The BEST BARD in Baldur's Gate 3 - Detailed Tactician Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today we're going to be covering my pick for the best barred build in balers Gate 3 this guide will be extremely detailed and aimed at beginners and veteran players alike so we're going to be going over every decision that you need to make in order to have the most powerful B available to you in quite a lot of detail so get ready I have used an example character as the main character or the m a main character as the example character for this build because I think typically a Bard is going to want to be your main character there's no Bard by default amongst the companion classes and Bard makes an excellent main character since you get access to all of the conversation skills and in fact in this build we are going to get access not only to all the conversation skills but the highest possible bonus in all four conversation skills so we'll be able to pass any dialogue check that we need to for your character race you are going to want to pick between I think there are three that stand out above the other others I've gone with a gith Yankee here because this gives you access to astral knowledge and Bs as a sort of Jack of all trades benefit very strongly from Gaining Proficiency in a bunch of extra skills in fact you even have a class feature called Jack of all trades um the more skill checks you can pass the better you can fit in and Bs fit in very well to every possible party configuration so having more skill access is really strong the other two races that stand out are wood elf or half wood elf which stand out for BS but also just for every single possible character because they have 35t move speed and additional Mobility compared to the default 30 foot and additional Mobility is incredibly powerful so wood elves are by far the best race by default I think although the gith Yan's Misty step does rival that and the other race that comes out ahead of uh the pack is the halfling the the reason for this is that halflings have the ability to reroll Natural ones including on concentration checks and we will be concentrating on a spell just about every single round of every single combat in the game so halflings rrolling ones on concentration means we'll lose concentration significantly less often over the course of the game and can really benefit you on average in terms of keeping your spells up that being said I think that the strongest option is still gank for the extra astral knowledge and that's what we've gone with for your character background I've gone with Guild Artisan for this one giving us Proficiency in insight and persuasion we of course want persuasion but the only important thing for your background is that you avoid getting Proficiency in deception or performance the reason for that will become clear later on but you want to actually avoid the Entertainer background which seems like the natural pick for a Bard but will actually cost us skill proficiencies down the line so as long as you avoid those two skills whatever background you pick will be fine the first thing that we have to do when we are building our character is we have to fix these default stats the barred default stats are not as far from the optimal spread as many characters are many classes default stats are but there's certainly some optimizations we can make firstly there are three odd numbers in your default stats and those are bad you usually never want odd numbers when you're building D and D characters and you certainly don't want three odd numbers because you only get bonuses at even numbers of these attributes to the actual roles that you're making so we can definitely fix that by changing these abilities around we're going to take this pip out of dexterity and place it in Constitution leaving dexterity at 14 then we're going to take these useless points out of intelligence BS never have a use for intelligence and place them into Constitution getting US 60 in Constitution and maxing out our available hit points almost every character is going to want 16 Constitution the default point spread for a Caster is going to look like 14 dexterity 16 in Constitution 16 in their casting stat whether that be Charisma wisdom or um intelligence depending on what you are Charisma for BS and 12 wisdom the reason for this is that wisdom is the best of the remaining saving throws in Dungeons and Dragons each of these abilities has an Associated saving throw with it and three of them are good and three of them are bad you get three strong saving throws and three weak saving throws or three important saving throws and three less important saving throws every class gives you Proficiency in two of those saving throws and it will always be one important one and one unimportant one dexterity Constitution and wisdom are the three important ones and the other three are unimportant BS get Proficiency in Charisma and in dexterity so you get one good one in dexterity and one bad one in Charisma so we place our points in wisdom because we don't need intelligence or strength for the saving throws that being said for a main character you would normally want to place you you might want to consider removing some points just to have a couple extra points in strength because additional carry weight and jump distance can be pretty useful and for this character we're actually going to do something a little different than the default we're going to go with 17 Charisma the reason for that will become clear later on down the line but um for now just bear with me and accept that we need this odd number there is also a way to boost one of your stats by one during act one in Boulders Gate 3 specifically I won't spoil how it works exactly but if you intend to use that then you can go with 16 Charisma and 12 wisdom or 10 strength but if you by default you're going to want to get 17 charisma you can also always Respec these numbers later in the game so don't feel locked in for our skill selection we want as I said you want to have access to all the dialogue skills but not deception and performance although if you want to use a Respec later on you can take these and then Respec out of them later on down the line but for now I think you're going to be fine just having persuasion and intimidation as your dialogue skills and then for your last uh two skills I would recommend getting slight of hand and stealth these are incredibly useful every party will want access to them you have decent dexterity so you can you can roll these very well um these are going to be the bread and butter of a lot of BS as well and give you a ton of additional options for Mobility as well as to open chests and deal with traps if you already have slight of hand on another character another good option is acrobatics or you could take one of the other skills if you're a gith yane try to leave one category empty so notice I've taken no intelligence skills because then you can set your astral knowledge to that skill and gain the maximum benefit from it starting instrument doesn't matter but let's also pick our Spells at level one we're going to want to take uh there's a few spells that are really important to have you are going to want to have sleep at level one we will remove this later in the game we'll replace this with a spell that scales better but at level one this is the single best action in the game it with no saving throw just takes an enemy out as long as their hit points are 24 or lower it can even hit two enemies if they have a combined total of 24 or lower hit points and it takes them out for two whole turns with no save knocking an enemy out for two turns is ludicrously powerful our other options are less important but I personally quite like having healing W bard typically don't have great uses for their bonus actions and healing word is one of the best bonus actions in the game so having access to that is very helpful I like having Thunder Wave and then finally for the last one I personally like having speak with animals because it gives you a lot of opportunity to engage with the game very well for our canant trip selection you're going to want vicious mockery this is less of an important pick to have your damaging canant trip on BS than on other um casters because ious mockery is the weakest of the damage en cantrips but is still pretty nice to have and I also quite like having friends if you feel like you'd rather just use uh archery for your default attacks you can skip vicious mockery and take one of the really strong utility spells being minor illusion or Mage hand um but for now I'm going to assume that you've picked this we also get Mage hand from being a GTH yane once per day this is our level one selection and let's hop to to level two so at level two we actually have a decision to make we are going to want to get access to Shield proficiency CU we don't have that and ideally heavy armor proficiency we also only need 11 levels of Bard to reach six level Bard spells so we're pretty highly incentivized to put one level into a different class we could do that right now it will delay access to reaching higher level B spells and class features but then we would get access to Heavy Armor and shield proficiencies right away as well as the other benefits of that other class in my opinion it's correct to just do this at level two although you could also wait until level four to get your first feat or wait until level five to get third level spells but we're just going to go right in and at level two take a single level in cleric the reason for this is that if you take life domain War domain temp domain or nature domain you get access to Heavy Armor and shield proficiencies this is going to increase your AC significantly throughout the game Shields are excellent for any character any Caster class which aard is um just two free AC as Wells the powerful magical effects associated with many Shields and cleric also gives you a ton of options for engaging in conversation skills as well you get access to the thury C trip which gives you advantage on intimidation and performance checks this doesn't have the downside of people getting mad at you like friends does although I personally have never seen an NPC get mad at me for casting friends on them so that may not actually have been implemented in the game let me know if you've seen that happen um and then you also get access to Guidance the single best cantrip in the game that gives you plus 1 D4 to skill checks you can use this on yourself anytime you are making any skill check and it's very powerful or use it on allies and for our third spell I like to take resistance it comes up sometimes in dialogue and also just gives you a lot of extra options for saving throws although any of the other three are very good light or blade Ward any of these these three are very good resistance light or blade Ward all have lots of utility for our subass I I would suggest taking life domain you will get then get access to bless as a domain spell and concentrate on bless is going to be one of the things that one of the best things that you do as a character for the few first few levels of the game you're going to concentrate on bless and then support with ranged attacks whether through vicious mockery or archery um is one of the most powerful contributions you can make you also get the disciple of Life subass feature and we took healing word as our one of our Bard spells healing word gives you this will give you healing word plus three meaning it more than doubles the effectiveness of healing W disciple of life is extremely valuable on lowlevel healing spells um it scales it obviously very well right like a level one spell gets two plus the Spells level so you you gain plus three points a level two healing spell only gains Four Points so you're only gaining 33% there whereas the level one spell this almost doubles the effectiveness of healing at level one you don't usually want to spend actions on healing in com but having your bonus action heal for up to eight is incredibly strong at this point in the game highly recommend going life domain cleric you also get access to Shields and heavy armor for aity you probably want to pick salune because there's a lot of unique dialogue options available if you do that and we only get one prepared spell because we only have 10 wisdom for that prepared spell I think you should probably go with Sanctuary this is another bonus action it's not concentration and it allows you to uh save an ally there's tons of creative uses for sanctuary and I recommend you explore using these one of the best is just to block a doorway with an invincible Ally and then shoot that shoot any enemies who are stuck on the other side of that doorway with arrows and stuff but there's all sorts of cool things that you can do so we're going to take a level of cleric to get access to Heavy Armor Shields and a bunch of very powerful utility effects then we go back to Bard there aren't a lot of decisions to make but at this point you are likely to want to replace sleep that we took at level one because it will have fallen off of its scaling um and I recommend that you replace it with Thunder Wave uh or no sorry we already took Thunder Wave with long Strider you can cast this without spending a spell slot because it's a ritual spell and it just gives your whole team plus 10 feet of movement speed and then for the actual spell that we're taking at this level um I think it's less important but I like having access to fairy fire disguise self gives you a ton of role playing options so personally I would take disguise self here we're already quite good in combat just between our healing and our bless and arrow attacks or vicious mockeries so just having access to more uh role playing options because you're a barred that's what you want to do I think is the best option here you also get the song of rest ability which is very powerful um just gets you a third short rest in a day which is very nice just lots of bonus out of combat healing for your party level three Bard we get to make the most important decision that we will make here which subass we're going to go College of Valor gives you medium armor proficiency and not much else we got medium armor uh from being a gith Yankee or heavy armor from being a cleric so we can pretty safely ignore College of Valor color of Sword College of Swords is more um melee oriented and is good for Archer BS but less good for spellcasting BS and I think those are the most powerful so we're going to go with College of lore one reason for this is that bards up until now have not had great uses for their reaction and every character in combat gets access to basically five resources you get your action your bonus action your concentration your movement and your reaction and we want to be maximizing all five of those resources at any point in time BS are very good at having an important spell to concentrate on you're very good at having actions you've got good bonus actions with healing word and Bic inspiration but now we get a good reaction because we can now spend an inspiration die to reduce an enemy attack this doesn't the the tool tip on this is bad but basically this lets you in response to an enemy attacking roll a a reverse Bic inspiration die to cause them to miss or in response to an enemy making a saving throw which is even better um cause them to fail a save cutting words is one of the best features in the game and also uses a resource you weren't otherwise using so it's extremely strong at level two we also get access to better spells one that you will always want is cloud of daggers this is no save damage and it's very consistent throughout combat and we will also likely want to replace one of our low-l spells whichever one you find you're not using like let's say you have long Strider from another source or you aren't using Thunder Wave you probably want to replace it with another level two spell and the level two spell that I would suggest is heat metal this is two concentration spells but heat metal is very nice because it gives you another use for your bonus action in combat which you don't always want to inspire or heal especially now that we have better uses for our inspiration dice with cutting words um but heat metal gives the enemy disadvantage on all their attacks or makes them drop their weapon and then lets you continue Contin to damage them every turn that you're concentrating on it as a bonus action really improves your action economy and is very powerful overall we also at level three Bard get access to expertise in two skills we're going to take intimidation and persuasion so now we have massive bonuses to these skills and three more proficient skills um if you're a ganki you're going to again want to avoid taking them all in avoid one category but by this point you should know what skills your party is missing and take those I would probably recommend taking acrobatics just to make yourself a little harder to push every character every party needs access to perception and then the last one I might just stick wherever um again you'll know what you need to be rolling at this point in the game depending on who you're bringing level four Bard we get our first feat and the feat that we're going to take is why we took an odd number in Charisma and also why we avoided taking deception and performance at level one because the feat that we take is actor this still gets us to 18 Charisma and gets us expertise in deception and performance and you don't need Proficiency in those skills to get expertise so basically we skipped proficiency and now have expertise in every dialogue skill for the highest possible dialogue checks in the game we also get advantage on every dialogue skill between thury and friends so huge uh bonus and excellent character for passing every dialogue check will be the best party face that you can possibly have for a spell selection it's less important I like to have something that's not concentration as a combat option so you could take maybe shatter here uh although silence is always powerful invisibility is good one that I would avoid is hold person because in Boulders Gate 3 it's actually implemented different than tabletop they the enemy gets to make a save when you cast it and then at the beginning of their turn before it costs them a single turn so they have to fail two saves in a row that's pretty unlikely on tactician so hold person usually ends up being a waste of a an action um in this game I hope they fix that because that's not how it's supposed to work it's not how it works in tabletop Dungeons and Dragons but uh for now I recommend not using hold person for extra can trip you just want to take a utility one minor illusion is very strong so I would take that or Mage hand if you find you want more than one per day there's also one other tip that I should quickly give you before we continue to level up because we now have access to cutting words and that is go into we need to hit a secret button go to your character sheet go to your Spellbook go to your reactions Tab and make sure that cutting words is set to ask when used by default this is going to use itself anytime an enemy attacks and there's a chance of it causing them to miss but you roll a D6 to reduce the enemy's attack so let's say they they roll a 15 against your ac10 you only have a one in six chance of making them miss you want to be able to decide when this is used not when not let the game decide you should also set opportunity attacks to this to avoid at wasting your reaction on just a melee attack since your melee attacks won't be good in fact you should always have all of your reaction set to ask on use but that's a that's an especially important tip for this character because we'll have so many reactions you don't want to waste level five Bard gets you access to level three spells and there's a couple that are extremely strong here this is one of the best reasons to just be a Bard is you get access to both of these spells and those are hypnotic pattern which is a massive AOE it's a 60 foot range but more importantly it's a 30 foot radius so a 60 foot diameter and it will for a single failed save cost an enemy two turns so this can basically take the entire encounter out of the battle for two turns let you focus them down one at a time gives you a ton of additional CC and utility probably one of the best spells in the game Bar None definitely recommend hypnotic pattern and then you're going to want to replace one of the ones that you're not using let's say you found shatter less useful you're going to want to replace that for plant growth this is non-concentration and it quarters enemy movement speed in a 20ft radius this can basically for no save take certain enemies out of the game entirely while they slowly waddle towards you quartered movement speed reduces their movement speed from 30 ft to 7 and 1/2 ft stopping enemies completely in their tracks level six we get one of the other excellent features of the lore Bard we get access to these magical Secrets this lets us access spells from uh any other class list and oh boy are there some good ones here there's one that you are always going to want to take and that is counter spell this is actually the single best spell in the game Bar None um it's a reaction that stops in opponent spellcaster from doing something you will definitely want to make sure this is set to ask on use like I showed you earlier but this is going to be the number one thing that your character is good for in like half of the fights that you're in counter spell is the best possible option the second one is a little harder because there are so many great options and I I highly recommend you explore this list but a few that stand out are Fireball if you just want a nice damage option eldrich blast which actually even without the warlock's invocation to increase its damage is still one of the best consistent damage sources in the game so if you are finding you're spending a lot of turns just shooting arrows eldrich blast can be very good you also get access to spells that aren't otherwise on any character spell list other than a single character such as hunger of Hadar a warlock spell this is an enormous Cloud that blinds enemies with no save and does tons of damage to them an extremely powerful concent ation spell although you will also have a lot of concentration options and it is also cool that other than warlocks you're the only character that can access this spell you also have good old standby haste one of the best Buffs in the game and just excellent for any character to have and the default uh pick is probably haste but like I said I recommend you really go through this and take your time to pick what you think will help given where the types of fights you've been doing in the game so far by level seven you should have a good sense of the role your character fits in the game and what you want out of them but I'm going to sort of assume that you took counter spell in haste or counter spell in hunger of Hadar I think those are great default options though also worth mentioning are Fireball Misty step Spirit Guardians Darkness eldrich blast animate dead there's so many cool options for Magical Secrets uh we also get another Bard spell and there's a few that are pretty good here you could go back for something like Thunder Wave that we picked up that we got rid of earlier at this point you've gotten the two best level three spells but uh stinking cloud is also very good it's a 20 foot radius cloud and if enemies are in it it stuns them for a turn you're likely to get at least one turn of inaction from an enemy out of stinking Cloud although they they will usually be able to leave the radius though since you have uh non-concentration plant growth you can place plant growth down to slow them and then put s stinking Cloud on top top of that causing enemies to always be taking the sinking Cloud effect also works well with Hunger of Hadar so there's a lot of options we'll say you took stinking Cloud here just for the sake of argument Bard level seven gets us access to fourth level spells and this is where Bard does start to fall off a bit in terms of spell selection there's a the higher level Bard spells are less powerful than the lower level Bard spells we've already gotten the the best ones in terms of hypnotic pattern and plant growth um as well as some of the lower level ones so our fourth level slots will often be things like upcasting cloud of daggers if you wanted to dip into a third class this is a good point to make that jump but you do miss out on some of the great class features of higher level bards so we're going to continue down the path of Bard a couple options for fourth level spells that are really good are polymorph um it's a single save to take an enemy out of the fight for five turns it's a wisdom save so against certain enemies you can be pretty sure they'll have bad wisdom saves and fail that regularly confusion should be good it's a group disabled similar to hypnotic pattern but I have found that in Boulders gate enemies will often just act normally even when they have the confusion effect on them it seems to the AI seems to be sort of bugged with how it handles confusion so until they fix that if they ever manage to I recommend avoiding confusion cuz I I think it just often doesn't function um I don't think I've ever seen them attack an ally because of confusion and they will just still Target your characters as uh very frequently so I have not found this one to work as implemented in the game if they fix it so it works as it's supposed to then it's a very strong option but we'll take polymorph or greater invisibility here at this point you should know which spells you aren't using and replace them with something you think you might use but you'll probably be using this whole list at this point cuz you'll have optimized it pretty well B level eight gets us our second feat and we're just going to max out our Charisma this maxes out our dialogue skills as well as giving us the highest possible save DC and take another spell that we think is going to be useful freedom of movement can be viable breaking an ally out of a stun is is good although there are a lot of powerful enemies in this game that's done so it can be useful to have access to this at this point though I might just take one of the lower level utility or combat options like invisibility or shatter um fairy fire is also good to reveal invisible enemies there's a few different options here that can be very powerful bir level 9 similarly the fifth level Bard spells are somewhat disappointing because of the hold monster has the same problem that hold person has with needing the enemies to fail two saving throws again if this worked as it as it was intended to it would uh be very powerful but unfortunately it does not currently dominate person is good in certain fights and very very powerful and Mas cure wounds is a pretty weak use of an action so I would avoid that my pick is probably going to be greater restoration if you didn't take freedom of movement you can just as an emergency button you will mostly be using your fifth level slots uh on upcast lower level spells but this is very useful uh or the magical secrets that we'll get next level but this is very useful in certain emergencies but things are looking up again when we get access to our second set of magical Secrets all of the lower level spells that I mentioned are of course still great but we also get access to some higher level spells includ including some pretty cool ones like banishing Smite this requires you to hit with a ranged attack so it's less um less powerful than it would be otherwise since our to hit rolles are not going to be as strong but it's still 5 d10 Force damage is great damage and the potential to banish an enemy as long as they have low health is very powerful just take them out of the fight for two turns um so that's one I would consider condra Elemental is great it's a dayong summon and like I said you don't have a ton of uses for your fifth level slots you can also just get more solid damage with cone of cold this is just a decent damaging effect um I also quite like wall of stone there's a lot of cool things you can do with this lots of utility on this spell and of course there's lower level spells as well ice storm is good ranged AOE damage wall of fire solves a lot of encounters just all by itself there are many encounters that just instantly are one by having access to wall of Fire although most of those are early enough in the game that by the time you hit Level 11 it won't be as powerful and of course there's still the unique spells from other classes that you could have access to mass healing word is very strong Warden especially with your life cleric boost Warden of Vitality is pretty cool um you are pretty tanky at this point cuz we've got heavy armor and everything so you can put up Spirit Guardians and just wait into combat at this point you'll kind of know what you need so let's assume you've taken conjure Elemental and Wall of stone just for the sake of it but I again I recommend that you play around with these spells this is the coolest thing about being a lard is getting access to all of these different spells so try out different things for our cantrip selection by this point again you should know what you need so we'll just take light for example and we also get expertise in two more skills which is incredible we already have expertise in all of the dialogue skills so I would just take expertise and slight of handed stealth although Athletics expertise is kind of fun because you can now have quite good Athletics even with negative strength and push enemies around um Insight will if you really want to be the ultimate dialogue guy you can put the the expertise in Insight again at this point you should know what skills you need for your party finally at B level 11 we get access to six level spells which of which we only have two options Autos irresistible dance which is a single save for no saving throw disable for up to 10 turns really really powerful although a lot of the bosses in this game have legendary resistance against crowd control so it's less powerful against them um but still very good against any enemy with a low wisdom save or ibite which lets you have an action I personally just think ibite is really cool so I like like to take that and let me just show you how it works cuz it's a little bit weird um but if we cast ibite here you can make Target an enemy and make them asleep which is 10 turns of perfect CC so really very powerful this is basically an Autos irresistible dance um as long as they're not taking damage fear which stops them from which makes them run away um and they can't take actions otherwise so also very powerful or disadvantage on attack roles and ability checks um which is the less powerful of these sickened is I would say weaker than the other two although I think this one might get around the legendary resistance to crowd control that bosses have I haven't tested that so let me know if you know the answer to that uh and then if it does then that's an especially powerful spell but then once you cast that spell uh you can continue to recast it every turn for the next 10 turns so you get just 10 turns of knocking someone out every single turn or at least making them save or fall asleep very powerful putting it all together we have a character that has dialogue checks in the 13s because of having double proficiency and plus five Charisma as well as excellent bonuses in every other skill check you have full bars spell casting heavy armor and shield proficiency for great AC and great tanking ability alongside sixing Constitution and you have access to some of the best spells in the game through magical secrets for gear I don't think there's anything that you particularly need in specific for a Bard there's a couple options that stand out a little bit like this plus two Charisma hat that you get later on will of course buff all your save DCS and and everything and you just want the best heavy armor best Shield that you can find you will use a crossbow in the early game so make sure you get a decent heavy crossbow early on and that will help out a lot um and for your melee weapon you will almost never be making melee attack so just take whatever you happen to want there make sure that it's one-handed so you can have a shield keep an eye out for anything that increases your charisma your dialogue checks and your spell save DCS those are going to be the most important things that you can have also you have a lot of bonus action healing so the items that give you Buffs when you heal an ally are very powerful and items that have Rider effects on healing allies any other Rider effect on healing allies is great um and items that prevent you from losing concentration so basically just anything that looks like it should be good for a spellcaster SP plus save DC is the best put that on and then get the best heavy armor and shield you can find and you'll be golden in terms of items all right my friends I hope that you have enjoyed this video this is a very detailed look at the best Bard in balers Gate 3 and as always if you have feel free to leave a comment uh like the video both of those things help a ton with the algorithm so I would appreciate if you would take the time to do that and you can of course subscribe to my channel for more balers Gate 3 builds and other strategy game content cheers my friends and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 80,036

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

Id: dfCPs8a3H6I

Length: 35min 22sec (2122 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 10 2023