Leftie Spellblades have more fun in Baldur's Gate 3 | Build

welcome back to creative excuses and to my first balers Gate 3 video normally I make Elder Scrolls Online builds and gameplay videos and a RuneScape 3 Ultimate Iron Man series on the side but today we are doing something a little different today we are talking about a really fun early game build for balers Gate 3 with a fun play style in combat and an interesting build path throughout the game if you're new around here the way that I like to make build videos on other games is to talk about problems and solutions it's a fun way to talk about why a build works and to talk about a game's mechanics that's my plan here so let's jump into it if you just want the build skip to that chapter in the video below balers gate 3's turn-based combat system is based on Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition which I have never played I've never done anything with d and d before this game and I don't think that I'll play anytime soon if ever however the result of being based on DN D is that your options in combat are all determined by a concept called the action economy this is a phrase that basically describes what a player or character can do in a single turn I think this is a term mostly used for DND but it can easily be applied to board games and card games as well in a classic game like sellers of Katon there are only so many actions that you can take in a turn you can trade players trade the bank play development cards or build things that's it each of those have specific variance of those actions but you can do all of them in one turn as long as you have the resources to do so in a game like Uno though your action economy consists of drawing a card and discarding a card sometimes with a special effect that's pretty much it in balers Gate 3 your action economy generally has three different resources you can spend each turn a movement resource which is just how far you can move and sometimes how you move to a new spot an action which can be something like a range of different attacks or spells s utility or otherwise and a bonus action which is usually like a miniature action but can also be a lot of different things like casting a healing spell drinking a potion applying a poison jumping which actually costs both an action and movement Etc there's there's a lot of options one very effective way to build out a character is to try and maximize your action economy the more power you can shove into each of your resources in your action economy the more you can accomplish in a single turn to make the fights go your way for example as a cleric you can cast something on yourself like Spirit Guardians one turn which is a concentration spell that's another kind of resource we can talk about another time but this spell spirit Guardians places an area of damage centered on your character that you can move around the battlefield using your movement As you move the spell goes with you this means by using one action in one turn you have made your movement resource into a damaging ability on subsequent turns for future turns your action is now freed up to heal or to do more damage while your movement has become an attack another way to maximize your action economy is the popular spell haste which while active gives the person benefiting from the spell an entire additional action this is an exceptionally powerful concentration spell as it means you can cast two spells that aren't concentration in one turn sometimes three on some classes it means you can get up to six attacks from a level 11 fighter with no other action economy Shenanigans it is probably the most powerful or second most powerful concentration spell in the game but neither of these examples are what I want to talk about here the second problem I want to talk about is twofold build videos for balers Gate 3 Focus quite heavily on the fun and crazy things that you can do in the late game and builds that I've seen that push the action economy to the limits are generally late game builds for me that's a problem because by the time I'm in act 3 the game basically feels over and I'm already starting to think about my next playthrough my next character and my next build so the thinking for this video is that I want to make a fun powerful action economy exploiting build that is available while still in act one and without any fancy items potions or Scrolls required there is no required Hasting here but you can get potions of speed early on that will just make you strong for the general build though we are going to rely on maximizing our bonus action now let's really jump into the build and see how it makes the most out of the action economy in balers Gate 3 act one this build comes in a lot of flavors an all Marshall melee focused build an all Marshall ranged focused build a Spell blade or an Arcane crossbow user which flavor you choose comes down to your preferred weapon choices and if you want to use magic in the build I am going to show you the Spell blade because that is what I want to play in this third full playthrough of the game but this is very easy to adapt for the other flavors and I think you can figure it out if you want a little help though feel free to drop a comment and I will almost certainly respond I am known to write books in my comment sections so here we go this is Charlie the spellblade at character creation I'm going to pick two key things race and class obviously for most builds the race does not matter that much mostly being a roleplay flavor thing but in my case I want access to the spellblade play style from level one so I actually only have three race options high elf as modius tling and half high elf these are the only races that get an offensive can trip as part of their racial features if you are playing playing an all Marshal version of this build you can probably pick whatever race suits you of these three races that I get to choose from the half high elf and highelf are the Clear Choices unless you want to be throwing a small ball of fire directly from your hand with the tling it does sound cool honestly but I really want to play a Spell blade and not the Arcane crossbow user so I'm going to choose a highelf as a high elf Charlie gets to pick a cantrip from The Wizard spell book which is basically all of the offensive canant trips I will be picking shocking grasp here because it will not get disadvantage in melee distance it will have advantage on melee armored enemies and when it hits it is actually a free disengage preventing one enemy from hitting you with an opportunity attack if you run away after shocking them it is a fantastic spell oh and if you set it up you can do double the damage of this canant trip by making targets wet first it's it's awesome it really is for the class we are going to pick the fighter for one simple reason we want a fighting style this fighting style and cantrip combination forms the core of the entire play style and is absolutely essential we want to pick the two weapon fighting style this fighting style add your full damage bonus to your offhand attacks with a weapon essentially we are making ourselves ambidextrous while this sounds kind of nifty this is actually massive for exploiting the action economy because our offhand attacks do not cost an action like our mainhand attacks offhand attacks cost a bonus action instead without this fighting style a bonus action off hand attack it still hits but it hits pretty low but with this fighting style our bonus action attack now has the same value as our action used on an attack we essentially have two actions per turn now when we use our bonus on an offhand attack see lefties do have more fun but that isn't all at level one with this high elf fighter combination we can now shocking grasp and off-hand attack every single turn we are a Spell blade at level one because our can trip costs an action and we can still attack with our offhand using the bonus action but that still isn't all because we've made our bonus action more valuable we can now do things like Dash Dash and attack on the same turn which is usually reserved for level two and above Rogues who can Dash as a bonus action and attack with their action essentially at level one we already have the ability to attack twice that's a feature usually reserved for level five Marshall classes and above we can use a cantrip or a spell plus a bonus action attack which is a feature reserved for level seven eldrich Knight Fighters or we can Dash and attack in the same turn which is a feature reserv for rogu stilla this is all at level one this is a level one very versatile Powerhouse and it's only going to get better and more versatile from there from levels 2 through 4 we are going to immediately multiclass into three levels of Rogue and take the thief subclass this is where the build really takes off with the thief subass you now receive a second bonus action meaning we can do things like Dash three times in one turn we can attack with a spell and two weapon attacks thanks to our two weapon fighting style and access to a can trip we can hide sneak attack and full power offhand attack in one turn we can do so so many things it's ridiculous all of this before level five our action economy is just honestly a bit ridiculous with basically the power of three full actions per turn and that's the whole build or at least that's the core gameplay style from there you can choose to multiclass more or you can commit to The Fighter for extra melee and ranged attacks and action surge or you can commit to the roog class for bigger sneak attacks which will maximize your action economy in different ways for my Spell blade though I will actually be taking eight levels of evocation wizard with a bunch of damage and utility spells all the way up to level four spell slots so that I can throw a fireball at my feet when I want to clear a room and then I still have two attacks in the same turn or I can disengage Dash or whatever else I need to do it's going to be awesome one fun thing to note is that if you use finesse weapons here you will end up with a better eldrich Knight and better Arcane trickster Rogue in just one build because you'll have spell slots all the way up to level four you'll have the ability to learn spells from Scrolls you'll have the ability to cast a spell and strike with two weapon attacks in one turn and so much more you can be sneaky to get your sneak attacks you can cast greater invisibility fly or haste you can sneak and drop a fireball in the middle of enemies there's so much versatility with this build that it it's just absurd for itemization on the spell Blade the choices are all yours as you play through your story items in this game to me are much more about the story than the power as you can lock yourself out of items very easily by making certain choices of when and how you do certain activities this means you may not have the items that I do and vice versa while I could use mods to give myself whatever I want that that isn't why I'm playing the game I like the limitations of making choices in the story and how that can impact the build overall however as a recommendation I would suggest looking for items that benefit an alternating spell and weapon attack play style on my second playthrough I actually saw a ton of these items that just weren't very useful on my trickster hird swinging warlock but on my third playthrough I definitely want to find and use as many of these kinds of items as possible I think there's a lot now of course there is so much more that goes into a build like this working I didn't talk about ability scores but they're on the screen now I didn't talk about feat choices or the specific leveling and respecing path that I will actually be taking in order to make this build strong and enjoyable from level one all the way through to the spoilers for all of those details check out the video description where there is a written guide to my starting ability scores and why I chose them as well as my planned Feats that may change as I actually play the character through to the end game if you enjoyed this video found it helpful and want to see more like it like the video subscribe and comment to feed me dopamine and encourage me to make more balers Gate 3 videos until then I'll see you all in the next excuse is

Channel: Creative Excuses Gaming

Views: 32,110

Keywords: bg3 spellblade build, baldur's gate 3 build guide, baldur's gate 3 actions, baldur's gate 3 action economy explained, what is a good baldur's gate 3 build, how to do a lot of damage in baldurs gate 3, bg3 builds, bg3 arcane trickster, bg3 eldritch knight, a better arcane trickster, a better eldritch knight, bg3 level 4 builds, baldurs gate 3 early game build, baldurs gate 3 how to play, baldurs gate 3 rogue fighter, bg3 multiclass spellblade, bg3 magic melee build

Id: 5GAv9uhOSvI

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023