FIXING the Companions - BG3 Honour Mode Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to Boulders Gate 3 hope you're all doing well today we're trying something a little bit different rather than taking a single character build from Level 1 to 12 I'm going to walk you through how to fix all of the companion builds when you first get access to re specs this is basically a part of my honor mode playthrough and if you're interested in how we got here I did live stream the playthrough up to this point um and I think that most people are going to arrive at the ability to Respec somewhere around level three if you take a fairly normal path through the game you should have access to five companions at this point those being uh Gail will Lazelle asaran and Shadow heart and all of them have come with severe flaws with their builds that you'll want to fix as quickly as possible to make the rest of the game smoother we don't yet have access to carlac because I think in most playthroughs you're going to end up being able to Respec before you find carlac although I will when we find her in this playthrough if people enjoy this video do an additional build fix guide for her just to quickly walk you through some of the premises of this of these builds these are builds for companions so among other things we're going to try to keep them as much as possible consistent with their their starting classes um rather than just making wild builds that have nothing to do with the characters and we are also going to make sure that they are viable on honor mode so they don't require any tricks that you can't use on honor mode they don't require any specific items because at this point in the game you won't have access to any specific items really um and you also can't guarantee finding every specific item when you're playing on honor mode also none of them will be using anti ethyls deal of course because even if we do want to take that which again isn't 100% reliable on honor mode you're probably going to put that on your main character rather than on one of these companions so all of these builds are going to be designed not to need that another important thing about these builds is that these are going to be fairly basic build fixes but I do have full guides for many of the builds up so I will reference what we're building towards with these characters as I go through them let's start with Shadow heart we have to do this kind of in one take because this is an honor mode save file um and like I said if you want to see where how we got to this point you can watch my 5,000 subscriber celebration live stream uh where I played up to this point in the game and what's really fun about that is that less than a week later we already passed 6,000 subscribers so thank you so much everyone yeah let's uh let's change class here so I have to try to do this without missing up if we do mess up I can cancel out but if I confirm the Respec then we are stuck with the changes we've made and at this point in the game the 100 gold to to Respec your characters is actually pretty relevant later on it's going to be free but for now the 100 gold is pretty important so let's take a look at shadowart and talk about the problems with her starting build shadow heart is I think one of the characters with the most flaws with her starting build the stat spread isn't terrible but definitely can be fixed and of course she has the issue of just being a trickery domain cleric which is the weakest cleric domain by quite a wide margin I would say um so generally speaking you're going to want to change that if that if you object to that I did do a lore friendly Shadow heart build which you can find here on the channel that uses trickery domain but for most players especially starting at level three where we want to have consistent and Powerful builds that operate without any magical items at all you're going to want to change her domain the two domains that I would recommend looking into changing are two are the two that I believe are most powerful those are Tempest domain which is the best generalist and allrounder I did a build guide on that called the best cleric in Boulders Gate 3 or light domain which is contrary to what you might think actually an incredible support domain the reason for this is that you get warding flare which allows you to act off turn and especially on honor mode the ability to act off turn to defend your characters is really important another thing that I'm going to be keeping in mind here is making sure that we have access to consistency in these builds because this is intended for Honor although of course you can use these on lower difficulty settings um but most important rather than hitting Peak power level is making sure that these builds operate consistently on low levels of resources and will be very safe to play through the game with so for that reason I'm going to spec shadowart into the light domain cleric although I think it is also worth keeping in mind Tempest domain and life domain is good as well although I think that that relies both on specific items to be powerful and overall is going to be slightly worse uh in terms of endgame power level than either light or Tempest domain though it's certainly not a bad cleric domain by any means something that's also worth talking about with cleric specifically is that it's just such a strong class that having a suboptimal domain isn't a huge issue but uh obviously we're trying to optimize these builds as much as possible notice this ability spread which is very very poor kind of a complete non sensibility spread so let's fix that we don't need any Charisma we need to get to 16 wisdom obviously you always want even numbers when you are building um dungeons of dragons characters because the bonuses to D20 roles that you make only go up on even numbers um so odd numbers in your stats never matter and there's all very few reasons to take odd numbers unless you're doing something very specific so one thing that we're going to of course be trying to do is fix all these characters to only have even numbers we want um o wrong button there we want 16 Constitution both because that will help Shadow heart maintain concentration on her spells and one of the best things that clerics do is concentrate on spells and of course give her more hit points which is going to be very important because light domain cleric only get access to medium armor we need to have high dexterity so we're going to PRI put the next priority on dexterity and then finally we have four points which I suggest actually just putting in strength the ability to reposition using jumps is extremely powerful for clerics especially because one of the things that shadowart will end up doing starting at level five is using um Spirit Guardians surrounding her in a damaging Aura so gaining additional Mobility through longer jump distance can help you apply that to more enemies more easily we have warding flare and also get access to burning hands and fairy fire fairy fire is a really important spell to have early there's a lot of enemies that will uh try to turn invisible and this can help you overcome them and so that's really important to have on some character in your party getting it for free with a light domain cleric is really nice for our cantrip selection we are going to want guidance of course you have to have one preferably two party members that have guidance in your um party especially on honor mode where you can't just save scum the the skill checks you definitely need the ability to add to your roles with guidance it's super important to have access to this I also do like having access to sacred flame although Shadow heart will have decent dexterity and will actually often want to make crossbow attacks rather than use sacred flame you should look at both against each enemy um it's still important to have this for enemies that take bonus damage from radiant damage or enemies with very high AC but that might have lower uh dexterity saves and you can use sacred flame against them and finally for the last pick I think there is a choice here between resistance and blade Ward personally I like blade Ward because you're still going to be even only in medium armor you're still going to be using Shadow heart as an off tank um doing a lot of melee combat and having access to Blade Ward though it's an inefficient action in combat you can pre-cast it before combat starts or you can use it if you need to like take an attack of opportunity and get away with Shadow heart um it's also a good way to keep yourself alive if you're just trying to run away you can cast this and uh and absorb one more Arrow on your way out of combat and something that's really important to keep in mind in honor mode is that you want the ability to leave combat very easily so for our skill selection there's nothing in particular that you need here from shadowart she can't get access to perception which would be the only important skill for a wisdom character to have so unfortunately you can't get that um so we really don't need to worry about her skill selection too much unless you are playing her as your origin character but this is for companion shadowart who probably won't be doing any dialogue anyways at character level two you get access to turn Undead and also Radiance of the Dawn um Radiance of the Dawn is a really nice one because it just is an ability to provide to uh do guaranteed damage enemies take half damage on a failed save and this is actually a quite solid damage option at low levels at higher levels obviously this will be um overshadowed by other stuff but at low levels 2d1 plus one damage is a lot of damage uh just very good um damage output at this point in the game so it's very much worth having access to this it also helps that it's radiant damage because later on if you get something that applies radiating orb this is going to be extremely useful to apply that but for now this is just a reasonable solid damage option um I'll talk about prepared spells when we finish leveling up and light domain also gets access to Flaming sphere at level three which is one of the best early game spells to have access to while it is concentration and thus conflicts with bless which is the other thing that clerics are mostly going to spend their time doing this is a great way to ensure safety and combat because enemies will often attack the Flaming sphere so it basically gives your whole party an extra hit uh hit bar hit point bar while also providing additional damage every round and you get decent damage from scorching Ray as well while being quite tanky because of your unlimited uses of warding flare 14 dexterity and medium armor for your prepared spell list at this point you want to have bless you want to have spiritual weapon and most of your combats are going to start with concentration on bless plus a bonus action spiritual weapon that will cause the enemies to have to Target the spiritual weapon or alternatively concentration on flaming sphere plus a bonus action spiritual weapon having multiple summons out is one of the best ways especially early game to prevent damage to your allies you always want healing word and I highly recommend having command as well this is uh an extremely powerful way to stop enemies from attacking or acting very important to pick that that up guiding bolt is very good and finally um you mostly don't need other level two options because Aid isn't really that good yet you you have better uses for your level two spell slots at this point later on you may upcast aid but for now I wouldn't worry about having Aid command is typically better than hold person because it only allows one save before the enemies skip a turn whereas hold person allows two though you could prepare hold person my opinion you should just prepare either whatever you need for that day something like lesser restoration is always good to have access to or you can just take Creator destroy water which has a lot of utility all right that's Shadow heart's build fixed let's go to aaran there I shall be here in my C spending my gold really quickly let's get into it so aaran starts as a rogue and you don't really need to make too many changes for for him of course his stat spread is poor so we need to optimize that but for the most part a lot of uh you know Rogues don't make other choices at level one so let's clear that stat spread and get it fixed up we're going to go with 16 Constitution to max out on hit points um Rogues are very single attribute dependent or sad which is a good thing um it's as I always say it's bad to be mad and it's rad to be sad uh they only need dexterity so you can get away with having very high Constitution making Rogues deceptively tanky because they're going to have very good AC from their High dexterity and pretty good hit points from having high constitution of course all of my builds are going to get 60 in Constitution because I think it's very important to have high hit points for your remaining stat points we're going to put 14 in wisdom just because it's the most important saving throw and then personally I like to have 12 in strength for the same reason uh mobility and repositioning is really important for Rogues you could even go to 14 strength if you really want the jump distance but because you have the bonus action Dash it's it's good enough I think to have 12 strength obviously getting up to high ground with a rogue and I'm going to suggest building aaran as an Archer here is really powerful um if you want more on this build you can refer to my very most recent build guide the best archer in Boulders Gate 3 um for a full build guide on what we're going to be doing with this build of course you need slight of hand and stealth expertise if your main character doesn't have access to the skills then assarian is going to be your go-to guy it's very important to have a character with stealth access on honor mode to scout ahead and also to run away um a rogue with cunning action Dash and stealth is one of your best options for getting out of bad combats you probably don't need him to have conversation skills so we can put those elsewhere but you you certainly can take them if you want him to do some conversing but we're going to suggest putting those elsewhere he also does come with perception Prof proficiency which is nice going to level up here at Rogue level two there's no other decisions to make and at Rogue level three the game suggests turning him into an Arcane trickster I'm going to suggest not doing that because of the three Rogue subclasses Arcane trickster is the weakest by a fairly wide margin at this level the best is going to be assassin and assassin is just the best by default especially for an Archer because you get to make two actions if you begin your combat with um with your Assassin Rogue again for more on that refer to the full build guide from two days ago um but Thief is also good if you have a specific build in mind for that Arcane trickster is significantly weaker than those other two for the best level three build we're just going to take assassin though action not reaction all right let's fix up lelle here lelle is one of the characters we need to make the fewest changes to she actually comes with one of the best builds by default [Music] in as a fighter you're going to want to select great weapon fighting unless you have a specific style of tanking in mind for her great weapon fighting is is going to be the best she also gets access later on to some gifts spe specific great swords which you do want to be able to make good use of cuz they're very powerful items so I suggest just taking great weapon fighting as well this will be one of the best ways to deal consistent damage in the early game relatively safely of course uh the asaran build I presented also does good damage but this way you can really mix it up in melee without having to worry about things of course we need to fix our stats though so but like I said she's the closest to an optimal stat spread by far all we have to do is sort it out so that she has numbers make sure that she has access to Athletics which she comes with by default and that's it you're done with Lal all right let's send them all home and we can fix will and confidence is an oops hang on have to actually level up LEL as well um of course you get action surge at level two fighter and then we have to select a subass luckily the game selection of subass is correct uh battl Master is going to be by far the best at this level especially um later on there are Arguments for taking eldrich Knight if you're going for a throwing build but Battlemaster is definitely the best default fighter class and is going to be the best for most builds that you end up going for for Maneuvers you're going to want to take trip attack which allows you to set up other melee allies to have Advantage as well as cause enemies to skip turns in some circumstances and uh if you action surge you can get advantage on your second attack with this very important Precision attack which is extremely important to guarantee that you land hits and if you watch my live stream with lelle you know that she has struggled with that um due to some bad dice rolling and then finally I will suggest taking repost this gives you while you won't trigger it uh all the time because your AC isn't at this point incredible um you this gives you a use for your reaction that isn't just an opportunity attack and it's really nice at this point in the game to have good uses for your reaction one thing that you'll notice is that of these builds two of them already have important uses for their reaction shatter hearts and lels cuz we're trying to maximize our use of actions something that I talk about a lot is that every character in combat uh every turn of combat you have access to five resources your action your bonus action your movement your concentration and your reaction and so optimal character builds try to make use of all five of those resources as much as possible um Fighters get great uses for their bonus actions by default and great uses for their actions because they're just hitting things so adding in a solid reaction means that we are already making use of many of our resources already starting at level three this build will also work very well with no magical gear whatsoever just blazel starting armor um because you're going to have pretty decent AC and you will hit very hard even with just a normal great sword all right now we're going to send them home mind shook you believe you say I I do believe I can survive without you because we are just in Camp forward skipping through this dialogue really quick dagg a happy friend oh darling I'm I it sounds and we'll grab will my I thought why infect and imprison him only to kill him all right well that is extremely buggy I'm sorry I don't know why it's doing that be aveng this is dialogue from act three I will try to cut that out um if I remember to that's uh hopefully we avoided some spoilers there but that's that's a very odd bug that it triggered an act three dialogue the basically the first time we've talked to uh will talented of course I all right let's go resp will a word if I may I shall be here in like as that was very funny all right so let's talk about Will's build here having gotten over the the spoilers that he tried to dump on us um will starts with okay stats although obviously we want to fix these and by default the game wants you to make him into a melee warlock you can certainly do this although at level three this won't be the strongest melee warlocks usually need to be paired with other classes in order to Excel and I did do a lore friendly will build guide which you can check out it's called the best melee warlock in Boulder Gate 3 and lore friendly will build guide just look up the lore friendly character Builds on my channel here if you want more about that one for our cantrip selection we obviously have to take eldrich Blast for will I don't actually think if you're not making him a melee warlock you don't need blade Ward if you are it's good because it pairs well with armor of agathys Blade Ward pairs very well with sources of temporary hit points um but I recommend that every party have access to Mage hand and minor illusions somewhere in it so here we're going to take minor illusion on will grouping enemies is really important for warlocks because you can then hit them with your AOE spells so that's a very useful one to have and of course you need eldr Blast for our subass selection this isn't a huge consideration but personally I think great old one is stronger than fiend if you feel like you need to have fiend for role playing reasons though by all means it's it's not significantly weaker but the fear on critical hits is very valuable especially at low levels it's free CC uh crowd control meaning that you are going to get this without having to spend any resources which is incredibly good um for our spell selection in order to maximize warlock damage you need to have hex that means that you're going to spend your bonus action casting hex and then your main action casting eldrich blast which by default is sort of the Baseline damage dealing number in the game uh if you ever are at a loss for how to determine if your character is doing good damage or bad damage compare it to a warlock casting eldrich blast with hex up if they're doing more damage than that then they're over the default damage and if they're doing less then they're doing weak damage and you probably need to rethink the build a little bit warlocks are kind of the Baseline for a solid damage dealer and then secondarily I like having armor of agius because this gives you temporary hit points can keep you alive and will be useful throughout the game obviously we have to fix our attributes as well will starts with 13 intelligence completely unnecessary completely useless to warlocks so we're going to dump that get ourselves up to 16 Constitution again to maintain concentration very important for warlocks as well as just have enough hit points 14 dexterity for initiative and armor class and 12 wisdom because it's the most important saving throw will can be your your party face pretty easily cuz he already is priced into taking persuasion so if you want him to do your conversation skills then just put these these into deception and intimidation you'll have great conversation skills if you want your main character to do the talking you can put these skills elsewhere but I'm going to assume that you just want to maximize his Charisma and maybe use him to do some of the conversation stuff and then we'll just put points in his conversation skills you know level him up here also just going to pause very briefly to drink some water sorry about that um as it happens when recording this video I have uh just recently tested positive for covid so if my voice sounds weird or if I'm coughing a little bit um then that why apologies for that we are going to take as our spell uh expeditious Retreat here because it's very important like I said to have access to ways out of combat in uh honor mode so having access to expeditious Retreat means that will can Dash very far out of combat without dying and then for your eldrich invocations you of course want agonizing blast which lets you add your charisma to your eldrich blast very important to do that and then um very important to get that damage bonus and then we'll take Devil's site because next level we're going to take Darkness one of the best defensive options in the game again very important to have this level of consistency when you're playing on honor mode because Darkness gives you 100% immunity to enemy ranged attacks you don't even ever have to roll a die and always on honor mode your enemy is Randomness so you really want to make sure that you are trying to void Randomness at level three we get access to uh a level two spell so we're going to take darkness and then we're going to replace a spell and the spell we're going to replace is exped expeditious Retreat and we'll replace that with Misti step which basically just does the same thing but better gives you a really great Mobility option lets you get in and out of combat or into unreachable locations really easily and of course um it being a higher level spell slot doesn't matter matter for warlocks because you always have access to your highest level spell slots every short rest for a packed Boon at this level it actually doesn't matter that much so if you want to build will into a Melee character you could take pack to the blade the most powerful at level three is pack to the chain The Familiar can be used for scouting very easily and is very good for that pack to the toome also gives you access to a second character with guidance which I like a lot and later on will give you access to better spells personally I think that the best option here is pack to the toome going on into the late game but if you just want to maximize your power at level three and then Respec later pack to the chain is the is the best um the quasit can turn invisible meaning that you can use it to scout locations very very safely um and also it can provide Advantage for aarian or a threat threatened Square for aaran sneak attack stuff like that very important to to get that as well um so pack to the chain is the most powerful at this level pack to the toome I think is the best pick going into the late game unless you want to build melee in which case it's packed at the blade warlocks luckily have all three packs be extremely viable so which you pick here is less important than obviously still important but there's no trap Choice here all of these are very good um unlike some of the other character classes and finally we're going to level Gail here n let me actually cancel out of this cuz we need to Respec him and get his stats fixedly with silver tongue I shall be here in like as I should mention also cuz I I mentioned that I got covid I'm fine I'm like already recovering do not worry or anything um but you know everyone take precautions be safe out there uh for Gail we want to have a solid cantrip selection that gives us access to the other of minor illusion or Mage hand that we didn't get on our other companion um to make sure that we have access to both of these spells it's very important to have access to both of these so we're going to take Mage hand Firebolt is the best damaging canant trip and you usually only need one of these damaging canant trips so I don't mind just taking the other of minor illusion or Mage hand um or I could take true strike just to annoy everyone if if you feel like you are going to need a second damage type the second best can trip here is Ray of frost personally I would take um just minor illusion but both of those any of those third picks are going to be good for you excuse me the most important spells to have access to of course are going to be Shield you don't need Mage Armor cuz Gail's already proficient in light armor for being a human so Mage Armor just doesn't matter you need magic Missile you need fog Cloud which you can once they fix the bug use similarly to Darkness to prevent enemies from attacking you currently it's bugged and they will just attack you in it so be aware of that but hopefully they fix that soon I also really like having access to Long Strider somewhere in the party it's very important to get this because it's a ritual spell does not require a um a spell slot to cast and just increases your whole party's movement speed by by 10 ft and Ice knife is very good because it lays down an ice surface if enemies walk on an ice surface and slip and fall then they lose their whole turn and similarly grease can do the same thing but with a bigger ice surface which is uh even more powerful sometimes so I quite like having grease as well though the existence of ice knife makes grease a little redundant I still think it's pretty nice to have the these Spells Of course are also going to depend a little bit on what Scrolls you've found up to this point uh since gaale can learn spells from Scrolls you should pick your spell selection based on what you don't have never take a spell on level up that you have a scroll for you could just learn it from the scroll instead for our attribute split we're going to go with another very standard stat spread we're going to take 16 intelligence 16 Constitution 12 wisdom and 14 dexterity this gives you the best saving throws as well as the best initiative both of which are very important and AC very important to wizards and of course makes you more resilient to not failing Constitution saves which are important to maintain concentration on your spells for our skill selection there's nothing in particular that Gail needs um investigation of course like he has Proficiency in intelligence skills which you might as well just max out though typically these skill checks are made in combat so or in conversation not in combat so you won't unless he's also doing a lot of talking be able to make use of the these skills but for the times when they're made outside of combat on outside of conversation not sure why I keep saying that uh then you'll at least have them on him all right let's level up and here we're going to have to make the most important decision that we'll make for Gail which of course is what subass is going to be the game suggests that you make him an evocation Wizard and I'm going to suggest that you don't do that the reason is that evocation wizard mostly gets the ability to prevent allies from taking damage from your evocation spells but there's two reasons why I think this is weaker than some of the other wizard options one is that damage spells are simply not the best spells that Wizards have access to while Wizards do get some good damaging effects they are not going to be your highest damaging class and they are much more sorted suited to using their versatile and Powerful Spell access for control and Buffs things like fear hypnotic pattern and haste even with the Nerf on H mode are going to be the most important things that your wizard does none of which are evocation spells and for the times when you do just want to Chuck a fireball at something you can just not put your ally in the fireball you don't you don't have to move your ally into the fireball so evocation wizard even if it is doing the thing that it's doing often times you can get around it just by um good positioning of units which you should strive to do rather than get lazy with evocation Wizards there are certainly some advantages to this but I think they are outweighed especially on honor mode by the more powerful sub classes and I'm going to suggest you choose one of the two of the most powerful sub classes in my opinion one of these is abjuration which lets you build up Arcane Ward for more on this see my video the Invincible tank wizard um because this is going to be one of the best late game options for your Wizard and also gives you a lot of extra survivability early game and the other option and the one that I'm going to suggest taking for most parties especially if you don't like the idea of your wizard being your main tank which you know aesthetically that's a little weird uh is to take divination wizard because this gives you access to the portent ability one of the best abilities in the game this gives you guaranteed die rolls and you can substitute the die roll that you make with your portent roll for any roll of a D20 that you see basically Ally or enemy what this means is that you have in your back pocket at any time a guarant gued saving throw success a guaranteed saving throw failure for an enemy a guaranteed critical if you roll a 20 on your portent Randomness is the enemy of Iron Man runs especially but also just of solid tactical play the more you can reduce Randomness the more consistent and safer your run will be and divination Wizards are the the absolute monarchs of reducing Randomness in your play having access to Port means you are just much safer and much much less likely to get randomly uh destroyed by A Series of Unfortunate Events for our spell selection we're going to continue to fill holes here basically based on whatever spells we haven't found uh Scrolls for important ones to consider maybe our expeditious Retreat I talked about this under um the Warlock section but still good here feather fall gives you a lot of options enhanced leap gives you a lot of options find familiar is weaker than the pack of the chain familiar but still useful another one that I really like to have access to is protection from evil and good which gives you a ton of ability to avoid uh certain Encounters in the game it just completely solves at least one encounter and there's a couple others that it's very good for so just making sure you have this somewhere in your back pocket is very important I think and finally at wizard level three again you're going to want access to um the best wizard spells the the most important ones to have access to at this level are flaming sphere and Misty step again misy step is so important for Honor mode play uh just really really critical for every character that can get access to this to get access to this because it's going to keep your party alive and let you just get out of really bad situations much more easily other good spells to consider include scorching Ray web is also decent although worse in Boulders gate than it is in tabletop invisibility has tons of uses hold person is very good although you will often because this is duplicated with Shadow Hearts command and warlock uh spells You may wish to not take hold person here um in my opinion you're going to want to have flaming sphere and Misty step up for most combats but again this is going to be dictated in some in part at least by what Scrolls you have found also very good to have access to is cloud of daggers cuz it doesn't allow a save and just deals guaranteed damage which can be very important in certain combats all right that is our look at fixing every origin character's build uh well not every origin character but starting at this level when you get access to resps I suggest that these are the resps that you make in order to make your honor mode playthrough or tacti or below playthrough as smooth as possible as always my friends I hope that you have enjoyed this video uh do let me know if you liked this format and want to see more of it this kind of thing um I will also probably bring you like boss fights from this play through as I continue on it and if you want to watch the whole playthrough up to this point I did live stream it I do not guarantee live streaming the rest of it um all in order but currently everything that is part of this playthrough is available on on the channel right here all right my friends hope that you've enjoyed this video and of course if you have do please take the time to leave a comment uh like the video both of those help a ton with the algorithm and you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content take care of each other be well and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 89,041

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

Id: spydm4O7nGQ

Length: 37min 9sec (2229 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023