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

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today we're covering my pick for the best healer in balers Gate 3 this is a pretty unusual build because you may have heard that healing in Boulder's Gate is a difficult strategy to implement since typically the numbers on healing don't keep up with incoming damage today we're going to break that rule by making a character that's so good at healing that not only do does your healing keep up with incoming damage it wildly outpaces it very few enemies in the game will be able to do enough damage to out damage this character's healing so your party will be able to stay alive and healthy fully functional even on honor mode here I'm using shadowart as our build example because nominally she's the heal of the part healer of the party although we actually will not be going with a straight cleric for this build and you'll see why in a little while before I jump in I do have a couple quick thank yous to give out I want to say thank you so much to chamu or Shamu for becoming a channel member let me know how you uh say that and as well as Wayne Sutherland and Scott Meers for $10 each thank you so much my friends I really do appreciate it all right let's jump in and talk about how to build an incredible healer for this character we are using shadowart as the build example because like I said she's nominally the party's healer but this will also be an excellent main character for a couple reasons one is that the first level we're actually going to take is Bard and this is going to be a Charisma based character so you will be able also to have excellent dialogue skills on this character dialogue skills you can actually think of in some ways as being preemptive healing because often you can use them to get out of a fight or to make a fight easier reducing incoming damage meaning that you have less that you actually have to heal so I feel like it plays pretty well with the strategy of the character that this character is quite good at dialogue skills as well for our attribute selection of course we are beginning with Bard so we are going to want decent Charisma and we also want of course excellent Constitution because we are going to be a spellcaster who needs to maintain concentration on things as well as just being a character in the game who likes to have lots of hit points um and because having high hit points combos very well with being a Healer both because you can help tank for your team but also because the more hit points you have the less likely you are to die before your turn comes around and then you can heal yourself and your party back up to fall we also of course want 14 dexterity to have decent initiative um and well this build will be using heavy armor it will still help with armor class and until you get good enough heavy armors to not have to worry about uh dexterity and then of course your dexterity helps with initiative which is critically important for every character and then finally we put our last four points into wisdom because it's the most important saving throw for our skill selection here we are going to go with dialogue skills if you're playing this as a main character if you aren't playing it as a main character um and don't need the dialogue skills you can because you're a Bard get away with putting points into basically any skill that your party needs uh since you have access to every skill in the game as a bar my advice if you don't have these skills covered is this character makes a great character to cover slight of hand for you um and and also an excellent character to cover perception both of those are skills that you're going to need a lot of uh during the game so it's really nice to have access to them on your main character as well you can also if you are interested in bumping your strength up cuz for main characters it can often be nice to have slightly higher strength just to increase your carry weight and jump distance makes the game a little smoother you can use Elixir for that that's probably the easiest way but this character will uh generally be casting spells so the club of Hill giant strength is also a great way to increase your strength or you could use the gloves of dexterity and then put more points in strength other than that this character really does not need like Ethel's hair or any additional stats from anything or any specific items other than healing specific items so it slots very well into just about any party for teammates for this party this is something that people have asked me to do if for this character um this is something that people have asked me to touch on sometimes is what teammates should you consider for this party this for this character this character actually plays extremely well with teammates that want to take a lot of damage or will frequently take a lot of damage because you're a healing focused character so something like a bare totem Barbarian whoes takes a lot of hits and halves incoming damage doubling the effectiveness of your healing spells is going to be an incredible teammate this plays out very well with Druids as well um so just anything that's going to take a few hits and let you use your incredible amounts of healing to save your characters from death for our cantrip selection you are going to want to take friends if you're the party face be careful using this on tactician or honor because it will cause enemies or characters to turn hostile but it's still very powerful to have advantage on Charisma checks so it's always worth taking if you're the party face just be careful when you use it um and every party should have access to minor illusion so you could take that you could also take vicious mockery vicious mockery will help you decrease incoming damage which reduces the stress on your healing which you will be getting later on um the chances of this Landing are typically not amazing and it doesn't do incredible damage but it does give enemies disadvantage on Attack rules and is a a combat canant trip that you don't otherwise have so it's nice to have access to vicious mockery as well um this is my recommended cantrip selection but you can actually benefit from a lot of different cantrips on this character for our spell selection one thing we won't be taking is cure wounds because the amount of healing that cure wounds does and the fact that it's an action and requires you to be in melee with the party member you're trying to heal means that it is hard to use and doesn't even keep up with the incoming damage of enemy Attacks An Enemy great sword attack is going to average about 10 damage um whereas a cure wounds is going to average seven and a half healing you can see that you're spending a spell slot and an action to not even keep up with a resource free action from an opponent uh so cure wounds is just a very inefficient use of your time and your spell slots that's why healing typically struggles in D and D and why we need a specific character and build to get around those issues what we will take instead is healing word because healing word is a bonus action so it doesn't have the problem of taking your whole turn and it doesn't have the problem of needing to be in melee cuz it's 60ft range it's best used to get allies up from zero hit points if they've dropped to zero you can use healing word to get them back into the fight immediately but this is just an incredible spell and the powerful Buffs that you can apply when healing will be very easy to apply with a bonus action with healing word something that is going to be very important when we get access to certain items uh in the next couple levels for our other spells every party should have access to Long Strider it is resource free and increases your whole party's movement speed by 10 hit points or by 10 points 10 feet um long Strider is a ritual spell which it doesn't tell you in the tool tip here but that means it doesn't take a spell slot to cast so you can just cast it on everyone and you want dissonant Whispers which is the best combat spell for bards at level one this paralyzes an enemy in place if they fail the save meaning that uh you can stop them from attacking you if they're melee or keep them next to your melee characters and finally you can take a utility spell for your last spell like disguise self or speak with animals but just to stay on theme I'm actually going to recommend that you take heroism heroism gives your party member five temporary hit points every turn which is effectively healing them for five hit points every turn so long as they're taking at least five points of damage if this runs for the full 10 turns and they take five points of damage every turn turn that's 50 hit points of healing which is an incredible amount of value for a level one slot now you'll never get 50 hit points of healing out of it but you can because you're not concentrating on much other on many other things at level one you can pretty reliably get 10 or 15 or maybe even 20 points of healing out of it and you pre unlike uh T wounds you pre-cast this before the combat starts getting your first five hit points immediately and then it will continue to provide throughout the fight so long as you can maintain concentration on it as long as you aren't taking so much damage that your character dies or zero damage heroism is going to continue to provide hit points to your raging Barbarian buddy or whatever and this can actually be a good way to apply healing in the fight I don't recommend this as like the most efficient action uh in most fights but it is very usable and one that you will gain some value out of in certain encounters especially if they're going to go long and it's just un themed for a Healer finally we have to make the most important decision that we're going to make and pick the right starting instrument I'm sure you can all agree on which is the most obviously correct starting instrument so I won't even bother selecting it for you but if you get this one wrong then your character is completely doomed so make sure you get this right at this point it's worth talking about the items that Boulders gate makes available to healers that are incredibly powerful for healers so there are three items that are really important all of which you can get early in act one one is the whispering promise which basically when you heal an ally if you're wearing the whispering promise ring they get blessed for two turns another is the hell Rider Pride which when you're healing an ally they get Blade Ward for two turns and the third is the boots of Aid and comfort which when you heal an ally it gives them three temporary hit points these all combo together very well because boots of Aid and comfort giv give temporary hit points it g you get three temporary hit points well those temporary hit points are doubled in value when you have the Hell Riders Pride uh defense buff applied to them when when your ally is taking half as much damage the healing that you apply is doubled in value so hell Rider's Pride combos extremely well with healing effect and of course applies on healing effect an incredible boost to your character Whispering promise ring also just makes them way better at fighting for through this entire time this combos extremely well with healing word because healing word is a bonus action meaning that you can apply all of these powerful Buffs to your allies without even spending your turn on it and take your actual turn to do something else these are going to be the core of the combos that we're using in order to make our character proactive as well as powerfully reactive throughout the game when we get to level two we are are presented with a choice we will want levels in cleric but we also want to continue uh levels in Bard so the question is do we take the cleric level immediately or do we take the Bard level next I'm going to suggest that you dip immediately into cleric and of course we're going to take life cleric because this gets you access to Heavy Armor which is going to make you much more resil Shields and heavy armor which is going to make you much more resilient in the early game allowing you to act as a secondary tank for your team in addition to your melee allies you also get the bless spell a great thing to concentrate on even though you're able to apply bless um to your to your allies using healing but bless is still an excellent spell even given that and you get most importantly the disci disciple of Life feature disciple of life makes your healing spells do extra healing equal to two plus the level of the spell so if you cast a level one healing word it heals for three more than it would otherwise effectively doubling the healing of the spell this is an incredibly powerful and efficient effect that makes your healing uh significantly better and as you cast higher level healing spells or have healing spells that can be applied multiple times um in a single cast this effect multiplies out over itself giving you incredible amounts of bonus healing throughout the the game for our cantrip selection from cleric we're going to take guidance because every party needs guidance and every character that can take guidance should um you probably want to take resistance as well it just cuz it's comes up in some dialogues where you need to make a saving throw in dialogue you can use resistance and finally I do recommend that you pick up blade Ward here in case you need to cast it on yourself yes you can apply this through healing but you won't 100% of the time have access to Healing to do it so blade Ward is really good to to pick that up you could also take light if you prefer that don't take attacking cantrips because your wisdom isn't going to be very high and then for our prepared spells we're going to pick up um ones that don't have saving throws because our wisdom isn't very high so we can't use stuff like command on this character but we can use something like uh protection from evil and good or Shield of faith for certain encounters but most importantly we can use Sanctuary which allows us to protect an ally who's in a bad situation um Sanctuary cannot you can't be targeted by enemy attacks but you can still be healed so you can sanctuary and Ally and then heal them back to full while they are safely within the sanctuary or Sanctuary yourself to allow you to pass out healing without being in trouble cuz you can H uh you can heal allies as long as you don't hurt an enemy while in the protection of sanctuary Sanctuary is just an incredible effect doesn't take concentration super powerful only takes your bonus action worth dipping into cleric just for that even aside from the other great things that you get and then of course you're going to prepare your other spells based on the situation but probably something like create water is always good for seeing invisible enemies and and so on we could now take cleric level two to get access to The Preserve life uh Channel Divinity healing this would let you once per day apply all your healing Buffs to your allies for your channel Divinity or once once per Channel Divinity usage you can spend this to apply all the two rounds of Buffs to your entire team I think that this is powerful but I actually think it's more important that we get more of our levels in barred early I just wanted to mention that as a build variant but this will allow you to gain a bunch of uh you're you're gaining your actual combat spells much faster two levels of delay on gaining new combat spells and new Effectiveness in uh new spell levels access to new Effectiveness for your party is a lot so I typically don't recommend taking two levels when you're building a Caster like this until you've reached the core component of your of your build at level two you also get song of rest and song of rest is the best form of out of combat healing CU it just gives you a short rest replenishing half of your hit points which is obviously a ton of healing there's basically two types of healing in Dungeons and Dragons in combat healing which is usually weak and out of combat healing which is extremely powerful and useful if you want to avoid long resting too often song of rest helps you with this and also gives you back your short rest resources it's incredibly strong to have in your in your party very useful for our spell selection here we're just going to take uh one of the spell utility spells that we didn't before something like speak with animals or whatever just anything that your party needs at Bard level three we get access to the College of lore Bard College of lore Bard gives us a number of things it gives us additional skills which you have to select from this interface which is kind of annoying I don't know why it doesn't do this in a separate skill interface but we now get expertise in two skills which should be dialogue skills probably like persuasion and uh decep ction let's say and then we also get some additional skill proficiencies so now this character can cover a lot of your bases um in terms of giving you in terms of what your party needs now you can definitely have slight of hand you can definitely have perception you can definitely have all of the dialogue skills and so on on your party member because you're College of lard and you also get access to cutting words cutting words is a reaction that lets you reduce the an incoming enemy attack Roll by 1d6 um increasing as you level it up and that is going to turn hits into misses frequently and of course the less your characters get hit the more value your healing has because the smaller the numbers that you have to heal back up are um reducing incoming damage improves the value of your healing because it's going to be in uh healing a larger percentage of incoming damage so this all combos very well together attacks that Miss attacks that are mitigated by blade Ward and attacks that heal uh are healed are all comboed together these are all multiplicative effects that keep your characters alive very well for our level two spell selection there's nothing really that combos Super well with our theme of being a Healer but of course you can still be a super an incredibly powerful contributor to combat just with the cloud of dagger spells a great thing to concentrate on um and you can you know you can put yourself in sanctuary while concentrating on it and do a bunch of damage uh I would recommend taking this for sure the other spells are a little less important which you take in particular heat metal is always nice to have so you could replace a level one spell with that um but cloud of daggers is the most important selection that you're going to make at Bard level four we get access to uh a feet and the first thing that we and of course our Feats are just going to be increasing our ability points the having additional save DCS and increasing our Charisma bonus that we are applying to any healing effects that we're cast to a lot of our healing effects uh gain our Charisma bonus both makes us better at casting the control spells and damage spells that this character will do when you're not healing and also makes you better at healing so it's a no-brainer to increase our Charisma and of course it makes us better at our dialogue skills as well um for our spell selection here things like heat metal and hold person are great good things to concentrate on very powerful Bard spells that um most parties are going to want so you can pick those up for our cantrip selection here we already have access to Blade Ward let's make sure we have minor illusion in our party if you didn't have it from someone else you'd probably have taken this earlier but it's it's still important to have and nice to have multiples you could take Mage hand as well Mage hand is also a healing spell by the way because you can drop potions for your Mage hand and have the Mage hand hurl potions at your allies um if you drop a stack of potions on the ground and cast Mage hand next to it the Mage hand can throw those potion at your allies helping to contribute to Healing so that's something I should have mentioned a little earlier and actually makes Mage hand quite good for this healing build at bird level five we gain additional Bic inspiration making our cutting words succeed more often so we should be taking even less damage and our inspiration recharges after a short rest now so our song of rest lets us recharge our inspiration that's a inherent Synergy to The Bard class and this means we can very freely use cutting words to devastating effect to enemy attacks preventing them from Landing their attacks very often for our spell selection you get a choice between three of the three or four really of the best control spells in the game um BS get access to all of the Premier crowd control spells which can stop enemies from acting all of which are excellent things to concentrate on or just have available and these our choic is basically which of these do we want we're kind of spoiled for choice these these are fear which is uh one of the most potent debuffs in the game you can still attack enemies while they're frightened Glyph of warding which you can use either to do damage or put enemies to sleep hypnotic pattern which also takes enemies out of the fight and plant growth which stops enemies from moving by making difficult terrain that is extremely difficult to move through one quarter movement speed is crippling to your enemies I'm going to recommend for this character um and just in general probably that you take hypnotic pattern and glyph ofing this gives you one concentration option and one non-concentration option so they're the ones that are going to be generally most applicable and this will allow you to have the ability to use both a concentration choice to take lots of enemies out of the fight or a non-concentration choice if you need one of those and are concentrating on something else at this point also heroism has kind of lost its shine because five temporary hit point per turn is just no longer really relevant by the time you're level six so we'll replace uh heroism with the second level LEL three spell that we want at B level six we get access to the spell that makes this build work and it is such a good one so we get two magical secrets and one of those magical Secrets is going to be counter spell as it always will be this is just an incredible defensive action and the other magical secret is going to be Warden of Vitality Warden of Vitality is a non-concentration spell that lets you cast restore Vitality which restores uh 2d6 hit points to an ally as a bonus action um so basically this gives you 10 casts of a souped up healing word however there's two things that are really nice about this spell one it's not concentration so you can use it in addition to other concentration options and two um it's a level three spell meaning with your cleric feature it gets five additional hit points per cast of restore Vitality restore vitality normally averages seven hit points yield but with plus five additional hit points on top of that from being a uh Divine a life cleric that averages 12 points of healing per cast of this as a bonus action and of course every point of healing there also gives three temporary hit points adds your blade Ward adds blade Ward and blast to the Ally this means that you're healing for 15 points of healing per cast for 10 turns straight which is uh an average of 150 points of healing or a maximum possible value of uh 200 points of healing if you were to roll double sixes on all of your healing that's an absurd amount of healing the heal spell at level six as a six level spell heals for 70 so while obviously you aren't going to be able to get 10 turns worth of healing out of the spell most of the time the fact that it comfortably doubles or even triples the total healing value of of the best the most powerful healing spell in the game gives you an idea of some of the numbers that we're working with it's also going to let you keep those Buffs active on your party even throughout very long combats because you can continuously use a bonus action to cycle through allies applying new temporary hit points new blade Ward and new blast to all of them while using your main actions to contribute to the fight and you also still have your concentration spells from other uh opportunities if you have counter spell from another character you could also take haste or hunger fedar as something else to concentrate on but uh these are going to generally be the best options for your healing character so right away already we've made a character that can apply um hundreds of points of outof combat healing and in combat gets to constantly fuel their allies with large bursts of healing and buff them for our other spell selection we're just going to take whichever control spell we didn't take probably fear at this point as an emergency spell well um but what if we can do even better than 200 points of healing in from a single cast of a spell maybe we can get 400 points of healing from a single cast of a spell well there's a way to do that and the way that we're going to do that is that Warden of Vitality is not limited uh to a single use per turn it's just that you will normally only have a single bonus action per turn however of course there is a way to get additional bonus actions doubling the healing output of waren of Vitality we're now going to take a few levels of Rogue which will give us access to sneak attack not terribly important for for this character since you'll be using spells rather than weapon attacks most of the time bonus action hide Dash and disengage all of which can be useful especially if you are using your Sanctuary Buffs or not you know sitting in sanctuary concentrating on stuff or not using Warden of Vitality that turn these are all very good options to have on any character is and will allow you to apply your control spells while hidden or while you can concentrate on hypnotic pattern and then hide you can concentrate on um cloud of daggers and then hide or disengage run away from enemies and maintain your concentration very easily using these bonus actions they're very powerful on casters and then finally at Rogue level three we take Thief Rogue getting an additional bonus action this means that we are able to use our Warden of Vitality buff um twice per turn taking it from an average of 150 points of healing to an average of 300 points of healing with a maximum of 400 points of healing actually I guess technically the uh the boot to V and comfort won apply twice so I have to subtract 30 from each of those so it's an an average of 270 points of healing or an average or a maximum possible value of 370 points of healing uh from a single cast of a level three spell that's a ridiculous amount of healing and more than enough to keep up in combat in even in Long combats against powerful enemies this is going to allow you combined with having incoming damage since you're consistently keeping blade Ward up on your allies um and that also combos very well with other sources of damage resistance and stuff you can combo this with a Ranger with elemental damage resistances you can use protection from energy spells from an ally to gain ele mental damage resistances and so on to make your characters very very difficult to kill and to consistently keep them at full health fully buffed and operating at maximum Effectiveness for our next level we have a choice here where we can either take another level of Rog to get a feat or if we really really want uh don't care about our uh combat options we can continue to take more levels of cleric because at cleric level three you'll get access to Aid and at cleric level two you get the the cleric uh the channel Divinity option to allow you to more freely apply your healing Buffs but overall I think that you're best off just taking another level of Rogue getting your your ability Improvement maxing out your charisma this means that your control spells are going to be able to be applied very very consistently and of course you you apply additional Charisma effects to everything that you do in terms of healing as well finally at character level 12 we're just going to go back into our last level of Bard here getting Level Seven bar to get access to fourth level spells there's a bunch of strong fourth level spells that can help us out in combat here we can take things like confusion greater invisibility um or polymorph just all very strong control spells confusion is probably the best of these and an excellent spell to concentrate on overall so given that you can have confusion up and Warden of Vitality running in most combats you are able to both provide a ton of crowd control as well as a ton of healing to your party one thing that's actually kind of fun here is if you wanted to roleplay a pacifist character you could just not take cloud of daggers and dissonant Whispers And this character otherwise is only doing control effects and otherwise does no damage um so you could have a character that actually contributes a ton to your party while never doing damage to enemies that's not the most powerful option but it's just a fun role playay option available to this character since you're so effective as a Healer and crowd controller I will just show you quickly how Warden of Vitality Works because it's worth checking uh worth just mentioning how this works so we're going to equip all of our buff effects here and then I'm going to enter turn base mode and cast Warden of Vitality so now I have with my two bonus actions two cast of restore Vitality so I can cast this any on anyone within 30 ft buff carlac up she gets the Buffs three temporary hit points as well as you can see we rolled very low on our healing there but she gets plus five right because she gets two plus the spell level every time we cast the spell so even with an incredibly low roll with a bonus action we applied um 11 points of healing blade Ward and bless to carlac and then of course we can hit another party member with a second cast of the spell that time it was 11 hit points buffed up to 14 hit points which is still honestly a pretty low roll but you can see how many hit points we are passing out in terms of healing and temporary hit points every single turn um with this character and how powerful it is to be able to do that with a bonus action uh this is also an incredible amount of outof combat healing because we have three short rests thanks to song of rest and the ability to use Warden of Vitality out of combat to apply um hundreds and hundreds of points of healing if our characters for some reason need it in fact if we spent all of our level three and level four spell slots on Warden of Vitality we would be averaging um we would have an average of more than 1,200 hit points that we could heal just from that for our whole party which is way more damage than you need to heal in a given day of adventuring so that's an incredible amount of outof combat healing if you really want a party that doesn't long rest this is your guy for other gear I recommend just going with basically any shield and heavy armor is the uh ideal for this character of course the Dwarven splint mail I think is one of the best in slot heavy armors in general but also nice for this character cuz additional hit points means you have more to heal um and of course we have at least one ring Boot and glove slot uh forc already for our weapon basically you just want anything that provides a passive bonus so I also like the uh devotees mace because this lets you provide the healing intense Aura from the from the mace which is an additional option for healing so you can get that from a hling or something um this character doesn't normally get access to it but it is probably the best item for this character because the healing Aura applies all your Buffs and is is does all of the things that this character wants to do a typical turn in combat for this character is just going to be casting a control spell and concentrating on it and then passing out tons and tons of healing keeping your party alive while your barbarians or whoever Bonk down the enemies and win the fight supported excellently by shadowart here all right my friends I hope that you have enjoyed this video and of course as always if you have feel free to leave a comment like the video and you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content cheers folks I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 45,085

Keywords: Etarran, Cephalopocalypse, Baldur's Gate 3, Larian, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Build, Guide, Strategy, Tactics, Tutorial, Jaheira, Minsc, Astarion, Gale, Karlach, Shadowheart, Minthara, Wyll, Halsin, Lae'zel

Id: LU0wL0veB7I

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024