The BEAR KNUCKLE BRAWLER - BG3 Karlach Honour Build Guide

so as has become tradition we're going to start off by beating the crap out of the oathbreaker Knight to show off our damage but first let's just take a moment to look at how awesome carlac looks here just really cool all right let's punch him okay so we stunned him which means we actually didn't start a combat but um if we had failed on this stun we could immediately enter a Rage which would have any incoming damage uh that we would be taking back meaning that there are almost no consequences for failing this stun but since we did we can just go ahead and use Flurry of Blows with our first bonus action has yeah our violence hasn't gone unnoticed and then we can go ahead and use Flurry of Blows with our second bonus action to fight and then we can go ahead and make another attack have and you can see we've taken one of the most dangerous enemies in the game down to half Health stunned him knocked him over all in a single round of combat and all of this was done with no Buffs from allies no Elixir running and almost no items equipped as you can see we have very few items equipped just some clothes um and so obviously the total damage output of this character would be even higher with all of those things but it operates almost independently of teammates and items and can take out one of the most dangerous enemies in the game in a single round let's get to the build hello my friends and welcome back to another Boulders Gate 3 build guide I hope you're all doing well this build which I am calling the bare knuckle fighter is newly possible as of patch six and I think is awesome monk as a character class is one of the most powerful classes in the game with the highest ceiling doing some of the highest damage output with the most accurate attacks thanks to the broken nature of Tavern brawler as well as providing a ton of crowd control thanks to stunning strike or toppling blows um and giving you just an all round machine in terms of of damage and crowd control however it has two key weaknesses one is that it's squishy with relatively low AC and hit points compared to other melee Fighters and two is that it's highly multi-attribute dependent meaning it needs four of the six attributes to be as high as possible strength dexterity Constitution and wisdom um in order to maximize the efficiency of your monk this build allows us to mitigate both of those downsides creating one of the most powerful characters in the game with n of the associated downsides with this character there are of course some trade-offs but this gives you a lot of extra options in terms of how you're going to build your monk it's an extremely flexible and Powerful build and it will make up for any misplays by being extremely resilient in play and having all of the powerful damaging effects and crowd control that you're used to from a monk let's jump in and start building the character before I begin though I do want to quickly say thank you so much to m XF 5000 for becoming a channel member Alexander cartano for becoming a channel member tilted Koso for the € 20 and fearsome Jin for the thank you so much my friends I really do appreciate it this character I'm using carlac as the example character because if you haven't guessed from the the name the character will be using Barbarian because in patch six the bare totem barbarians rage was fixed so it now adds the rage damage to your unarmed melee attacks we're actually for that reason going to start our character with a level of Barbarian the reason for this is that it gives you just additional hit points from the beginning of the game though it's not that important um as well as access to to better skills overall because uh monks don't give you access to perception skills whereas barbarians get perception so it's just a better skill selection that's not that important and if you prefer being able to make unarmed attacks on the nautiloid then you can begin with monk but I would recommend starting with Barbarian for this build for our attribute selection we get to build a very clean attribute split because thanks to our barbarians unarmored defense class feature barbarians get unarmored defense just the same as monks do only it's based on their constitution instead of their wisdom um we can dump wisdom letting us only have to take three of the six attributes instead of four of them this makes our attribute selection for a monk much much cleaner while also giving us the same boosted AC that you would get from a monk and the same additional damage that you get from being an unarmed attacker or a Barbarian so for that reason we are going to take 17 in strength 14 in dexterity 16 in Constitution which gives us plus three to our Armor class and then we put our remaining two points in wisdom you will still take wisdom boosts if you can get them throughout the the game just and of course if you want to use a an elixir of Hill giant strength then you would simply take this attribute selection but with um with 16 decks 17 Constitution and 14 wisdom and that would give you the additional uh bonuses from that this build of course like every melee like every strength based build benefits from using the elixir of Hill giant strength but we're going to build it without them because one of the great things about this build is it doesn't have the strict attribute requirements that normal monk builds do and so you get to get away with not having to be forced to drink a hill giant Elixir every day that's all for our level one decisions we of course make sure that we get perception um in our skills because that's a great skill to have available in your party and then we are going to level up at level two we will dip into monk giving us access to Flurry of Blows and the unarmed attack damage our rage will stack adding two to our unarmed attack damage and one of the great things about monk of course is that um you get to attack many times per round since rage adds flat damage to all of your attacks it just adds a flat plus two to all of your attacks you are now applying that rage damage many many times per round more than many more than you would as a standard Barbarian so you're getting even more value out of Rage than you would as a normal character as a as a normal Barbarian and of course you're getting higher damage attacks at this level than you would as a normal monk no other decisions to make at first level monk though so let's continue to level up the character monk level two we get access to unarmored movement and of course we will not be wearing armor or using a shield we have the unarmored defense from Barbarian so we have uh reasonable AC at this level it's 15 AC with our dexterity and Constitution though of course we can um improve that with any gear that we get that improves your AC but 15 AC for this level even for an armored character is not that far off what you would expect um most characters to be at thanks to the armors that are available at this point so we should be relatively competitive in terms of armor class with other melee characters at in the early in the very early game we also get our bonus action hides and disengages and patient defense which are not massively valuable to this character this character's bonus actions will be very stretched at this early level because we need to rage with one bonus action and then we need to Flurry of Blows with future bonus actions so we will be benefiting um less from these than a normal monk would luckily these are not a huge component of most monks uh Powers however they will be useful if you need to like get out of Dodge really quick for an honor mode run where things are going badly and so on at character level three we get to pick our subass and I think one of the great things about this build is how flexible it is I believe this build works extremely well with either the way of the Open Hand monk or the way of the Shadow monk way of the Shadow monk gets you the teleports their abilities all work while silenced and so also work while raging which lets you cast some spells while raging which is kind of fun um but I'm going to recommend taking way of the Open Hand monk it just a maxim your damage this also gets you the additional uh special flurries of blows which let you topple enemies stagger them or uh push them all of which are very relevant normally you're going to use topple because knocking an enemy prone also gives you advantage on future attacks which lets you land your attacks more easily it will help with your allies you can trap enemies in place and stop them from moving if you can prone them when they have zero movement all of these are incredibly powerful and will give you uh if you prone an enemy when they have zero movement they will sometimes skip their turn because they have to they can't get up since they have zero movement um I still think that's kind of a bug but since they haven't fixed it yet it's definitely available to use um and of course this just get will give us the most damage later on since this character will be making so many attacks per round the flat damage from where the Open Hand monk is just going to be incredibly strong at character level five we get to take our fourth level in Mon and get to grab our first feet you could if you wanted to take your first five levels in Monk and then start grabbing the Barbarian levels later to get Tavern brawler as soon as possible and get extra attack as soon as possible um I like starting with Barbarian because it gives you additional hit points and get you access to better skills but that's also certainly an option it's never wrong to rush Tavern brawler as soon as possible and of course the feet that we're taking when we hit monk level four is Tavern brawler we will boost our strength which is why we took 17 in strength though if you wanted to use Ethel's hair you could have taken 16 and maybe gotten an extra two points of wisdom out of that also definitely an option but this is the cleanest build without any boosts from uh strength Elixir or or Ethel's hair Tavern brawler allows us to apply our strength twice to when making unarmed attacks so all of our unarmed attack both to to hit and damage so all of our unarmed attacks will be hitting at plus eight and plus eight from our strength plus our proficiency so our attacks will all be hitting at plus 10 and adding plus 10 to damage which is going to do an enormous amount of damage given how many times we're attacking per round the plus 10 to damage comes of course from raging because we get eight from strength and then two from our rage damage so we are able to add even more damage to every attack than other Monks at this level would be Tavern brawler is so powerful because as I've mentioned in some of my previous build guides it breaks the rule of dungeons of dragons design called bounded accuracy which tries to keep your hit chance within certain values so that it's never like 100% for you to hit basically you should always have more than a 30% chance of doing stuff and less than an 80% chance of doing stuff um in in sort of the way that this game is balanced and designed bound Tavern brawler completely breaks that rule by giving you plus4 to hit at this level pushing you way outside the bounds of the bounded accuracy system meaning that going to hit with just about every single attack at this level and totally negating uh the disadvantage of monks attacking with unarmed attacks but making them both hit more often and do more damage than characters with weapons this allows us to do massive damage with every single turn because we're making three attacks all of which are doing an extra 10 damage so we're averaging 30 damage per round just from our bonuses let alone any dice that we're rolling character level five we take another level in monk to get to extra attack and also to get to stunning strike this will allow us to stun enemies preventing them from acting and also giving us um huge bonuses when attacking them stunning strike is so powerful it works on just about everything and the save DC is based on the higher of your strength or dexterity so in our case it's going to be based on our strength meaning that enemies are going to be very likely to fail their saves against the stuns and you are going to uh be able to stun almost every enemy in the game there's actually very few enemies that are immune to stunning strike it is a boss killer and will allow you to make four attacks per round against an enemy who can't do anything to you while raging the entire time at this level I think it is we want to start getting our defensive skills online so we do have a choice to make we could either take another level of of Monk to increase our damage we get to add 1 D4 damage of this this Elemental type plus whatever wisdom bonus we've manage to scrape together to our unarmed attacks so because we are a barbarian right and add two from our rage damage it's as though we were an open-hand monk with 14 wisdom either way we add an additional plus two damage to our attacks so that lets us skate by with lower wisdom and get higher Constitution higher strength and dexterity than a character would otherwise have when building with monk unless you're using the items that give you bonus stats and then even if we are using the items that give us bonus stats it will still let us have much cleaner stat spreads by using the hill giant Elixir we can then increase our dexterity more increase our constitution to 18 increase our wisdom even higher and get even more damage than a standard open hand monk build would get thanks to the rage damage and The Barbarians unarmed defense feet so at this level I do recommend taking your sixth level of Monk but you could also go into your second level of Barbarian right away which is what we're going to do next because at this point in the game our sheer offense is starting to fall behind just a little bit there are some enemies that we won't be able to to stun or won't be able to burst down in a single round and we need to start getting our defenses online well one way to get those defenses Is by The increased hit points from Barbarian but another another way to get those defenses is when we hit Barbarian Level three we get access to wildart Barbarian and we can take beart rage beart rage Hal incoming damage and so suddenly our squishy monk has gone from one of the as sort of a glass Cannon of a Melee character to one of the tankiest characters in the entire game you're incredibly mobble thanks to the fast movement from your monk levels you are also incredibly tanky thanks to your rage damage uh resistance from bearheart which hases all incoming damage and your damage has kept up with a normal one a normal open Palm monk build at this level because we get to add our rage damage and therefore the lower wisdom doesn't actually hurt our damage at all altogether this is this package has now come to together to build a character that is as powerful as a normal open-hand monk build would be but without any of the downsides at this point and of course we can now make it even better one thing that this character does struggle with is that your bonus action is very in demand because you want to rage at the beginning of combat using a bonus action and you need your bonus action to make Flurry of Blows attacks or additional unarmed attacks just from your monk levels um but there is of course a way to fix that this isn't mandatory and you could also continue to monk level 9 to get the resonating strike and a second de feat or you could continue to um Barbarian 6 to get an additional one of the additional Beast aspects but I think that the best way to build this character at this point is like many other monk builds to start building into Rogue the reason for this of course is that Thief Rogue gets an additional bonus action when at level three so while we don't benefit from sneak attack and our bonus actions are so constrained that the bonus action hide Dash and disengage from Rogue level two are not going going to be massive uh points in our favor when we hit Thief Rogue at level three this gives us an additional bonus action allowing us to rage and make a Flurry of Blows attack in the first round of combat and then make multiple Flurry of Blows or offhand attacks in subsequent rounds of combat massively improving our damage in the second and later rounds of combat after we've raged this gives us five six attacks per round before we get hasted or blood lusted or anything from an ally all of which of course will increase our attacks more and those six attacks per round are all adding an additional 10 damage to every single strike because of our rage damage and the double damage from Tavern brawler so our per round damage without any other bonuses is somewhere around 80 to 100 um which is very good before you even take into account that we've we can add additional bonuses by getting more strength additional bonuses by getting item that add extra damage dice to our attacks or additional bonuses by getting Buffs from allies so when you put it all together you have a character who has almost all of the damage and utility of the normal open-hand monk Thief Rogue multiclass character and almost none of the downsides so you give up very little and mitigate two uh really difficult problems that the character has its squishiness and its attribute dependency by being able to mix in bar Toad and Barbarian and just having all the dam damage that you you take in an encounter um while maintaining the the level of damage output that you would get without the Barbarian levels is incredibly powerful and also lets you play much riskier with the character normally with a monk you have to attack and then run away because your character has low AC and is relatively easy to and low HP relatively easy to take down so you need to use your Mobility to escape but with this character you can be much more aggressive about positioning in dangerous locations and also because of your low AC enemies are extremely likely to attack you which you actually want because then you're taking half damage and so you're getting double value from any healing that this character is getting any support that this character is getting any temporary hit points you have from Aid or Heroes feast or uh other sources of healing or temporary hit points like items and and spells all are doubled when they're applied to this character so the ability to force enemies to attack you both by being an enorm threat thanks to your extraordinarily high damage output and crowd control effect and also by manipulating the AI the AI into attacking you thanks to being easy to hit makes this character an incredible tank as well as an incredible damage dealer for items for this character you actually don't have as many strict requirements as other monk builds as well which is one of the nice things about this you get to be much more flexible with your items although I do highly recommend the bone Spike Garb because the bone Spike Garb gives you 15 hit points temp hit points whenever you rage um you're going to be raging in most fights and those 15 temporary hit points are doubled because you have the bare totem Barbarian rage so they get twice as much value that's just a lot of additional tankiness which is really nice um and reducing all incoming damage by two is incredibly strong because uh you are also having all damage when you have a multiplier on your damage reduction then any flat damage reduction you have in addition to that gets even more valuable because the flat damage reduction is then reducing a higher percentage of incoming damage since all incoming damage is reduced the bone Spike boots are nice for theming but not as necessary though they do give you a little bit of AC and saving throws um which is always nice but of course you can use any of the other boots honestly the the misy step boots are your best bet like they are for just about every character and you want a set of gloves that are either the gloves of dexterity to increase your AC and initiative because this like every character um that doesn't have 18 dexterity the gloves of dexterity are excellent on them or just any any set of gloves that increases your damage with unarmed strikes like the flawed hell dusk gloves just to pick one example the additional damage that these do and the bleeding that these do gets applied six times per uh per per turn at minimum meaning that you are going to gain an enormous amount of extra value this character also works extremely well with carlac of course because she has the soul coins and when you use a a soul coin you gain The Infernal Fury which lets you do an additional 1 D4 damage while raging which of course you're always going to be raging and at in the current state of the game infernal Fury is bugged and always works on unarmed strikes um I believe that's still true after patch six uh always works on armed strikes so you get this even when not raging but this is also this build is future proofed um even if they do fix that bug because the U will be raging so you're going to get the infernal Fury buff of course ascended asaran is also very good as he is on every character that's making multi attacks per round other notable gear includes of course potions of speed additional attacks are always very strong even on honor mode one extra attack with this character is worth a lot elixir of Hill giant or Cloud giant strength give you massive value twice as much value as they give every other character uh because of course you will um have Tavern brawler so you get double value from strength and if you're regularly using Elixir then you just want to drop your strength down to eight and put those extra attribute points elsewhere other than that no specific item requirements for this character build which makes it really nice for as a monk because monks often have particular items that they want this character not so much and so you get to slot this into a lot of other parties uh a lot of parties without any trouble which is particularly strong all right my friends um let's also just uh let's punch the oathbreaker Knight just for fun here I'm going to just quick save real quick all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the bare knuckle Fighter um I think this build is awesome and I highly recommend giving it a shot and of course as always if you have enjoyed this build or this video do please take take a moment to leave a comment and like the video both of those things help a ton with the algorithm and I really do appreciate you taking the time to do that I read every single comment that I receive um I haven't been able to answer them all lately just because the volume has gone up which is which is awesome uh but I do read every single comment that I get and I really do appreciate you taking the time to leave your thoughts and let me know what you think and of course as always if you've enjoyed the video you can subscribe to the channel um for more of this and other strategy game content and if you have enjoyed the video a lot you can consider becoming a channel member or uh leaving me some money with the buttons down below the video uh cheers my friends I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 27,640

Keywords: Etarran, Cephalopocalypse, Baldur's Gate 3, Larian, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Build, Guide, Strategy, Tactics, Tutorial, Jaheira, Minsc, Astarion, Gale, Karlach, Shadowheart, Minthara, Wyll, Halsin, Lae'zel

Id: oewBqn0GjW4

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024