Four Powerful Early-Game Builds for Baldur's Gate 3

high level builds are a ton of fun in Baldur's Gate 3 but it's a long road to get to the gate in the first place and the First Act of the game can be considered one of the hardest parts of the game in fact while your builds are still coming online with the ability to respect your characters at any point the build options are endless but there are a few builds that Monty and I stuck with through the entire game so here are four builds that you can start with and use all the way through Baldur's Gate 3. my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelly McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes and today we're sharing four early game builds that you can start with right away at level one two three involvers Gate 3 and take all the way to the end of the game there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling before we get to the builds this week's episode of our show is sponsored by Amaria a new 5th edition compatible campaign setting that is now live on Kickstarter Amaria introduces four pillars of power in their world that you get to choose which one you're going to connect to or stand up for they are mana chronomancy psionics and anti-magic which you can wield with over 20 new subclasses at least two for every core class in fifth edition Legacy of Mana also introduces three new classes the sage the renik Knight and the psionist as well it includes brand new Feats spells and magic items the campaign setting the module book and the amazing dice by dispel dice are available in both fantasy and Anime variants and some amazingly talented contributors have worked on this project including Elsa Teague Ed Greenwood Keith Baker and Damian Haas these are some of our favorite writers working in role-playing games so this is sure to be an amazing setting in book so follow the links down in the description description below to back the kickstarter today and now let's get to the builds so these builds are going to work for your main character or your companions we're going to suggest which companions they work particularly well for as well we're also going to go over three to four magic items that you can find early in act 1 that are really really powerful for that particular build note for those who are still in act 1 of baltus K3 when we talk about the magic items we are going to be saying where they are located so if you do want to avoid those spoilers we will have spoilers at the bottom of the screen to let you know when that section is up so with that let's kick things off with our first build which is a cleric build you find Shadow heart as the first companion and this is a great way to spec her even if it's not entirely lore friendly at the start of the game shadowheart is one of the first companions you gain and honestly I only respect her once and never looked back and she's just been a cleric the entire time which actually makes it sound like it's reasonable if you're playing playing a cleric as well to follow the same build and although shadowheart presents herself as a trickery domain cleric and that is in line with her whole lore both Monty and I respect her as a light domain cleric this allowed you to bring some of those key Blaster spells into the game as well as the beautiful reaction ability to impose disadvantage on an attack which in Boulder Skate 3 comes up so much and is endlessly you can use it endlessly meaning that almost every time an enemy was attacking me it would pop up on screen and say hey do you want to give them disadvantage the answer is always yes the light domain also has Radiance of the Dawn as its Channel Divinity power this power is a huge AOE effect that does a great amount of damage especially for dealing with low level enemies like goblins that you face a lot early on in your adventures when you respect Shadow heart or spec your cleric you're going to want to put a 14 in dexterity a 16 in Constitution solution using a plus one and you putting a 16 in wisdom that starts at a 14 you put the plus two in in there the the reason why we don't max out wisdom right away with the ability scores is because we're going to be just putting our plus twos in there as we level up with this character at level four and level eight and so we don't really benefit from having the odd ability score to bump up as soon as possible on top of those really great abilities that shadowheart gets there's also the other phenomenal cleric spells such as Spirit Guardians and spiritual weapon spiritual weapon doesn't do that much damage but I have noticed more often than not when I drop a spiritual weapon into the game a lot of enemies spend their whole turns attacking it which just means that my party isn't getting attacked and spirit Guardians does damage whenever something enters the area which includes if you move towards the enemy so I love just dropping Spirit Guardians on shadowhard and having a run around the battlefield field and everybody's getting damaged not to mention the light domain cleric gets things like Fireball and burning hands which made it feel really not essential to have a wizard in my party because most of the big damage spells were already on Shadow heart before you get to level five and get Spirit Guardians your bread and butter is usually going to be just casting bless on your allies and dropping that spiritual weapon and then bringing in whatever else you need from there I miss with sacred flame all the time so I often just default to guiding both instead but you can also bring in other spells like enhance ability as well as the ubiquitous guidance so that you can Ace all those ability checks really having a cleric in your party to cast guidance for every single ability check that comes up in the game is so valuable and it's really hard to ignore the how much it comes up time and time and time again when you're playing through the game as a last note on running a cleric in Baldur's K3 I will say that in an earlier Baldur's cave video we mentioned that healing isn't that great and it's not great in tabletop and it's not great here I actually do think that healing has more of a place in Baldur's Gate 3 than it does at the table at the table there's not really a lot of penalties to just be like okay I'm casting a healing word on the person who's down and they're back up but in Baldur's Gate 3 when you're doing this turn-based combat it can actually be really detrimental to have a character go down you raise them back up and they actually lose their action for that turn so although healing still isn't the greatest thing having a Healer in your party who can actually see somebody who's at like three hit points and say I'm gonna boost them back up so they can survive another round it might be the last round you need to win that combat and I've done that more than a few times in balder skate 3. it's absolutely worth bringing healing word and mass healing word and that also gets more important as we talk about the items that you can equip this character with so a couple spoilers here the first two items that you can get that are really amazing for this character actually are going to be buffing healing word and mass healing word in a really big way the first magic item that you should give to Shadow heart or yourself as a cleric is the whispering promise ring it's available at several different merchants in act one and what the ring does is that whenever you cast a healing spell as the character wearing the ring you also cast bless on them at the same time so they get the benefits of bless as well as being healed the bless is concentration free it does only last two turns but if you're pumping out a bit of healing during combat you don't have to concentrate on the bless spell because you already have less going while you're healing your party the other item that you can pair this with is a little bit tricky to find it's called The Hell Riders pride and it's a pair of gloves that you can get from zevolor if you remove kaga as the leader of The Druids there is a way to do this without killing The Druids that involves exposing kaga as a shadow Druid otherwise you can get the gloves if you kill her for zevlor the hellwriters pry gloves like the whispering promise ring add an extra effect when you heal a Target in this case the effect is resistance to bludgeoning piercing and slashing damage for one round and so these stack so you can healing word and Ally giving them two rounds of blast and resistance to bludgeoning piercing piercing and slashing damage and just send them right on into battle and if you use Mass healing word it's going to apply to everybody that you heal which is essentially your whole party so by the time you're later in the game you can be blessing and giving those damage resistances to your whole party just by simply bumping up their hit points and in fact I found this effect so powerful that in the later games I would cast Mass healing word as a bonus action which you can do at the same time as you're launching Spirit Guardians even when my entire party was at full hit points because resisting the damage before it happened and blessing the party was more valuable for my third level spell slot than actually the amount of hit points that masculine word restores the last item for your cleric or Shadow heart is the Luminous armor which is found in the saloonite Outpost in act one this armor works with radiant damage which if you're playing a cleric you're going to be doing a lot of your spirit Guardians your channel Divinity your guiding bolt there's a lot of ways that you're going to be dishing out radiant damage I even gave Shadow heart a mace that does additional radiant damage she rarely uses it but if she does get in a situation where she's going to Bonk somebody at least it's doing radiant damage and what this armor set does is anything that's hit with radiant damage it creates a burst of additional radiant damage and causes that creature to Glow it creates an orb above them for every stack of this radiant orb that they have they get a minus one penalty to their attack rolls so not only are you causing them to glow and be visible and stand out more on the battlefield which I find helpful but their ability to hit you just goes down and when you combine all of those two items together it's a huge swing you can basically charge into a group with enemies with Shadow heart putting up Spirit Guardians stacking up this radiant orb giving them a massive attack penalty and then Mass healing word all your allies to give them a plus D4 to their attack rolls and saving throws and resistance to damage and Shadow heart will just clean up with this an honorable mention on the note of the mace there is a legendary mace the blood of lathander that you can find at the end of act one in the githyanki crash if you give this mace to Shadow heart with the armor and all this this build you will just be able to face roll through act two the next build that we want to talk about is going to be our Rogue or Ranger build depending on how you go but we're going to talk about kind of combining those two and for me this was my asterian build it's a good build for your PC as well because you can build this character to fill a lot of different roles in dialogue too whether you're using a styrion to stick with as a rogue or if you're gonna change them into a ranger or if you yourself are playing a Ranger a rogue the main idea here is that you want to be dual wielding hand crossbows one of the things you can do in Baldur's Gate 3 is there's not really any loading property for hand crossbows so there's no limitations on dual wielding them and getting in your extra shots this also helps because there are a lot of ways that you can get magic hand crossbows and depending on your build if you're the ranger or the Rogue there are ways to get additional shots out of those crossbows as well well this is going to be even more effective when we combine it with the Sharpshooter feet which lets you take a minus five penalty on the attack roll to get a plus 10 to the damage and with a couple key pickups we can compensate for that penalty maybe having Shadow heart cast bless on us first with your ability scores regardless of whether you're going Ranger or Rogue you're going to want to make your dexterity score 16 and probably your Constitution score at 16 as well by either putting a 14 index giving it a plus two 15 in con giving that another plus one and then you can kind of put your other stat points wherever else you want to from there I went with for a Starion you can just give him a good wisdom score but if it's your main character you might want to put the remaining points in Charisma and take some of the charisma-based skills to be the party face using the expertise from Rogue to boost that up further because this character is going to also be who we take slate of hand with to open locks and pickpockets the the key subclass choices here are that if you're going Ranger you want to take gloomstalker gloomstalker gets an extra attack on the first round of combat and that means that you get three shots with your crossbow in the first round of combat much more of an opportunity to get in a sneak attack and to take out one or two enemies before combat's even really gotten going but as a thief Rogue you get a full-on extra bonus action starting at level three which means that this character can actually make three hand crossbow shots per turn every turn so the thief Rogue actually comes out on top in our books at third level but you might want to be respecting between the two classes going forward because level five the gloomstalker gets the full-on extra attack so both these characters have kind of that extra damage the gloomstalker also brings things like Hunter's Mark longstrider and speak with animals as part of their Ranger spells so there's a bit of a trade-off there but they're both so good why not combine them and this this does take you to the end of act one and early into act two but the idea here is that if you can combine these two elements together especially if you can get to fifth level Gloom stalker with three levels of thief Rogue which is now probably into the start of act two so all of these act two but even if your four levels of gloomstalker and three levels of Rogue or however you want to mix and match it the idea here is that if you carry on as a Gloom stalker Thief Rogue you're going to end up with a whole bunch of attacks as a rogue with Sharpshooter dual wielding crossbows because if you have your extra attack from gloomstalker and you have the additional bonus action as a thief Rogue it means that you are now making four attacks per round with the first round of combat giving you a fifth and this is in addition to all the great skill expertises the really useful Ranger spells and being able to have a source of invisibility for yourself the gloomstocker ranger also gets Misty step and disguise self which are Super useful spells all through the game for positioning it really comes online early it stays really good and there's some really solid items that you can use to equip this character we talked about how you want to get two hand crossbows for this character and if you're lucky you can buy them both from Damon in the camp of The Druids right away when you get there I was lucky enough on my second playthrough that Damon had a magic one and a mundane one and I was able to buy them both right away and at that point you're kind of set up once you arrive in Grim Forge you're going to find the fire stoker hand crossbow which does additional damage to burning enemies eventually in the game more in Act 2 you can actually get a hand crossbow that sets Targets on fire so combining those two setting them on fire and then extra damage to the Target that's on fire is really great but early on you can find some other pretty simple magic crossbows that worked really well the other item that is amazing for this character is the caustic band which you can get from the mica nid colony in the underdark of Act One the caustic band is really simple it adds two acid damage to all your weapon attacks but when you're making four or five attacks that's an extra 10 damage upwards of it really adds up pretty quick and it's a great easy pickup for this for this build in the guess Yankee crash you can also buy gloves of dexterity which increase your dexterity to 18 and give you plus one to your attack rolls this is great because with this build you're probably only going to get one feet and you're going to want Sharpshooter with that so you don't really get the opportunity to up your dexterity but these gloves take care of that for you you can even dump your dexterity to eight if you're gonna cheese it and put those ability score points somewhere else that's that's what I ended up doing I put the gloves on and then just respect my character to dump dexterity it's great because it's like you get a minus one but a plus four so it it ends up evening out yeah we got some support and an amazing damage dealer as well but we probably need a little bit of a Bruiser on the front lines and this is where I think karlak can really shine as a full-on barbarian we both love carlak she's awesome great personality and I love having another party because she's got some of the best quips as well she's just phenomenal she's it's a shame because I think that she has the the least payoff story-wise but she's one of the best written characters in the game um but carlock's amazing and having a barbarian is great I went with the Wild Heart Barbarian I went with the Berserker Barbarian so Monty and I actually both have separate builds for Carlock and I think both are incredible I I personally think that Carlock although you can stick with Barbarian towards the end of act one I gave her two levels of fighter because then she gets action surge which I think just helps booster up a bit and I I think did a really good um gave her a lot in terms of being able to dish out a lot of damage in the first few rounds of combat if I am swarmed by enemies she can take out four in a single turn yeah um I on the other hand went with the Berserker because I wanted to have that frenzied throw power because with my car lock build we're gonna do a bit of a throwing character and this is where we have to talk about the items first because the items are what make this build work with Carlock we're going to max out our strength we want that 17 right away so we're going to put 15 plus 2 15 in Constitution plus 2 and a 14 in dexterity whatever else we put our other ability scores at doesn't matter her skills don't matter but what we're going to do is at level four we're going to take Tavern brawler as the feet this is going to bump our strength to 18 and it's also going to add twice our strength modifier to the attack and damage rolls of Throne weapons now you might be willing to throw your entire inventory at your enemies or throw your enemies at your enemies but you don't have to because in Act One the vendor in the goblin Camp sells a returning Pike that comes back to you every time you throw it and it's a magic weapon that does d10 damage base we can combine this with a ring you can buy the Ring of flinging from The Druids in act one and a pair of gloves that you can also get from a quest in the mykinon colony that added that both the ring and the gloves add another D4 to your throne weapon damage so in total you have a weapon that does it's ridic like when you throw this bike it just one shots whoever gets hit by it and then it comes back and you do it again with your extra attack and you do it one more time with your frenzied throw for myself I want a little bit of a different direction with Carlock but I think both of our builds are addressing the same problem one of the biggest problems with a Melee character in Baldur's Gate 3 is their maneuverability a lot of combat encounters involve enemies in hard to reach areas spread out pretty far a lot of ranged combat from your enemies and so you end up wasting a lot of time trying to get your melee combatants up to an enemy just to have them kill it in one hit and then have to spend their next action dashing to the next enemy so Monty solved that by throwing his Pike across the battlefield at his enemies I solve that in a different way when I was leveling up Carlock I gave her two levels of fighter the rest of the way Barbarian she also picked up great weapon master and polar master and I gave her there's a lot of magical glaves in the game and magical hellbirds and magical just great weapons that are that are awesome and beyond that though the most important things I gave her were boots of speed the boots of speed are available in the micanid colony and just allow you to Dash as a bonus action and because karlak most of the time doesn't have anything to do with her bonus action because of great weapon Master when she's in the thick of it she sometimes is able to kill an enemy and get that bonus action to hit another enemy which is great but when she's not in combat the bonus action being used to just Dash can get her into combat a lot faster I actually find that I have almost no issue clearing an entire Battlefield in one round and then still being able to dish out my multi-attack also from a vendor in the mica and colony is the Amulet of Misty step which I also gave to Carlock because sometimes running isn't going to cut it and you have a group of enemies that are up on a ledge or somewhere that's hard to get to and again Carla can Misty step and then continue to run after that so really I with those two items giving her a magic glaive and giving her the two levels of fighter she can get into combat no problem and then dish out sometimes three to five attacks if I want to use action search and she can clear a battlefield pretty quickly a great two-handed weapon to get for Carlock early in the game which will carry you through early on really really well is the everburn blade and that comes from the tiefling boss that's on the nautiloid and you don't actually have to kill him to get it instead if you get if you rescue Shadow heart from her pod and prepare the command spell you can use it on the tiefling Commander to force him to drop the blade and then have someone run by and pick it up and so if you you get two chances to get him to drop it because shadowheart has two spell slots and it's about a 55 chance for him to fail to save so it's a good odds or better odds if your saves coming uh to get this The Sword and uh it does an extra D4 burning damage it's a great two-handed weapon for the early part of the game to give to Carlock and it just slaps I will also say that it is possible I tested this myself it is possible to kill the tiefling before the reinforcements show up it's it's tough but the tiefling actually will only attack the Mind flare so they'll keep duking it out and the mind flare will ignore you the tiefling will ignore you and I got all three of my party members kind of so I had lizelle myself and Shadow heart and they grouped up around the tiefling and all just kept picking away at him and just as he died made two more of these tieflings showed up and I just grabbed the blade and b-lined past the other enemies to to grab the chord and end the combat encounter but I managed to get the blade so the last build is the build that took me through the entire game on my first playthrough and is so good I'm playing it again on my second with dark urge and this is the sore lock build but you're going to want to start out just as a plain old Warlock and take Eldritch blast take hex and take agonizing blast and repelling blast and have a blast blasting your enemies off cliffs with Elders blasting act one has so many Cliffs and if you have will in your party will can fill this role or if you want to play a warlock or Heck if both of you want to be warlocks there's nothing wrong with extra blasting power that knocks people around the fact that there are so many cliffs in the game and Elders blasting enemies off of them just kind of ends combat encounters early in act one I fought a hag and it was I think supposed to be a much tougher battle but I blasted her into the pen in the middle of the room yeah but unfortunately that means that you didn't get to bargain with her for the plus one ability score hair I did not because I blasted her into a pet and that was the end of it so this is one of the key things to not do because uh you can if you spare the hag you can get an item that you can bargain with her and get plus one to one of your ability scores which is great for this character specifically because you can do 17 Charisma and get the plus one and then with all the multi-classing you're going to do with them it's going to be a little bit later before you get a feed so I quite quite like bargaining with them maybe don't blast the hag into a pit but you can and that's what's important [Laughter] do you think that like when we get into actually adding the sorcerer on top of the Warlock this just gives you access to metamagic more spell slots so you can actually drop great concentration spells blast your enemies into those concentration spells as well as off of cliffs and it's it's just a great build the Warlock really comes out as a powerful contender in this game and if you just stick with a warlock through all of act one it's probably worthwhile but two levels of warlock is kind of all you need because as long as you have Eldritch blast it automatically scales at level 5 and 10 to get its extra beans and so I start off with just those two levels of warlock my Charisma 17 my Constitution is 16. my dexterity is 14 and I take those first two levels which having your first two levels is warlock really helps just get you through those first two levels then at level three you want to take your level of sorcerer but what's important here is that you actually want to re spec your character so your first level is Sorcerer And then you have two levels of Warlock the reason for this being is that Sorcerers get Proficiency in constitution-saving throws so doing this gets you that I went with a dragon sorcerer as well which gives you the extra hit points and the AC boost and if you play a half elf or a human you also get Proficiency in Shields which means that you can have ac-17 as a third level sorcerer warlock which is pretty good to get you through the early game as well you're not that squishy with with this build either and then from there you're just going to go you're just gonna be happy with your two warlock levels and go sorcerer the rest of the way picking up twin spell quick and spell and whatever other magic meta magic excites you along the way and pretty much if all you do with this character is cast Eldridge blast and twin haste on yourself and hysterian uh you're probably gonna face role most most fights in the game there's a lot of magic items that you might want to give to this character and uh where do we start so it takes a little while for the magic items to really come online for this character and it relies on a couple specific interactions if you choose the lightning based draconic ancestries you get to add your charisma modifier to lightning based Elemental damage but Elders blast does force damage however there's a staff that you can get in act one from joaquin's rest from rescuing the counselor from the fire called the spell sparkler and it causes when you cat deal damage with spells you gain lightning charges and when you have lightning charges you get a plus one to hit and your attack steal an extra one lightning damage well it turns out that this extra one lightning damage gets the full Charisma bonus from the the dragon sorcerer lightning and then it applies to every beam of Elders blast and then there's a necklace called the necklace of Elemental augmentation that you can get from the gith Yankee crash that also adds another your your spell casting ability modifier to your lightning damage and so you can end up with a situation with your elders blasts are getting this extra one lightning damage added to them that is now letting you add your charisma modifier to it again and again and again right so then if it's plus five so then it is plus 16 on top of your outage glass it what I'll say is it's actually really weird how Baldur's Gate 3 is calculating this extra damage and all I can say is that it it feels like the Eldritch blast is just like I've easily done a hundred damage with a single casting of Eldridge blast at higher levels in the mid in the mid levels it's it's a little bit less so I feel like the spell sparkler and the necklace of Elemental augmentation are kind of the first two kind of Flagship items that I found really boosted the damage this character did and so for the most part I was just using like Scrolls and and other stuff to to get some extra spells to use and whatever I can find through the rest of the ACT between these four builds Monty and I did a different variation on these for each of our playthroughs but it was funny that when we came together we essentially came up with the same four four Concepts and I think that that says a lot about uh how useful they are in Bulger Skate 3 and they come online really early and these are ones that you can ride out through the entire game and unfortunately I'm really sorry Gail but you kind of become obsolete with all of these options on the table yeah yeah Gail spent most of both my playthroughs waiting in Camp yeah sorry man yeah you seem like a nice guy but I just don't know much about your other thing yeah your brief plot lines that you forced on me yeah um and of course there's some higher level builds that you can do by you know doing a paladin warlock I find that that takes a little while to come online there's a couple variants that you can do for the gloomstalker thief hand crossbow build that involve barred levels as well but that's also a much more higher level build too but these four really felt like builds that you could kind of start with and play through the entire game with I do think that there is room and let us know if you want this uh but we would look at taking these builds into the higher level and what we might do in a multi-class maybe a third level or like a third subclass or class in there and uh just see what high level end game builds we might be able to make we included discussion of the magic items that you can find for these builds in this video so let us know if you enjoyed that part of the video as well and we'll continue to give lists of recommended items and where you can find them for the various builds in Baldur's Gate 3. we don't normally do item recommendations for our builds in d d because there's no way to control for that with your dungeon master but in bald Skate 3 where you can always find the same items in the same place it's pretty easy to talk about them in the context of our builds and in many cases the itemization in Baldur's Gate 3 makes certain builds possible so we think it's an important thing to talk about but let us know how you feel about that in the comments below we're really enjoying bulger's K3 and we hope to cover more content so if you like our build ideas or us talking about the items tell us what some of your favorite subjects are that you want us to go into more detail on in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the content that we create and want to see more of it please consider becoming a patron of our show it really helps us make these videos possible and if you want to support us make sure to hit the super thanks button down below also if you want to check us out playing Dungeons and Dragons you can check us out in the world of drachenheim which is Tuesday evenings on Twitch you can find all the previous episodes of that right up over here we got plenty more videos about get three and DND right up over here please subscribe to our Channel like this video and ring that Bell so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 66,762

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: sgfw59DH9m4

Length: 32min 52sec (1972 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2023