The BEST KARLACH BUILD in BG3 - Lore Friendly Tactician 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 a lore friendly build for carlac as part of my lore friendly companion builds series The goal of this build is to create a powerful tactician viable build that Hues as closely as possible to the character's existing lore for carlac in particular I think that this build is as good or better than in some ways my default suggested Barbarian Build which you can find under the Best Barbarian Build in balers Gate 3 um and so this character will work extremely well for carlac on tactician it will work extremely well for a main character it's powerful gets access to a bunch of really fun tricks as well as being quite customizable so you can make a lot of changes without damaging the core of the build in my opinion and still end up with a very powerful character that is a little closer to what you want to do if you want to make some changes this build also I think follows very closely to what carlac is as a character so let's talk about that I think there's really two directions that you can go if you're trying to make a lore friendly carlac build because there's a severe contradiction at the core of her character that is that she is a zaral tling but also a barbarian and mechanically speaking those two things do not play well together the reason for this is that zaral tling gets these Smite attacks that's the unique thing they get as a race at level three and level five you get a Smite that you can use from your racial Heritage but Smite they are the smite are both spells and bonus actions as a barbarian your bonus action in your first turn of combat is almost always entering a rage and so you can't use the Smite on your first turn of combat but you also can't cast a spell when you're raging so you can't use the Smits on your later turns of combat either in order to resolve this contradiction I think there's basically two directions you can go and I will be posting a build for each of them but in this build we're focusing on carlac as we first meet her where she is re rejecting this part of her Heritage she's just gotten done fighting in 10 years of the blood War as a champion of zarel and she is still has the skills and experience that come from being that Warrior but is moving as far as possible from her life in the hells as she can the blood War was is a brutal and horrific and NeverEnding war between devils and demons in Hell of course we talk about that a lot in AES uh as we talk about that a lot throughout the game and carlac experienced it on the front lines which means that she as one of zaro's Champions was sent to fight hordes of demons constantly and is therefore used to fighting incredibly outnumbered against impossible odds against unspeakable Horrors and brutal opponents we need a build that reflects that and luckily Barbarian gives us the tools to do that so the first thing that we need to do is take a look at her character stats obviously the starting companion stats all need adjustment because they all start with three odd numbers but the Barbarian stats are actually a lot closer to a solid Barbarian Build than the other class default class stats so we don't have to make as many changes as you otherwise might we're going to drop Charisma and raise Constitution so that we actually have a reasonable Health pool and we also want to get to 14 dexterity so we're going to lose two points in wisdom often you will see me reduce strength here but for various reasons we're going to keep strength at 17 and I'll show you why when we get to our first feat if you prefer you can build this stat split and then Respec your character once you reach level four to gain the 17 strength it's also worth mentioning at this point that barbarians benefit from the gloves of dexterity more than any other character class pretty much and so if you intend to use those on carlac then you'll want to leave her dexterity at8 but that you should Respec into when you gain those gloves for her skills I think that her default skills are both the best that you're going to get and also fit very well with her established character um perception and survival are moderately useful but the really important one for barbarians is going to be Athletics the only one that really matters especially if uh carlac is not your main character and a party face if you are playing as origin carlac You may wish to point put uh these two points into Charisma just to give you a little more success in conversation skills but give her character I think it's it honestly is kind of fun if she fails every dialogue check and just kind of bumbles her way through social interactions uh that that seems very appropriate to me so really up to you and and how you want to play that character luckily we have no other decisions to make other than selecting Barbarian but it's worth talking about what that gives us we get medium armor access access to Rage which is the core class feature of Barbarians giving you resistance to damage and extra damage on every one of your attacks super powerful and extremely um valuable of course is the core thing that this build will be built around and it's also the first thing that carlik does when you meet her so it's very appropriate leveling up to level two there's no decisions that you make at Barbarian Level two but you do gain access to Reckless attack which is one of the better class features in the game you can make attacks with Advantage um in exchange for enemies making attacks with advantage against you this is very useful both because the game lets you see whether you've hit or not before you decide whether to use Reckless attack so you only have to use it if it might convert a Miss into a hit um but also if you want to fish for a critical hit you can activate it yourself and it doubles the chance of critically hitting when you roll with Advantage you have two chances at rolling a 20 instead of one and any increase to our critical threat range the the die roll that we need to get a critical hit is doubled even further by using Reckless attack so it's very worth keeping in mind that you will often want to Reckless attack anyways even though it makes you slightly less survivable because you can double your chance at getting a critical hit you also get danger sense which gives you advantage on dexterity throws against spells um that's moderately useful if the opponent is throwing a fireball it does mean that you are less likely to take damage from that but overall this is a very minor ability that won't come up at character level three we have our first major decision of the build and that is what subass we're going the game recommends that you take wild heart for carlac as you can see here when we when we level her up it's in the default uh wild heart is the default of the three um if you want a Berserker build that's my default recommended Barbarian Build but we're going to lean into Wild Heart Barbarian which Wild Heart Barbarian choice we make I think is really interesting and the one that we are going to go with is one that I think you actually don't see that often um people build with and that is Tiger heart the reason for this is twofold Tiger heart gives you quite a lot of additional options in combat that are not necessarily visible just from the tool tips because the tool tip for Tiger heart rage is pretty bad actually um so first off you gain an additional 15 ft of jump distance your default jump distance is already extremely high because you're a high strength character and this is going to let you hurl yourself all over the battlefield it's both extremely powerful because Mobility is very very good and also very appropriate for carlac who whose whole thing is jumping into combat first ahead of the the party because she was sent to break Enemy Lines during the blood War you also get access to the Tiger's bloodlust special attack and the important thing here is actually the phrase weapon actions what this means is that it doesn't take an action unlike what this this says it actually takes an attack so if you have multiple attacks in a turn you can use Tiger's blood lust multiple times I'll actually show you a typical turn of combat at the end of this video because I think there's a lot of weird stuff that Tiger's blood lust does that is worth talking about um so I'll show you that and kind of talk about how the how it interacts essentially though this lets you attack rather than a single enemy you attack in an AOE and it applies bleeding there is no save against this bleeding it is if you hit with the attack they will bleed and any up to three enemies within the weapon cone uh get hit it also can't hit allies it's only enemies um so you don't have to worry about allies getting in your way you can still use this effect an AOE attack on a two-handed melee weapon which is what we're going to be using of course is extremely powerful because it lets you multiply the very high damage per attack of Barbarians across large groups of enemies and the bleeding also gives us access to a bunch of fun synergies as well as doing some other cool things this also lets us apply on hit effects multiple times to multiple enemies using normal weapon attacks so if you have a weapon that does extra damage dice those get applied to every single enemy you hit if you have a weapon that has a cool effect on it that gets applied to every single enemy you hit uh an early example of this is the shattered flail that you get from the null that heals you for every enemy you hit well it's going to heal you up to three times on a single attack if you're using Tiger's blood lust another uh good example is something like a poison if you poison Your Weapon It's going to apply on every enemy you hit and that is extremely strong the ability not only to hit every enemy in combat as long as they're within a small area but also to multiply all of the effects that your weapons have or that you have access to from allies if you get uh any on damage effect from an ally like let's say you have a paladin Ally that gives you extra damage on your attacks from one of their Paladin class features that will be applied on everything you're basically able to make up to three attacks for every single attack that you have so the bleed is a nice little bonus but the real bonus here is that you can make a normal attack against multiple enemies at once something that almost no other character gets access to and it also of course leans very heavily into kac's role as a Frontline warrior in the blood l blood War excuse me where she would be breaking through Enemy Lines by you know tossing aside large groups of demon demons character level four of course we get a feat and this is why we were able to take 17 strength because going alongside that 15 ft of bonus jump distance that we get while raging we can take the athlete feat this lets us increase our strength or decks by one of course we're going to increase strength to get to an even number um you always want even numbers in your ability scores because only even numbers actually increase what you add to your D 20 roll um that's something that I've been asked a few times because the game never really explains that but essentially even numbers increase how good you are at rolling Dice and odd numbers don't so you always want even numbers in your stats um and you increase your jump Distance by 50% with the bonus 15 ft the extra movement speed from being a barbarian the extra strength you will be able to reach the jump cap distance of 100 foot jumps pretty easily on this character if you have decent uh if if you increase your strength or use something like enhance leap to additionally triple your jump jump distance I did a build video based on maximizing jump distance called the owl bear flies which does it with a druid but this build also will get to soar across the battlefield landing on enemies from maximal distances and smash into them laying waste to multiple enemies at once Barbarian Level five we get the Barbarian fast movement making you one of the most mobile characters in the game already with 40t of basic of Base fast movement um plus additionally jump distance whenever you have a bonus action that you can use on that you are going to be incredibly able to reach any enemy and especially important if you win initiative which this build will also be very good at doing because enemies will often start battles grouped up with one another and so if you can jump into a big group of enemies and hit them all at once then you can start off combat with a bang of course you also at level five get extra attack which lets you use your tiger SL uh your your Tiger's wrath attack twice every turn doubling the effectiveness of your AOE attack which is of course excellent here you also get your Legacy of a verus Smite these can come up if you there's a fight where you don't want to use rage but typically you're going to rage every fight so you won't usually be using these uh Smite attacks at level six we get our first major diversion point for the build and this is something that I'm going to say you will want to decide what you value more but I will have a a suggestion as to what you should pick and that is which animal aspect do we pick there are two here that are going to be particularly strong for um this character and that is aspect of the Beast tiger and aspect of the Beast Wolverine both of these care a lot about bleeding enemies and of course we inflict bleed very easily every attack we make with our tiger swing will inflict bleed um and so aspect of the Beast tiger effectively increases AR hit chance against enemies by at this level four and once we get our strength to 25 uh if they're bleeding that means that you are very very likely to hit subsequent attacks in a round and you'll uh also miss significantly less frequently even when you have great weapon Master turned on which is the next feat we're going to take so this counteracts somewhat the penalty of great weapon Master now personally I don't think that you really need aspect of the Beast tiger to hit chance is excellent so you're you would never be wrong to take it but because we have Reckless attack we have other ways to generate uh bonus to hit chances and because we're making attacks against multiple enemies every turn it's less impactful for us to miss specific single attacks that being said you could definitely take this the other option here is aspect of the Beast Wolverine which lets you MIM an enemy that you attack if they're bleeding or poisoned remember that we can apply bleed on every attack and we can apply poisoned on every attack if we poison our weapons so either way this will work um and M the maed condition gives enemies movement speed of zero this effectively duplicates the feat Sentinel which I think is uh an underrated and excellent feat that stops enemies from moving trapping enemies in melee with you is incredibly powerful if you are a powerful Melee character like a barbarian there are lots of ranged enemies or spellcasters in the game that do not want to be in melee contact with a barbarian and will experience significant upset if you can lock them in place and many of those are also the ones that are vulnerable to bleeding this build does have some disadvantages against enemies that are immune to bleeding I'll talk about how we can itemize against uh to deal with that as we talk about items later on but if you maim an enemy and prevent them from leaving contact with you then you are guaranteed on subsequent turns to be able to continue to attack them dealing tons of damage every round one other thing that's worth mentioning about this and I will show you how this works is that it says if you attack a bleeding or poisoned Target but if you have any weapon that deals multiple kinds of damage so if you have like let's say a weapon that deals uh 1d8 slashing plus 1d6 fire damage then the fire damage will apply the M it for some reason thinks that that is two separate attacks so it thinks that the second attack is hitting an enemy that's already bleeding and will MIM them I believe that this is a bug um but as it works it means that on your very first tiger attack you are going to M every enemy that you hit provided you have a weapon that deals an additional damage type one way to very easily get this also is that carlac has her soul uh coins ability which lets her basically gives her an Elixir for the entire day that causes her attacks to deal 1 D4 of extra fire damage this is very synergistic with this build because not only does that 1 D4 get applied to every enemy on every attack you you make so when you're attacking multiple enemies it gets applied multiple times it also guarantees that we will be Ming enemies on our first attack every time provided we have that on again if that doesn't make sense because this this ability is somewhat confusing in how it works I will show you a turn of combat so we can get a sense of how that works level seven we get one of the top three or so class features in the game one of my favorites to really aim for and that is feral Instinct you get a plus three bonus to initiative combined with your decent dexterity you uh will win initiative very frequently meaning you can leap into combat right off the start and lock down a bunch of enemies in melee contact with you preventing them from acting in any meaningful way um in that combat you also can't be surprised with is actually pretty relevant in certain story missions throughout the game I've talked extensively about how good initiative is if you have watched any of my guides you probably have heard me talk about initiative many many times um so I won't repeat all of that but suffice to say winning initiative is good and you should try to do it land stride difficult terrain from Barbarian level eight is fine um it certainly is useful and especially useful if you have an ally that has access to plant growth or Spike growth you can walk freely through those um mostly this is a minor bonus that won't come up that often but it's nice to have when when you do have it also bear in mind that your massive jump distance will let you clear most difficult terrain or Hazard hazardous Fields with ease so you won't usually have to worry about land stride but uh you know it's nice when it comes up but more importantly we get access to a feat the feat that we're going to take here is great weapon master and there are two reasons that are really that this build really really likes great weapon Master one is that we attack multiple enemies at a time often and each enemy that you attack applies the damage from great weapon master so we're multiplying that plus 10 bonus across every enemy we attack on a standard turn of combat if there's three enemies in close proximity you can make six attacks and if you critically hit you get to make another attack as a bonus action the the first ability of great weapon Master here the when you land a critical hit or kill a target with a melee weapon attack uh you can make another melee attack usually this is a minor benefit compared to the additional 10 damage but for this build this is actually huge because we're attacking so many enemies so often we're very likely to critically hit and because each attack action we make is so valuable since we're hitting multiple enemies with it um the bonus attack is commensurately more valuable itself so we both are more likely to trigger this and get more value out of it when than just about any other character making great weapon Master the ideal feat for this build at this point we could continue in Barbarian um and you can get uh some really good options for one thing you could get the tiger animal aspect since you get a second animal aspect at level 10 so if you really want that and especially if you find yourself yourself missing on your attacks more frequently than you'd like then that's a good option but I think at this point we can benefit from multiclassing and I think that carlac also evinces quite a bit of discipline in her sort of approach to combat so it makes sense that she will and also has learned a lot by the time we've reached level 9 it makes sense to me that you could Branch out and take some levels of fighter it's also just of course very good for this build because we get access to two really important features one we get a fighting style and because we're going to be using a two-handed weapon great weapon fighting increases our average damage massively great weapon fighting of course lets you roll the damage dice of every attack you make and you roll the damage dice on every enemy that you hit so we're applying great weapon fighting more often than any other character is when we're using our our AOE tiger swings also because we often want to be using damage Riders from effects that increase our damage dice will be likely to roll those carlac native plus 1 D4 damage when she consumes a soul coin well that has a 50% chance of being rerolled by great weapon fighting and if you're hitting three enemies with it that's going to be an extra like five damage or so that you're doing just from that feature combined with great weapon fighting and of course at level two we get the single best class feature in the game action surge um I don't need to go on and on about how good this is but I will just very briefly say remember how our attack actions are more valuable on this character than just about any other character well action surge gives us more of those so we get to use those more often and more powerfully making four tiger swings in a round plus an additional great weapon master attack because we're definitely going to kill something or critically hit if we are making four swings uh means that we are are on par with or ahead of most other characters for number of attacks in a turn and that not counting that all of those attacks are potentially hitting two or three enemies so sometimes we can in in a theoretical maximum we can make 13 attacks in around if they're if the enemies somehow all [Music] survive before even using stuff like or anything along those lines at this point I think there are again two choices that you can make um Battle Master is always an excellent subass but I will say that the Battlemaster Maneuvers are slightly less valuable for you than for other characters because you can't use them in the same turn that you are using Reckless attack or in the on the same attack that you are using um your tiger swing or not in the same turn you can use them in the same turn but not on the same attack um so while these are still extremely powerful I think because this build actually really wants to fish for critical hits you're best off with champion champion reduces the role that you need to make a critical hit doubling the chance of every attack critically hitting remember a lot of our attacks are made with advantage and we're hitting multiple enemies per round and every time we critical hit we get an additional attack so Champion fighter gives you a lot of additional bonuses that um that work really well though you're never wrong taking Battle Master and finally at fighter level four we get to increase our strength to 20 maximizing our damage output and our chance to hit overall I think that this build is going to do some ridiculous damage output in just about every scenario especially if there's multiple enemies that you you are facing but um even against single Target enemies it's extremely powerful it also has great utility with lock down one thing that I should mention and one reason that we aren't taking Battle Master is there used to be an exploit where if enemies had zero movement and you knocked them prone so if you maimed them and knocked them prone they wouldn't get up and thus wouldn't take their turn that's been patched out so I'm not recommending that because uh that that no longer if you're wondering if you've heard about that build that no longer functions so I'm not recommending that build first up let's talk about a couple items that we can use and then I will show you a typical round of combat so some items that are extremely good for this character and are anything that increases your damage dice done per attack so something like these flawed hell dusk gloves well the this 1 D4 fire damage on your weapon attack will apply on every swing from your tiger attack um another item that is is going to be really strong is uh and similarly something like this horns of the Berserker giving you additional uh it aside from having seeking blood and blood thirst be pretty thematic names for the abilities this also gives you an extra two damage if you don't have full health um and an extra two bonus on attacks against enemies that have already taken damage which is very powerful because we are swinging around in circles at large groups of enemies and any bonus chance to hit we can get is great elixir of blood lust give us additional actions every time we kill an enemy and remember that we are hitting both um weak enemies and strong enemies at the same time one of the things that this build does best is clear out sort of chaff enemies while hitting bosses at the same time because if the if they're next to each other you just get to hit both of them with the same attack and so that can let you apply multiple attacks to the Boss by killing their weak ads um if you have the of blood lust running of course haste is great for this character so whether cast by an ally and I have built lots of builds that will allow you to apply haste or consume from a potion of speed is very valuable any poison that you apply to your weapons so even just the basic poison when you're hitting multiple enemies at a time this can be very valuable uh enemies gaining disadvantage on their attack roles and not being able to leave contact with you because they're maimed and have zero movement is means that they pretty much won't be able to do anything and that's with just the basic poison obviously there's way better poisons Dr poison will put them to sleep preventing them from taking a turn and you can apply this multiple times in a turn very easily gloves of dexterity uh are worth mentioning just because they help increase your AC and initiative and initiative is very good for this character for armor you're going to want any of the medium armors um if you're using the gloves you're going to want any of the medium armors that doesn't cap your dexterity bonus uh and if you aren't using the gloves then just the best medium armor that you can find the adamantine scale mail is quite good for Barbarians in particular because Reckless attack makes you more likely to get critically hit so preventing that is very useful um a couple other items that are worth mentioning the bone Spike boots remember we have gigantic jump distance this gives you bonus to class if you're not wearing armor but everything else is not dependent on not wearing armor in particular you get brutal leap which replaces your normal leap your normal jump ability or lets you replace your normal jump ability with jumping and knocking people down if they're prone you get advantage on your attacks against them without having to use Reckless attack so that's very useful hope that gives you some idea of what items are really powerful on this character and now I'm going to just quickly show you a turn of combat just so we can talk about how the tiger rage Works bear with me while this loads I will also say this build is super fun to play just cuz you get to swing around and attack enemies all at once um highly recommended in actual play one thing that you will want to do is find a way to maybe apply Radiant damage with your weapon for act two because a lot of the act two enemies will be immune to bleeding um but otherwise you're going to be doing just fine throughout most of the game most important enemies actually aren't immune to bleeding and there's a lot of bosses that aren't immune to bleeding that you can then MIM all right so we've got a turn of combat I've started combat it looks like uh my allies have actually killed Gail so we're just going to go bully asarian a little bit here so let's enter a rage the reason we have to do this in combat is of course you can't rage outside of combat so now we have access to Tiger's blood lust and you can see that this creates an AOE attack so a couple things to know about this attack oh whoops I have my uh had a shield on um so let's make sure that we have great weapon Master applied we're also going to run over here to to attack aaran um so a couple things about this attack we are going to be able to make this attack if you make this attack normally you can't attack recklessly so this this version of the attack will not be made at Advantage but if we Reckless attack first this will be an attack against a single enemy then I'll have to action surge here to get another attack then make a tiger's blood lust action this attack will be made at Advantage because all of our subsequent attacks will be made at Advantage so you can see we used uh Tiger's blood lust and this attack was rolled at Advantage you can see 1 D20 Advantage here we also um Tiger's bloodlust has the dam supposedly the damage that you do on your attacks in exchange for attacking multiple enemies but notice where the half damage is applied it's applied after the d8 plus strength modifier but before the great weapon master and rage bonus and additional bonuses from every other point of damage and then these damage instances are not haved at all so only the base damage of the weapon gets haved meaning that it actually does not reduce the damage so even though in this tool tip it says 1d8 + 19 over2 that's actually not what it does it does 1D um plus 6 over two and then adds the remaining 13 damage after that so that's very confusing but obviously better for us because it's going to apply our full great weapon Master damage over every enemy that we hit secondly you'll notice that we hit aaran we gave him the bleeding condition and then in the same attack we gave him the mimed condition because we applied a second type of damage to him for from the Thunder or fire damage and so now he is both bleeding and maimed and we're continuing to make Advantage attacks against him if we then were to kill him we would get another attack so I guess let's see if we can manage that it doesn't uh it's certainly possible we'll just make a reckless attack here ah uh no we were too damage short of killing him but if we had killed him we'd gain an additional attack as a bonus action in this round of combat we wouldn't be able to use that cuz we've already used our bonus action on Raging but um we were very close and you can see that even with a uh we did 90 damage against aaran using only three of our four attacks for that round one of which was a tiger's ra Tiger's rage attack um which supposedly deals less damage but in practice deals almost the same amount of damage and this is a fairly optimized build for aarian who is admittedly somewhat of a glass Cannon but still a pretty threatening enemy if you had a large group of enemies in the area you would be full to zeroing just about all of them in a single round of combat while also Ming them in future rounds of combat asaran is going to not be able to leave contact with us and will um just have to sit here and suffer and so as an Archer which uh this version of aarian is built as an Archer um he would be in extreme danger and in fact he's bleeding and at two health so will drop as soon as he gets to his turn so I hope that that turn of combat gives you some insight into just how things will typically go in a round of combat with this character and you can do that basically as many times as you have rage charges per day um which is four times a day obviously extremely powerful all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this video and that you enjoy playing carlac the way I think the developer kind of meant for her to be played charging into combat breaking through hordes of enemy formations and really starting off fights with a bang if you've enjoyed the video of course feel free to leave a comment and like the video that helps a ton with the algorithm if people take the time to do that and I appreciate everyone who does and you can subscribe to my channel for more Boulders Gate 3 videos lore friendly videos for other characters coming for the rest of the characters coming soon as well as basic builds for every class and more builds as the fancy strikes me and of course other strategy game content cheers my friends and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 89,563

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

Id: SCSiNSSL4A8

Length: 35min 0sec (2100 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023