The BEST PALADIN in Baldur's Gate 3 - Minthara Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well I'm very excited to bring you this build because this is the single most requested build video since I started doing these guides today of course we're going over my pick for the best Paladin build in Boulders Gate 3 using manthara as the example character the reason I think that this is so heavily requested is twofold the first reason is that according to laran statistics Paladin is the most popular main character uh and so if you're playing a paladin you're in great company the second reason is that I think that of the 12 base classes Paladin is actually the most difficult to build the reason for that is that while paladins have some incredible strengths they also have some pretty restrictive requirements in order to get the most out of the character in order to cover that appropriately I'm going to structure this build guide a little bit different than I have some of the previous ones and we're going to talk about what the goals are that we need to hit in order to maximize our Paladin before we start building the character let me know if you think that this structure actually makes more sense for builds going in forward I'm interested to see what you have to say so paladins have two main strengths the first one is that they are the highest damage character in the game by a quite wide margin at least in terms of the base classes there's of course some broken Combos and stuff that you can use with other classes to get higher damage but by default paladins will do the most damage and specifically the most burst damage the second is that they give your whole team a bunch of really powerful Buffs most notably that they increase your saving throws which is incredibly powerful they have another Advantage especially the oath of Vengeance Paladin in that they're very self-sufficient you don't really need a lot of Team support in order to make your Paladin powerful these advantages come with some corresponding disadvantages one is that you don't work outside of melee you're forced to be a Melee character because your Smite attacks where all of your damage comes from are required to be melee the second is that you are basically forced because of a class feature that we'll talk about in a later on down the line to use a two-handed weapon that means that you're going to be a Melee character with for a Melee character relatively low AC and so you're going to take hits a lot and because you want to be concentrating on a spell all the time taking hit means that you will sometimes lose concentration on your spells which can be very punishing especially with the spell that we want to mostly be concentrating on thirdly you are extremely multi-attribute dependent or mad what this means is that paladins basically want five of the six stats as high as they can possibly get them you need strength because you are a Melee character trying to hit other enemies in melee you need dexterity for initiative you need Constitution because you're a character in Dungeons and Dragons which means that you're going to be taking damage and you need hit points to survive that but even more so you're a Melee character and you're a Melee character who wants to be concentrating on spells concentration checks are based on your Constitution saves so you need those as high as possible to not lose concentration you need wisdom because it's just an important saving throw and you need Charisma very badly because it increases all of your saving throws and I just talked about how important those are overall as well as being your spell casting stat and triggering a lot of your class features needing five of the six attributes all pretty high is a pretty solid a pretty serious build restriction finally you need to hit at least nine levels of Paladin in order to unlock your third level spells which are where paladins especially again oath of Vengeance paladins which spoilers that's what we're doing get a lot of their power from but Paladin by default only reaches six level Caster because you only get a Caster level every second Paladin level meaning you only get third level spells your Smite damage is based on the spell slot that you use to Smite with so when you smite an enemy you spend a spell slot and you do bonus damage based on the slot level one it's 2 d8 level two it's 3d8 level uh three it's 4 d8 but if you have a fourth level spell slot you can get 5 d8 obviously we want to be able to do that because that's an incredible amount of damage 5D is better than just about any other form of damage and on a critical hit where you double it it's the same as a uh chain lightning a level six spell which means that we are highly incentivized to take at least two levels of another spell casting class so that we can reach fifth level casting from 10 Paladin levels and seventh level casting by adding two more levels from a full casting class I know that's a little confusing because we're doing like levels and spell levels and and casting levels all at once but but bear with me it'll make sense as we go so putting that all together we have a character that wants to be in melee needs a lot of different stats needs at least a couple levels but not too many in a lot of classes and so in order to maximize Paladin there's a fair Fairly narrow build path that I think is correct to follow for Menara specifically you get a couple other advantages because Menara is actually the most mechanic Al powerful character in the game um because she comes with an extremely powerful bonus action that makes her an Inc an excellent Paladin she also gets a bunch of ilsd powers unlocked and one of the cool things about Paladin in Boulder's Gate is that they are the best class to use ithd powers in the game um because there's a couple that synergize extremely well with what you want to be doing when you get manthara she's probably going to be about level six because you get her sometime in act two but this build actually won't change in order between uh starting at level six or starting at level one so if you're building this for a main character you'll follow exactly the same build path Menara as a Dr is I think actually one of the best races for Paladin and the reason for that is that the dr's darkness spell in combination with a certain item is extremely powerful for paladins uh and indeed for every character but if you want a different race then you really can't go wrong paladins are pretty independent of racial featur but The Usual Suspects like wood elf for bonus movement speed or gith Yan for Misty step are incredibly strong um dgar for the bonus and llarge can be useful or halfling because it makes it harder for you to lose concentration on your spells all worth mentioning as being powerful all right so with that out of the way we know kind of what our goals are for the build let's get right into it so first off we are going to start with Paladin and take oath of Vengeance oath of Vengeance I think is the best Paladin because it lets you gain advantage against important enemies for an entire combat paladins love Advantage because if you critically hit with a Smite attack not only does it double the damage of your weapon it doubles the damage of your Smite dice as well meaning that paladins love Critical Hits more than just about any other class in the game um so any source of Advantage doubles the chance of you critically hitting that's incredibly strong for our attributes we have some fairly specific requirements so we're going to change things around here we are going to ensure that we get 16 concentration and 16 strength although I will say that there are some attribute builds that you can do if you're willing to use certain items and I'll show you a second version of this build after this that make the multi-attribute dependency with paladins much less punishing and that will make your character much smoother paladins benefit very strongly from taking uh potions or using the gloves of dexterity so I'll show you versions of those build based on those items afterwards but for a default build this is going to be your stat array you need strength in order to hit you need constitution in order to to live and you need Charisma in order to cast your spells and boost your saves for your skill selection there's nothing in particular that you need except for athletics every strength character should have Athletics because pushing enemies is very important and for if you're a main character and intended to do dialogue checks it's very nice to have your dialogue checks you'll have decent Charisma throughout the game so I don't mind this you can also take um I mean really for Menara there's nothing else here that matters so I would just go with her default stat spread level two Paladin you get the most important things that Paladin has access to you get your smites which allow you to spend your spell slots on extra damage you're pretty much always going to want to use your spells for damage rather than for the spell effect but there are a couple spells that I think are worth mentioning as being particularly powerful for paladins at low levels one of these of course is bless concentrating on bless is going to increase your chance to hit which is incredibly strong you need to cast this ahead of the of a fight but it is very useful for you and your allies as well another one that really is very useful for paladins that will that is surprisingly good even though it doesn't look that good is Shield of Faith you will always want to be concentrating on a spell and this is one you can cast at the beginning of the day and as long as you don't lose concentration on it you'll keep plus two AC for the entire day since you're going to be a two-handed weapon user who fights in melee you'll have lower AC than most other characters so this is very powerful you already have healing options so I don't think you need to take cure wounds but and unfortunately because we have low Charisma relatively low Charisma the ones that allow saving throws are going to be less strong than the other ones um Divine favor I think is not good even if you aren't Menara but is redundant with manara's abilities um so I would mostly at this point just take the special smites I think of the two special smites you want wrathful Smite and thunderous Smite because proned and frightened are great conditions for our fighting style this is where Paladin's synergies really start to take off you get great weapon fighting which allows you when rolling a two-handed rolling a one or two on damage dice for two-handed melee weapons reroll the dice this is any die that you roll as part of a weapon attack so you guessed it it includes Smite damage great weapon fighting is mandatory for paladins because it's going to increase the average damage of your Smite attacks enormously and so that's why we don't use a shield this also highly incentivizes you to use weapons with multiple small damage dice rather than single large damage dice so you prefer a great sword or a maul over a a battle axe um just something to keep in mind when you're picking your weapons Paladin level three for vengeance Paladin gives you vow of enmity this lets you spend a channel oath and a bonus action to gain advantage against a specific en enemy and not only is this incredibly powerful in and of itself just for hitting on all your attacks it's super good for paladins because they love advantage since it generates more critical hits also with single powerful attacks like paladins do just hitting on your attacks is really important you also get Divine Health which actually in this game comes up a fair amount preventing disease from affecting you is kind of interesting I actually don't know I think this might prevent you from taking the negatives if aaran bites you so that's kind of a fun little bonus uh if someone knows how that interacts let me know in the comments for your next spell again we're steering clear of things like command that allow for saving throws because our safety C's are not that good but something like protection from Good and Evil can come up most of the time past the first few spells you're spending these spell slots on smites so which spells you pick doesn't matter particularly Paladin level four gets you your first feat and so you're going to take strength you might think you would want to be boosting Charisma but you really just want to be hitting as hard as possible and as often as possible so increasing your strength is really important at Paladin level five we get the most important class feature for any Melee character as well as access to second level spells for our oath which means that we get Misty step which is maybe the single best spell for a Melee character to have as a bonus action getting next to enemies is incredibly strong and you also get extra attack even without smites this lets you double your damage output in a round so obviously that's incredibly strong but you can now have insane burst damage if you are willing to use two spell slots on your opening round of combat if you use two level two spells that is all of your level two spells for the day but that gives you two attacks with an additional 3d8 bonus damage each on your opening round of combat that's going to kill basically everything at level five as a Dr Menara also gets access to darkness which opens up a combo that I'll talk about when we get into items but uh most importantly you're going to want to have your level two weapons your level two spell selection Misty step is the most important one I wouldn't worry too much about which ones you prepare at for your level two spells because level two spells are really going to be spent entirely on smites um but some that chem matter protection from Poison can come up so I would usually prepare this just because if you do want it then it's very good like you'll only cast this when it's excellent so that's probably the one that matters the most um I think it's probably not worth spending a spell slot on your paladin on Aid this is something your cleric should be doing if you have a cleric but paladins need their spell slots for Smite at level six Paladin we get access to our other most important Paladin feature Aura of protection don't pay attention to the plus zero there this is bugged in the level up screen for whatever reason but basically this gives you and your allies in a 10- foot Aura around you plus two to all of your saving throws or plus your charisma bonus to all of your saving throws which for us is plus two currently although if you increase your charisma in some way this goes up this is an enormous bonus it's much better than it sounds because basically this is every saving throw you make throughout the entire game that you are going to have your charisma bonus to it will double the saving throw bonus for a lot of your allies for many saves as well as your own for certain things it also means you're significantly less likely to lose concentration on certain spells because because even though we don't have Constitution save proficiency we now have plus three Constitution and get to add our Charisma to it so we'll have a plus five bonus to our concentration saves this means that on minimal damage hits you which make you roll a dc10 concentration check you are only one in four to lose your concentration save um on those minimal damage hits which means that for most of the things that are going to knock concentration off of you you are much less likely to lose it this is obviously an extremely powerful class feature and it's one of the two reasons that we're in Paladin having gotten our two most important Paladin features or three most important Paladin features between Divine Smite extra attack and AA of protection we now have a choice to make we can either try to reach our third level spells Faster by getting to level 9 Paladin as soon as we can or we can try to reach higher level smites Faster by taking our off levels in other casting classes now at this point I prefer to take our off levels earlier in order to gain access to higher level smites as a level six Paladin we're basically a third level spell caster which means we need two levels in another character class to reach level three smites uh level three spell slots allowing us to Smite at level three which class we are going to choose is the class that we're going to choose for this should be a Charisma class because that will synergize well with our existing Charisma you could also take wizard because of an exploit that allows you to get highle wizard spells based on your Caster level rather than on uh the level of wizard that you have for more on that you can look at my video the real best wizard in balers Gate 3 but we're going to be avoiding that for this build that means that our choice is basically between two possible options for increased Caster level Bard and Sorcerer of the two for one specific reason I think that sorcerer is stronger oh actually sorry I need to hit accept before for level six Paladin before we take Sorcerer And that reason is very simply the spell shield we are going to be a fairly low AC Melee character as I've said before because we're going to be in in plate armor but with no shield with 18 AC The Shield spell lets us mitigate that problem it also gives us a good use for our reaction which paladins mostly don't have great uses for their reaction and every character should try to have uh uses for their reaction in combat there are five resources that you can use every turn on every character those are your action which paladins have some of the best actions in the game with Smite attacks your bonus action paladins have some of the best bonus actions in the game and manthara specifically has an excellent one your movement your concentration which we're always going to be using and your reaction adding Shield gives us a excellent use for our reaction in addition to opportunity attacks meaning that meaning that we have a lot of additional advantages in terms of our action economy for a second spell I think you just want a utility spell again steering clear of things that have save DCs so I'll probably take enhanced leap and then for your can trips you want all of the utility can trips like uh minor illusion like Mage hand like friends that kind of thing you probably again want to see your clear of Firebolt or or Ray of frost damaging ones because these will be based on your charisma this is actually I know I joke about this a lot uh blade Ward is also really excellent for melee characters as well this is actually I know I joke about this a lot but Paladin is actually one of the few classes that does have some uses for True strike because you can cast it ahead of combat to gain advantage and gaining Advantage is very powerful um if you pre-cast this before combat you get advantage on your first attack roll obviously you can also hide but sometimes because you're a Melee character you won't be able to hide and so there is some utility real utility to taking True strike like I said I know I joke about this one a lot but in for this build there is actually a real use case still not incredibly strong but worth mentioning because it's rare that a use case for this spell comes up for our subass we're going to go with storm sorcery because this lets you fly as a bonus action you'll mostly again be spending your spell slots on smites which unfortunately do not work with tempestuous magic but the uh special Paladin smites do work with tempestuous magic and that lets you disengage from combat or reposition more easily um the fact that you or sorry the special Paladin smites don't work because they require your bonus action uh they would work if you had a second bonus action from something um but the ability to reposition yourself with tempestuous magic is still very useful for any Melee character and I think it beats out just the other minor bonuses you get from the other sub classes level two sorcerer we get to upgrade our spell selection a little bit and you can take something like expeditious Retreat or feather fall both very useful and you also get access to Twin spell which is going to be incredibly strong because both the Vengeance paladins get haste and twinned haste is one of the best things that you can do with a a turn and distance spell as well incredibly strong this also gets us access to level three spell slots because we are now a sixth uh uh fifth level spellcaster having two from sorcerer and three from Paladin meaning that we can Smite at level three for 48 bonus damage starting at level eight normally on paladins you'd have to wait until higher levels in order to access that uh the those higher level smites at this point we go back to Paladin the Relentless Avenger opportunity attack boost is fine it's not the most incredible thing that you can uh have but it's totally free so it's a nice little bonus we get our second feat allowing us to maximize our strength and at level 9 Paladin we get access to haste haste of course is one of the best spells in the game and the best spell in the game for a Melee character we can twin it with as a sorcerer meaning that we have the option to haste in Ally as well so paladins play very well with their team as a result if you have this concentrated on you're going to be doing tons of damage at every stage of combat incredibly powerful so we of course have that prepared for your other three for your other level three spells the uh Elemental weapon is actually quite good this is um oh no excuse me this has uh concentration so we we'll never use this for some reason I thought this didn't have concentration um most of the higher level special smites are not as good at this point because they do lower damage than just using your spell slot for that Smite as well as the save DC is is based on your charisma so enemies are going going to succeed a lot Crusaders mantle is kind of interesting if you have allies that are multi- attacking a lot um but mostly your level three spell slots are going to be used on haste and on smites finally at 12th level we have a choice between taking level 10 Paladin this gets you access to Aura of Courage giving you uh the ability to prevent allies from being frightened this is a very powerful effect and there's actually one fight that this one that in the game that this basically solves all on its own uh as well as getting additional lay on hands charges um and this still gets you level four spell slots because we would have five spell levels from Paladin and three from sorcerer however I think that you actually prefer to take your third third level in sorcerer because this allows you to get metam magic Quicken spell so you can then Quicken haste anytime you don't want to Twin it quickening it is very powerful but those two options I think are somewhat interchangeable putting it all together we have a character that can haste itself um and an ally does massive burst damage based on smites and gets access to a bunch of good utility spells from sorcerer as well as having great defenses thanks to your Paladin save bonus as well as Shield I would probably take Darkness if you're going to use one combo that I would like to mention as well for items you just need the best heavy armor that you can find and the best uh two-handed weapon you can find ideally one that rolls 2d6 not one that rolls 1 D12 to maximize your great great weapon Mastery certain items I think are particularly good on paladins though because paladins love critical hit so much anything that can guarantee a critical hit like this Killer's sweetheart ring is incredible because this will allow you to guarantee a Smite as well anything that increases your AC like this cloak of protection is very valuable to you because you are as I've mentioned a few times lower AC than many other melee builds finally there I should mention a couple things that menar gets specifically as opposed to other paladins and the first is this Soul branding bonus action this is gives you five feet of bonus movement speed and an additional 3 to n damage on your next attack that's actually 2 D4 plus one which means it benefits very strongly from Critical Hits as well as from great weapon master or sorry um great weapon fight the the the fighting style yes great weapon fighting not great weapon Master really wish they would name those two slightly more differently um benefits very strongly from those bonuses as well and this is what makes Menara the most mechanically powerful character in the game because she's going to be doing a way more damage on every attack than most other characters at the cost of a bonus action um as well as being able to make herself move faster with this she also gets access to some elied powers of which the most important is luck of the far Realms because as we talked about gaining access to guaranteed Critical Hits is incredibly strong one thing that you're definitely going to want to do on your Paladin is go to your spell book here and go to your reactions and as with every character you want to set these all on ask but most importantly you want to have luck of the far Realms and divine smite on all of your Divine Smite on weapon damage set to ask this way you can choose whether you're going to use a Smite anytime um a Smite might be useful rather than having the game decide for you whether or not you're going to use one there are two choices here Divine Smite on critical hit and divine Smite on normal hit you should just set them both to prompt you every time so you don't forget to use a Smite and don't have to choose in advance whether you're going to use a Smite because one of the advantages of smite is you get to see whether you hit or not before deciding whether to use it or not or whether the enemy just is going to die to the weapon damage um finally I should mention that there are a couple Combos and exploits that we can use so one of these is that if you can cast darkness and have the eversight ring which unfortunately I wasn't able to Dev mode into the save the save is actually borrowed from my friend lesie because I didn't have a save with manthara unlocked available so shout out to Leslie and shout out to the people at the balers Gate 3 script extender who made this possible made modding this uh save possible um but the eversight ring makes you immune to blindness this counts the blindness from Darkness so if you are a Dr and place a Darkness cloud or have an ally or from your sorcerer levels place a fog Cloud it means that enemies will not be able to shoot you with ranged attacks they'll have disadvantage on all their melee attacks and you'll have advantage on all your melee attacks it's a different use of concentration than haste but incredibly powerful as well especially at lower levels and since you're a Dr it doesn't actually cost you a spell slot so that one's worth mentioning finally I'm going to show you a build that uses the attributes that increase your or the items that increase your stats because paladins are so multi-attribute dependent they benefit much more strongly from Elixir or gloves of Hill giant strength and the gloves of dexterity so we can actually make some changes to our build to increase its power level if we're going to use those um if we're going to use those items the first and most interesting of these is that we get to actually start as a sorcerer the reason for this is that Sorcerers get Constitution save proficiency and while you can't do that on the default build because multi-classing into Paladin only gives you medium armor proficiency on if you're using the gloves of dexterity medium Armor Plus the gloves of dexterity gives you better AC than heavy armor uh if you use one of the medium armors that is uncapped in terms of how much AC you get so that lets us take attribute spreads an attribute spread that looks more like this gaining 14 wisdom which is really nice and boosting our Charisma up to 16 which gives us incredibly better save saving throws we also get to have still have 60 in Constitution take the same make the same uh spell decisions and everything that you would make otherwise and then we're going to go into Paladin I'm just going to be speeding through this but you'll make all the same choices that we made in the last with the last build leveling Paladin as quickly as possible o hit the wrong button [Music] there we don't need but importantly we don't need an ability Improvement because we're going to have 20 strength from our um Hill giant Elixir which lets us open up a lot of Feats paladins love Feats but usually can't take them because you so desperately need your attribute improvements but there's a lot that are incredibly strong for paladins the most important of these and most interesting of these is Savage attacker because this lets you roll your damage dice twice and use the highest result once again this counts all damage dice so manara's branding soul and all Smite damage uses gets to roll your highest uh roll your dice and use the highest result this has some negative some mild negative Synergy with uh great weapon fighting because you'll roll fewer ones so the great weapon fighting won't come up as often but Savage attacker is going to be on average like a 30% increase in your DPS so this is an incredibly powerful feat that we don't normally get access to here we are going to continue to level up dip back into sorcerer like I said earlier for the same doing the same things that we did before I'll just take the other sorcerer level now just for Speed though you'll want to do it in the in the same order that we did before as well where you take the Paladin levels beforehand to get access to another feat the best feat here is actually great weapon Master to increase our damage even further although because so much of a Paladin's bonus damage comes from their uh comes from their Smite attacks you are going to get less benefit out of great weapon Master than other two-handed weapon users but it's still an excellent feat that increases your damage output significantly um some other options are things like Mage Slayer can come up quite a lot Sentinel is excellent for any Melee character keeping them inside your negative effect especially if you're going for the darkness Synergy from being a Dr um warter to make it even harder for you to lose concentration is pretty good but I think probably I would just go with great weapon Master here at this point you're really gilding the Lily like this build is already really strong so you're just getting a lot of additional power on it as well and then of course we would have gotten this level a little sooner but you take your levels in haste you you get access to haste capping off the build and then when you have taken an Elixir and are wearing gloves of dexterity you have uh you will end up with very good AC if you have one of the armors that allows you to use your full AC with medium armor notice that our AC actually increases because we have the gloves of dexterity and the medium armor rather than plate Armor All right my friends I hope that you have enjoyed this video and as always if you have then do please let me know what you think in the comments down below uh leave a like on the video that helps t with the algorithm and you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content cheers my friends and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 33,015

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

Id: rpgRw1a-fEE

Length: 33min 30sec (2010 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2023