The BEST ARCHER in Baldur's Gate 3 - Honor Mode Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today we're covering my pick for the best stealth Archer build in balers Gate 3 one of the characters that got a significant buff or rather a bug fix in patch five is the Assassin Rogue which gained the ability to actually regain its action on the first round of combat meaning that you can take an attack outside of combat and then when combat starts you'll be able to take another attack this means that starting at level three the Assassin Rog will be able to make two attacks in their opening round of combat something that very few other characters in the game get the only other characters in the game that can start making two attacks starting at level three are things like the gloomstalker ranger or the Berserker Barbarian so that puts you in a fairly Exclusive Company in terms of very high damage output in the opening round you also get automatic criticals against surprised enemies so this build is going to be making use of that feature however in order to best maximize Rogue we actually want to a fairly heavily multiclassed build if you've been watching my videos for a long time you will recognize this build as an updated version of the best assassin in balers Gate 3 uh one of my earlier build videos but because I didn't complete the build skeleton in that video I'm going to walk you through level by level this is I think an excellent party member or solo for tactician or honor mode um in the higher difficulty modes one of the best things you can be doing is the stealth-based range attacks because it means that you're never in danger so especially for Honor mode having a stealth-based range attacker in your party lets you start every fight basically up one enemy uh cuz you'll usually kill someone before combat even starts and then also you will win initiative and probably drop a second enemy before the opponent even get a chance to act so the purpose of this character is to take out priority threats or if you're planning to solo then you're just going to want to stay in stealth and kill everyone before combat starts um and without them knowing that you're there at all I'm using aaran as the example character because of course for a stealth Archer character that makes perfect sense to me and also because his unique ability to gain a bonus to hit synergizes very well with this character which will end up not maxing out its dexterity so we want other sources of to hit bonus where possible all right let's get right into building the character so first up we have to oh let me actually reset this to our default stat spread so you can see what we're fixing so you can see that this default stat spread both has three odd numbers and also has a bunch of stats that are just not useful at all for a rogue so aaran I think has one of the worst starting stat spreads we can definitely fix that um before we build this character so we're going to get rid of all of this intelligence we don't need any of that uh give him 14 wisdom 16 dexterity and 16 constit tion and then with our remaining four points if you are a main character you could put these into Charisma to give you actually pretty decent dialogue skills as a rogue with Charisma you can end up with uh pretty high skill checks just overall or if you are not a main character you could place these into strength giving you a little more Mobility because the jump distance is actually quite useful for a stealth character this can allow you to get up onto High Ground more easily without having to spend like a misty step or something like that in order to uh re Terror down on your enemies from a location they can't reach you from if you are not on honor mode uh then you should highly consider taking 17 dexterity and planning to take anti ethal deal but on honor mode I will say that that is something that you just can't rely on because it's very easy to accidentally kill her and not be able to take the deal so I would not take the odd stat spreads if you're playing on honor mode uh we just can't count on getting that all right for our skills of course the only thing that we really really need is slight of hand and stealth and you're going to take expertise in both of those I guess you don't actually need slight of hand but you're taking a dexterity based Rogue so you you definitely should grab slight of hand um and of course expertise in stealth is core to the whole purpose of this build which is to kill enemies from the Shadows all right let's take those skills and level up at Rogue level two there's no decisions to make but you do get a few things that are very important to the function of Rogue as a character class being bonus action hide Dash and disengage all of these are super useful especially for an Archer Rogue so if you bonus action hide then that will give you advantage on your next attack and you should be able to find an easy place to hide um somewhere in the arena because you will be able to attack from any angle meaning that the bonus action hide will be very reliable For You especially if you get your stealth check high but in general you should be able to move out of enemy line of sight before hitting this and then still attack this will let you apply your sneak attack over and over again because you can continue to cunning action hide and also make your attacks very reliable because you'll have advantage on every one of your attack roles cutting action dash of course gives you a lot of mobility and lets you still attack in a turn that you double move and cutting action disengage is very useful for an Archer because it stops melee characters from shutting you down completely or getting attacks of opportunity against you use all of these abilities very heavily they're extremely important to your kit and I highly recommend you familiarize yourself with how they work and how to use [Music] them at Rogue level three I talked about this already but for a stealth-based Archer character the best pick of course is Assassin Rogue assassin after having been buffed is also I think in a vacuum the most powerful of the three Rogue classes thief gets some other options when it's doing things with offhand attacks but in particular assassins get a ton of bonuses so what do you actually get from being an assassin well you get advantage on everything that hasn't acted in a turn yet um or hasn't take acted in a combat yet excuse me which is very powerful both because it lets you hit and does means that you can use your bonus action for something other than hiding uh and still gain advantage and also because enemies you have advantage against you can sneak attack so you don't need an ally to provide you the ability to sneak attack one of Rogues weaknesses is that if your allies don't have great initiative you will often win initiative and then have to go first in a round before an ally can move up to support your character if your allies do have good initiative then you will be able to move them into base contact with an enemy ahead of Your rogue's Action um something to keep in mind also just as a side note cuz I know people will call me out on this um if you all win initiative as a party or if multiple characters win initiative or act uh on the same initiative in Boulder's Gate you get to choose what order they act in so if your whole party has good initiative you can move your Melee character adjacent to an enemy and then guarantee that you'll be able to sneak attack that enemy even if your Rogue technically rolled higher you'll still be able to move the fighter first but if an enemy gets an initiative score or in between you and your ally you won't be able to move that Ally into position and so won't be able to make sneak attacks normally Assassin Rogue gets around this issue by just being self-sufficient when it comes to triggering sneak attacks because anything that hasn't acted in the turn in the combat you are going to have advantage against and be able to sneak attack you also get Critical Hits against every surprised creature and you're going to surprise enemies very often because you will often be starting combat from stealth and that can apply surprise um to groups of enemies so extremely useful of course also there's some dialogue choices you can use to gain surprise but primarily this is going to be again stealth attacks against uh enemies who aren't expecting you to attack them you get surprise and then you get a round of combat where they're not acting where you have advantage and automatic criticals against them of course those criticals will multiply your sneak attack dice as well for even a more initial burst damage and you also now restore your action and bonus action at the start of combat basically giving you two attacks in the first round of combat so long as you attack before combat starts huge bonus and means that you are doing an insane amount of damage very very early in the game at this point we're going to make a degression because Assassin Rogue actually does not benefit that strongly from continuing to take levels in Rogue every second level you get another die of seak attack um and you get some other minor boosts but honestly Rogue at level three has already gotten the best things from the class I actually I'm intending to do a a video on this so keep an eye out for it about different breakpoints for different characters uh different character classes um but for rogue a very typical breakpoint is level three because when you get your subass access that's kind of what you need from Rogue and you can often move into another character class in this case the character class that we are going to move into is Ranger and the reason for this of course is that we want to frontload more damage and the other character that is best at front loading damage is the Gloom salker Ranger for our favored enemy here you are you should definitely take Ranger Knight um even if you don't intend to wear heavy body armor because it will give you disadvantage on stealth checks and you have high dexterity so you won't gain as much AC as other characters would the ranger knight uh gaining access to Heavy Armor proficiency lets you wear helmets gloves and boots that have the heavy armor tag which are all very valuable for your character um without having that problem of the heavy body armor so it's this gives you a huge a uh significantly increased access to different items many of which are actually very good for you for natural Explorer you're going to want Wasteland Wanderer fire typically resistance to fire damage lets you resist the most commonly seen damage type in the game and in Dungeons and Dragons generally fire resistance is always good it also is going to let you if you for example Start a Fight by blowing up a barrel you can resist that damage and one thing that this character will get to do is use explosions and set up stuff out of combat because you're going to be so stealthy all the time you can do the barrelmancy tricks more uh with more facility than other characters can I moving an explosive Barrel next to an enemy before blowing before starting a combat something like that for our abilities again you don't really need anything in particular here um we already have the skills that we need one thing to notice is that it does not show you your skill proficiencies from Rogue in this menu so you do have to remember what you've already taken just worth keeping that in mind but just fill out whatever you feel like your party needs access to at level two Ranger we get a fighting style giving us archery fighting style which is great for this character of course as a ranged attacker you need the archery bonus to hit this means that you will hit very reliably even though we haven't gotten a a dexterity increase yet at this point in the game with the plus two to hit we're going to be hitting very reliably especially with advantage on all of our attacks excuse me one second have to drain some water my apologies I'm recording this with a bit of a sore throat all right then we are going to select spells and so the spells that you want to take here are going to be long Strider every party should have access to Long Strider what this doesn't tell you in the tool tip is that this is a ritual meaning that it does not take a spell slot to cast and it lasts all day so just having access to this means your whole party gets 10 ft of bonus movement speed for the entire day that's incredibly valuable for this character I should also mention that if speaking of movement speed I forgot to mention this at the beginning if you are playing this character as not a staran then your Best Bets are going to be the wood elf who gets self- proficiency and uh uh who who gets extra proficiencies and bonus movement speed the Deep gnome who gets advantage on stealth checks as well as advantage on mental saving throws which which is incredibly powerful um or the halfling just letting you reroll ones many of your attacks are going to be made at like 90 95 98% to hit and so rrolling ones can actually be very valuable for this character preventing the very few times you would miss uh on your attacks and for our second spell we're going to take Hunter's Mark you usually are going to want to bonus action hide rather than cast Hunter mark but the times when it comes up this extra 1d6 of damage is very good and if you get a critical it's an extra 2d6 of damage so that's pretty nice um and you can it lasts all day so you can uh you can transfer it from character to character at any time during the day making sure that you always have additional damage even without spending too many spell slots so this is just a very useful additional damage boost to have especially because in our opening round of combat we're now going to be making three attacks because we are going to take the gloomstalker ranger gloomstalker is one that suffers from another bad tool tip just like the long Strider tool tip because you have the dread ambusher feature gives you a plus three to initiative already very good winning initiative means that you are more likely to have advantage on your attacks cuz remember enemies that haven't acted yet you have advantage against them and also um of course winning initiative is just good for any a host of other reasons but even more important for this character but also on your first turn of combat your movement speed increases by 10 ft and you can make an attack that deals an additional 1d8 damage what this tool tip doesn't tell you is that that's an extra attack it does not take an attack action or an action of any kind actually you can do this and take a different action as well as a different bonus action um and it does an extra de8 of damage so that means in your opening round of combat comat you're doing an additional attack plus the one you did before combat starts so you're already doing three attacks in the first round of combat applying sneak attack very likely to be applying Critical Hits on some of those so your average damage in your opening round of combat is already ridiculous and it only gets better from here you get also another bonus action hide which is redundant with the Rogues one so unfortunately there is a little bit of redundancy there but that's okay uh umbrell shroud letting you become invisible if you're obscured uh is fairly useful this is relatively free and there are some cases where it can let you get into a good position in combat before combat starts um just having outof combat access to invisibility gives you basically free reign to move around most Arenas before the combat begins letting you pick the optimal place to start combat from for our spell selection here at this point there's not a lot that you really need uh you could take cure wounds just to have access to some healing you could take fog Cloud fog cloud is a little buggy in the current version but is very good for ranged attackers once they fix the bug um so how this is supposed to work is that if you're standing in it enemy range characters will not be able to attack you currently that does not seem to be the case I've seen uh if you watched my honor mode playthrough you saw my characters getting attacked in the middle of fog clouds and um enemies not respecting the fog Cloud at all and I've seen other people reporting this as a bug So currently this seems to be bugged when they fix fog Cloud uh this is going to be a very powerful option how you use this spell is you cast it on yourself you stand in the middle of it so enemies cannot attack you at range and then you step out of it to Fire and then step back into it before ending your turn making you perfectly immune to ranged attacks um that being said you will want to be a little careful with this one right now because it in the current version as of the date of recording here seems to be bugged at Ranger level four we get access to a feat and the feat that we are going to take is actually not an ability Improvement because our hit chances should be very good every turn of combat basically um we have archery fighting style and we have advantage on every attack we're going to take Sharpshooter Sharpshooter gives you an attack penalty so one reason that aaran is so good for this character is that you offset the penalty with aaran happy buff from having him drink some blood um you can offset that penalty by one point then you offset it an additional Point by your archery fighting style and then you gain advantage on all your attacks so you're still going to be quite likely to hit your attacks and every attack will do an additional 10 damage given that we're doing three attacks in the opening round of combat at this point that's an additional 30 damage to an enemy uh before they ever get a chance to act incredibly powerful you can also toggle this off if your hit chance looks really bad but I will say that almost always the math works out that you will do more average damage leaving this on even if the hit chance is very low um so that's something to keep in mind it it does feel bad to miss those attacks but typically you're going to do more average damage leaving Sharpshooter on 100% of the time also worth mentioning is that uh when you are starting a combat if you miss an enemy they often won't notice your presence it's only if you hit them that that will actually start a combat so you'll get a few chances to try to hit them um even if you have bad hit chances thanks to a sharpshooter but again I want to I should emphasize that you will almost always prefer to leave this on all of the time because that gives you the best chance of or the best average damage per round at Ranger level five we get access to extra attack of course very important for this character and also Misty step although we will not be keeping this level of Ranger forever something that I should have mentioned earlier as well and and uh forgive me for the slightly out of order thing I will put time stamps for this so it'll be a little easier for everyone is that this build does involve one Respec in order to reach its final form this leveling order is the best leveling order and then when we hit Level 11 we're going to Respec back back down to a lower level in order to uh maximize the character here we are going to pick up usually Spike growth is the best just good for ranged characters you can block enemy melee characters from reaching you you could also take pass without Trace which gives you plus 10 to stealth checks um it conflicts with other concentration spells but it does last all day and you're unlikely to lose concentration on stuff because you uh typically will not be taking damage on this character so you just don't need to worry about losing concentration or making concentration checks having plus 10 bonus to stealth checks is very powerful allowing you to maintain your your superiority in terms of being out of combat the entire uh time so when you make an attack the enemies make you make a stealth check versus the enemy's perception to see if they can see sense your presence and if they don't you just get another free attack you can just keep attacking until they eventually see you so this is very powerful for taking out groups of enemies without them ever knowing you're there here we're going to go back to Rogue to pick up a feat and we'll just take an ability Improvement getting up to 18 dexterity and then at this level we're going to actually multiclass again because we have all of the things that we need from both Rogue and Ranger and we are going to go into fighter fighter gets you a fighting style in this case defense because we already have archery so defense is the is going to be the most useful of the remaining ones um and plus one bonus to Armor class is always good and then you get action surge bringing your total attacks in the opening round of combat up to six because you're going to attack once from out of combat or occasionally twice then when combat begins you have your uh normal attack plus your extra attack from being a level five Ranger then you get your dread ambusher attack so that's four attacks and then you action surge to make two more attacks action surge isn't like haste so in in honor mode haste and potions of speed are nerfed you can't benefit from extra attack on those extra actions that you get from haste and po potion of speed you can only make one attack with those but action surge you can still make two full attacks it's it just counts as a full action so you'll be able to make six attacks on your opening round of combat that's 60 damage from Sharpshooter that's an extra 30 damage is from your bow that's an extra um 24 damage just from your dexterity and then of course your sneak attack and any additional damage riders that you have this character of course also benefits very strongly because we're making so many attacks from having any anything that increases our damage especially anything that rolls dice so keep an eye out for items that give you extra damage dice because those will be doubled by your Critical Hits finally at Battle Master level three you get Maneuvers and the Maneuvers that we are going to pick are menacing attack because this can keep melee enemies at range Precision attack because this again helps offset the Sharpshooter uh penalty and either trip attack or disarming attack personally I prefer trip attack it can also slow enemies and it can help out your allies by giving melee allies Advantage so this is the build up to this point but then in order to maximize our character at level level 12 I think you're going to want to make a ree back this build only reaches to Feats and so we can actually get those in a slightly more efficient way while still getting everything we need from Rogan Ranger and getting a few more hit points and things too so we're going to just talk to Withers and I will quickly run through the character Respec we will still start with Rogue for skill access although you could choose to start um with one of the other classes but this gives you the best skill access you don't have to change like any of the skills that you've been using throughout the game you won't have to change and then we go to level three Rogue we get access to Assassin no more decisions here take Ranger as well making sure that we take Ranger Knight um you may be asking why do we need to take this heavy armor proficiency if we're taking fighter later and that's the reason is that this is fairly confusing um the way this works if you multiclass into fighter if you start as a fighter you get access to heavy arm armor and if you multiclass into fighter you only get access to medium armor so in order to gain access to Heavy Armor we need to get it from another source in this case Ranger Knight then we will take gloomstalker making sure that we get access to everything and again making all the same decisions that we did before and then this is where the build deviates we're going to go straight into fighter and the reason that we want to do this as a re speec rather than starting this way is that this delay lays access to your feet um all the way to the end of the build so the this charact this version of the character takes much longer to come online we get three Maneuvers here getting access to menacing attack Precision attack and trip attack then we get our feet and we're going to take sharpshooter and then we get extra attack from fighter level five so that's why we don't need to reach Ranger level five and then at fighter level six we get another feet the way the reason you do it this way is it's a few more hit points um slightly better access to other things and you still get two Feats this way um which is just overall a slight optimization to the end game build but it takes longer to come online in terms of itemization for this build you are going to want of course the best bow you can find one that is worth mentioning is the Titan string bow which I don't currently have but the Titan string bow lets you add your strength to your damage so then you could use an elixir of Hill giant strength to make every attack do five more uh damage or use this club of Hill giant strength that you can find in the underdark as your mainhand weapon and then you'll still have an Elixir slot for something like an elixir of blood lust um either of those will increase your flat damage output significantly you still do benefit very heavily from elixir of of blood lust even though they were nerfed in honor mode they're still very good and of course in tactician difficulty or below it's going to be your best option for increasing your damage potions of speed are also still very valuable for you additional attacks are just really strong for any character that's applying Sharpshooter because even though this is only a single extra attack on honor mode it's still going going to be a ton of extra damage cuz every one of your attacks hits so hard you will also want to make sure that you have a shield equipped because you can gain the AC benefits of a shield as while having a two-handed ranged weapon equipped um because the game lets you freely switch between weapon sets this is just to stop people from getting punished for forgetting to do that you are still technically it's still technically better to switch between your melee and ranged weapons uh at the end of your turn so make sure that you are have your melee weapon set equipped when it's not your turn because then you can make attacks of opportunity but either way you'll benefit from The Shield um also any weapons with passive benefits like the knife of the under Mountain King uh that reduces your chance needed for critical hits are very good as melee weapons because you can actually benefit from that while making ranged attacks um another thing that's worth mentioning is that because you have good dexterity and uh medium armor access or even heavy armor access but medium armor access in this particular case you can use the armors that let you add your full dexterity modifier plus a shield giving you very good AC with 24 AC here we're ahead of where characters in plate armor would be so we actually have the highest AC values in the game on this kind of character with the medium armors that let you apply your full um bonus anything that increases your damage and especially anything that adds dice to your damage like these stalker gloves are really valuable there's a several other gloves that add a D4 of damage to your weapon attacks that's extremely powerful for this character and something that you should keep an eye out for of course any bow that increases your damage or has Elemental damage attached to it is very good as well and one other thing that is worth mentioning as well for this character is that because you only reach 18 dexterity you're one of the best candidates in the game to dump dexterity and instead use the gloves of dexterity in that case you would take eight dexterity for for your starting stats and put those points elsewhere in the build um either Charisma wisdom intelligence probably wisdom is what you would Max and then add in the gloves of dexterity and that would get you access to another feet the other feet that you should take if you're using the gloves of dexterity is alert because winning initiative is so important for this character it also makes you immune to the couple fights where you do get surprised for story reasons and that's extremely powerful as well because this character really suffers from being surprised you want to be doing the surprising not getting surprised a typical turn in combat you're going to want to start with this character stealth whether you you are um on my way whether you are part of a party or solo you're going to want to start with this character stealthed and then you're going to want to initiate any combats by having them make the attack so that will surprise the enemies um and allow them to regain their action before combat starts getting your extra action in combat so you will typically fire that also something that's worth keeping in mind is that you can use the special arrows these do additional Elemental damage and so benefit very strongly from Critical Hits because the 28 fire damage uh 2 D4 fire damage excuse me gets doubled if you have a critical hit which you are guaranteed to do against surprised enemies thanks to this build all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the stealth Archer or Assassin Rogue and as always if you have do please feel free to leave a comment like the video both of those things help a ton with the algorithm and you can subscribe to my channel for more honor mode build guides and other strategy game content cheers my friends I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 34,475

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

Id: ExIOptufzgc

Length: 30min 48sec (1848 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2023