Invincible Wizard Tank a Breath of Fresh Air! - The Gas Cloud Abjuration Wizard - Baldur's Gate 3

hello and welcome today we will be talking about one of my favorite new builds that I've already beaten the game on tactician and honor mode with the gas cloud wizard now uh this is a build that is 10 abjuration wizard one white dragon sorcerer and one monk seems quite straightforward and for anyone who knows there are two main things people like to use when you're an duration wizard now their main mechanic is Arcane Ward your Arcane Ward blocks damage equal to its charges so in this instance 12 turns remaining does 12 charges and then loses one charge so anytime you take damage you'll reduce it by 12 then you'll have 11 left next one you'll take 11 less and then you'll reduce it to 10 so on and so forth casting abjuration spells will add to this so that's why abjuration can keep this up pretty high there's other things that add to it but we won't worry about that right now the other another important spell is called armor of agius you gain five temporary hit points per level of the spell you cast I cast as level six so it's 30 temporary hit points and if they hit you it does five times the level so it does 30 cold damage now the way this works is as you'll see I'll move somewhere I'll move away they will try to attack of opportunity me and they'll hit themselves in that instance for 42 damage and if you notice it's cold damage so what what happens when I put a water bottle down punch the bottle and fly away one missed but the other one took 80 you might not think I have another attack but look at this I do well we'll get into that later don't forget it's on the exam after a slight pause you fly away again another Miss but then another hit so already in total we got 88 then 80 and then the one that was up here for 42 it's 200 damage can I get one more no I be ready for the next turn all right so now how do we get there and why is it so effective you might have noticed I was taking zero damage now the reason this is so important because with the Arcane Ward up you take zero damage from attacks if they don't do enough damage to bypass the amount it does it has remaining so in that instance I had 12 charges left their opportunity attacks were doing less than 12 damage to me so they were doing zero means it removes Zero from my temporary hit points of armor of agathys but it still hits them for the entire armor of agius damage now I was also using fire Shield chill but we'll get into that later now at low level it's a pretty simple build If I level four wizard you are going to take an ASI in to add to con and int this will be at 17 at 15 and 16 at the start but then you get to 18 and 16 con is more important in this build than int is or than Dex is they're both nice but con is the real important guy you're already a tanky wizard it gives you not only more HP but concentration saves all concentration saves are con based and because of that you need to have a good con we'll get more into that later now for items early game I didn't really have any good gloves so I wor gloves of archery in case I wanted to take a range attack with my bow get the spell sparkler a great staff early game adds lightning charges on hit damage with spells the absolutes warboard plus one to all saving throws and gives you use of heroism ring of protection standard good Crushers ring plus 10 to movement also just standard good now the next couple are actually good for what the build does now infernal robe this robe is harder to get now because you cannot do the glitch with carlac like you used to be able to but instead if you don't want to kill carlac to get this you can get instead the protecte Sparks wall also a great robe also plus one AC also an act one the reason though this one in particular is good is because early game it gives you fire Shield warm which is not as good for this build his fire Shield chill but it's a bonus action to use it and it's basically free and so this is really nice to put on early so when they do hit you they they're already taking damage but at these levels you have a pretty pitiful Arcane Ward because only Mage Armor is really adding to it you could take Arcane lock at level two spells but Arcane lock is not a very good spell beyond that don't worry about making your Arcane Ward Max at these levels instead just play yourself kind of like a normal wizard put down things like clouds of daggers use magic Missile and otherwise just be kind of tanky as you see here I went for 17 AC already and this is level four um now I want to mention absolutes Talisman this is great because it has Aid on it Aid as you see here is an abjuration spell so actually it does also add charges and then this item the lifebringer is great because we already have the staff that adds lightning charges so this just gives you temporary hit points which is just another way to be a little tankier in these early situations now since level four is not too exciting we'll move straight on to six um and at six is when you actually start doing what the build is about you become the gas cloud wizard now you get access to armor of agathys here by taking one level of white dragon sorcerer this is how you get the armor of agathys you can cast it the highest level and you'll give you 15 temporary hit points now 15 isn't a lot but at level six I mean I only have 51 HP so 15 more means I have a 66 total HP more than anyone in my party as a wizard too full Caster now besides this I said the other thing is important is we get gas cloud because at level five wizard we get access to level three spells we'll talk about that in a moment but first I want to go over one thing I usually don't like to Respec in the middle of builds but to be optimal with this build at at level six you want to resp so that sorcerer comes first because this will make it so that you have Proficiency in Constitution saves as you see my con save is much bigger than it was earlier and again very important for this build now if you don't like to Respec you don't have to do that or you could start at level one as a sorcerer and just come all the way up here either way it'll be fine but you have to make your choice now also when I respect this time I kept it as the ASI but if you had hag hair here you would actually want to resp to Tavern brawler instead of ASI because you would still have 16 int with the putting the hag hair into int and Tavern brawler will take your con to 18 and Tavern brawler will be important in the build later so you either have to do it now or later now back to what we're talking about for the level six itself get gashes form the reason gashes form is so important in this build is is a twofold it doesn't seem super power powerful especially when you read it here it just says it can't you know fit through this it but it says it's very hard to damage now it doesn't tell you right there but what that means is that it gets resistance to all damage when you're a gas cloud and what it also gets is you have advantage on Constitution dexterity and strength saving throws now two of those are nice but the real important one is it gives you advantage on Constitution saving throws this is a concentration spell so when I cast this on myself I am now concentrating on it I do not want my concentration to break because then I lose the nice resistance that I have look at these they they'd all be gone and with the Arcane Ward the Arcane Ward reduction applies after your resistance so with only five charges they need to do 11 damage to do one damage to me you see how it starts to add up and now we look let's look at the rest of the gear now that we're a gas cloud you we you see we can punch but it only does one damage so that's not too great hint hint um gear wise not much has changed in these this department I have to dismiss it to show you the rest but um we did get an upgrade to boots disintegrating night Walkers these um are just a great boot make you hard toh slip around make you have Misty step once per I think it's long rest but let's check no once per short rest great boots and then there's a daredevil gloves at low levels there's not a lot of wizardy gloves but this one gives plus one bonus to spell attack rolls and then you can also make uh range spell attacks in Meely now when you're not in the gas cloud form at these levels you want to be mostly using Glyph of warding as your AOE nuke because this will add to your Arcane Ward charges but then if you already have High charges you can just Spam scorching Ray that's why I keep on the spell sparkler because I usually I usually use magic Missile and scorching Ray at low levels but the by here like I said you usually want to keep your gaseous form going save your level three slots for that and then you'll be you'll be doing 15 damage to them every time they try to hit you and that's every time you fly away from them as you saw before when I was doing it in the original part the one of the M Main benefits is you can actually move away from enemies without spending movement and get provoked attack of opportunities usually you'd have to you know walk a little ways and they'd attack you but if you just click the fly and move somewhere it'll it'll provoke before you actually lift off the ground so you spend zero movement to get a attack of opportunity of anyone nearby you then you just move to the next guy spend your movement on that and do it again now we're not going to deal with anyone in Camp because they're not aggro to us we'll move on to level eight now here's where things start to get a lot better because you have higher level spells your armor of agathys is now starting to do 20 damage per hit and again 15 to 20 doesn't sound like much of a difference but when you start adding the wet in now you're doubling it again and at these levels again we already had the fire Shield warm on this but now we we put on the shield of scorching reprisal it gives another way to add retaliation damage they'll take more fire damage when they miss you this one is not quite as good I tested it but you know it's nice now um bow of awareness great for bow for anyone who doesn't use their bow um evasive shoes at this point because I wanted to up the AC even more cloak of protection same thing and um Amulet of Misti step you could also be wearing the psychic spark if wanted to spam more magic Missile but I wanted to do more Miss more gas cloud now um I want to bring up true lovees Embrace because not only is this a ring a way to give people warning Bond it's a way to cast an abjuration spell and you don't have to keep the ring on to have the bond stay on so you and the other person can each put the rings on cast the warding bond and then take them off only thing I suggest is whoever you put the warding bond on don't make them have too low of an AC yes you can absorb all the hits they take as an abjuration wizard but you will blow through your armor of agius and your Arcane Ward very fast if they have a low AC I tried it on my druid over here and believe me it didn't work out to it but yeah um when you're done with it just put on um you know ring of Twilight another great AC thing they did just uh fix it it used to give two AC it only gives one now but in act two it's still plus one AC it's very great uh besides that you would you want to get ice storm you access to lightning bolt uh it's pretty straightforward still at this point you're just ramping up until you get to the next real jump in terms of functionality which is when you get Monk levels or one monk level that is so up until here you you you will be incredibly effective as a tank as I showed you you have Plus 8 to 10 to your Constitution saves you'll almost never be knocked out of your gas cloud when they hit you for zero you don't even have to make a concentration check and so you just fly around taking a beating and never getting knock down so here we finally have the the monk level added our second feet taken as well with wizard 8 the second feet well again so if you haven't taken Tavern brawler it'll be Tavern brawler otherwise you're going to put plus two into that con now the reason we could do that is because we also lowered the decks and put gloves of decks on this will give us a little higher AC again we also lowered AC slightly because of our choice of gear but we also put on the H vigilance now this gives you plus one to initiative and advantage on perception advantage on perception that's irrelevant also gives attack roll as reaction with Advantage which is nice because since you're going to be in melee a lot of time people will be moving from you and you will be getting knocked out of gas form sometimes and so you'll use this when you really need to hit people on an attack of opportunity but usually honestly you should be saving your re reaction for shield um now beyond that I think the only other item is I upgraded was the fist breaker Helm plus one to set spell save DC plus one to initiative you see that the initiative came in handy oh and we got the higher initiative from the hell Rider Longbow as well basically just an improved version of the other bow and yeah and so at this point with the one con from Tavern brawler and the two from the ASI we get up to 20 and that's a plus 11 to con saves now with Advantage most damage will never make you or since we have all the damage reduction you'll almost never make a con uh concentration check that's higher than dc10 with a plus 11 and advantage that means it's a one out of 400 chance to fail and so you're likely to never get broken out now let's go see what it looks like at the end so the whole thing about the monk level added is for two reasons one is it raises our base punch damage from one to 1 D4 which is not great but it also gives it so that when we make an unarmed attack we can make a bonus action unarmed attack now let's first look at what this looks like I'll turn into a gas cloud now look that looks a lot higher than it used to doesn't it now that we have Cavern brawler we start using strength Elixir now this is popular in a lot of builds where you have to have a high strength for tabn brawler but also want good other stats you're going to be using elixir of cloud giant or Hill giant strength for most of the game after you hit Level 10 it's not until Level 10 so it's not most of the game but after level 10 you're going to want to do it and as as I'm showing you this is why now your punch is hit for 20 that's a lot better than one and so I mean you know fight now the gas cloud can actually fight people which is very interesting and we'll show you why I mentioned the bonus action unarmed I showed it here earlier it's not going to trigger right now because I attacked out of combat so we'll just go to the next one but so just like normal monk when you attack someone you get access to bonus action unarmed so usually would be out here but it actually goes only in the bonus action tab it's gone now but you actually have to click the bonus action tab or you won't see it this actually applies to multiple things they'll show up here while in this form and you can actually use them it'll have a small delay when you click it as you saw in the original video but it is entirely usable it means you have two 20 damage punches even as a gas cloud now again this isn't super important it's 40 damage a turn but but it's adding on to your potential hundreds of damage as you move around escaping enemies and causing them to force their attack of opportunity another reason the gas cloud is so important for this is its natural AC is 10 I have a plus three cuz I took white dragon sorcerer but that's a very low AC still my AC outside of this form as you saw is 23 so I can be very tanky but one I'm in the glass gas cloud the the time I want to be hit now I'm much easier to hit also because um we're at level 10 in abjuration if once you short rest you actually gain a large amount of Arcane charges just for free now so you'll have no problem of keeping it above 15 and it Max is 20 at this level now in terms of item changes we put on the best Shield absolutes protector this one is the one that just gives you access to fire Shield chill once PR long rest it is a a normal action to use it so it does take some setup and it's much easier to use after a uh or right before a fight starts than it is to start a fight with it because then you have to either haste or speed potion and then do two actions or you have to otherwise set it up somehow regardless it's very useful it's another free act a free use of fire Shield chill we have that on our bar now too because we have level four spells and level six spells really but because we have higher level spells we can cast it ourselves now um hell Rider Longbow stays ring of protection stays now ring of Fay wild Sparks is very good because doesn't say it here but when you look over here sorry not here it's uh in here when you look in here ring of fa wild Sparks adds plus one to your spell save DC that's really strong it doesn't say it adds that but it does um we wear Amulet of the wind rider because this gives us another use of gaseous form uh still evasive shoes we put on GL Gauntlet of the Tyrant which allows you to do a little extra damage with unarmed with when you're not gas cloud so you can use say your Flurry of Blows and get some good damage in as a bonus action or it also gives you plus one into spell save DC and a use of level three command so it's just very useful as a Caster in general uh robe of the weave plus one to spell save DC and attack rolls and then whenever you succeed on a spell save throw against a spell you regain Health with the plus 2 AC this is just very great robe good in mini builds still clo of protection and we have hood of the weave finally also plus two to save DC and spell attack roles now the last one I wanted to bring up was staff of cherish necromancy now I like this one at the end of the game because even though we don't need to use these necromancy spells it this this staff basically gives you infinite uses of them because of that you're going to be using most of your spell slots on recasting Armor of agius or gas cloud or fire Shield chill and so when all that's over this gives you the usage of just direct damage that costs basically zero spell slots because by that time you should have gotten at least one life Essence and if you get at least one the way the staff works right now you basically just can keep casting forever all right so now that we've seen how it looks we'll go one more time to the example you want to make sure that most of the Spells you take as this build are not concentration because again gaseous form is there are ways to get around this because there are potions of gaseous form you can use these but they're consumables so I don't like to base a build around that you can do it though and if you cast a concentration spell before you go into gaseous form through a potion it will keep concentration now beyond that most of the stuff you're going to do while you're a gas cloud is just walk or fly around and punch water bottles or other bottles that at you have at your disposal you can use your fist attacks to break open um potions to heal yourself or Allies you can use it to break open toxins and poisons you can use it to break up an alchemist's fire there's a lot of options in the consumable items that if you know how to use them right even though you can't throw them you can still use them in a small AOE the the most important one is going to obviously be the water bottles so make sure you stock up on those because in this part of the game you're not going to get a lot more unless you're buying them from shops and you're going to be using them a lot because there's a lot of really big combats and you want to be able to use at least two a turn if the enemies are bunched up if you put it on the ground near a group of enemies when you punch a water bottle everyone nearby will get wet so let's see if I can get an extra guy in here this time so when I I remember when I start to fly oh that's a bow person no wonder remember when I start to fly away it's the immediate time they provoke see I clicked here took me zero movement boom he crit and actually killed himself for it now here we'll use the water bottle see both wet again only 13 AC and then here we go now if you see it here again now it has appeared it's time to use it now there always will be this little pause because unfortunately there's no animation for a bonus action attack from a gas cloud and then we will fly away once more oh not enough movement to fly and yeah there you have it killing guys and then I mean after this you know even if I don't have any more movement to do it I can just stay here and if they attack me they're going to take a lot of damage the AI won't go straight for you because you do have Arcane W charges they they understand that makes you tankier but the AC will tempt them and it might just make your other allies safe well I hope you enjoyed the build it's one of my favorites and as I said this I actually used in my party that I completed honor mode with and it was great it worked the entire time and the extra tankiness really helped in the fact that there was no reloading in there you have to make sure that every time you go into a fight you're going to live through and win and this is a very reliable build as all abjuration wizard builds are but this one takes that unique spin with that one level a monk and using that gas cloud I hope you all fly around and enjoy people punching you as they die have a great one

Channel: Robert Plays Videogames

Views: 8,283

Keywords: Baldur's Gate 3, Wizard, Abjuration, Gas Cloud, Gaseous Form

Id: Acy3Xvbt_4k

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 08 2023