The BEST CLERIC in Baldur's Gate 3 - Shadowheart Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide today I'm going to be covering my pick for the best cleric build in balers Gate 3 I'll of course be using Shadow heart as the example character here and this is the actual build that I use for shadow heart but this is also a build that could be very useful for any main character cleric if you wanted to do that instead this is also a build that will be pretty happy soloing I think it's not going to be the highest damage out put at the end of the game but it's got some really strong tricks that let you do tons of damage as well as being generally quite tanky clerics are one of the best SK best classes in the game because they can do pretty much everything they can nuke like a wizard they can tank like a fighter and they can mix it up in melee combat reasonably well as well Shadow heart is a high half elf which is unfortunately one of the worst races for a cleric the reason for this is that the weapon and armor proficiencies or rather the armor and shield proficiencies that the high half elf gives you are wasted on clerics because you get those from cleric anyways and the bonus can trip that you get scales off your intelligence which on a cleric we want to reduce as much as possible the best races for cleric are pretty much our old friend the wood elf is going to be the best but in particular I think that you want one that has some way of gaining perception proficiency whether that be from your background or from your race so wood elf definitely fits that bill with the extra movement speed and perception Prof proficiency but any other race that gives you that proficiency will be really valuable since WIS uh cleric skill with wisdom and perception skills with wisdom the fact that they can't take it on their normal skill list is a real downside for this class and something that we want to make up for from our background and race but let's level shadowart so Shadow heart has uh a starting stat spread that like all of the other companion characters is not very good and that we will need to fix although I will say this is closer to being a good stat spread than most of them it's it's just got three odd numbers but this is at least close to the proportions for stats that you're going to want that being said we can definitely improve it so let's go with get our constitution up to 16 and our wisdom up to 16 almost every casting class is going to want 16 in their main stat and 16 Constitution and then we can build up strength and dexterity which of these you have at 12 and which at 14 I think is going to depend a little on what you want your character to do the 14 is good because if you're a medium Armor class then most medium armors cap your AC from dexterity at two but we are actually going to be getting uh heavy armor access so the dexterity will not be giving us AC on the other hand initiative is quite powerful as well my recommendation is that you build 14 strength and 12 dexterity that way you still have some initiative bonus um but the and don't lose any AC but in the early game you might want more dexterity and less strength and then maybe you re back and switch that number and if you find yourself needing more initiative on this character who definitely does struggle with that then you are going to want to increase your dexterity as well finally for a main character cleric is one of the classes that benefits the most from using the method to increase your stat by one which I won't spoil but in the early game there's a way that you can increase one of your attributes by one point and cleric benefits amongst the most for that that from that so if you are a solo build you're definitely going to want to grab that and then take a stat spread more like this so that you can get your wisdom to 20 using only two fet or uh using only one ft instead of two for our can trip selection we definitely want to have access to the single best can trip in the game and close to the best spell in the game guidance succeeding on skill checks way more often is so powerful with guidance I also highly recommend having resistance because there's a lot of dialogue checks where resistance will come up and give you some additional saves and that can be really useful for passing saves during dialogues it also is not terrible to cast uh just in combat but you're going to have way better things to concentrate on so this is mostly for dialogue checks but is still quite useful and then finally you probably want sacred flame just so that you can do some damage with a canant trip although for much of the game you're going to be better off firing a ranged weapon or using even with negative intelligence using Shadow Hearts Firebolt can trip than using sacred flame just cuz the it does no damage if the the opponent succeeds against it so often you're actually going to be better off using a crossbow attack in the early game finally we have to look at Shadow heart's domain and unfortunately trickery domain is the weakest of the seven cleric domains available in the game for a number of reasons one is that the main thing that it gives you is a blessing of the trickster and then at a higher level invoke duplicity allowing you to summon a uh an illusion that gives advantage to allies but invoke duplicity costs an action blessing of the trickster gives you advantage on stealth checks which doesn't particularly matter um and the best that you get from invoked duplicity is advantage on attacks spending an action to give an ally advantage on attacks is not strong trickery domain also has a lot of duplicate spells that are already on the cleric's spell list and what you want from your domain spells which are always prepared paed is spells that are not on the cleric spell list because that's going to increase your overall Total Access to spells so we're looking for a domain that gives us better Spell access as well as a couple other things the other thing that tricker domain doesn't get is there are three domains here that give you medium armor proficiency and the other four give you heavy armor proficiency heavy armor especially for a cleric who doesn't really want to build dexterity is way better than medium armor in the late game and so it's really important to get access to Heavy Armor finally Tempest and War domain get access to Marshall weapon proficiencies which does come up a little bit but isn't as important um but life nature Tempest and War all get access to Heavy Armor and so are really good of those nature I think is the weakest because while it does give you a bunch of spells that aren't on the Druid or aren't on the cleric spell list they are mostly not very good spells overall so unless you really really want speak with animals I would avoid nature domain life domain is very good as a onlevel dip because it gives you uh this feature that gives you additional HP on your healing but for a main character a main cleric it's less powerful because you won't want your cleric to spend most of their turns healing you would much rather them be buffing your allies destroying your enemies tanking making attacks healing is a pretty inefficient use of your actions and so the spell that you are going to end up using for healing most often is healing word which is a bonus action it benefits quite heavily from disciple of life but because it it plus three healing on healing word will increase the amount of healing that it outputs by like 50% but that becomes less powerful as you level up and you won't really want to use higher level healing spells that said life domain is still a very good cleric domain but in my opinion the best cleric domain and the one that you should take on shadowart or a main character cleric is Tempest Tempest gets Marshall weapon access it gets access to a number of very good spells that are not on the cleric spell list and even better it gets access to a unique spell that Tempest cleric is the only character in the game that can cast it and that's both really cool and also extremely powerful fog cloud is also one of the best control spells in the early game so this is a really nice one to have access to and the Wrath of the storm reaction since you're going to be mixing it up in melee gives you some additional damage clerics won't have a lot of use for their reactions in the early game so this can be very helpful finally another one worth mentioning even though it only gets medium armor access is light domain because it has the best or second best defensive ability in the game warding flare you can give an enemy disadvantage on attacking you and that's incredibly powerful and then at level six you can use that to protect an ally so that's even better um and you can do this any number of times it's not limited in any way so as long as you have a reaction you can give an enemy disadvantage this is a super powerful defensive ability but I think overall you're going to want heavy armor and the really good Spell access from Tempest domain more than light domain but I think in sort of order of power level I would say Tempest light and then life in that order and then the others are all lagging uh further behind those three which are the best our spell selection we don't have to make right now of course it's just based on what we want to prepare so let's hit confirm and level up and let me take a look real quick at just what spells we have access to in our spell book so because it's important to to decide what spells you want so we're always going to have thunder wave we'll always have fog Cloud you will always want healing word prepared and bless which is one of the best things that you can be doing with your actions the other two I think are less uh set in stone I really like having guiding bolt just cuz it's a nice damage option especially at low levels at later levels you're going to want to upgrade Creator destroy water um and command is really good because it can cost an opponent their entire turn so that's a very nice way to spend your turn stopping the opponent from doing anything gives you quite a lot of additional ility on this character I'll go over sort of what spells you want to have prepared at each level as we level up so you have access to Heavy Armor and shields you're going to have pretty good AC you also at level two get this destructive wrath ability that gives you the option to maximize the damage of any thunder or lightning spell that you cast lightning spells benefit from this even better because a an enemy with the wet condition such as from create water which you as a cleric have access to um take double damage from lightning spells so maximized and doubled damage from lightning spells means that you can often just one-hot enemies with any form of Lightning Spell and because we're a tempest cleric we get access to most of the lightning spells in the game for our prepared spells we can now add in one more here so I think this is a pretty good starting set I like to add in either create water or Sanctuary is also quite good um you have to be a little creative with how you use it cuz it does stop your Ally from acting but as a bonus action that can really prevent an enemy from uh that can save someone in a bad situation Sanctuary is quite powerful now we get access to level two spells including shatter and gust of wind both very useful to have access to for the cleric I highly recommend also that you prepare spiritual weapon most of your turns in the early game are going to or most of your fights in the early game are going to look like you casting bless on your three damage dealing allies and spiritual weapons because this is a bonus action that summons a unit on turn one then on subsequent turns you're either going to be casting guiding bolt or just attacking with a melee weapon most of these other level two options you don't need at this point although hold person can be very powerful ful so maybe you want to remove create or destroy water for that but enemies will spend their turns focusing the spiritual weapon and it only costs you a bonus action to cast clerics mostly don't have good uses for their bonus actions so it's really nice to have an option that is so powerful and has such high utility in the early [Music] game as we level up here you get access to another can trip I like having uh blade Ward and light both are quite useful but blade Ward I think is has a lot of fun creative options you can do with it for example if there are two neutral factions fighting one another casting blade Ward on one of them gives them resistance on all damage which is very powerful and doesn't involve you in the fight so if you want to turn two sets of enemies against each other and have one side win without getting involved in the fight blade Ward can be very useful for our feet we are of course going to be upgrading our wisdom very important to do that um with almost any Caster you want to make sure you are hitting your maximum casting ability cuz that determines the DC of your spells and thus how often opponents fail their saves against them at level five you get access to chain lightning from being a tempest cleric which is really powerful um as well as Spirit Guardians which is another thing that you might want to spend your turns concentrating on because you have heavy armor and uh and a shield and very strong defensive abilities you can just get into melee with your spirit Guardians running and opponents will take 3d8 of damage every turn that's super powerful you can also just do a guaranteed 30 or 60 to a wet enemy damage every turn with call lightning using your maximized lightning damage um and just one-shotting enemies with 60 damage at the start of a fight is really powerful so these are going to be incredibly useful abilities to have access to um I also quite like Mass healing word because sometimes it's nice to just provide healing to all of your allies so that's very good as well we're taking pretty much only cleric all the way through with uh because we need to hit at least level 11 cleric to get access to level six spells and the cleric level six spells are quite good so we actually do want to access those um but whether we take another feat or a dip into another class is the main decision that we're going to have to make and I'll answer that when we hit Level 12 this one is kind of nice you can push enemies with Thunderbolt strike pushing enemies is good if they are in melee with you um and you have the ability to add extra Thunder damage to your attacks because you're a tempest cleric so you can use that and then push the enemy back and then run away without taking an opportunity attack we absolutely want to have Spirit Guardians prepared I also quite like healing word and I quite like animate dead as well animate dead gives you a lot of options just because having a summon running around can be very useful there's all sorts of stuff you can do with that whether that be setting up sneak attacks for your Rogue whether that be just distracting enemies whether that just be some additional damage having extra units on the field is very powerful so consider spending a slot on anime a spell slot on animate dead level four is where we get some of the best options for clerics um we get ice storm as a tempest cleric which is still pretty good but mostly what we want here uh from level four is banishment banishment takes an enemy out of the fight completely if they fail their save and it's a Charisma saving throw which many enemies will have low Charisma so it can be very useful to Target those enemies with banishment and you're very likely to knock them out of the fight for two turns taking a powerful enemy out of the fight for two turns will give you time to clean up all the other enemies very powerful to have access to banishment as well [Music] at level eight we're of course going to take our ability Improvement but if you already have 20 wisdom because you started with 17 and gained one then instead of that the feat that you're going to want is alert this solves all of your initiative problems and being unable to be surprised is really good I think alert is mandatory for almost any solo build so if you're planning to solo on this character you really want to get alert you might even want to stay at 18 wisdom and pick up alert on level four instead of picking it up on level eight cuz it's just that powerful in balers Gate 3 initiative is rolled on a D4 so plus five initiative means that you have a bonus that is twice the average initiative role that most characters will get at all so you're basically guaranteed to win initiative against any enemy that doesn't also have alert if you have alert [Music] finally at level five we get access to destructive wave a spell that appears nowhere except on the Tempest cleric spell list um and it's a very good spell because it hits a ton of it has a giant AOE 30 foot AOE centered on your character which is very powerful and one thing that it doesn't tell you here is it doesn't hit allies so you can use this in the middle of a big scrum and it takes out enemies it hits enemies but not doesn't hit allies knocking enemies prone is super powerful as well because it gives your other guys advantage on attacks so this is I think a really powerful spell that only this character can access at level 10 we get divine intervention which allows you to do some pretty cool effects the best of these is summoning a weapon you summon a unique mace and it's a plus three mace with a bunch of other fun effects so you'll definitely want to use that and that will often be the best weapon for uh a cleric to carry alongside their Shield shadowart of course makes very good use of this although she does have access to a couple other unique weapons that might be more powerful but the div intervention weapon is incredibly strong so you're almost always going to want to spend your divine intervention on that you get an extra can trip take kind of whatever but you also get you have your level five spells available as well so let's make sure that we've got some good ones I'll talk about our our sort of default spell list when we also hit our max level as well go with flame strike here and finally we hit Level level 11 cleric and get access to six level spells this gives us create Undead or planer Ally both of which are very powerful summons and which you want I think is going to vary depending on what the day is um Heroes Feast is also very good if you're adventuring with a full party having W advantage on wisdom saves is pretty nice with the cleric's wisdom save proficiency it means you pretty much won't ever fail uh wisdom save um and Immunity to poison disease and frightened can be very good as well if you watched my build with the the fart Druid then you can use Heroes Feast to allow your whole party to stand in the toxic clouds much like that character gets to um and I really like that build so if you haven't checked that one out definitely do and then of course also blade barrier is just really good damage so very powerful effect to have access to finally at level 12 we already have access to level six spells so the question is do we want a feat more or do we want the class features of another class at level one more and I think that the answer is that there is a a couple class features that are good enough we definitely want access to those so I will put a one level dip into another class rather than finish off cleric although of course you could just max out cleric no problem and if you do want to max out cleric then you should probably use a Respec to go to 15 Constitution and the feat that you should take will be resilient in Constitution gaining one putting you back up to 16 gaining a couple points in some other stats and gaining Proficiency in Constitution saving throws if you don't want to use a Respec then War Caster is also good but resilient Constitution is going to be a slightly better bonus to your concentration saves and it's very important not to fail concentration saves on this character that being said I think that the optimal way to build this is actually to take a one level dip into sorcerer um and the reason for this is that you are able to take the storm sorcery uh subass which gives you tempestuous magic allowing you to move every time you cast a spell as a bonus action like I said clerics don't have a lot of uses for their bonus actions so having the opportunity attack free movement lets you evade enemies very strongly I should also say that actually the most powerful thing to do here is to take one level of wizard which gives you six level wizard spells thanks to the way Wizards learn spells from Scrolls um and I will be doing a build that features that but since I think that that's based arguably on a glitch and is a little cheesy the best sort of non Chey build is with sorcerer where you gain access to storm sorcery you also with sorcerer get access to another really excellent defensive tool and and that is of course the shield spell shield giving you a reaction that lets you raise your AC by five since we're going to have quite High AC at this point in the game probably around 22 to 24 AC The Shield spell can let us boost our AC up to 27 to 29 which makes us incredibly difficult to hit and then of course you also get access to um at least one other spell some that are kind of fun to do our expeditious Retreat is quite good gives you extra Mobility which is very powerful um I also don't hate having witch bolt it will use your con your charisma so you're unlikely to hit with it but since you're a tempest cleric having witch bolt is a good damage option if you can find something that you're guaranteed to hit with it of which there's a couple things that you might want to use it uh for also it never hurts to have access to featherfall or magic Missile or whatever so but mostly we just want shield from this and storm sorcery which is both on theme for our Tempest cleric and also gives us the extremely powerful tempestuous magic ability what canant trips we choose from this are mostly not relevant since we won't be using them for attacks and by this point in the game we should have our utility set up already but minor illusion and Mage hand are both still very good so you might want to take those anyways and then just having something like light or dancing light uh having access to those since we haven't taken them in our cleric portion of the build will be really strong what we're going to want to end up with as our sort of final prepared spell list is let me uh get this going here for our final spell list I think we are very likely to want access to just going to clear all of this and take only the mandatory ones here um you will always want want healing word you always want bless those are going to stay relevant all the way up until the late game I also think that create or destroy water is really good up until the late game spiritual weapon is a really nice bonus action that is quite powerful again all the way up to the late game you're going to want that Spirit Guardians will still have a ton of utility uh over the course of the game it's very good damage you'll mostly be using call lightning instead of it as your level three concentration spell but it's still nice to have access to it Mass healing word I wouldn't leave home without banishment is the best offensive option for clerics and then over here flame strike it's nice to have access to for a high ranged damage option and then you can alternate with destructive wave um the others of the level five spells are less powerful but some of the level six spells it will depend on which of creat Undead or pler Ally you want you won't be able to cast both since you only get one level six spell slot um but I would either use that or say if your level six spell slot for blade barrier so I like planer Ally the rest of the spells here are kind of what utility you want having guiding bolt which you can upcast to do pretty good damage is kind of nice um silence is always valuable so I would probably take that as well remove curse comes up way more often than you would think it does and animate dead is still very good and finally I would probably just take something like um guardian of Faith which is just decent damage and it's never terrible to have heal uh although hold person is also quite valuable at this point in the game you'll be able to have a pretty good idea of what spells you need for your party but the most important ones are things like healing word and bless in fact all the way up until the late game your cleric is going to spend most of their early turns just casting bless which is and spiritual weapon um that's going to be like the first seven levels of your character because that will be the most optimal turn that you can take and for that reason I want to highlight one item in particular that's incredibly good for this character and that is the staff of Arcane blessing which you get in mistress Temple below the uh Goblin Camp I believe and it doubles the bonus from bless this is an insane amount of extra to hit roll and is going to make your party way way more effective if you have this equipped and are using bless frequently all right my friends this has been my pick for the best cleric in Boulders Gate 3 I hope that you have enjoyed this video and as always if you have do please take the time to leave a comment like the video and you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content cheers my friends GG

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 68,429

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

Id: GtljSKjZm-A

Length: 27min 55sec (1675 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023