The BEST MAIN CHARACTER in BG3 - Tactician Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well so a bunch of people have asked as I've been doing these build guides hey who's the Avatar character that is in the save that you've been doing all these guides in and so I wanted to walk you through this build CU I think it's actually a really fun one and is in fact my pick for the best main character to play through balers gate with by best I don't necessarily mean the most powerful but what I do mean is that this is the most versatile character that will get to experience the most of the game it was important to me when building this character that I'd be able to just sort of do a little bit of everything so that I could without knowing exactly which companions were going to show up in the game um slot in whoever I liked the most in my party and have my character fill the role of the fourth party member with no problem as well as get to do any unique dialogue and unique situations that you might encounter during the game for this reason this character gets skill proficiency or expertise in almost every single skill in the game we get access to almost every spell in the game and we can mix it up in melee combat tank uh tank extremely well fight in melee reasonably well we have excellent skills throughout every possible skill challenge and we have expertise in every single dialogue skill which allows you to of course make any dialogue check that you want it's also probably the best character for Romancing everybody in case you need to make checks when doing that so that's why I like this character so much I'm going to show you sort of the final state of the build but I should warn you that there are some spoilers and we use some exploits and specific items in in this build so just be warned that there will be some of those coming up during this build guide in the end state of the build we have great stats across the board spellcasting a availability for every spell we get full wizard spell casting we get uh fifth level B spell casting at full DC we get skills that are plus 11 in all of our dialogue skills plus eight in all of our intelligence and dexterity skills as well as Athletics and decent skill checks across the wisdom skills I have left these three as the lowest skills because they come up the least often survival just lets you locate the treasure boxes which contain random loot so you're not missing anything in particular by not having survival um and animal handling you can almost every animal handling check that you can make in the game we can just Skip by having access to speak with animals finally medicine does come up sometimes and so it would be nice to have access to this but I don't think it's as important as having access to all of the other skills so that's why I've gone with these you could also of course rotate your GI yany skill proficiency to have wisdom instead of intelligence if you feel like you need to make wisdom skill checks all right let's get into the build so we'll talk to Withers here and start right at the beginning I will say also that this build has developed somewhat organically so there's probably some different items that we could use in C ways and some other choices that we could make in order to um optimize the build order a little bit than the ones that I actually made in the game I'll try to call those out as we go through but of course if you have ideas for improving the build and making it more versatile more able to experience more of the game by all means let me know all right so we start level one with Bard to get a decent number number of spells and our stat spread is very interesting we want want to hit um as high intelligence and Charisma as possible the reason I've gone with this stat spread while also of course getting 16 Constitution because that's really important the reason I've gone with this stat spread in particular is that on this character I took anti-thy deal for Charisma and ended up because I had uh had been playing most of the game just as a Bard but for an initial stat spread you are probably better off taking anti ethyl's deal on intelligence and going with a 17 intelligence start um or with an odd number in Charisma you could get 13 and 17 take ethyl Steel on intelligence because we will be gaining a single point of Charisma later in the build but this is the the current split um you'll also want when you if you're starting this build from level one to leave intelligence at 8 and dexterity at 16 at the start and then you respe to this setup once you have um the gloves of dexterity which allow you to ignore Having Eight dexterity for the early game we won't need intelligence and then once we do actually put a point into Wizard and need intelligence we'll be able to use the circlet of intellect to have 17 intelligence for most of the early game and then won't need to actually put points into intelligence until the later game um for your can trip selection I recommend just taking the the normal good ones um minor illusion and friends are great Mage hand is great you could also of course take vicious mockery it's just nice to have especially in the early game for our spell selection on Bard we are going to try to avoid taking things with saving throws in the early game although later on you are going to have the same DCS on your Bard and wizard spells um once you reach act three and get a certain item but for the first first two acts you're going to be playing with slightly lower DC on your Bard spells than wizard spells and so you want to try to avoid taking things that have save DCS we need speak with animals cuz that allows us to access a whole bunch of content that you don't get otherwise and I really like healing word disguise self also is very important to have access to on a character that wants to experience the most of the game possible because you are going to need to be able to use this if you want to speak with dead with someone you killed which is going to give you a lot of extra information you wouldn't get otherwise for race we of course take GIF Yankee and the reason for this is the astral knowledge um class feature which lets you gain Proficiency in all skills of a certain type we're going to be using that on intelligence skills giving us access to every single intelligence skill so we'll never have to level up an intelligent skill for our skill selection at level one you are going to want to take intimidation and persuasion oh I also took a guild Artisan as my background you could also probably gain a skill point by taking urchin as your background here um or it's it's it comes out the same if you take urchin as your background because you'll want slight of hand and stealth eventually um but Guild Artisan is what we took here which gets us insight and persuasion and we need persuasion proficiency as well we get intimidation proficiency you can also and you'll have you'll recognize this setup if you watched my build for my Bard build you could take all of the the conversation skills at level one and then resec to get them all later once we get access to the actor feat which we'll be taking at level four but uh this is the the best setup for now or at fourth level Bard but this will be our final setup in terms of skill selection leaving these stats the same because this will be our endgame stat let's keep going this is an interesting this is kind of a weird different setup for me so let me know how you like this build guide that's not based around a specific character or anything just walking walking through my actual character build all right so at level two we take cleric you have a couple choices here for cleric you can take um because we want to get access to Heavy Armor and Marshall weapon proficiencies and cleric is one of the best ways to do that as well it gives you a ton of extra options and an enormously important conversation option with our cantrip selection if we take the thury canant trip let me actually get that we don't need sacred flame because that will be based on our wisdom which won't be good we get guidance and thury so now between uh friends and thury we can always have advantage on every Charisma based skill we also get to guidance oursel or have a party member do it for an additional bonus so we have huge dialogue checks right off the bat resistance or blade Ward are probably the best of these other ones although it can also be useful to have light on any character um blade Ward can be very useful since we will be tanking in melee sometimes this is uh very handy it also makes it harder for you to lose concentration on spells um and this character does have a small weakness in that your Constitution save is good but not incredible so and you don't get uh Constitution save proficiency so any damage that we can reduce will prevent us from losing concentration for our subass to maximize the amount of things that we can do you want to take either Tempest or War domain because that gives you access to both heavy armor and Marshall weapon proficiency and so you can wield any weapon wear any armor in the game once you have have either one of those you could also go with knowledge domain which gets you expertise in a couple other abilities so this way we could gain expertise in some of the intelligence abilities which we don't need to have learned in order to gain uh gain expertise in them so we can gain some extra skill checks this does make it a little harder because there are five intelligent skills so you gain Proficiency in five skills if you astral knowledge intelligence um and you don't want to astral knowledge wisdom because we already have Insight but you could move your background around to allow you to do that uh I also recommend taking salune as your deity if you're doing this because there's a lot of unique dialogue for salun worshippers in this game um but for our subass we're probably going to take Tempest because it gives you access to fog Cloud which is always useful or War because the extra attack does that you can do three times a day it will make you better in melee another option is to take life just because the disciple of Life ability is very powerful and having bless always prepared is extremely good um I'm going to assume that we have taken War which gives us two spells that aren't incredibly useful for us but we mostly want cleric for bless and healing word so we'll just always prepare those if you took life you would have uh bless always prepared already so you could take uh create water which has a lot of utility as well starting at level three remember that at this point we have these points in dexterity not in intelligence um we can take a level of wizard and gain access to second level wizard spells because how wizard works is even though you don't learn the Spells as you level up learning spells from Scrolls is based on your total Caster level not your wizard level uh and that's true even after the most recent patch so you can learn um any as a as a Bard one cleric one wizard one we could learn second level wizard spells from Scrolls at this point we won't have the intelligence to make use of this so my advice is to save your wizard level until you find the circlet of intelligence um and then you can put your point into Wizard and start gaining Wizards spells from Scrolls but you could certainly take this at level three and just for ease of of functioning I'm just going to take the wizard spell at level take the wizard level now what order you take this in is going to depend a little on how your playthrough is going for your can trips we want to have at least one damaging can trip we will have good intelligence throughout the game so we uh starting soon so we will benefit from having a good damaging canant trip we'll take whichever of Mage hand and minor illusion we didn't take before um and Firebolt is the best damaging can trip so that's the one that we're going to take and we could take blade wward if we didn't have access to it we could take as I always like to do true strike just to annoy YouTube commenters so let's do that for our spell selection uh as our first level spells you definitely want to get access to Shield fog Cloud grease fog Cloud if you're not a tempest cleric um and magic Missile that you probably want find familiar since the goal is to maximize our ability to interact with the world although we will also pretty shortly get a unique familiar during the course of the game um and because we're a wizard we can learn the scroll to get the unique quasit familiar and have access to the best familiar in the game as well but you can definitely take fine Familiar of course you'll learn all of these spells because you'll just learn every scroll that you come across as soon as you come across it so what what we select here doesn't matter that much oh it's showing all the spells that I know actually cuz I on this character I've already learned a ton of wizard spells so our prepared spell list isn't very useful in this section because it's it's currently showing every single spell that I have learned from a scroll which as you can see is a lot of them so at this point in the game we're basically the same as a third level wizard but with a bunch of dialogue checks and a bunch of extra dialogue checks and heavy armor and shield proficiency and Marshall weapon proficiency so we're better than a third level wizard in pretty much every way um but at this point we go back to Bard and we're going to keep leveling up in Bard for the next little while because Bard gives us access to a bunch of defensive tools that will become become really important for this character as well as a bunch more skills so for we will keep taking more Bard spells again take ones mostly without saves uh like feather fall or what whatever but what you take at this level doesn't matter as much I don't think you could also for example take sleep at level one because it's really good um and then swap it out later but I'm just going to show you sort of the end game of the build at fifth level we get access to the gith Yan once per day Misty step which of course is awesome and for our bar spells um some that are really nice to have are any that the wizard doesn't get access to of course are great so for example uh Wizards don't I think get enhance ability um or enthrall I'm not actually 100% sure which ones they get and which they don't but but which but the spells that bards get that Wizards don't are what you're really looking for um although of course any of the good spells that you just always want prepared you can basically think of your Bard levels as giving you sort of cleric domain spells think of it as the same as the domain spells it's just a spell that you always have prepared by default so it's you your selection should be based on what you think you'll always want for example cloud of daggers is something that you are always going to pick uh no matter what so always going to want prepared no matter what for our subass I think you actually have two choices here you could go College of Swords if you want to make this a more Marshall oriented character because you'll get access to extra attack that way and then you will be a fully functional Marshall character throughout most of the game as well if you go College of Swords I personally like going lore College because cutting words gives us access to the two best defensive options in the game cutting words and shield from our wizard levels um while also giving us access to a bunch of other skills lore Bard gets extra skills and will get expertise in more skills as you level up so now we can take three additional skills here which is of course really good we'll just take probably Athletics slight of hand or Athletics and stealth and then we take additionally don't take deception or performance you need to skip these but we take one other skill that's not in intelligence so I'll just take acrobatics so that we have all the dexterity skills cuz I think that's fun we also get to add expertise to pers equion and intimidation at this point in the game meaning that our dialog checks are now extremely high um which is excellent and they're just about to get better at Bard level four we get to take the actor feat so remember that I suggested that you put uh or said that how I did this is I grabbed the one point in Charisma from anti-l boosting my Charisma by one so that act feet puts our Charisma to 16 here which is great um at this point you could also have moved your stats around a little bit if you wanted to use the anti-thy Boost to intelligence then you could end up with lower Charisma but higher intelligence and I think that way you could actually hit 20 Intelligence on this build easily which is something that my version of the build because I didn't put that point in there doesn't do uh but then you would just want to make sure that you're starting with 15 Charisma or 13 Charisma depending on what level of Charisma you want to hit by the end of the game so your options are start with 13 take actor and you'll finish the game with 14 start with 15 take actor you'll finish the game with um you'll finish the game with 16 but you would need to lose a point in Constitution to do that spell selection again just take kind of whatever you feel like you are missing at this point and continue to level up your Bard spells but the actor feat now gives us expertise in all of the dialogue skills you don't need to have these dialogue skills in order for actor to give you proficiency and expertise in them so once you have that we now have double our proficiency bonus to every single dialogue skill as we continue to level Bard we gain bonus Bic inspiration which is really good for cutting words of course and higher level spells this gives you access to some spells that Wizards don't get that also don't require saves like plant growth is an incredible spell quartering enemy movement is incredibly powerful of course hypnotic pattern is always very good and you can just pick that one up cuz it's one of the best options available able um if you don't have speak with dead from another source you may want to pick up speak with dead although there's a lot of ways to get that there's amulets as well as the book of F that lets you get the speak with dead ability um for free so I wouldn't usually spend a build resource on speak with dead level six you get two magical Secrets which lets you learn two spells that you just always want to have prepared these are mostly all wizard spells um but there's a couple that are unique for you to be able to get you can pick up Spirit Guardians as a magical secret which Wizards don't get access to you can pick up Hunger of Hadar one of the best spells in the entire game that normally only warlocks get access to you can pick up the paladin spell Warden of Vitality so consider these spells as ones that Wizards can't get that BS can't normally get that are incredibly powerful hunger of Hadar is one of the best reasons to be a warlock in the first place and so getting access to this from a magical secret is incredible um similarly you get Crusaders mantle as an option normally Paladin exclusive so look at those spells that are exclusive you can also just take the ones that you know you're going to use like counter spell and haste are of course incredible to have always but I definitely would consider taking these spells that you wouldn't otherwise get access to like hunger like Spirit Guardians if you don't have another user for that um Crusader mantle or Warden of Vitality my personal pick here is going to be hunger of Hadar and I like Crusader mantle as well although that is a second concentration spell I mean a lot of these are concentration spells restore Vitality as a bonus action is nice but not incredible so I wouldn't I wouldn't worry too too much about getting access to this but it basically is just a third level spell for as many healing words as you want so it can be somewhat spell slot efficient but overall I think that you're going to be best off just taking other unique spells you could also just grab revivify but Scrolls of revivify are cheap revivify is one of those words that's hard to say then of course you just take whatever spell you want access to from your actual Bard levels level 10 you get a bunch of spells um that are really nice to have as well some of these are also not on the wizard spell list you could just take greater invisibility or freedom of movement are really fun ones to have as well um I suggest kind of playing around with those spells and also based it on what Scrolls you have found which bar spells you take but mostly again you're going to want to avoid spells with DCS I should also mention throughout I I didn't say this at the beginning I forgot to mention this but we take eight strength and then just drink elixir of Hill giant strength every day you can buy three of these per per long rest from anti-thy in act one so just buy a ton of them at the beginning of the game there's also a if you don't like doing that there's a weapon that you can find in the underd dark that increases your strength to 19 although it's a little hard to find so a lot of people will miss it but that is also an option for a second feat here we're just gonna go with an intelligence increase and then at Ninth level barard we get access to fifth level bar spells which include some that you don't otherwise get again um though the fifth level B spells are not incredible so I wouldn't worry too much about which ones of these we're we're grabbing um but you know it's always nice to have options at this point most of your highle spell slots are going to be taken up by your wizard spells especially because by the time you hit Level 11 you should have gotten access to some of the unique wizard spells that start showing up many of which are extremely powerful and I'll show you those of course as we go finally for our last level I think there's a couple choices that you can go with here you can go with Bard level 10 for two more magical Secrets this can get you some really fun ones um that again bards and wizards don't normally get access to like guardian of Faith Like banishing Smite which is kind of fun um death Ward if you wanted something like that most of these though are not enormous boosts but but getting access to Guardian of faith and banishing smite are are pretty cool uh banishing Smite as a bonus action you can use with a bow gives you an whole bunch of extra damage which is kind of awesome um and then you can possibly banish them to another plane of existence you also at this level get just more B spells uh so the magical secrets are also very nice you could also at this point just take second level in Wizard to get a wizard subass wizard subclasses of course have a lot of very strong options my pick for this one is either evocation if you're finding that you are hitting your allies with spells you're going to be throwing around a lot of damage because you have access to the entire wizard spell list and and many of the unique wizard spells do AOE damage um or the best one is probably divination because access to portent is incredibly powerful this is one of the strongest abilities in the game my pick for this is probably divination wizard although if you want access to just the broadest array of spells getting the level 10 magical Secrets is really fun as well but I just love divination wizard it just feels so fun to use and then of course you just take at this point you should have all the level one spells known probably but any that you don't have you can just grab all right so that is my pick for the most versatile main character that you should be able ble to get just about every single experience that the game has to offer whether that be fighting in melee tanking skill checks dialogue checks and just about every spell in the game um from this single character and it's also extremely powerful of course because you're just a very high level Caster you do want some certain specific items to really improve this build so one item that is really important is just anything that increases your save DC like uh here's K's Shield that increases your spell save DC the more of these you stack the better since we don't hit 18 uh since we don't hit 20 intelligence we're going to be slightly lower on safety C unless you use Ethel's hair on intelligence in which case your charisma will be a little lower um you can also boost your charisma with something like the birthright hat there's also a couple other options for boosting Charisma during the game but this is a a solid one you can boost your Constitution with the Dwarven splint mail and this is I think one of the best heavy armor P pieces in the game it also gets you to 18 Constitution so you'll have uh really good hit points for a mostly barred character and as a wizard you'll also of course want to be drinking um elixir of Hill giant strength every day like we talked about although if you don't want those another item that can fix this is the club of Hill giant strength if you wield this it just sets your strength to 19 you won't be doing a ton of damage if this is your source of Club of Hill giant strength but it does give you a bunch of points in athletics and also jump distance and carry weight which I think are really important for a main character but that's why I just use the elixir of Hill giant strength cuz it's just really nice to have high strength on a main character so putting it all together as you can see we have plus nine to our athletic so can push pretty much anyone and can't be pushed by just about anything we get slate of hand and stealth you actually don't need um acrobatics cuz we have Athletics so you could put this point into one of these other wisdom skills if you wanted if we use AR gith Yankee proficiency astral knowledge Proficiency in intelligence we have plus eight to every intelligence skill we have decent although not incredible wisdom skills and of course we have plus 12s to all of our dialogue checks which is excellent I guess I should should also mention that the single best weapon in the game for this character is going to be the uh marah Hesh Kier because it's the best wizard staff and you are in the end game a wizard you also want the gloves of dexterity this is mostly for initiative honestly um but also of course for your skill checks slate of hand and stealth rely on these so it's really nice to be able to have these gloves of dexterity as well all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at this character I think this is a really fun character um and honestly I wanted to make this build just cuz I wanted to show off my main character you know we all we all love the The Little Tunes we've created so uh I was like you know what what if I can get a couple thousand people to look at my little guy in particular um and yeah I hope that you enjoyed that look at it and sort of the thought process for trying to build the most versatile character in the game and as always if you have then feel free to leave a like leave a comment both of those things help a ton with the algorithm suggest any more optimizations or itemizations this is designed to come into its own with items in the beginning of act three so I haven't included any late act three items um but sort of the mid game act two and the I guess the latest one shows up end of Act 2 from KCK Shield that is sort of important to this build but anything that increases spell can work the same so just keep keep in mind that you're looking for items that do that and of course you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content and I'll catch you next time cheers my friends GG

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 27,916

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

Id: VY7vzkKKXsM

Length: 30min 43sec (1843 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023