts Thorn whip is considered a melee attack so won't be made with disadvantage finally we can replace a spell which I always recommend as a warlock whenever you get new spell slot levels here I'm going to replace tash's hideous laughter with hold person I think it's just an upgrade as far as crowd control goes and since we won't have lower level spell SLS to cast tas's hideous laughter old person is just a much better option and we'll move on to our next level at level 9 we're a fourth level warlock normally I would recommend picking up bone chill here because having a way to stop certain enemies from healing is really important to have but we can actually pick this cantrip up with spell sniper so instead I'd probably take blade Ward it's not hugely important but it can be nice to have as a pre-fight buff then we get another second level spell there are a bunch of great options here personally I like cloud of dagger darkness and detect thoughts all for different reasons we will be picking up devil site at our next level so I'd probably take Darkness it's definitely something you want to have access to then we also get our second feat and this time we're going to take spell sniper this will reduce our critical hit chance with spells by one and it's the reason that Marshall characters can't get their critical hit chance quite this low it's it's the only reduction that's specifically for spellcasters then for a can trip as I said I'd take bone chill if you either don't want or already have bone chill you'd probably take shock and grasp so that you have a good option while enemies are within melee range of you but I think the utility of bone chill is more important especially since we already have Thorn whip then at level 10 we have one more warlock level to take we get third level spells here and we definitely are going to take counter spell nullifying enemy spells is just way too important and for our alrich invocation we're going to take devil site now we can see through magical Darkness and the full build is almost online a big part of our game plan will be casting the darkness spell and hiding within it it's preferable if other characters could cast it instead of the Warlock themselves but you can also be self-sufficient then again I'd always replace a spell when we get new spell levels at this point I'd probably get rid of armor of agius but you could also get rid of hex if you're not using it anymore since we're usually going to be concentrating on other things in fact I've even talked myself into it a little bit and we're going to take hunger of Hadar this is one of the best crowd control spells in the game and is unique to warlocks there's just no good reason not to take it then we can move to level 11 here we're going to go back to Rogue levels it's important that we get cutting action hide this is what's going to let us cast alrich blast and then hide in our Darkness at the end of each turn and the reason that this is important is that one of our sources of critical hits the Shad Slayer cloak only works if you're hiding or invisible the dash disengage can also be pretty useful then our final level 12 I think here we're going to stick with Rogue and unlike most builds to take Thief subass we're actually going to take the Assassin subass this makes it so that we have advantage on attack rolls against creatures that haven't taken a turn yet and with the alert feet that should be most creatures on the first round we also gain Ambush which makes it so that whenever we attack a surprised creature it's automatically a critical hit which is obviously great with Mortal reminder although I have found it kind of inconsistent with ELR blast I don't know if it doesn't apply to spells well or if I just have been noticing it incorrectly and since we're going to be trying to start motion encounters with a surprise round we also have assassin's alacrity which immediately restores our action and bonus action now just with our class levels we're able to set up encounters with Darkness or hunger of hdar and get a one sided Advantage with devil sight we'll be able to eldrich blast and then cutting action High to every round and with the champion subass and spell sniper we're critical hitting on an 18 so let's move over equipment to get those last six points of critical hit reduction as well as the other items that feed into the build now this build has some very specific item needs so there won't be as diverse a selection as I normally do for these videos we will be using elixir of viciousness for one of our critical hit reductions and you can have arrows of Darkness on hand for ways to create small Darkness clouds without having to use a spell slot our most important item to pick up in act one is the knife of the undermountain king it's one of the first item based ways to reduce our critical hit chance but until you pick this up you can use the spell sparkler you can get this very very early in act one and lightning charges add a little bit of hit chance and damage to our eldri blasts then I'd recommend the Daredevil gloves pretty much up until we get better gloves in act three these give another plus one to our spell attack roles with alrich blast but it also makes it so that when there's creatures within 5T of us we won't have disadvantage on our ranged spell attacks the other really important item to pick up in act one are the boots of Stormy clamor this inflicts a creature with two stacks of reverberation whenever we inflict a condition upon them and as far as I can tell the displace condition from repelling blast counts for this and it seems to count even when you miss most of the time and it's important to note that eventually Aldrich blast will be three separate beams each applying these stacks on their own so you can easily spread reverberation around different creatures or stack it up extremely quickly on one you only need five stacks of reverberation to have a chance to knock a creature prone so three Blast from Aldrich blast does this all on its own and if even one of those blasts hits and they fail the saving throw against Mortal reminder they'll be prone and frightened unable to move or get up now in act two we'll grab a few other important items we can get another stack of critical hit reduction from either the cobt cowl or the Dark justicier Helmet both of these requires to be obscured to get the critical hit chance reduction but wouldn't you know it we're obscured in a cloud of Darkness so this is actually really easy to keep up at all times we also get the spine shutter amulet in act two and whenever you deal damage with a range spell attack it inflicts an additional two stacks of reverberation so that's four Stacks per blast that hits we also get our two rings here the first being the risky ring giving us advantage on all attack roles while receiving disadvantage on saving throws but one of the best ways to improve our critical hit chance is to give ourselves advantage on attacks there are ways to do this without the risky ring like through clouds of darkness and different abilities from allies but just having a solid way to always have Advantage no matter the situation gives a huge increase to our likelihood of rolling above an 11 then the Ring of mental inhibition makes it so that whenever a fo fails a saving throw against one of our spells or actions they gain up two turns of mental fatigue between our reverberation Stacks mortal reminder and other spells like hunger of Hadar will be causing enemies to roll saving throws pretty often and giving them mental fatigue when they fail creates this compounding debilitating effect basically once we lock down an enemy they will stay locked down now in a lot of characters in act two you could also get the potent robes which are probably our best in slot armor piece since this is clothing we'll take a pretty big hit to our AC but we're also going to be hiding every round so that doesn't really matter sadly on a dark urge this is much harder to get I don't have it on my dark urge honor mode playthrough so I just recommend any armor that gives you the highest AC ideally without disadvantage on stealth checks you'll notice that I'm wearing the cerebral Citadel armor from act three I just think it's thematic with the whole frightening build and since I'm leaning into iLive Powers It just fits the look now this does give disadvantage on stealth checks I'd probably be better to use something like the hellis armor that doesn't impose disadvantage on stealth checks that's probably just a better armor overall honestly but it's hard for me to resist that ilth dri the cloth of authority is also a really nice thematic alternative although again we'll have a slightly lower AC act three is also where we'll find the rest of our critical hit chance gear we can upgrade our helmet to saffar Roo's horn helmet it'll just reduce our critical hit Chance by one without any conditions and we also can't be frightened which is again just nicely thematic with our whole frightened thing then there's the shade Slayer cloak which is why we took Rogue levels while hiding the number we need to roll a critical hit is reduced by one and it's a lot safer to start your turns with an eldrich Blaster spell and then hide at the end of your turn you can hide at the beginning to still get the effect but then you won't be hidden for the rest of the initiative order and this character is not particularly tanky so you want to keep the focus off of you since patch six creatures can still shoot things into darkness you need to have all the other creatures in the darkness with you to avoid that we also get the Deadshot bow we won't be using it to attack of course but it again reduces our critical hit Chance by one and then we get bloodthirst uh mine is named a little bit different because orin's body disappeared in my playthrough so I had to use console commands to bring it into the game ideally you won't have to do that but like the others this reduces our critical hit Chance by one and I actually like to have this in the offhand for this character we don't care about the vulnerability to piercing damage so I like the plus one to AC and you can sometimes use your reaction to make a melee attack you won't be doing crazy damage with your melee attacks but it's just another chance to get a critical hit and apply mortal reminder you just have to balance the fact that if you make that attack you'll lose your hidden condition at the start of act three I like to upgrade my gloves to the cerebral Citadel gloves whenever we frighten a creature which will be often you gain 1 D4 to attack rolls and saving throws it's just a solid boost but really what we care about is added damage especially since we don't have the potent robes for that So eventually you'll upgrade either to the crater flesh gloves or the spell Mite gloves we'll be getting a lot of critical hits so the 1d6 force damage from the crater flesh gloves will be applied pretty consistently which always becomes 2d6 on a crit the spell might gloves give us a minus 5 to attack rolls but a d8 of extra damage instead of a D6 and it's also Force damage because eldrich blast is force damage and it will also apply to all attacks instead of just crits so the spell m gloves are probably a little bit better but they're also kind of a pain in the ass to get yet I've gone with the crater flesh gloves just because they're on that critical hit theme but between being a champion fighter having the spell sniper feet using an elixir of viciousness wearing sao's Helm Deadshot knife of the under Mountain King blood thirst and using cutting action hide every turn to make use of the Shad Slayer cloak that's an eight-point reduction on our critical hit chance so that we critically hit on a 12 once you add in the advantage of the risky ring that's almost every attack at least one of the three blasts from eldrich blast will crit this character is capable of dealing massive amounts of critical hit damage every turn with alridge blast without consuming any resources as well as locking down entire groups of enemies with Mortal reminder frighten and stacks of reverberation and they're one of the best party faces in the game with expertise on one of their Charisma checks as well as the friends can trip not to mention that they're hard to pin down thanks to action hide they have other forms of great crowd control like whole person and hunger of Hadar and you even have access to Casting haste once per day now this is a pretty tight build there's not a lot of room to play with the class levels but I'm not 100% sure that the Rogue levels are fully necess they do give us one of our critical hit threshold reductions with shad Slayer cloak but the difference between 12 and 13 is not huge you could potentially add guard levels into this class instead cutting Wars is an excellent ability you would still get expertise that way as well as some other spell slot levels and the other really strong combination would be going down to only two or three warlock levels and taking a bunch of sorcerer levels so you can Quicken Aldrich blasts you could even make an argument for losing the critical hit reduction from Champion fighter in favor of just doing a sorcerer warlock split it wouldn't be difficult to still get a critical hit on a 14 and then be able to dish out way more eldrich blasts every turn but I do think going for the full 12-point reduction is really fun and I think this is the class setup that can make the best use of it in terms of additional team options since we're kind of building around Darkness here having other characters that also work with darkness is really good especially a Beast Master Ranger with the dire Raven this is probably the best in-game way to spread Darkness around the battlefield and you can even find a build guide for it from last week's video otherwise you want other frontliners since we're a little bit squishy you want something like a fighter or a Barbarian that are able to take the hits for your Warlock and the one role that this character can't F at all as support so having a druid Paladin cleric or a bard of some kind to offset that weakness would make a really solid overall party in my honor mode run I have this warlock aarian as a Beast Master Ranger laselle as a tiger Barbarian with two warlock levels for devil sight and Shadow heart as a trickery cleric so I hope you like this critical hitting warlock mortal reminder is one of my favorite features that larion added and overall the game makes warlocks feel really good to play I'm putting out new build guides every week right now so make sure to subscribe and hit that notification Bell so that you know when they go live I've got more ideas than I have time for so until the next time happy adventuring

Channel: Ultraviolet Arts

Views: 127,310

Keywords: Baldur's Gate 3, BG3, Baldur's Gate, Build Guide, 5e, DnD, D&D, Dungeons and dragons, larian, larian studios, build, class, darkness, darkness spell, warlock, great old one warlock, eldritch blast, mortal reminder, critical hit, critical hit build, spell sniper, fighter, champion fighter, rogue, assassin rogue, assassin, champion, great old one, GOO, GOO Warlock, Reverberation, Risky Ring, Crit Build

Id: G-CIuvsKbPs

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024