THE BEST Death Knight Build (Warlock/Paladin) for Baldur's Gate 3

death Knights have always been an intriguing class from my days of playing EverQuest as a kid through to World of Warcraft there are so many ways this class can be envisioned in this video today we're going to go over my build for a death knight in balers Gate 3 utilizing both the Paladin and the Warlock the DED locked in build I suppose it's more of a dark night since we won't be hinging on summoning Undead due to the nature of how Aura of hate Works will be more controlling them if you'd like to see an undead summoning melee hybrid build let me know below but if this is your first time on my channel the way I do things here is by UPF fronting the knowledge of my videos so you can decide if it's the right one for you so with that being said we'll be starting out as a paladin until level two then we'll transition to warlock with the great old one subass and pack to the blade for five levels this will give us plenty of Elder unifications as well as an extra attack and finally we'll jump back into Paladin for five more levels and then at the end we'll decide if we want to spend our last two levels in Paladin or warlock depending on the focus you have for your character and that's really the gist of this entire video and if that's all you wanted to know please feel free to shut the video down and get back to spelunking in the lower City before you head out though please don't forget to like comment and or subscribe each one of those things does help me out in a huge way I currently have 89% unsubscribed viewership on the channel that's a metric I'm trying to change this year so every little bit helps you can jump ahead to any part of this video that in you the most using the chapters in both the timeline and the description and if you'd help with any other subject in B Gate 3 check out my playlist linked below and at the end of the video but let's get started here on the best death knight build for balers Gate 3 loading into the game let's take a look at character creation for this class now you can go with any race that makes sense for you um I'm going to be selecting tling in this example here because I like the zaral tling in specific the uh cant trips that you'll get access to are pretty cool you'll get searing Smite and branding Smite which you'll already get as a paladin but it's nice to be able to kind of remove those you always have them as can trips which is really cool but some other good things of course you can go with any of the elves uh half work is actually really good here because of savage attacks when you land a critical hit with a melee weapon attack you deal an extra dice of weapon damage you'll be doing quite a bit of critting especially with how Smite works and the reactions bound to it so having Savage attacks online is really nice and also just Relentless endurance that you can kind of uh stay active uh so whenever you reach zero hit points you regain one hit point instead of becoming down which is really cool humans though are always just a really good one to for human versatility getting additional skill and proficiency as well as getting a 25% increase in your um Carry capacity is is just always generally nice but go with whatever works for you A lot of people like dragon born paladins I myself do as well just remember the uh chromatic ones are the evil ones and the metallic ones are the good ones from what I can remember now as far as our actual um where's where's my guy there he is um as far as our actual class goes we're going to be going with Paladin first because this gives us access to Heavy Armor if we go with warlock first and then Paladin we don't get heavy armor and the whole point and kind of image of this build is all around heavy armor now for sub classes too you can start with whatever you wish if you don't want to go with oath breaker you can go with say oath of Vengeance um you can go with oath of the Ancients you can go with oath of devotion I just don't really like it as much because you don't get the things that you get for oath of devotion as as far as your spells are spells you almost always already get or at least something similar to what you already get ancients and Vengeance I feel gives you something that is unique to that Paladin that doesn't they don't get them otherwise and I really like Vengeance in general when it comes to mobility and being able to destroy things background choose whatever you wish is always um my always kind of mmax approach here is by insight and persuasion uh from Guild Artisan it's just nice to kind of have those skills already taken care of so you can spend proficiencies and other points now for your abilities let's go ahead and clear this and and we're going to do this and this I'm going to do a contested thing that a lot of people do not usually do we're going to put points all the way here into charisma at 17 because in Act One what we're going to do is go and encounter the hag and I'm going to not spoil it for you just encounter the hag go through the whole situation and if you let her go then she'll give you her hair and it gives you a free plus one to any ability you put it into Charisma and you've got 18 Charisma right at the start of the game which is really nice because that's going to give you a plus4 to your charisma checks it's great for your spell casting abilities as a paladin and as a warlock in an addition in addition to that it's going to help you for all of your conversational skills right all of your um deception your intimidation and your persuasion that you'll be using quite a bit in this game we're going to bring our wisdom up to 10 that we don't have to deal with any kind of BS when it comes to um hold person or Charm person any of those kind of abilities that remove control and you can decide if you want to go with a dexterity Paladin and focus on finesse weapons or strength we're going to be going strengthen this example here so we're going to bring this up to 15 and plus 1 to 16 our constitution we're going to want at 14 and we're going to hang out right there and that leaves us with 16 strength and eight dexterity but we're not going to stick like that you can just simply reduce this by one point and put the 10 two points here into get 10 dexterity um but this is going to require you to get some way to increase your strength to 16 that's very easily done if you choose heavy armor Master as far as a feat but if you don't want to worry about being ryant upon certain Feats to push your strength up to its next portion or its next portion of bonuses um then I would simply put your strength at 14 and put your dexterity here at 12 this gives us plus one to our initiative and yeah we do get plus one to our dexterity saving throws and our AC but we're using heavy armor so that doesn't really matter we're still going to be doing quite a bit of damage with 14 strength don't you worry about it and we're doing a majority of our damage using smites which comes off of our Charisma modifier so Smite is going to be doing that damage based off your charisma same thing with all of your warlock spells and when you use packed blade it's going to be pulling from your charisma to do damage anyway so don't really worry about your strength being that low we're going to be doing the damage with our Charisma so these are all of the things you'd set up at character creation let's jump now into some uh progression for this build now before getting into that build um I brought up these two uh portions of the bg3 wiki to show you guys very quickly we have the oathbreaker Paladin and we have the necromancy school from The Wizard and why we're choosing one over the other or why we're not choosing these two in conjunction is essentially one thing Aura of hate triggers at level seven and we cannot get the level six ability from necromancy school with the two furthermore Aura of hate does this you and any nearby fiends and Undead gain additional damage this does not apply to any Undead in which you summon it's a very weird bug you will I don't know if it's a bug I don't know if it's intended or not but when you look at the character you will see or I'm sorry any Undead you summon you will see that they have the aura of hate on them but it does not add to their actual damage but if you control Undead using your channel oath ability your channel oath ability then you will get the benefit of Aura of hate so if you're looking at this build or you're looking at all these death knight builds and wondering why people aren't just going with the necromancy school it's mainly because you cannot pull from this Aura of hate and the necromancy ability here um that triggers at level six is really not going to benefit from him right you get all these cool summons but they're not going to benefit from your aura of hate which is one of the best things about taking oath breaker cuz it's just a free bonus to your damage look at this gain additional damage to melee weapon attacks equal to to your charisma modifier so if our Charisma fire modifier is 18 that's a plus4 damage we're just not getting that outright um if we don't pick our oath breaker to level seven so if you're wondering why I'm not taking it that's why again if you want to see that melee hybrid Necromancer build leave a comment below for our progression we're going to get to level two and we're going to select Paladin once more this is going to give us access to our divine smites which are crucial and some just basic spells here um this is going to be lovely awesome spiffy and we also want to take advantage of our fighting style so you can choose between great weapon fighting or dueling it's one of the other I mean you could choose defense or protection too if you want um dueling implies that you're going to use a sword and a board or great weapon fighting is going to be just a two-handed weapon it just depends on how you want to approach it there are amazing Shields that make you particularly better at casting there are a lot of really awesome T weapons that are just Bonkers so just go with whatever one makes the most sense for you I'm going to choose great weapon fighting for this video and we'll progress forward now at level three we're going to Pivot away from Paladin and go into Warlock and this is going to give us a lot of really fun stuff to do for cant trips we're definitely going to go with eldrich blast because we're going to use a bunch of invocations to make that blast badass and we're going to go with blade War take only half the damage from bludgeoning piercing and slashing attacks of course for our subass go with whichever one you want I think the great old one is definitely the best of the three when it comes to um the features that we're going to be playing around with Arch Fay though is really good the fiend probably being the lesser of the three but by no means is it bad in any way shape or form and I just mean specifically for the subass we have in mind here today so we're going to get two Spells Of course dissonant Whispers And Tasha's hideous laughter as well as mortal reminder when you land a critical hit against a creature that creature and any nearby enemies must exceed a wisdom saving throw or become frightened until the end of their next turn and there's a lot of things you can do to kind of helped us out with some items that we'll talk about in the gear section of this portion of this video but you can have a lot of really cool fun with that for some spells here though you know you you get tshas and dissonant Whispers as part of your uh packed here with the the great old one but armor of agathys is just so good you gain temp five hit points and deal five cold damage to any creature that hits you with a melee attack you're going to be just using this so much and the nice thing too about this is is last until long rest and it's not a concentration ability you can just have it active and I really like arms of Hadar as well because this is just a nice cool explosion around you it's going to do damage to everyone it's necrotic it's very kind of um uh what's it called a a thematic for what we're doing here so we're going to stick with that we're going to go ahead and progress forward and this is going to bring us into level four where we get to select um our spell of uh oh hex there we go now hex is really nice because this is going to basically give it disadvantage on any ability of your choosing so you're hiding something or attacking something that's a really really strong uh maybe the boss to a certain act and that act is oh this character is really good with its strength you hex its strength and it's now going to have a disadvantage on all of its melee attack or you know what it's a caster and it's specifically using intelligence we're going to hex that um intelligence and it's going to remove its ability to really reliably cast just keep in mind hex is a concentration ability and you're going to have a ton of concentration abilities as a paladin as well as a warlock when we get into um what's it called now we'll see in a bit it's a really cool ability now as far as your eldrich invocations we're definitely going to be going with agonizing blast when you cast ELD blast add your charisma modifier to the damage it deals now of course we're going to be using just tons of Charisma so we do want that on now repelling blast is also one I really like here because this allows you to manipulate the battlefield you can push things around knock them into stuff knock them over a PR ath whatever you so wish um you have disguise self if you want to take advantage of any of the items that say Hey have to be a specific race you cast disguise self on yourself make yourself that race and then even if you go to sleep and come back to whatever race you were as long as you don't unequip the item you don't have to recast disguise sth that's kind of really nice right um where's the other one I was looking for um for the most part it's pretty much you could go with something like fish Vigor if you want but repelling blast I think is probably just the the safest best one to go here at the beginning and we're going to push ourselves here up to warlock level three where we'll choose more spells darkness is a really good one that you can take advantage of shatter is really nice just to kind of give yourself some ability I really love Misty step but there are so many items in the game that give you Misty step so you don't really need to rely on this one if you don't want to Ray of enfeeblement kind of fits into the role of a death knight using your necromancy capabilities so if you'd like to to go with that you definitely can just to kind of point out some pretty good ones hold person's always nice I just don't really like it because it is a concentration spell and you're already kind of jammed up for strong concentration spells I would probably go with something like a shatter a ray of enfeeblement even like cloak of daggers or a reaction spell like hellish rebuke so if someone hits you you get to do damage back to them immediately and I really like those capabilities it does of course uh take up a spell slot now for our packed boom we're definitely going pack to the blade here now this is probably a no-brainer because we're doing a melee class but pack of the blade here is it uses the wielder spellcasting a modifier and its damage is magical and you're proficient with the weapon we're Paladin so we proficient with all weapons but still this is the big Focus here because we have some items that can cue off of this and this is going to what's give this is what is going to give us an extra extra attack in this build let's go ahead and accept this and push into our level four warlock where we will now have our choice of feet so let let's have a discussion about Feats with this build you kind of have to think of something you are not going to have access to any more than two feets because we're going to a max level of five warlock or Paladin and a max level of seven Paladin or warlock we're not going to be able to get a third feet so when you're looking at this keep that in mind so I'm going to take a look at something like heavy armor Master which is probably one of my favorite perks or I'm sorry feet this isn't Fallout uh Feats for when I am taking heavy armor it just makes me a veritable dreadn I have got so much tank ability with just this perk alone and this would be one that would enable me to take 15 strength at the start so that at this point I would have 16 strength what you can also do is you can just start with 14 strength and have 12 decks and then when you finally get to a point where you want to do this just Respec your character and swap it around so you'd have 16 strength so you you can get kind of gamey with that if you so wish but heavy armor Master is one I would almost always take because we're going with heavy armor in this build now if I was going with a great weapon great weapon Master is very good because of the ability to crit hit on a on a Target or kill it and then make a bonus action attack right after so that's very nice your character is a little jammed up in its bonus action capabilities because you can use hex as a bonus action or Misty step as a bonus action so just kind of be mindful of that when you're taking great weapon Master you might not end up actually using the bonus action as much the big benefit here is to be able to do 10 more damage at the cost of a minus 5 to attack roll which you can toggle on and off um that is a really great one lucky is always good Mage Slayer is great for just kinding to crack open someone's concentration if it's an enemy I do like athlete because you can get a strength or deck bonus but you know if you're prone you can get up pretty quickly um ability Improvement is always a good one right this is just kind of the one that Everyone likes like if you didn't if you deci decided not to do anything with the hag and you had 15 strength here you could put a point into strength and a point into Charisma and you'd have both of those at an even number if you had done that uh at the onset of your character creation another big one here is Savage attacker when making melee weapon attacks you roll your damage dice twice and use the highest result basically you get an advantage on your damage dice um if you went with sword and board go with Shield Master here it's really nice because it's going to help to reduce the damage you take from spells that force you to do deck saving throws always lovely but another really good one as well is warcaster you gain advantage on saving throws to maintain concentration on a spell and you will be casting spells with concentration throughout the entirety of the game as both a warlock and a paladin and also you can use a reaction to cast shocking grasp that's not here and or there it's really the advantage to uh saving throws is really cool because I'd rather not use shocking grasp as crazy as much here you can use Coss Target out moving out of melee range I rather just use my weapon to be honest because I'm a Melee character so go with what makes sense for you I'm going to just choose heavy armor Master for this character in this video here right now um there we go and then I'm also go go to our spells here where I'll choose Darkness because it's always good to Blind a whole blanket of things and canant trips we can go with whatever you know friendship is really good or friends if you don't already have this is always really good um if you want to stick really heavily with the death knight capabilities or Knight theme go with bone chill it's just a really cool one it's necromancy does your uh necrotic damage and they have Undead targets receive disadvantage on attack rolls always spicy now it's time for our final level in Warlock and this is where we're going to get uh one of my favorite spells for Warlock and it is hunger of Hadar so creatures within this black sphere are blinded and take damage at the end of their turn and at the start of their turn creatures starting their turn in the area take 12 uh um coal damage and cre features any their term take area or I'm sorry acid damage keep W to say area uh but yeah they take acid damage and it's difficult terrain so they move super slow it is a concentration ability so keep that in mind but it it's just so strong it's such a great way to just lock down everything around you it's one of my favorite abilities you can also though go with flight so you can have your character fly around it's that's also badass and counter spell is very good as well so keep in mind with a warlock you cannot swap these abilities out at whim you have to respect your character to push yourself from Maybe Hunger of hatar into counter spell so maybe you do go ahead and swap those things out as you get further into the game you like you know what hunger of hatar is its usefulness is just not as strong to me anymore I'd rather have counter spell go ahead and resp it cost you 100 gold go do it real quickly but another one I want to point out just because we are playing a death knight build is vampiric touch very nice here touch an enemy to siphon their life force and regain half as half as many hit points for 10 turns you can use empiric Touch again without expending an additional spell slot so it has a really cool kind of exploding effect and there are a lot of abilities or armor pieces that will say hey if you did something uh cast a spell in melee get X Y and Z benefit so this can really trigger a lot of fun stuff and lastly we have um our final Elder invocations and these have things like bestow curse and now you can cast slow with a warlock spell slot uh so just again go with whatever here kind of fits the big ones were agonizing blast and spell uh I'm sorry repelling blast but you can go here with you know thief of five Fates once prong R you can cast Bane using a warlock spell slot pain Bane targets up to three character it's not as crazy or as great but I'll just go mask many faces so I can play around with some of the items that say Hey this is locked only for GI Yankee or whatever it is now we push on we're into Paladin level three and we're going to choose some spells here uh I'm going to go ahead and swap off some of these all real quick to just kind kind of go through all of them um searing Smite is great and so was branding Smite it just depends on if you chose playing as a tling or not if you did just use your caner versions of it um bless is always a great one to have keep in mind though it is a concentration capability uh using stuff like thunderous Smite is cool because it's a bonus action and it is and and and a primary action but it is not a concentration ability whereas some of these like searing Smite are concentration abilities so keep those things in mind um protection from Good and Evil is always really good because this is going to give you um Target can't be Charmed frightened or possessed by the Elementals celestials faas fiends and Undead aberration as well and you're going to deal with all those in Spades Shield of faith is nice it's a concentration ability yet again but it does give you a nice flat increase to your armor class by two very fun very good command can be really good if you don't already have a cleric that can use it or any of the other characters that would um Divine favor is whatever wrathful Smite is what is another fun one that can also cause fear and fur Something That We're can use a lot in this build and I'm GNA go through the oath breaker abilities towards the end of this but I just want to push us through it up to level five Paladin um so here we're going to get more lay on hands charges and we're going to choose a new feet I'm going to go ahead and choose great weapon Master just because of the character I've created in this video but we've already gone over this section before lastly we have level five Paladin which gives us our final extra attack so what we got here what we got with um warlock level 5 that I did not go over because I'm dumb um it should be over here in this portion is is it this where is it aha deep in pack so level five warlock we get this so blade pack holders gain an extra attack with their weapon this deepen pack capability is going to stack with this extra attack capability of warlock I'm sorry of Paladin so when we swing our sword we get to get three attacks per one action of doing melee attack one for the primary action two for the extra attack three for the deepened pack extra attack it is disgusting it's why this build is all over YouTube is being able to take advantage of both of these things and then for our spells we get oath spells or luster restoration and silence but ignore that because we're going to get new ones in a little bit um but for our level level two spells we I'm going to drop heroism here in Divine favor we can get magic weapon which I actually really like I think it's very kind of normal but very fun uh the weapon becomes magical receiving plus one bonus attack and damage rolls it's just a vanilla way to buff up your weapon uh branding Smite if you did not choose uh tling this is really nice because things can't become invisible and it's quite a bit more radiant damage than on top of the radiant damage you are already going to do again keep in mind it's a concentration capability and lastly I do really like protection from poison um because it lasts until long rest gains advantage on saving throws against being poison resistance to poison damage that's always just kind of nice if you know you're going to come to a lot of poison BS in the game so this is where we kind of have a bit of a like a bifurcation between CH choosing between Paladin or warlock so let's talk about that right now choosing to go to level 7 Paladin is what I'm going to do for this video is because I want my Paladin to get the aura of hate from oathbreaker which enables us to get our Charisma bonus into our damage that's what I want to do now that's because I'm choosing a melee Centric Death Knight build you can choose a casting Centric Death Knight build or at least a build that pulls more out of the Warlock capabilities by going One More Level here into warlock which is going to give us entropic Ward which is actually a melee capability as a reaction you can impose disadvantage on an attack roll against you if the attack misses you gain advantage on your next attack roll against your attacker for one turn that's actually really sick especially with the amount of attacks that come out of us that can be disgusting ing amount of attacks you pop a potion of heroism and you have advantage on six attacks to the face not counting for as many of the ones that you're going to use uh Divine Smite on so it's a really really great ability don't sleep on it but the big reason I'm pushing warlock to level seven is that our warlock spells go from level three to level four and keep in mind too warlock spell slots replenish on a short rest so if you do want to go with more of a casting warlock type of Death Knight just push your warlock on up to level seven but me personally I'm going to be going to level seven with our Paladin for level six here this would give us or of protection if so we're going to push one more level up here into level seven now I'm going to go break the character and I'm going to show you what happens once we um actually take this character and put him into oathbreaker so once we transition to oathbreaker you can see what happens we get access to spiteful suffering the big thing here is control dead we'll be using this quite a bit as well as Dreadful aspect so with control dead what you need to know is when you choose this ability at level two even you know if you go o of devotion break your oath very early in the game it's super easy you get access to control and dead and control and dead it says here until long rest so the undead unit once you long rest you can just simply reain it back in to control Undead it does have to be I believe has to be your level or lower now the target's level must be lower than yours so basically you can have it up pet Undead that you bring along with you throughout the majority of the game it might die it might not unfortunately control Undead is the only way we can take advantage of the aura of hate that we don't have active right now cuz I'm not level 12 um but it's worth noting still that once you get into act three you can take advantage of some really really strong Undead they're Undead all throughout the majority of Act 2 um you'll un you'll encounter Undead in the very beginning of act one when you go to withers's Tom so there's always ways you can get access to them but unfortunately we cannot summon them reliably with this build to get bonuses from Aura of hate there's plenty of other ways we can summon them and I'll show you with some equipment but just to kind of illustrate why we've selected control andad as our primary source of Undead and why and how we're buffing them in through there hellish rebuke so if you chose this as a warlock spell you don't need it because you have it as an oath spell but I did want to say it is a really good warlock spell nonetheless inflict wounds into crown Madness and Into Darkness again we already have the spell because of our um warlock capabilities so don't select it if if you if you decide to 100% go with uh warlock just keep those things in mind then at level seven we would have Aura of hate here but because my I I've just been going through the game as slow as humanly possible I don't have access to a level 12 character because I'm the worst content creator of all time but you would see Aura of hate here which would increase you and your allies um Alli fiends and Undead their Charisma I'm sorry their attack damage by your charisma modifier so ours is plus three it would give me plus three damage at all times and then any fiends that are summoned up through maybe a summon planner Ally any Undead that are under that control Undead or any kind of friendly Undead for any reason would get this bonus to their uh attack damage so that is our oath breaker and how it spices into the character now as far as the gear goes for this kind of combination we're going to take a look at the weapons first and you have a lot of really good weapons that you can take advantage of uh with this character I mean you can go right early in the very beginning of the game and get the blood of Leander that is that legendary mace that we've talked about before that is a 1handed weapon not a two-handed weapon but it's got a lot of really great capabilities it heals you it sheds light on things um it uses Sunbeam it's got a weapon Enchantment of plus three now of course too you can use the everb bur blade if you get that when you are on the the uh ithd ship that's a really of course popular one that everyone has nowadays but that's when you when it the reason it's really good is it also it does fire damage and that's always going to be really nice getting any kind of additional damage you can On Target is strong and you'll use it throughout the majority of act one outside of that though and another big act one one here is the faith breaker you'll get access to this right during the goblin camp and it's actually a really solid weapon because it's versatile so you can use it one-handed or two-handed and this ability absolute power is pretty disgusting does a lot of damage so it's a nice thing to kind of have if you want to just use something early in act one I do like it but some of the big standout ones here too we get Black Guard sword in act three dazing Smite on a hit infused with one of your smites the target must succeed a constitution saving throw or become dazed this is a long sword so it's one or two-handed which is lovely the f aluve is also a long sword which is um one or two-handed but the melody here is really cool so you can sing all allies within 20 ft have a 1 D4 bonus to attack roles in Charisma wisdom and intelligence saving throws sick but Shri is also amazing all enemies within 20 ft of range have a 1 D4 penalty to Charisma wisdom intelligence saving throws affected creatures also receive an extra 1 to four Thunder damage so it's just free damage on target it helps out with any kind of uh spells you or your allies might be casting it just depends on what you want to do it's a bonus um or it's primary action to kind of to turn that bad boy on and it's I I really really like it's one of my favorite swords you get it in the underd dark and I've used it for the majority of the game but some other cool ones too our corpse grinder here if you want to stick with a two-handed power malls that you want to dance around with not a power Mall this is Warhammer 40,000 but also there's the halberd of vigilance which is one of my favorite weapons too gain a bonus to initiative roles uh and advantage on a perception ability checks which is great cuz perception is annoying and Adroid reflexes here when you make an attack r as a reaction you make it with advantage and there's a lot of ways that you can do that uh using a hird so lovely here uh lastly though the big one that I'm using right now is the charge bound H Warhammer this is a really cool weapon that's meant for either an ight or a warlock because of the packed weapon capability so packed weapon as we know it's going to convert the uh the damage that it does I'm sorry not the damage but the proficiency that it uses or I'm sorry the uh the modifier that it's got good Lord it go through every single possible thing here into Charisma rather than strength or dexterity depending on the item so charge bound Warhammer we've packed it so now it gets that additional plus one weapon enchantment which is sick it turns on this this weapon deals an additional 1 to six lightning damage and this weapon has a plus one bonus to attack damage and attack rolls because this these magical powers only kick in if you've packed bladed it so this thing actually turns into it says 7 to 21 but try not to look at those numbers when you look at these items look down here 17 to 31 damage with some lightning damage coming out of this and then we're can just use Divine smites and have a whole hell of a lot of fun because it's added into that Divine Smite so you can see how that's a lot of fun there is an additional piece of equipment that I'll be talking about but it's a spoiler so I'm going to save it for the end of this equipment section so if you want to skip over that you can so uh just hang tight we got one more sword to go into for our armor let's have some fun we have uh Reapers and Brace this is one that we're going to get at the end of act two all incoming damage reduced by two it's get how of the dead it's just very thematic more than anything I don't think it's an amazing the world's best uh uh heavy armor but it's really really really good and it looks cool as hell and it's very uh death kny right let out a bone chilling howl that numbs all nearby creatures and numbs pretty cool here movement speed half haved the spellcaster has advantage on attack rolls against the affected entity as well and remove removed by help or when hit by spell Caster but I like it a lot also you can't be moved against your will by any spell or actions but have a disadvantage on dexterity saving throws if you activate it so you do have to deal with that um it's just just too cool to to pass up as far as some of the other items I'm wearing here we have gloves of heroism you'll get an act one when you use your channel oath spells uh remember that it's going to be these um you gain heroism so just a free heroism here and can't be frightened you receive five temp hit points per turn you cannot have more than one source of temp hit points so just kind of keep that in mind you're not going to stack a whole bunch of things but this is something you get the very beginning of the game it's a nice kind of turn on to give you some early um cheap temp hit points and also strength saving throws plus one because your strength can be lower if you want in this case helmet of smiting uh when you apply a condition with one of your Smite spells you gain temporary hit points equal to your charisma modifier again only one sord of 10 pit points I'm just showcasing all of them you wouldn't have all of them on at once and two remember strength is not your primary focus it's Charisma you have your strength here just to kind of if you need to fall back on it or whatever needs to H whatever needs to happen for strength rolles or whatever it's there but your primary damage comes out of your charisma and your charisma modifier and that's where you get a nice benefit here is that you're getting that Charisma modifier as temp hit points and Constitution saving throws are increase by one so any any concentration roles you make the vivacious cloak here is another source of temp hit points you gain seven temp hit points after casting a spell wall on melee so I would say between like the three of these items choose one stick with it and roll with it you could probably keep this cloak on for the majority of the game if you wanted um a lot of these you're going to get in the early portion of the game and they will fall off of usefulness just trying to Showcase them I like the black guards grieve which you get an act three as well because this gains you get long Strider on your character so if you're not a ranger or not have access to Long Strider it's nice just to have it because long Strider gives you an extra 10 ft of movement and Athletics plus one so it helps with all those shove rolls that you're doing for some other items too we have Amulet of the Harpers which just gives us advantage on wisdom saving throws as well as Shield which is a reactions which is a free AC uh for for any kind of particularly hard hit killer sweetheart is an absolute must when you kill a creature your next attack role will be a crit hit once spent this effect refreshes after a long rest this is a reaction as you can see down here so you don't have to use it but it's a nice way to just all right I'm going to turn on a crit hit which is going to lead to a Divine Smite which can lead to any number of crit hit responses from either being a level seven warlock or any number of other things from our our gear we about to go into for other armor pieces though we have the black guards plate from act three advantage on wisdom saving throw check um and it's super thematic right like this is this this is what they uh blackgard probably not blackard blackgard this is probably what they expect everyone who's an oath Breer to use uh we also have the adamantine scal male but think of this as the heavy armor version which would increase your incoming Dam or reduce your incoming damage by two rather than one and when a melee attack hits you they're reeled for three turns rather than um two also I think you have 18 Armor class and attackers can't land crit hits on the wear get this at the end of act one so it's quite quite good quite early as far as helmets go we have the fade hell dusk helmet one of my favorites it's just a really solid one Constitution saving throws and helps out with those saving throws against spells by plus two really easy to get an act two had to think about that Circle of Bones though is quite good and I really really like it just depends on the route you're taking it maybe makes more sense for that Necromancer I was talking about but Allied Undead within 20 ft are resistant to bludgeoning slashing and piercing damage so this does actually affect your control and dead so you can use this and it will actually help them out and it gives you a source of anime dead so we put this on and we have anime dead in to our repertoire which is lovely we can just kind of have that turned on if we so wish um I put Birthright here because it's a free source of Charisma gives us plus two Charisma so if you don't you get this in act three so if you're really like I'm just I I just don't have a good helmet I want to stick with just pop on a sweet ass pimp hat and you have a plus two to your charisma so it's a really nice way to just get a lot of Charisma another Cape here is really good is Cloak of Elemental absorption absorb Elemental damage once per short rest which is lovely take half damage from the next Elemental attack targeting you deal an additional 1d6 of that element type so it's a lot of Wombo combos that can be done with that one you have a lot of gloves at your disposal too depending on which ones you want to stick with you get the blackards uh gauntlets strength saving throws attack plus one that's damage you get an extra attack here um also inflict wounds if you want to use that Legacy of the Masters is great because you gain a plus two bonus to attack and damage roles with the we with weapons and a strength saving throw plus one it's probably the the best like kind of endgame gear when it comes to just straight up melee damage gloves with the battle is power when a weapon attack roll inflicts a condition you kind of do this right inflicts a condition and you have this inflicts a condition you kind of have those guys go together uh but you get Arcane Acuity which then does this bonus to attack rolls and spell difficulty class per turn remaining you're going to be doing tons of those in Spades another really cool one here is Luminous gloves when the wearer deals radiant damage which your smites will do the target receives one one turn of radiating orb which means that they then have minus one to their attack roles so it can be good against a lot of meleia targets lastly you have cerebral Citadel gloves charm or frighten a creature to gain a 1 D4 bonus to attack rols and saving throws so you have lots of sources for frighten so take advantage of it you this can help basically give you a free bless uh which is lovely and a strength saving throw now as far as Shields go if you want to stick on the shield route you can get with the adamantine Shield very early in the game just nice to kind of it's very good from a defensive standpoint The Shield of the UND devout your foes have dis advantage on saving throws to resist your spells or actions that inflict fear remember your crit strikes inflict fear do we have the thingy that shows the thingy where's that thingy that I'm talking about when I say the word thingy aha where is it mortal reminder when you land a crit hit against a creature that creature any nearby enemies must succeed his wisdom saving throw or become frightened so this will Wombo Combo with it right so they they now have disadvantage manage on that saving throw to resist your spells or actions that inflict fear which you can help out with this which is been going to give you uh basically a free bless so there's just a lot of really cool ways you can take that frightened capability and really have a lot of fun with it as far as some really cool other rings and Equipment you can go with is ring of the exalted marrow It just fits the the overall stick of what we're going with subjugate the undead with your commands and ghoulish touch it it's just kind of fits the death KN it's it I'm not saying it's like oh this is really good just think it's cool fit very thematic if you want to stick with more of an RP route and if you want to really Min Maxi on your uh uh neck piece you can go spell slot restoration from the spell Crux amulet this is just going to allow you to turn all those spell slots back on lastly we have the dis dis disintegrating nightstalkers which just gives you Misty step as well as not cannot be in webbed entangled or ens snared and one last item I do want to showcase before we go forward is the diadem of Arcane Synergy I actually don't have it it's from the mountain pass but this synergetic moments when you inflict a condition gain Arcane Synergy for two rounds Arcane Synergy enables you to add your spell casting modifier to your weapon damage rooll it further compounds the amount of damage you can do with your smites by just adding way more Charisma damage onto targets it's really really really good but it does take up a helmet slot there is a ring counterpart to this which does um the same thing if you do damage with cantrips so if you do um any kind of uh uh ELD blast or anything like that that will work just as well it just kind of keep in mind you just have to deal damage with a can trip first and then you get the Arcane Synergy and but it does last for two turns let's jump over to our last two items which are spoiler items do not go ahead if you do not want to be spoiled about something that happens in act three if you jumped ahead to this point and you don't know it it's a spoiler stop now if you have not gotten to this point in act three or maybe if you haven't completed the game just be careful you might learn something you didn't want to learn let's look at it now it's this helmet it's my favorite thing I didn't know this was in the game but when I saw it I got really giddy so it's serox horned Helm you gain dark vision up to 10 ft the number you need to roll a crit hit while attacking is reduced by one that's the biggest thing that we want here because it helps trigger our crit hits even more you can't be frightened and cannot be afflicted with other emotion altering conditions and you could a constitution saving throw plus one it's probably the coolest damn helmet in the the game too and this sort of chaos is really good you are going to have to definitely uh of course pack blade this right so right now it says uh 7 to 20 we'll pack blade it now it does 8 to 21 so there you go it's going to be uh Chaos on hit regain one to six hit points it's just a nice ability because it has a lot things to do here as well as lacerate cleave Rush attack pommel strike it's got at all and it's also our packed weapon now too so we're getting the benefit here of our Charisma into this bad boy here we be real cheesy put the birth right on there it gives a little bit more damage but it's probably one of my favorite weapons too I just a huge o to balers gate one so I absolutely love it but those are all of our items let's jump into some combat so before we jump into combat let's take a look at stuff we're going to do ahead of time uh we're definitely going to cast or of protection right that's going to give us a little bit of bonus even though uh we are an oath breaker remember Ora of protection is part of the base Paladin kit into that too we have got armor of agapis so I can go ahead and just go ah press it level one and just give me five and five we can use our spell slot from our warlock to get this up to 15 and 15 go ahead and do that that makes it even better here so we have other things that we can do too we can go ahead and use like magic weapon which I can use a warlock spell slot to do casting the the spell using a fourth or fifth level spell slot will increase the bonus by two and six and so on and so forth so the reason I'm using a warlock spell slot is because you need to look at your normal spell slots as a currency for your Divine Smite so we just cast these two things and now we can just simply go short rest and we get all of our warlock spell slots back online so just kind of Be Clever about the way that you're casting spells don't you simply just use any spell SL that you can find typically too before we'd even jump into this fight we'd want to go find an undead to control that would be a big focus of this class of course um I don't have any on demand to go and find um or conversely if you have a corpse around you can use animate dead if you have um say this spell circlet on your on your headpiece right or if you had gone to seven in your uh uh Paladin you would have the anime dead oh no that's level n that's level nine I lied to you you would not have anime dead and seven but just kind of setting up some stuff here just so you kind of know what you should have before even jumping into combat I lied I found an undead on command in the bass at the bass gate to control so you can see I made strange beggar lumbar under my control and he benefits from my AA of protection and he would be benefiting from my aura of hate um he has Undead Ward though and that is because of that helmet I talked about right this little circlet right here Undead Ward Allied Undead within 20 ft are resistant to bludgeoning slashing and piercing damage so now he's taking half of all that so this allows you to really keep your Undead up close and personal doing even more fun stuff in the Sun and is this on ask I'm yeah make sure the my Divine smites are on ask you always want to make sure these bad boys are on ask that they are doing all that fun stuff so it's basically you're you're telling the game to ask you to um when you do a crit hit if you want to use a Divine Smite otherwise you just can just go ahead and attack as normal so that you can really m maximize your crit hits that's the kind of big Point here right so I'm actually going to turn off this right here which allows us to do more damage just so I can have a higher chance of actually hitting for the sake of the video I'd probably keep it on but we have a lot of things that we can do now as a um a death knight I can just explode right now and do damage to everyone around me and have them all take uh necrotic damage and we can juice this thing up with a uh spell plot for our warlock if we so want so we can have this do four to 24 damage we can have all this different kind of fun we can go ahead and use blade Ward here um what's another fun one I was trying to bring up earlier we do still have hunger of Hadar which I wouldn't use in this case right we're up close and personal but I would be casting it over here to kind of create like let's say that there's a bunch of enemies over here cast it over on them something that's kind of range a spellcaster whatever it is you'd use that to kind of lock them down keep them in one spot so a little bit more manageable and easier to deal with but the big thing here is our currency which is our um spell slots which Divine smite's going to take advantage of so let's go ahead and bring up this and let's type in swiftness I'm sorry uh speed there it is just have one of these going that way we can if if we fail here we can just kind of keep going to show off how Divine smite's going to ultimately work for us let's go ahead and hit okay we'll use executioner to trigger that um crit hit well that didn't work how I wanted it to cuz that didn't crit hit go ahead and use it again we'll critically Miss of course because that's that's the way you make a video and now here's the coolest thing about being a blade lock we can take this or uh whatever this is lock it in we can do this boom okay 3 to 24 or we do this 4 to 32 because we're using the warlock spell slot which is a replenishable resource on short rest I mean you can replenish the other ones on Long rest sure but let's just go with this boom that is just absolutely juicy so we can take a look here we went ahead and hit them use Divine Smite on on critical hit and we hit over here for critical hit so we did both 27 damage and 35 damage right because we we we do so much more with crits on our divine smites as well we take all that damage and we just go ahead and go absolutely crazy with it let's see if we can get a trigger another one over here no again maybe not swinging for the fences here yeah well either way you get the point and two if anything if anything really gets in a hard situation I could have gone ahead and use lay a hands on anyone I've got a lot of utility with this um class now because we are seven we we don't really have a lot of Channel oath abilities here spiteful suffering I could have used Dreadful aspect I could have used if I really wanted to layer in some of those frighten capabilities but we really just weren't going with that here today right we didn't we didn't really focus on it and if anything's at range I don't need to use a ranged uh weapon I can just simply use my Aldridge blast and because our Charisma is at 17 in this example it would be 18 if you were to play the right way um you would go ahead and actually be able to do three damage beams that would do quite a bit of damage that would be plus4 um because you'd have your agonizing blast which is adding in your charisma modifier and this doesn't even show off Aura of hate which would give me an additional plus three to all my damage so hopefully this shows you how this is a really fun death nighty kind of build we do focus on controlled dead more so than summoning the dead and you definitely can animate them through through things right I could wait a whole round here and we could summon up this guy but I think that this is a really fun class and it's one that's all over YouTube everyone's got a different take on this for the most part they run the same kind of Baseline but I hopefully this gives you a better idea of how to play your death knight in a balers Gate 3 if you have any suggestions or different ways to approach this class by all means Let It Be know in the comment section below let people know of hey you know what I've actually had a lot of luck using medium armor and going with this armor instead of the heavy armor route let it be known spread as much of that information as you can but as always guys thank you so much for watching here today don't forget to like comment subscribe all that kind of fun action but have a good one and take [Music] care

Channel: ItalianSpartacus

Views: 165,417

Keywords: THE BEST Death Knight Build (Warlock/Paladin) for Baldur's Gate 3, baldurs gate 3, baldur's gate 3, bg3, lockadin build, lockadin bg3, best lockadin build, bg3 builds, bg3 death build guide, bg3 death knight, bg3 death knight heavy armor, bg3 death knight build, bg3 death knight or bounty hunter, bg3 death knight reddit, bg3 death knight weapons, bg3 best death feats, bg3 death knight armor, bg3 italianspartacus

Id: iTatly-3Q1g

Length: 49min 22sec (2962 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 10 2023