SHAR'S SHADOW - Lore Friendly Shadowheart Build Guide - BG3 Tactician

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today we're covering a lore friendly yet tactician viable build for shadow heart the goal of this build is to use Shadow heart's existing lore and character to make a build that's appropriate to her and what we know about her playing through the game while still being strong and powerful for tactician mode this build actually ended up way better than I thought it would be it's much stronger than I expected it to be as uh when I started making this guide and so I think that not only does this build fit very well her established lore it's also going to be actually quite a powerful build as you go through tactician in a way that I honestly wasn't really expecting when I started making this guide so what do we know about shadowart so she is of course a cleric of sh the god of darkness and the night and secrets also sometimes called the god of Thieves in phon not in balers gate but that's an epithet that that goddess does get she also is a trickery domain cleric which we know from the start of the game because she's specked into that when you first acquire her um which means that we are going to be trying to use trickery domain in this build we also know that in an early confrontation with Lazelle she pulls a knife and Lael who's like a big tough fighter takes this threat seriously obviously this happens in a narrative moment and not exactly in gameplay but in Dungeons and Dragons right a cleric with a knife is not really something to be concerned about most of the time especially if you're tough fighter and so I think that this build needs to include some way for shadow heart to be feasibly dangerous with a dagger or at least some sort of dexterity based finesse weapon for that reason I think that shadow heart makes the most sense as a cleric Rogue multiclass and so we're going to be building uh constructing this build around that setup which also leads to some really interesting things happening later down the line with the build that make it actually quite strong first off I think we need to talk about trickery domain clerics in general although we will not actually be taking our first level in cleric we're going to be taking our first level in Rogue but just to give you a sort of brief overview of trickery domain clerics I have said in some of my other build guides for cleric that I think trickery is the weakest of the seven domains that is available to you in Boulder's Gate and I think that that's true the reason for this is that they don't get a powerful unique class feature the way that light domain or knowledge domain clerics get and they don't get heavy armor like the other four domains leaving you relying pretty much solely on the domain spell list for the power of the domain luckily it's a very good domain spell list giving you access to a lot of spells that clerics normally don't have which is what you really want in a domain spell list um so we can gain a lot of benefit from these the Spell access that clerics wouldn't normally have access to and make ourselves much stronger through access to spells that we wouldn't otherwise get that being said I think when you are doing a rogue multiclass you almost always want to start with Rogue and the reason for this is just better skill access we can start with a lot of really important skills for the build and so we are going to be able to do that right away first off Shadow heart is probably unless you are planning to play her as a main character as as your origin character probably not going to need the conversation skills if she is your origin character then you will likely want to take at least one of the conversation skills probably deception it makes the most sense lorewise um but if she isn't then my advice is to take acrobatics slate of hand and stealth and perception our perception will be really good because we're going to have excellent wisdom since it's the cleric build and slight of hand and stealth with expertise in both of those lets her replace any other character as your lockpicking and stealth character and also stealth is of course very important to the nature of the build that we're going for acrobatics is okay um you this is probably the weakest of these skills but since we will have a lot of dexterity it'll be a good check and it's nice to not get shoved um but it doesn't come up that often so you could definitely move this point to something else if you think there's something a little more appropriate for our stat split I'm actually going to suggest another very odd stat split for this character because we want to have very high dexterity we will be making primar ranged attacks if we ever make an attack so dexterity or using a finesse weapon in in melee combat so we don't need any strength and of course we want wisdom and Constitution because we're going to be a cleric and we need to have hit points so as to not die so for this reason we are going to go with one of the odd number splits that we you will sometimes see in my builds where we try to maximize three stats as much as possible I'm going to suggest taking 17 wisdom 16 Constitution and 15 dexterity and then we'll spend our first uh attribute point to get our wisdom to 18 and our dexterity to 16 this will give you really good initiative in AC as well as decent dexterity based attacks while giving you the highest possible DCS for your spells and this will still be primarily a spellcasting build so later on you are definitely going to want to max out your charisma or your wisdom excuse me you can gain some of these extra stats back if you want to use the gloves of dexterity I'll talk about that later on but of course for if you aren't using the gloves of dexterity on this build then you're going to need to actually build decks if you are using the gloves of dexterity then you can drop this down to eight and put those points in intelligence and Charisma if you prefer we have no other decisions to make but do get access to sneak attack and I should also mention that if you want to use this build for a custom character you probably should not be a high half elf it doesn't really add anything to the build um you will want to be a Wood Elf because this build is based primarily around movement speed or potentially a deep gnome for the stealth Advantage obviously that's very strong um as well as the advantage on saving throws especially since we've dumped intelligence and Charisma as low as they can go all right so having taken our first Rogue level now we need to make her a cleric otherwise we've sort of missed the point of Shadow heart's [Music] build and we want to level up our spells as quickly as possible we will of course be taking trickery domain since that's the domain that she comes with and at level one trickery domain gets a few different things you get blessing of the trickster which is basically Irrelevant for this build it requires your concentration and your stealthiest character is very likely to be shadowart herself so casting this on somebody else mostly won't matter um charm person which is not a great combat effect but can be relevant if you are if she's your party face and disg self which also is only relevant for party faces in this game so for the most part these two spells don't matter luckily cleric Spells at level one are just really really strong already and so you can definitely have an excellent prepared spell list regardless for our can trip selection I will say that guidance is extremely useful for any lockpicking character you can guidance yourself and now Shadow heart will be excellent at opening locks as well as you should probably take sacred flame while this build will get access to good ranged attacks it helps to have multiple options for how to deal damage and this one can allow you to bypass AC against enemies with high AC but low deck saves and finally I would strongly suggest taking blade Ward here because this build will end up in melee combat pretty frequently there actually is quite a lot of use for blade Ward especially if you pre-cast it before combat you can get one turn of damage resistance from blade Ward and it's resource free mostly this is because the other options aren't that important to you but blade Ward I think will have some utility for this build so it's worth picking up for your prepared spells one thing that we're going to be emphasizing in this build is spells that require a bonus action to use and you'll see why in a moment but basically clerics get some of the best bonus actions in the game because they have access to Healing word and then some other additional solid bonus action spells later on and because we want to spend our action as especially at this low level on applying sneak attacks 1 D6 of sneak attack on an archery shot or a melee attack is actually quite relevant at these very early levels um levels like 1 through three and so it can really be quite valuable to spend your main action on attacking that will fall off later in the game where you're going to be wanting to spend your actions more on spellcasting but having access to attacks plus a bonus action at this very early stage is very valuable one of the best bonus actions and one that this character actually uses better than just about any other character is sanctuary and you can use this to like group enemies up on an invincible Ally or to bait with your uh with Shadow heart herself by moving into um the middle of enemies revealing yourself from stealth with Sanctuary applied to you and then all the enemies cluster up then you drop a giant Fireball on them from someone else which strikes me as very appropriate to a trickery domain cleric finally of course we want bless because it's just excellent and command is also really important for every cleric so I would highly recommend taking that as well command is an excellent way to uh drop enemies and also something that's really unique and important for this character is that if you disable an enemy with command and they are prone you can trigger sneak attack against them because you'll have Advantage you won't normally be able to do this cuz it would require both of your actions but if you make an offhand attack with a dagger you can do that that being said you're typically going to want to have a shield in your offhand so it it won't come up that often but that's that is one little trick that you get if you happen to want to have an offhand dagger equipped all right let's go to the next level and we're going to keep leveling cleric at level two you get access to trickery domain's signature ability invoke duplicity this is another way to trigger sneak attack so it it does kind of help with this build although at this point the 1d6 of sneake attack is is still relevant but not as important and this does take an action so you only ever want to use this before combat starts not during combat it's just way better to to actually attack or cast a spell than to use this um especially because it takes your concentration so you'd rather just continue to concentrate on blast while firing arrows or whatever um but how invoke duplicity works is that within 10 ft of the illusion allies who are also within 10t have Advantage so this can help another Rogue in your party trigger sneak attack it can also just help your melee characters hit more easily and it can help you trigger sneak attack from melee this is I this is a slight degression but I want to rant about this ability just a little bit so bear with me in tabletop Dungeons and Dragons invoke duplicity is one of the coolest and in my opinion just most fun to use ability in the game because it allows you to cast spells from the location of the illusion so you can use it to cast spells around corners um you can use it to really sell enemies on the illusion that you are in that location and not in wherever you happen to be hiding do all sorts of incredibly cool things that doesn't happen in balers gate and isn't included and it's a real let down to me honestly that they didn't do that um I assume for coding reasons I assume it would have just just been too difficult to code but it would have been so much cooler if they had done it that way uh that being said it's it's a free ability and you know you're going to use what you can get for our prepared spells here there's nothing in particular that we need to add probably guiding bolt is the best just a very useful way to De deal damage and also the advantage you can use on subsequent turns to trigger sneak attack level three cleric we get access to level two spells which includes one of the most powerful bonus actions in the game in spiritual weapon spiritual weapon is so good because it doesn't require concentration gives you a whole unit that enemies will focus on again very on theme for a trickery domain cleric to get them to like chase this spectral sword around um and only requires a bonus action to cast your typical combat with a cleric for many levels and for almost every cleric are going to start with a bonus action spiritual weapon and a main action bless although this character will get a few other options later on but um this is so good for clerics because it doesn't take concentration an extremely valuable resource for you and is even better for this build for reasons that you'll see coming up another couple spells that are worth mentioning specifically are hold person normally I'm not a huge fan of this spell because enemies get a save when you cast it and then also at the beginning of their turns so it requires two turns to or two saving throws before it costs them a turn um which again differs from how it works in tabletop D and D but the guaranteed critical hit is very valuable when you have the extra D6 of damage from sneak attack or the additional sneak attack damage that we're going to get later because it the critical hit doubles sneak attack damage as well so there's some Synergy with with hold person and with this character's build um that I thought was worth mentioning that being said I think what we're probably going to want is to just take spiritual weapon you're going to spend almost all of your level two spell slots on that also worth mentioning is um minor image because this or Mirror Image excuse me this character is going to be a Melee character primarily or a tank um and you will have a base of 20 AC because we're going to end up with 16 dexterity medium armor for 15 AC and a shield which means that mirror image raises our AC to 29 which is a ridiculously high amount and basically guarantees that three attacks will miss against you normally this is an ability that isn't that relevant because it's on Wizards and stuff who don't get good AC but on this character with very good base AC mirror image is actually a pretty efficient defensive tool if you are going to take some attacks as we level up we take a feat and and we we're pretty much locked in for what our feed is going to be because we took the odd number stat split so we're going to grab both of these going up to 18 wisdom and 16 dexterity we get an additional can trip and you pretty much just take whatever you want light has some uses although you'll often be in stealth so you may not want to cast light on yourself um for your prepared spells here a couple others that are particularly useful are things like uh blindness also gives you advantage against certain enemies and doesn't requ concentration um so that's also another way to trigger your sneak attack um and also to just stay hidden from enemies it makes your stealth more effective if they are blind um silence is always good but for the most part I think you're just going to want to stick with the spells that we have available already you can pick up blindness if you want a level two combat option or hold person something like that level five cleric we get a couple things that are really fun from the uh trickery domain as well as just from cleric spells cleric Spells at level three get extremely powerful and that's what makes this build tick but one thing that we get that other clerics don't get is the very very strong spell fear fear is only a single save for two turns of full disable and it's an AOE so it can affect multiple enemies this is earlier than most characters get these very strong disabling effects um you get hypnotic pattern if you're a sorcerer or Wizard or Bard but the uh fear is in many ways better because um it also helps you reposition enemies and it doesn't break if you hit them so while hypnotic pattern will keep them from doing anything for a while fear will definitely last for two turns if they fail the spell this is going to be one of your best uh Tools in order to control enemies you also get the the core of this build and what we're going to be using as our main combat tool throughout the game Spirit Guardians Spirit Guardians does damage in an aura around you and the amount that you can apply this is functionally based on your movement speed which this build is going to get a lot of momentarily the one thing that is a downside of spirit Guardians is you can't become visible um which does conflict with your trickery domain power that will get next level that allows you to become invisible um but you can hide with it on and while it should light you up and cause enemies to automatically detect you when you have Spirit Guardians on I have sometimes had enemies just not notice me and you can just Crouch behind them hidden while they tick down for three to 3d8 damage every turn um slowly dying without ever noticing you it's very sort of like must have been the wind ow must have been the wind ow and extremely funny when that happens another very important spell is mass healing W which is the multi-target version of healing W and the reason for this is primarily an item set but also just because we are going to get multiple bonus actions so every bonus action spell is very valuable to us for our prepared spells therefore we're going to take Spirit Guardians and mass healing word and of course we also have fear um you can mix this up of course remember always that you can change your prepared Spells at any time out of combat so it's very useful to be able to um change your spells based on the encounter that you're about to go into so just keep that in mind as an option available to you at at any time and adjust your spell list accordingly this is just a good default spell list that'll see you through most days having gotten access access to level three spells we could continue to go down cleric but I think now is a good time to add in our next two Rogue levels in particular the reason for this is that we now get access to cunning action Dash which effectively lets you spend a a bonus action to move double your speed doubling the range at which you can apply Spirit Guardians if you have Spirit Guardians up you can run around the battlefield super fast with cunning action Dash or cunning action hide to hidden by running up to an enemy damaging them finding somewhere out of their line of sight and then hiding um and you can do this All in One turn by casting Spirit guardians or another spell is your action running up to an enemy and damaging them with the spirit Guardians with your movement and then hiding as your bonus action it also gives you disengage if you are in melee combat that you don't want to be in which is often the case for this character of course you can disengage fire a range attack disengage fire a spell whatever you happen to need to do but mostly you're going to be using this for Action Dash allowing you to Spirit Guardians the entire field much more easily and then of course when we hit level three Rogue and get to become a thief remember that I said right at the beginning that sh is the goddess of Thieves you get an additional bonus action letting you triple your movement speed in a round so with your base of 30 foot movement speed you now have 90 ft of movement speed or multiple bonus action spells like you could cast sanctuary and mass healing word in a turn healing word and uh spiritual weapon right off the beginning of a fight um spiritual weapon and double move if you just want to be applying your spirit Guardians as much as possible all of these are excellent options that will let you have a ton of fun and utility on this character I will say at this point the character is probably weaker than a normal level eight character because our our core combo hasn't really come online yet since we only have level three slots for Spirit Guardians and at this point the damage of of those is starting to fall behind a little bit but as we continue to gain more cleric levels the damage on Spirit Guardians will increase again and we will be able to use this much more efficiently here we're going to go back to cleric and we get channel Divinity cloak of Shadows which lets you become invisible uh for a channel Divinity charge gener speaking not super useful although somewhat useful for letting you start combats in sort of Ideal locations you can become invisible walk to where you want to start a combat in um even through enemy sight lines and then begin the combat from wherever you actually want to be situated so that's that's somewhat useful there's a lot of options for cloak of sh for two turns of invisibility that let you do cool stuff and I'll let you kind of experiment with that as you go for the most part part this is a minor benefit but not an enormous one here we get level four spell slots which you're primarily going to be using to upcast spiritual Guardians to level four but it does also give you a bunch of other really solid options banishment remains an excellent CC spell that targets a save that's typically low on certain enemies um remember that you can always inspect an enemy and see their stats in Boulders Gate 3 and so you are able to Target banishment at enemies that have low Charisma saves guaranteeing that it works or making it much more likely that it works polymorph is also a very strong um crowd control spell although I would typically prefer banishment I think if I was going to prepare either of these but since you have both then you get to choose which one is better mostly based on which enemy save is stronger dimension door has quite a lot of utility in this game although Miss step is typically more useful and one thing that you will want with this build especially because you have multiple bonus actions is to find an item that grants you Misty step so that you can cast that very often but there are definitely times when dimension door comes up and is very strong for our prepared Spells at this point you will likely want to have banishment and the rest are kind of up to you something like managment um oh it seems to have unprepared Spirit Guardians for us so we definitely want to make sure we have that and mass healing word up so I would probably go with a spell list something like this although since managment is somewhat redundant with polymorph we we also have inflict wounds yeah it it seems to have eaten my prepared spells for some reason all right here we go um inflict wounds does also have some utility for this character as well I should mention because you will often be in melee combat so it's a slightly more damaging version of guiding bolt that you can cast in melee without disadvantage but since you can disengage as a bonus action with this character I think you're usually going to be better off with ranged attacks cleric level eight the big thing is that we get to increase our wisdom to 20 but also you get Divine strike poison allowing your melee attacks to deal an extra da of poison damage this is a very small boost at this point but does give you a little bit more utility if you are still making a dagger attack generally speaking at this point you're just going to be want to you're just going to want to be casting spells rather than making attacks but if you do make an attack you know an extra d8 of damage certainly doesn't hurt and finally at cleric level 9 we get access to fifth level slots again you're going to primarily be using these to upcast Spirit Guardians to a level five Spirit Guardians where it becomes extremely damaging and then you can run around doing all sorts of nonsense um dominate person does have some utility but at this point the trickery domain spells are less useful honestly the the real goodie in trickery domains spell lists are mirror image and fear the others are good but getting two really solid domain spells is is pretty good for a domain um most domains will not have more than one or two spells that you actually want to cast so getting two that are really nice is is very powerful for trickery domain somewhat makes up for the other features of it being a little weaker these other spells are mostly damaging options that are less damaging than upcasting spiritual Guardians so you're typically just going to want to focus on that putting it all together you end up with a build that has pretty decent HP but more importantly you have excellent AC with 20 um provided you are using one of the medium armors that allows you to get your full AC bonus and the first one of these is available early in uh or late in act one or early in act two I can't remember where you find this one exactly um but adding your full dexterity bonus is of course extremely powerful and gives you 20 AC which is the same as a character in full plate with a shield so you've got great AC and can also benefit very strongly from that your normal turn of combat is going to look like casting several bonus action spells whether that be healing word spiritual weapon um or just normal healing words sanctuary and so on in addition you are going to spend a lot of combats concentrating on Spirit Guardians often cast at a high level um and then using cunning action Dash to run around remember that we have two dash actions so if we double cast cunning action Dash then our movement speed goes up to oh it's actually 15 fet higher it goes up to 90 but because uh this character currently also is benefiting from aspect of the elk it's 105 ft of movement speed if you get long Strider cast on you then you can get up to 135 ft of movement speed um from certain allies make allowing you to run around with Spirit guard ends up at a very high level damaging everything in the room extremely uh extremely powerfully so you can see we can we can move all the way around basically touch everything in any given room with these Spirit Guardians guaranteeing that we do tons of damage in every turn of combat and this whole time probably our spiritual weapon is going as well finally I think this build actually benefits fit more strongly than many of my other builds from certain specific items so I'm going one thing I like about Spirit Guardians also is that if you have it up in Camp everybody runs away from you so you can you can uh Shepherd all your allies around which is very funny um this build actually benefits more strongly from specific items than some of my other builds so I'm going to take a moment to mention some of those because there's some that are extremely good for this build and actually this build is the best user of two of the best cleric items in the game these items are the Hell Riders Pride gloves and the whispering promise Wing ring which uh together mean that when you heal a creature they become blessed and gain blade wward you can heal your entire party as a bonus action using mass healing word applying these two extremely powerful Buffs to your entire party additionally if you have the boots of Aid and comfort then that also gives them three temporary hit points um and all three of these items are available early in act one so you can be doing this pretty much the entire game and remember the three temporary hit points are basically the same as six temporary hit points because they all are getting blade Ward as well having incoming damage um meaning that you with only one of your two bonus actions apply a ludicrous number of turns worth of Buffs to your entire party so you're one of the best characters in the game at breaking the action economy in a way I think is very tricky as well and very appropriate to Shadow heart's build of course the gloves of dexterity set your your decks to 18 allowing you to recover these other stats to increase your strength um intelligence and Charisma strength is actually pretty relevant for this build as well because with two bonus actions you're one of the better characters for jumping and shoving so if you want to drink a strength Elixir and have 20 strengths that can even give you a little more Mobility because with 20 strengths you will probably jump further than you run um and then finally anything that has radiating orb attached to it if you deal radiant damage to an enemy which you're doing a lot because you have these spiritual Guardian effects uh they gain minus one to their attack roles per turn remaining of the radiant damage if you stack multiple of these effects um there's a couple items that apply this effect and you can stack multiple and they will apply multiple turns of this effect at once there is no save against this so if they take any radiant damage it just reduces their attack Roll by one so even the most powerful bosses in the game if they rely at all on their attack role you can completely shut them down by repeatedly applying radiant radiating orb effects to them um stopping them from being able to hit you at all especially if you have uh this character tanking with your mirror image up for example they will miss on their first few attacks because of the mirror image and then you will have had enough turns to apply radiating orb that they'll Miss on all of their other subsequent attacks one other thing that's worth mentioning for this character is that by default we have no good way to use our reaction so items that give you something like Shields like this Amulet of the Harpers um are also very valuable for this character because there's no this character otherwise has no way to use their reaction although you can use it to attack and since we have decent dexterity and decent damage from our attacks our opportunity attacks are a little better than other clerics might be but generally you're going to want to shop around in your items for a way to use a a reaction if possible all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at shadowart as a lore friendly build using her particular character to the fullest extent I think um I think this build actually came out really fun and is both really fun to use and also much more powerful than than I thought it would be just zipping around the battlefield blasting everything with Spirit Guardians is honestly so good and you're very hard to hurt and get access to all of cleric's incredible bonus action utility twice as often as other clerics so altogether very happy with this build let me know what you think if you give it a shot cheers my friends and as always if you have enjoyed the video do feel free to leave a comment and like the video because it helps a ton with the algorithm and you can subscribe to my channel for more lore friendly builds more basic guides to characters more complex guides to more broken combinations and other strategy game content cheers my friends and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 63,985

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

Id: eDDbeqkQTgU

Length: 32min 38sec (1958 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2023