The BEST FIGHTER in Baldur's Gate 3 - Lae'zel Tactician Build Guide

all right hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide today I'm going to be walking you through my pick for the best fighter build in balder's Gate this is intended to be a solid basic guide for Lazelle or a main character as a fighter and we will be focusing on building a solid and simpl to use build without using any particularly wild tricks just making the best use of the character and optimizing the build to make sure that you have what the tools that it takes for your fighter to excel either in a party or solo but this is more intended as a build for a party to begin with of course the first thing that we have to do is fix lazelle's stats because like all of the companion characters she comes with a poor stat spread the use recommended button here I don't recommend using it because it gives you three odd numbers and so you are going to want to change that so that you only have even numbers in your stats cuz that's where you get bonuses so like with most Marshall characters the the right stat spread is going to be 16 14 and then 16 making sure that you have 16s in strength and Constitution and then you put your remaining points into wisdom because it's the most important saving throw of the other three although if you are a main character you might wish to move some of those points into Charisma in order to have better conversation skills even though we intend to be in heavy armor I still highly recommend having the high dexterity because initiative is so important in Dungeons and Dragons and in Boulders gate three small bonuses to initiative are enormous unlike in tabletop Dungeons and Dragons where initiative is rolled as roll a D20 and add your initiative score in Boulder's Gate it's roll a D4 and add your initiative score which means that bonuses to initiative are five times as valuable as normal in Dungeons and Dragons so it's very important to have high dexterity to ensure that you go first since this is going to be a high damage output build going first will let us take out an enemy before they even get a turn the other choice that uh we have to make of course if you are not playing this for lazel is what race you are going with and what background you're going with for a fighter the best races are gith Yan is actually one of them because the bonus Mobility options from gith Yan are incredibly powerful so even though the weapon and armor proficiencies are are wasted on you since Fighters get all weapon and armor proficiencies as part of their class the additional Mobility from enhanced leap and from misy Step are extremely powerful so gith yank is one of the best options wood elf is of course always excellent because of the bonus move speed and on melee characters dgar can be good because the enrage is very power or enlarge excuse me is very powerful as well so those are my top three choices for race here but of course lasel is a gith so that's what we're going with for her for our fighting style we are going to pick great weapon fighting both because it is probably the most powerful of these options if you intend to do damage output and also because lasel has a number of unique uh great weapons that are I guess not unique to her but exclusive to GI Yankee and those items are so powerful that it's worth building a character who can make good use of them for a main character if you wanted to do sword and shield that's also totally viable and you could pick either defense or protection here I would steer away from dueling or two weapon fighting for this version of The Fighter although those also do have some uses elsewhere but of course for lasel we're going to go with great weapon fighting finally for our skill selection the only really important one is that you need Athletics this is incredibly useful to the fighter because one of the things that they get of course is high strength and being able to reposition enemies is always super powerful I would for Lazelle recommend putting your other two point points into perception and survival and then using her gith Yan astral knowledge to gain all of the dexterity skills which will give you acrobatic slight of hand and stealth those give you a significant boost to your outof combat utility and allow her to also be your lockpicking character with 14 dexterity and slight of hand proficiency she'll be okay at it which means that you won't necessarily need to bring aaran in your party or have lockpicking elsewhere always nice to get that kind of incidentally rather than having to build a character specifically for it so this is my recommended stat spread for LEL let's keep on going so one thing that's kind of interesting about fighters in Boulders gate as opposed to tabletop D and D is that typically in Dungeons and Dragons Marshall characters like Fighters benefit very strongly from multiclassing because their abilities are quite front-loaded um and they tend not to gain more stuff as they go down the line but in balers gate because you stop at level 12 and Fighters get maybe the best feature in the game at level 11 you actually have a pretty strong incentive to stay single class fighter all the way through or almost all the way through that being said fighter is also one of the best two level dips because of this ability that we get at level two action surge this gives you a whole extra action which once you combine that with extra attack from hitting level five means that you can make four attacks in a turn obviously that's incredibly powerful but we don't have any decisions to make at this point so let's keep leveling up our first major decision is what subass we're going to pick I've already showed an eldrich Knight build so if you're interested in that one there is one on the channel go check that out but for a fighter who intends to be primarily a fighter I think the best build uncontested is battl master um battl master has a number of extreme extremely powerful effects that we can use to really amp up the ability of the fighter you get these superiority Dice and you have four every short rest which means you can use 12 of them in a day uh 16 if you have a Bard and get a third short rest which is very powerful it means that Fighters have some of the best sustained resource output in the in the game only warlocks come close to being able to just do as much in a day as a fighter can um I yes warlocks actually slightly exceed Fighters cuz they're also on short rests and Elder blast is so powerful but uh Fighters are in terms of how much they can get accomplished in between long rests one of the best classes in the game Battlemaster fighters in particular excel at this because of these Maneuvers which allow you to perform powerful actions in combat there's a lot of Maneuvers but we need to pick the the best ones for us so of the three that you start with I am of the strong opinion that two that you absolutely have to take first are Precision attack and repost Precision attack is allows you to spend a superiority die to add a d8 to your attack role that's an average bonus of four and a half most of the time that's going to mean that you hit on pretty much every time you make that attack with a Precision attack this also will come up next level due to a feat that we're taking because it counteracts the downsides of any penalties that you take to hit extremely well repost gives you something to do with your reaction which is really important to this character as well because current Fighters one issue that they have as a character is that they don't get to use their reaction very effectively by default repost fixes that enemies will miss you frequently because you have high AC and that gives you the option to spend a superiority die to hit them back for additional bonus damage for our third pick I'm going to go with trip attack you definitely want one of the ones that lets you spend a die to add damage because you can use that in combination with Precision attack to guaranteed hit for a lot of damage and trip attack has the additional benefit of knocking the target prone which gives any subsequent melee attacks you make in that round Advantage so for example you can trip attack even at level three you can trip an enemy action Surge and then hit them with Advantage you use Precision attack on the first one to guarantee that the trip hits and then you get a GU a more or less guaranteed hit from from the advantage attack for your second attack this means that you're extremely reliable at dealing damage so these are the three that I would pick there's a couple others that are also good and you can swap the order of these around but I highly recommend going with these for the first we'll talk about the other good ones as we go on at level four you have another major decision to make because you get access to a feat Fighters get more feat than than any other character and so you and also have access to more useful Feats as in more of the Feats on this list are good for Fighters than typically for most characters so you are going to want to make quite a bit of use of this feet list to amp up your character there are two Feats other than ability Improvement that are particularly worth noting on this character to start with and those two Feats are great weapon Master which adds 10 damage to your attacks at the cost of a minus five but we took Precision attack and tripping attack meaning that you can very reliably even through the disadvantage land these great weapon Master hits which will increase your damage output massively we'll be making a lot of attacks in a turn and so great weapon Master will also have a fairly High chance to trigger its bonus action additional attack this is also good because because as I mentioned Fighters don't by default have a lot of uses for their bonus actions or reactions and so adding great weapon Master giving you potential use for your bonus action on a turn is extremely powerful the other option of course is just to take an ability Improvement at uh level four and the final option that's very good especially in a party is Sentinel this gives you an alternate use for your reaction and now between repost and Sentinel you have two uh reactions whether an enemy attacks you or attacks an ally also preventing enemies from moving and keeping them inside of damaging AOE effects keeping them away from your ranged allies is extremely powerful so Sentinel is very good in a party but for this build which is primarily focused on damage output I recommend starting with great weapon Master you mitigate the downsides of great weapon Master with your Precision attack and the advantage from trip attack and it will vastly increase your damage output especially starting next level when we get access to extra attack for a giving you a second attack with each action that you make an attack with this also doubles the number of attacks you get from action surge is obviously extremely powerful this is going to double your damage output and the IT multiplies the great weapon Master damage as well because you're adding 10 on each of those attacks additionally this also at level five for lasel or a main character gith Yankee gets you access to Misty step which is excellent any repositioning tool on a fighter is super powerful so keep an eye out for those in your items there's a couple items that also give you a bonus action Misty step once per day and those are all extremely good for Fighters um let me show you one of those actually now an item to keep an eye out for is the disintegrating night Walkers here which give you Misty step once per day and also prevent you from being uh in webbed entangled in snared or slipping which is incredibly strong so that makes you immune to surfaces and gives you a misty step once per day very powerful boots you get them in the under dark in act one at level six because we're a fighter we get a second feat so most characters will have to wait till level eight or longer if they multiclass but because we're a single class fighter we get to get a second feat for this one I would recommend just taking your ability Improvement at this point we do want to hit 20 strength and while we took a detour for great weapon Master it's very important that we hit 20 strength I will also talk about a second version of this build where we get more feat because we are going to use an item to uh give ourselves bonus strengths so we won't have to spend Feats on it but if you are not doing that then you definitely want to increase your strength because 20 strength is really important it increases your damage output and your hit chance which since we will be taking penalties on our attacks our hit chance is really important level seven we get to add two Maneuvers and I think that the two best ones to add here are uh disarming strike which can be very useful if an enemy has a weapon that either you want to steal or that is very powerful some uh especially boss enemies will have very powerful unique weapons that getting getting those away from them is extremely valuable and can really make certain fights much easier and the other one that I like is menacing attack although I would also say that uh pushing attack or goting attack can be very good but menacing attack I like in particular because you can use it with a ranged weapon to prevent an enemy from closing the distance to you so if you frighten an enemy they can't move and that means that you can use this with a ranged weapon which you are a fighter and have full access to all the ranged weapons in the game do remember that you can make ranged attacks on this build no problem um especially from high ground and stuff it your hit chance won't be at all bad with 14 dexterity uh and you can even use Precision attack on those if you need to but in particular frightening an enemy and preventing them from closing the distance with your squishy allies can be extremely useful if you can't get your this character into melee in time so those are the Maneuvers that I recommend at level eight we are just going to continue to increase our strength that's very important and then at level 9 we get access to indomitable this is an extremely powerful ability especially because as a fighter you have Constitution saving throws um anything that makes you roll a constitution save is usually quite uh you you are proficient in Constitution saving throws anything that makes you roll a constitution save is going to be pretty debilitating some of the worst conditions in the game like nauseated which prevents you from doing anything have Constitution saves so indomitable not only makes your weak saves better it also makes your strong saves very unlikely to fail and that's incredibly powerful one of the best class features in the game here level 10 we get two more Maneuvers and also the superiority die increases from a d8 to a d10 that means your Precision attacks are more likely to hit uh at a d10 you have an average of 5.5 on that roll which means it more than mitigates the downsides of great weapon master um and also add an average of five and a half damage to every attack you make with your Precision attack activated um for our other Maneuvers at this point it's a little less important but I would take maybe pushing attack and I actually kind of like fainting attack um at this point we do have now more uses for our bonus actions but sometimes you just really need an attack to hit and so you can use you can say all right I'm going to use my bonus action plus Precision attack to make a fainting Precision attack and just guarantee that we hit with advantage and the additional bonuses something to keep in mind about great weapon Master is that the way that the math works out it is almost never correct to turn it off you will do more average damage almost always by uh leaving it on all the time and accepting the penalty and then you mitigate the toah hit with by knocking the enemy's prone by using Precision attack by gaining Advantage from other ways such as by hiding and sneaking up behind them before bonking them um there's a lot of ways you can mitigate the toah hit penalty and even without those the the math is a little complicated but the average damage per round is almost always higher using great weapon Master than not using great weapon master so don't be afraid to just leave it on it will feel bad sometimes when you miss but most of the time you'll be you you're going to do more damage on average with it on finally at level 11 we get the other reason we stayed in Fighter for so long improved extra attack which gives you three attacks per action in combination with action surge that's six attacks um if they crit you get an if any of those crit you get an additional attack thanks to great weapon master and that's incredibly powerful this is obviously one of the best Feats in the game it makes a great weapon Fighter the highest damage output character uh just in terms of raw damage output because this is so powerful doing um this many attacks in a round other other than some some very specific multiclass combinations with usually with warlock can do can get slightly higher damage but you get to do it with lots of HP and and heavy armor and everything as well so this is one of the best most solid builds in the game is just taking fighter all the way through finally at level 12 we do have something of a choice there are three options here you can either just take another level of fighter and take another feat my uh uh preference if you're taking another feat if you are in a party you should take Sentinel it's just very valuable and if you are not in a party you should take alert because like we talked about initiative is just so valuable um on any character but in particular on solo characters you need to win initiative all the time so if you're playing solo you may want to move alert to like level six and wait to hit 20 strength at this point but also if you're playing solo you'll probably use the second version of this build which I'll show you in a second which uses an item to get strength rather than Feats the other option if we didn't want to if we didn't feel like we needed Sentinel there are two other classes that have very strong one level dips for us that we could consider taking one of these is barbarian barbarian will give you access to uh Rage which allows you to just gain some additional uh damage and while you can't use it in heavy armor it does give you two extra damage per attack when you're making six attacks per round this is incredibly valuable the other um class feature unarmored defense won't come up because you'll still be better off in medium armor but the bonus damage from Rage can still be very useful the other option if you want a slightly more defensive option is cleric in particular for the light domain cleric because the light domain cleric gives you access to warding flare this is a reaction that can be used an unlimited number of times per day and causes an enemy's attack to have disadvantage against you unfortunately you can't use it and then to force an attack to miss and then repost that attack but you do get um one of the best defensive tools in the game this is going to average it the the math work out to it being about minus 4 and a half on their Ro on most common roles that they would need to make so if they need to roll between a six and a 14 to hit you then it averages out to4 and a half on their roll um and if they need to roll sort of at the more extreme ends it's less impactful but but the way the math works out you should think of it as being about minus 4 and a half so it's basically a shield that you don't have to spend a resource on and that's incred ibly powerful and will keep you alive my personal preference in this case is to go for just the 12th level of fighter and take your last feat um I think defeat is slightly better but warding flare is the best option if you are finding yourself needing some more defense and you do get a couple spells and things like that which can be quite useful as well can trips obviously can can help like having just light is very useful and having the ability to bless yourself before going into combat you won't lose concentration very often because you have indomitable and Constitution 16 Constitution and Constitution save proficiency so blessing yourself is extremely valuable you will definitely want to be getting this from somewhere so I would recommend getting bless and healing word as your two spells if you are going the cleric route all right so let me also just quickly reset and I will show you requ what we will do if you want to make use of this item in act one there is a vendor uh anti-l will sell you three of these every day so you can stock up on elixir of Hill giant strength for the entire game and just drink one every day meaning that your strength will always be 21 given that you won't have to put any attribute points into strength in character creation or into strength in your level UPS which frees us up to take a lot more feat so I'll just quickly run through that and talk about which Feats we want at each level if we're using Elixir rather than using our strength rather than actually using strength so let's do that our attribute split of course is going to change because we are not taking any any strength in our character if you are doing this you'll probably want to build the character the way I showed you in the first build and then Respec it into a um into this version of the character later on uh you can do my advice would be to do this split with our additional five um points here you can then go to 14 wisdom and then like 10 Charisma something like that and the reason for this is that then you can use antiel deal to get to 18 Constitution as well um or you could just take even numbers and just boost boost your other stats appropriately something like this um but getting to 17 Constitution will allow you to to use anti ethal deal to get to 18 Constitution which of course increases your HP significantly so that's probably the most powerful build if you just want to strictly optimize this character other than that all the other decisions that we're making are going to be the same so we're just going to speed through this level up process but I'll just show you which Feats we'll take it at each level take the same uh Maneuvers and I would recommend still starting with great weapon Master you'll have 20 strength already so you're very likely to hit we definitely want to work s into the build although if you are not in a party you would probably prefer alert the other option here other options here are Savage attacker is decent although since you'll very often be using a great sword it has less impact than it would with a another um weapon because you have the great weapon fighting style so you're already rrolling those dice so what you probably want is to take Sentinel pick whatever and here you may wish to take mobile mobile is really good because increasing your movement speed is super powerful um and then also being able to disengage from combat can be very useful normally you're going to want to stick to enemies in combat and not have them uh get away from you but just increasing your movement speed with mobile is really good and another one that I like a lot if you happen to have a good glaive is or halir is polearm Master because the bonus action attack is really good and making an opportunity attack when a target comes in range especially if you are so playing the game solo is a great use of your reaction um in combination with Sentinel when they come in range of you they get hit and then they can't leave range of you that turn turn which is very powerful as well so you might consider this and at level 12 you are more likely to want to take the cleric dip in this version of the build because you already have all the most valuable Feats but if you really just want to max out on um on fighter power then the best option is probably mobile here uh other options you could take tough if you feel like you need a little more HP like at this point it's it's going to depend a lot on what you're feeling like your character needs I would stay away from charger because these are actions rather than attack actions so you can't do the charges and then make an attack in the same turn so they're less powerful than it looks like it would be um heavy armor master I would avoid as well because we're already getting strength so the strength point is wasted but you can stack up quite a lot of damage reduction with this so if you have a a suit of armor that gives you High Dam damage reduction the more damage reduction you stack the better each point of it is so it's very possible that that's the best pick for you in that case if you want to try to be more defensive all right so this has been a pretty detailed look at the fighter and my pick for the best fighter the Battlemaster fighter so I hope that you have found this useful and have enjoyed this video if you have of course feel feel free to leave a like comment on the video and you can subscribe to my channel for more balers Gate 3 build guides and other strategy game content cheers my friends I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 5,432

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

Id: FrKazgQv9ls

Length: 27min 50sec (1670 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023