The BEST DAGGER ROGUE in BG3 - Lore Friendly Astarion Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today I'm going to cover how to build the best dagger focused Rogue in Boulders Gate 3 this is Asian's default build when you meet him so of course we're using him as the example character and this is I think an excellent lore friendly build for aaran as well as for a main character if you are using this for a main character to have your main character be a dagger wielding Rogue or affectionately referred to as a blender Rogue then you probably don't want to be a high elf because there's not a lot of synergy between high elf high elf and what we're doing the best racial racial choices are as always wood elf for the bonus movement speed Dr for the once per day darkness is actually pretty interesting GI Yankee for misy step or halfling for Advantage on stealth checks and the ability to reroll ones any of those will be pretty close to mechanically optimal highelf does get one interesting thing so which is Proficiency in long swords because in balers Gate 3 there's actually several long swords that are finesse weapons meaning that you can use your dexterity to deal damage with them we will though get access to long sword proficiency elsewhere in the build so while this is fairly useful in the early game it will be replaced later as we level up Rogues have several important advantages in Dungeons and Dragons and the most important of this is that they are single attribute dependent or sad despite the abbreviation that is a very good thing because it means that we can focus our stat array on only the attributes that we care about I guess technically they're double attribute dependent but the important thing is that they pretty much only need dexterity to function most other characters are going to need a minimum of three attributes whether that be for a Caster class you need one of your casting stats for your spells and safety CS Constitution for hit points and dexterity for Armor class and initi Rogues do damage based on their dexterity so the only two attributes that they actually need any points in at all are dexterity and Constitution because you get damage Armor class and initiative from your dexterity and hit points from Constitution this means that when we're fixing assarian default stat build array there's a lot of improvements that we can make so let's do that now and we are going to get rid of all of these extra bonuses whoops in the other skills that we don't particularly need and take 14 in wisdom this is because wisdom is the most important saving throw um typically the most dangerous effects are going to be targeting your dexterity your Constitution or your wisdom saves and Rogues handily already get two of those three as really solid attributes because we were able to put 16s in both of them and so we put our remaining points in wisdom to ensure that we have a good wisdom save as well these last few points are I would say fairly interchangeable I personally like to put them in strength because it gives you some additional jump distance which can be very useful on Rogues carry weight is always nice to have and there are some circumstances where you want to make strength checks to push an enemy or something but for the most part the remaining four points are up to you for a main character of course you're going to want a few points in Charisma so that you can take some dialogue skills Rogues also by default get access to all of the best skills in the game so your character background is less important for Rogues than for other characters but the natural one is also the best one that's urchin it gives you access to slight of hand and stealth which are of course the two most important skills for Rogues to have overall I like Asian's default skill spread for the most part although we don't really need inves a on him U perception is good to have on everybody and because we're taking 14 wisdom this is actually pretty useful stealth and slight of hand expertise is of course what you want to go with acrobatics and Athletics are both very useful so I would probably put my remaining point just in something else for flavor if he's not your conversation user you could leave it in investigation if you intend to have him sometimes in conversations you could put it in one of the conversation skills he already gets deception but in general the the last skill point doesn't matter that much the other thing that Rogues get at level one is they get access to sneak attack how sneak attack works is you do an extra D6 of damage to an enemy once per turn based on your Rogue level this increases at odd Rogue levels so you do 1d6 bonus damage at level one 2d6 bonus damage at level three 3d6 bonus damage at level five and so on this means that we're pretty incentivized to if we are splitting off from Rogue do so at an odd level which luckily synergize as well with the multiclass that we want to take but before we do that let's get uh moving so that we can get to our next level UPS one thing that's extremely important on this character and on any character that is intending to use two weapons and of course we're going to have two weapons equipped whether that be two shortswords short sword and a dagger or two daggers is that you want to counterintuitively turn off this dual wielding button by default if you have this on and you click attack on an enemy it uses both your main hand and your offhand Attack eating your bonus action you won't always want to use your bonus action for an off-hand attack especially because the most important thing for Rogues is to land your sneak attack every single turn you do that by having an enemy adjacent to an ally or having advantage against them either by attacking from stealth or uh a couple other circumstances knocking them prone an excellent Ally for a rogue is a wolf totem Barbarian which just provides melee allies with Advantage when adjacent to the same enemy extremely strong and the one reason that we won't want to always use our bonus action for an off-hand attack is that at level two Rogue we get all of these actions this allows you to use disengage Dash or hide as bonus actions so rather than doing a small amount of damage usually a D6 or a D4 with no at this level no attribute bonus or sneak attack on our offhand attack we would much rather attack disengage from the enemy and then run away this is the play pattern that you're going to see very often on your Rogue as you run up you attack with your main hand if it hits you apply sneak attack and then bonus action disengage and run away if it doesn't hit then you use your offhand attack in an attempt to apply sneak attack as long as you're applying sneak attack consistently every turn your damage output is going to be good and that's a really strong advantage that a dual wielding Rogue has even in the early game before you get other bonuses for dual wielding at Rogue level three we get access to our subclass and also a second D6 of sneak attack so we're now doing two D6 whenever we land a sneak attack and the subass that I recommend for this build is the thief the reason for this is I just talked about how good bonus actions are well thief gets a second one so now you have a main hand attack and two offhand attacks every round at this current point it is still mostly intended for your offhand attacks to apply sneak attack damage not to be huge damage in and of themselves because right now your offhand attacks are not applying the damage from your dexterity but starting at the next level we are going to fix that at level four we actually take a deviation from the build and we are going to take a level of fighter the reason for this is that fighter gives you access to a fighting style allowing you to pick up two weapon fighting so whenever we make an attack with our offhand attack now it does our dexterity in damage so now both our main hand attack and our offhand attack for three attacks every round are dealing full damage as though they were any other character this means that we at level four have access to basically a whole extra attack compared even to other characters that get early double attacks like the Berserker Barbarian or the gloomstalker ranger those guys get access to two attacks conditionally we at level four get access to three fully powered attacks because we have just as strong offhand attacks as we do mainhand attacks there are two choices for our fifth level you can either take fighter at as your next level and gain access to action surge this gives you a whole extra attack of course because it gives you an additional action or you can take level four Rogue to get a feat I personally prefer to go to level four Rogue because getting access to an ability Improvement now that we're applying our dexterity on every attack increasing our dexterity by two means an additional three damage around as well as extra AC extra initiative and extra chance to hit aaran also happens to have a bonus to hit himself which makes him an excellent Rogue because Rogues really just want to hit with an attack in a round in order to apply your sneake attack but since we're attacking so many times we can use that extra ability to hit to apply our extra damage dexterity to damage more and more frequently than most characters to to trigger this you're going to need to have him either feed on your main character at night or use this bite attack on an on a humanoid or I guess on any living creature um and then you gain this happy buff for the entire day plus one to all attack rolls saving throws and skill checks is an incredibly powerful buff to get basically for free and it means that aaran is actually the most mechanically powerful character in the game regardless of his character levels regardless of his class levels uh even before you give him any class levels he's better than all the other companions because of this ability one thing to note is if you have this debuff on your main character from allowing aaran to feed on them you can remove it with a lesser restoration or remove curse spell uh to remove the debuff from this so there's also more or less no downside to doing this but of course if you don't want to let them feed on let him feed on your main character then you can just use this on a random living creature sometime during the day uh if you're hiding it doesn't deal damage and won't aggro NPCs so you get this for free going into level six there are again two options at this point we can either continue down the path of Rogue in order to maximize our sneak attack damage dice or continue down the path of fighter because that will allow us to reach extra attack sooner and of course extra attack in combination with Fighter's natural action surge allows you to apply more damage faster I at this point think that you want to start leveling fighter again and then we will finish Rogue later in the build but which order you level these in I think is more or less up to you for the this example though I'm going to level fighter so now with action surge we have when we use action surge four attacks in a round um we're now also level six so it's very viable to have haste from an ally gaining up to uh five attacks in a round which is of course extremely strong when each of them applies your dexterity to damage that's an extra 20 damage just from your dexterity even ignoring the damage of your weapons if you've watched a bunch of my previous builds you will be somewhat surprised by the choice that we make here I don't think that Battle Master is a bad choice because it's by far the best of the fighter subclasses and we'll still have a ton of utility for this build but in this particular case because we're attacking so often and because Rogues have so much Synergy with critical hits you I think will benefit more strongly from taking Champion the reason for this is twofold one whenever you critically hit it doubles the damage dice of all of your attacks and sneak attack dice are damage dice so doubling the damage of all of your attacks is extremely strong anytime you can gain access to Critical Hits on Rogue you double a very high burst damage off the start of the fight and you can uh boost the chance of gaining Critical Hits because there's a lot of gear that will give you improved critical hit and a lot of it is geared for Rogues to use so you can get this number to something like critting on a on a 16 or higher when you are making attacks with Advantage you are almost I think you're about 40% to roll a 16 or higher with Advantage someone check my math on that but that means that over the course of making your four or five attacks in a given round you're basically guaranteed at least one critical and very likely to receive uh more than that over the course of long fights so Champion really synergizes with what Rogues want to do at fighter level four we get access to another feat allowing us to upgrade our dexterity again you might think you want uh dual wielder on this character but you are probably going to be using two weapon fighting mostly on light weapons anyways if you have found one of the long swords that I talked about that you really want in your main hand for whatever reason you can take dual wielder instead of your second two points of dexterity but I definitely recommend taking dexterity because of how powerful it is to get to 20 dexterity we're applying our decks to damage so often on this build that it will end up being extremely useful another thing to consider and I should have mentioned this when I was talking about the stat spreads actually is if you begin with 17 in dexterity um you can take the athlete feat instead of one of these Asis ability improvements gaining the gaining a point in dexterity and still reaching 20 and then also increasing your jump Distance by 50% this will cost you a couple points in something else like you would have 10 strength maybe or you would lose a couple points in wisdom but you will end up with a higher jump distance which can be very useful so that's a a build variation that I would consider as well this is the reason we've been leveling up fighter because now we reach extra attack this means every action we have and we often get multiple actions because of action surge at least once per short rest gives us an additional attack so now our core combo of the blender is going to be at least um four mainhand attacks and two offhand attacks one from each bonus action gaining an enormous amount of damage applying plus 30 damage from our dexterity as well as applying sneak attack dice we do want to start raising those sneak attack dice though so as we level up now that we're Fighter level five this build is fairly feet independent so we can skip getting we only need to get two Feats just to hit 20 dexterity we can go back to taking levels in Rogue here you get uncanny Dodge giving you the option to uh reduce damage by half this build actually ends up fairly tanky and I'll talk about that in a second but this is a big component of that you can reduce incoming damage by half and you also get a decent amount of HP from the fighter levels as well as medium armor proficiency so I will show you that when I talk about gear in a moment but this build actually ends up quite survivable for a rogue because of the fighter [Music] levels Rogue level six you don't get anything in particular you get expertise in a couple uh skills in in two more skills but at this point you've probably got all of your skills where you want them you probably just take Athletics and acrobatics plus 13 acrobatics means you sure are not getting pushed anytime soon and expertise in athletics even with low strength will allow you to push enemies very reliably especially because you are likely to push more likely to push enemies when you sneak up on them and this build has stealth expertise for a plus 13 stealth check as well so you are extremely likely to be able to push any enemy into a pit if that's something that you want to do finally at Rogue level seven you get evasion which is really good against AOE spells and again contributes to the significant tankiness of this build you take only half damage from any spell that targets your dexterity or zero damage if you succeed on the save and with 20 dexterity and dexterity saving save proficiency you are very likely to pass saves against Fireballs or anything else that checks your decks so you are extremely likely to just take zero damage if an enemy spell that targets your Dex ser save is incoming putting it all together in a typical round of combat you are going to have two actions from between action Surge and uh your normal action three if you get a party member to cast haste on you and then two offhand attacks all for full damage and you get to add 46 sneak attack damage once you will also have pretty good critical hit chance thanks to your levels in Champion fighter and thanks to our itemization a couple items that are really worth mentioning on this character anything that increases your critical hit chance like this shade Slayer cloak uh reduces the number that you need to roll to roll a critical hit also important is that you get medium armor proficiency on this build so there's a few medium armors in the game that allow you to apply your full dexterity to your armor class and with medium armor proficiency and your full dexterity using for example this Yanti scale maale we end up with 21 base AC Which is higher even than most characters in Full plate and a shield who get 20 base AC 18 from the full plate and two from The Shield meaning that you actually have better armor class in most of the gear that you're going to be able to in gear that you're going to be able to get pretty easily for this character then even the armor class focused builds that heavy armor users will be going additionally any other items that are really good of course you just want the best to light and finesse weapons that you can find um the knife of the under Mountain King is one that you get relatively early that's extremely powerful and then there's a few others that are really worth getting but this one gives you a lot of extra options again anything that increases your critical hit chance is really good and because we're making so many attacks around anything that increases the damage that your character does like these dark justicier gauntlets uh with six or eight attacks in a given round this is going to add up to a ton of extra damage over the course of a single round of first combat finally I would be remiss if I didn't call out the eversight wing ring this allows you to gain blind immunity meaning that if you are hiding in a Darkness cast by say you as a Dr or an ally spell Caster or a fog Cloud cast by an ally spellcaster or something done by throwing a uh firing an arrow of Darkness or throwing a bottle that creates a smoke cloud you make yourself immune to Blind enemies in this this Cloud will still be blinded and so you will be able to attack them while obscured with Advantage triggering sneak attack and doubling the chance of gaining a critical hit and they will have disadvantage on any return attacks so this is an extremely powerful effect that's very good for any stealth-based character finally I want to mention a couple build variations as well I'm not going to do full walkthroughs for them but I think they are worth mentioning one is that instead of reaching Rogue level s you could stop at Rogue level four and take three levels of Ranger for Hunter Ranger I'm just going to quickly show you the Fate th the feature that we want from that because if we take Hunter Ranger up to level three not going to bother picking anything in particular here not only do you get a second fighting style allowing you to take uh defense or two weapon fighting but you'll have one of a second fighting style from fighter so you'll be able to take defense gaining an additional AC putting your base AC up to 22 at Ranger level three you can take either the gloomstalker class for an additional attack in the first round of combat as well as initiative bonus super powerful um or the hunter subass which gives you access to Colossus Slayer for an additional d8 of damage on your second attack in a round since you're likely to critically hit very often this is pretty good but because this is only once per turn I think you are much more likely to want gloomstalker yet this is only once per combat as opposed to once per turn but you are extremely powerful at killing enemies early on in combat you really want to be one-shotting enemies and then running away and the additional gloomstalker attack which is a main hand attack will allow you to do that very effectively this also gives you dark vision which is pretty useful for a stealth based character and the ability to become invisible which is a good way to be to gain um advantage on an attack you the dread ambusher bonus action hide is redundant with the Rogues bonus action hide so you don't gain any advantage from that but the dread ambusher feature giving you a a whole extra attack on the opening round of combat faster movement speed and a plus three bonus to initiative means you'll basically always win initiative with plus eight from your between your dexterity and your dread ambusher bonus and then be able to onshot an enemy off the opening round of combat by stab stab stabbing them with daggers until they fall over all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at an asarian dagger based build and as always if you have do please feel free to leave a comment down below because that I both enjoy reading them and it helps out a ton with the algorithm like the video and you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content cheers my friends I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 17,221

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

Id: X5NtWa_Gi_c

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2023