The BEST RANGER in Baldur's Gate 3 - Detailed Tactician Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today I will be covering my pick for the best Ranger build in balers Gate 3 this is going to be a part of my simple builds Series so we're going to be focusing on maximizing the strengths of Ranger as well as taking at least the majority of our levels in the ranger class this is pretty interesting for Ranger as a class because in a lot of build guides you'll see people taking only three or maybe five levels of Ranger and then exiting but I think there's actually a lot that Ranger has to offer at later level s that we can really maximize in this build this build will be an excellent damage dealing character as well as being a range stealth character making it one of the best characters to solo tactician mode with if that's something that you're interested in doing I'm using Minsk as the example character here because he's the ranger uh that laran has given us but of course if you are looking for a build that is more in line with his particular history then you should check out my lore friendly Minsk guide which focuses on making him a two-handed weapon an attacker this build of course is also in my opinion an excellent build for main characters whether in a party or solo um and will serve you extremely well as a damage healing range attacker throughout the game before we begin I'd also like to take a moment to thank jonov Holt for the second 25 Norwegian croner donation as well as hath OLG for the 50 Swedish Crona so a little bit of a Scandinavian National rivalry going on there uh if you're from Denmark I'm afraid you're on the back foot but seriously thank you so much my friends I really appreciate it all right let's get right into the build if you're building this for a main character the first thing that you're going to want to do is probably pick a different race human is not by any means a bad racial option for your Ranger and is good for everything but we can do a little better in particular there's a couple that have strong Synergy with what Ranger is trying to do one of these is deep Nome because one of the advantages of Ranger is that you get to act from stealth deep Nomes get advantage on stealth checks as as well as Rangers uh with the subass we're going get incredibly strong saving throws and gnomes get racial advantage on all of their mental saving throws intelligence wisdom and Charisma meaning that you will pass pretty much every save that the game throws at you if you go a deep gnome another option of course is wood elf which is always an incredible option or half wood elf made even more powerful because this build is a ranged attacker so the additional Mobility as well as uh percep proficiencies are very strong on your character gith Yan is always a good choice as well um and then after that there are many the others that are great options but those are the three with special Synergy I believe because of the mobility or because of the stealth proficiencies also worth mentioning is light foot halfling for stealth proficiency and the ability to reroll ones very useful especially I think if you're solo just because ones natural ones are the real enemy of solo characters all right let's get right into building our character here so the first thing that we have to do is fix these stats because the Rangers default stats are terrible um one thing that Rangers have as an issue with the character is that they are multi-attribute dependent or mad that means there are at least three stats that they want to get and as I always say it's bad to be mad and it's rad to be sad single attribute dependent we're going to try to reduce our dependency on other attributes as much as possible while still increasing the three that we need one thing that mitigates the downsides of this for Ranger is that the three stats they need dexterity Constitution and wisdom are also the three most important saving throws in the game every uh saving throw there there are three important saving throws Dex con and wisdom which many effects especially the most severe effects Target and three less important saving throws strength intelligence and Charisma so typically it's safe to reduce your strength into and Charisma as much as possible as long as you don't give up too many points in decks con and wisdom since we're a dexterity based build we're going to increase our dexterity as much as possible and we cast with wisdom so we need that and then every character needs constitution in order to maximize your hit points for this reason I'm going to suggest the somewhat unconventional stat spread of 17 16 and 15 in Dex con and wisdom and then we will increase these with our first ASI to hit our odd numbers if you don't like this stat spread and I understand there's a lot of people who do not like having three negative 8s you can certainly reduce your wisdom uh down to 14 your decks to 16 and then you get four points to bring up say strength or just two in each of these and that will be also fine similarly if you are intending to use anti eths deal to increase your decks by one then you need the 17 but you don't uh want the odd number in wisdom in that case but this I think is going to be your best stat spread for most characters for our skills the most important thing is that we have access to stealth because that's going going to be critically important for this build you'll want to start just about every combat in stealth because it gives you advantage on your attacks Rangers also will benefit from having all of the dexterity based skills so if you get access to slight of hand that can be good which uh if you are a human you can get Proficiency in that um and then any wisdom based skills that you can pick up are also a reasonable pick for you obviously if this isn't your main character you won't necessarily need the dialogue skills like Insight but that's still reasonably useful to have the only really important one is stealth um another thing to point out is that you do have the option to take Urban tracker and gain slight of hand proficiency so if you aren't a human and especially if you're a Solo character you may want to spend your natural Explorer pick getting slight of hand proficiency but this stat split will be good because you get stealth you get slight of hand and those are both important skills for your character as well as important for your party to have for a favored enemy selection um there are these really provide extremely minor effects they give you Proficiency in primarily skills that you will have no bonuses in so they're knowledge skills uh and spells that are basically not useful true strike is completely redundant for this build because you will start in stealth all the time so you'll always have Advantage as well as being a weak spell overall um armor Proficiency in heavy armor is strong but because we're a dexterity based build and there are medium armors that let you use your full dexterity you will end up with better AC that in in medium armor than you would in heavy armor so Ranger Knight is less useful overall than it would be for the melee version of this build for example um and then all of the ones that let you cast can trips are not terribly useful so the best one overall is going to be Bounty Hunter giving enemies disadvantage on saves against ins snaring strike the saves won't be super hard to make anyways because it's based on your wisdom save DC um which won't be very high even with this stat split that emphasizes wisdom but giving enemies disadvantage against this effect and it's a very powerful effect and snare is a very dangerous effect for enemies so making them fail that more often is very useful for our natural Explorer pick uh like I mentioned if you're solo you might want to take Urban tracker but otherwise you should take Wasteland Wanderer fire resistance to fire damage will come up all the time in this game it's the most common damage type um and it's extremely valuable to have in terms of keeping you alive all right let's go to level two at level two we get one of the best things that Rangers get access to and that is a fighting style the reason this is so powerful is because for Archer characters you get the archery fighting style giving you a plus two bonus to ranged attacks this means that your bow attacks are going to hit way more often than any other attack made by any other character in the game 10% more often in fact because a plus two damage bonus damage increases the percentage chance of hitting by 10% per roll so overall you're going to have more success Landing attacks than any other character with your maximum Dex maxed out dexterity and the archery uh fighting style this makes you an incredibly reliable damage dealer and will combo very well with the additional damaging effects that we get later on we also get two spells because we took Bounty Hunter we'll probably want to take in snaring strike although later on we may want to just sub out of this anyways um and you'll likely want at low levels Hunter mark because the extra 1d6 damage per attack against certain enemies will come up and be pretty useful some other options to take are long Strider which is a ritual spell meaning it doesn't cost you a spell slot to cast and increases your movement speed by 10 ft I talked a little bit about how important movement speed is for this character because you can keep out of melee range of enemies long Strider helps you do that and fog Cloud because you can use it to become immune to ranged attackers I'll talk a little bit more about that later on at Ranger level three we pick our subass and the subass that I'm going to pick is going to be the gloomstalker gloomstalker gets a few enormous advantages that make it the best ranged attacker in the game um and is one has one of the better class features in the game available at level three that class feature is dread ambusher this gives you about eight different things all of which are incredible um so on the first turn of combat your movement speed increases by 10 ft by itself already a reasonable class feature and this is the smallest of the three things this gives you it also gives you plus three to initiative and initiative is ridiculously important in this game plus three is also an enormous bonus because in balers Gate 3 initiative is rolled on a D4 so a plus three bonus is more than doubling your average uh role on your initiative bonus it also combos very well with the fact that you are a dexterity character meaning you'll almost always go first in combat going first in combat lets you do a lot of things if you're a ranged character of course you can take out an enemy before they can act at all and this this character being a range damage dealer can typically knock one priority enemy out of the fight immediately before you can go if your whole party wins initiative as well you get to choose the order in which your characters act meaning that if you have a party member supporting this character Say by casting haste on you you can choose for them to cast haste before this character takes their turn so it's extremely valuable for every character in your party to have as high initiative as possible gloomstalker gets that the third thing is that you get uh right it's kind of buried at the end of this poorly written tool tip you can make an attack that deals an additional 1d8 damage what this doesn't tell you is that that's an extra attack on your first round of combat meaning that where every other character is making two attacks or making one attack you're making two only one other character in the game gets access to a second attack at level three and that's the um Berserker Barbarian and you just get this with no penalties un unlike them you have no penalties don't need to be raging or anything and in in fact get a bonus 1d8 damage on this attack this means that starting at level three you have the highest first turn damage output of any character in the game being able to take out enemies this early is incredibly strong you also get 80 foot feet of dark vision which is very useful as well um just in general as a stealth character it doesn't come up that often in the Arenas in Boulders gate but when it does you'll be very grateful that you have it and importantly you get a bonus action stealth you can hide as a bonus action this means that you will never need to be out of stealth on basically any turn of combat because Rangers otherwise don't have great uses for their bonus actions but if you hide then you have advantage on your next attack meaning that you are both making more attacks and are more likely to hit your attacks than just about every other character in the game umbrell shroud lets you become invisible um but it is somewhat redundant with just being able to hide becoming invisible is not incredibly useful for a lot of characters I mean this will come up especially in areas where you can't easily hide but for the most part you are going to not want to spend an action on this in combat it's a pre-combat thing um so you'll typically just want to use hide instead because it has effectively the same effect for our spell selection we'll take whichever one we didn't take earlier I'm going to take fog cloud here and then I might at this level consider replacing one of these two whichever one you're using less often like if you find you're not using in snaring strike you can replace it with long Strider if you don't have that on another party member um or don't have access to it already Ranger level four we get our first feat and because we took this odd number stat split we're going to take an ability Improvement getting up to 18 dexterity and 16 wisdom this means that that not only do we have good casting we can we will be able to have reasonable DCS in fact our save DCS will be almost as high as any other character's save DCS would be at this point in the game will only be one short of a full casting classes save DCS uh at level four and that's assuming that they rushed for the ability save Improvement and we will have 18 dexterity meaning we'll have a plus seven bonus to initiative a truly ridiculous number as well as really good AC and to hit chance and damage remember that plus four to hit is actually plus six to hit because we have the archery fighting style so we'll very rarely miss our attacks and they will do very good damage when we do hit with them we continue to level in Ranger because now we get the most important ability for a marshall character extra attack now you go from two attacks in your opening round of combat to three attacks in your opening round of combat one of which has the extra de8 of bonus damage um obviously this is extremely strong and will Aid in your attempt to just one-hot enemies off the start of combat you also because you're a gloomstalker ranger get access to Misty step the best Mobility tool in the game as a bonus action letting you reposition up to 60 ft means that you will no longer have to fear melee enemies at all this can also get you to places where enemies can't reach you so certain melee enemies will simply not be able to interact with you if you Misty step up onto High Ground um and it gives you escape and Mobility options you can also chase down fleeing enemies Traverse certain Arenas much quicker extremely powerful spell that it's great to have access to for our second spell we have a couple choices here you could go back and take retake whichever level of the four level one spells I mentioned that you don't have currently um I also think that Spike growth is really excellent it does take your concentration but it is a 20ft radius field that is difficult to rain having enemy movement one cool thing that you can do later on uh I guess I'll show you this later on but this allows you to block off enemy movement enemy melee characters will not be able to reach you enemy range characters will have a harder time fleeing from you and it also does a little bit of damage if they happen to try to do so Ranger level six we get to take another favored enemy and as I mentioned these are very minor bonuses so I'm just going to take a mage breaker because it gives us true strike and that will annoy the comment section and then here we're going to take another natural Explorer damage resistance giving us resistance to a second type of damage obviously this is really strong having resistance to multiple damage types means that we will be much more survivable than many other characters especially against AOE effects we also will have excellent dexterity and deck save proficiency so enemies that are launching fireballs and stuff at us well we have resistance and we will usually pass the save against those so they will be hitting us for very minimal damage poison I believe comes up slightly more often than cold um in this game although I think at this point you should be just about going into act two where cold damage is more common I'm actually not certain which of the two is going to be more common at this point but I think if you take cold it will have a slightly it will have slightly more valuable value for you in act two both of these are fairly equivalent and I'm honestly not certain which one it comes up more often I'm sure somebody has done the math on that and we'll let me know in the in the comment section down below Ranger level seven we get one of the major advantages of staying in gloomstalker for this long we could otherwise have left at level three or level five for another class excuse me um but that is the incredibly powerful iron mind feet this is one of the very few ways in the game to gain Proficiency in extra saving throws and this gives us Proficiency in another good saving throw in in wisdom as well as intelligence if we took deep gnome as our race then we would have Advantage as well on these saves meaning we would almost never fail a wisdom saving throw which is things like stun and fear and so on that come up quite frequently in this game um because we would then be proficient and have advantage on them but regardless having Proficiency in four different saves means we will be much much less likely to experience the full effect of anything that's being cast on us and we actually have decent constitution in the in the last important saving throw that we don't have maxed out or don't have Proficiency in so this character gets way better saves than just about every other character for our spell selection here at this point it's a little less important what we pick enhanced leap can be interesting although we do have pretty low strength so we won't be getting massive jump distances the way some other characters will silence does come up sometimes although I wouldn't spend too much effort on that honestly probably I'd just go back and pick SN and snaring strike again but uh at this point you will probably have a better idea of what you want want in a spell then of course we're already level seven so we go to level eight and we get the very fun class feature land stride making us immune to difficult terrain this includes the slow and damage from Spike growth so now you can place Spike growth underneath yourself you can surround yourself in it and enemies will have a very hard time reaching you in order to do damage some enemies will be able to jump the 20 ft distance to reach you but many will not some enemies can't jump at all and if you are for example in a narrow Corridor and can make them Traverse the full 40ft distance of the spike growth then they will be unlikely to be able to clear it in a single jump this can buy you an extra turn of shooting them as well as making them take a bunch of damage as they Wade slowly across it and you'll be immune to the effects for our feet here rather than taking a second ability Improvement we are going to take the Sharpshooter feet you could if you didn't take the odd stat split that I recommended at the beginning uh instead of this have considered taking Sharpshooter at level four the reason for this is that you have the archery fighting style meaning that you are basically only taking a minus three penalty rather than a minus5 compared to other characters that might be taking this and you're very likely to be attacking with with advantage on most of your attacks so you can mitigate the hit penalty of Sharpshooter with both of those things and do much higher damage earlier at the tradeoff of not getting to have high wisdom because you'll have to take a different stat split just something that I wanted to mention but for this build we will take Sharpshooter at level eight at this point we do have a decision we could continue down the path of taking levels of Ranger to get access to third level spells as well as some of the cool class features that gloomstalker Rangers in particular get later down the line we could also Branch out into another class and if you are looking to Branch out into another class the one that I would recommend is Battlemaster Fighter for the Maneuvers as well as action surge the best option uh the the single best class feature in the game giving you basically a whole extra turn once per short rest for this build though I'm going to recommend that you actually continue continue all the way down to Ranger level 12 and the reason is that gloomstalker Ranger actually keeps getting cool stuff all the way to level 12 a lot of Marshall characters don't and the other uh Ranger classes in particular I think don't really get as good of stuff as they continue to level but gloomstalker subass has some really cool stuff as you continue to go for a spell selection for level three this also gets us level three spells and this will let us take sort of the Big Brother of Spike growth plant growth which quarters enemy movement speed instead of having it um for all the reasons that this is good and because you are immune to the slowing effects of this yourself because of land stride this also unlike Spike growth isn't concentration so you can cast this and still be concentrating on something else although this character doesn't have a lot of incredible uses for its concentration you'll usually be using it on either fog cloud or Hunter's Mark um but plant growth is very good you can also pick up at this point if you want lightning Arrow um but typically I think lightning arrow is going to be worse damage than just making weapon attacks it takes your whole action and it's going to do 68 of lightning damage but the uh you're generally speaking better off just making three weapon attacks and you're opening round of combat or in sub two weapon attacks in subsequent rounds of combat conjure barrage has some um some uses but generally speaking I think it's also just worse damage than using your actual weapon attacks one other thing that's kind of fun and worth mentioning is protection from energy because we already have resistance to three of these damage types so this will let us get resistance to yet another one and make sure that we just have resistance to like all the elemental damage types especially good if you're going for a more thematic Ranger build who's kind of an an Outdoorsman uh you can gain protection from energy and have resistance to all of the elemental damage types but I'm going to recommend just picking something and not replacing a spell at this level level 10 we get another favored enemy so here we can take for example um we can probably take Ranger Knight you'll still be in medium armor but there are a couple late game heavy armors that are worth considering over medium armor maybe you want want some of the effects of them more than you want the extra AC that Medium armor will be worth to you um so I would probably take that it's the only one that has a real benefit but again these are very minor benefits at this point we get our last damage resistance from natural Explorer which is great and at Ranger level 11 we get the reason that we stayed in rinder for this long stalkers flurry um what this means is that that every time you miss on an attack you just get to attack again for free effectively this gives you advantage on every attack although it also works with normal Advantage which we will have on just about every attack meaning that you will almost never miss this actually I think uh if you really really want to never miss is Another good argument for going halfling which I mentioned right at the beginning but I think overall you're going to be better off with wood elf or deep gnome um but basically you have d advantage on every single attack super powerful means that you're an extremely consistent damage dealer and one of the best things that Rangers get to be is just very consistent you get to do the same thing every single turn very well it also combines extremely well with Sharpshooter because we have a to hit penalty from Sharpshooter with which stalker's flurry mitigates entirely in addition to the advantage which meaning that you are effectively making just normal attacks with advantage and archery fighting style um guaranteeing that you hit very frequently for the additional 10 damage from your Sharpshooter shots spell selection at this point is not I think terribly important um you'll maybe take protection from energy you could take lightning Arrow just to have access to an elemental damage type um overall I think that these if you really want healing and are finding that you need access to it cure wounds can be good if this were tabletop I would recommend good Berry but healing potions are so plentiful and just better than good berries in this game that you can just use healing potions instead and so we'll just take protection from energy and thematically have resistance to every damage type finally at Ranger level 12 we get access to our final feat going up to dexterity level dexterity 20 meaning that we are doing massive damage have great AC we have plus eight to our initiatives um every sing single attack that we make we have plus 15 damage to plus whatever the enhancement bonus of our weapon is I'm also going to take a moment to talk about equipment here because one thing that's really fun about Rangers is um I guess sort of O I need to actually finish leveling up one thing that's fun about Rangers is that they actually wear a lot of equipment better than many other characters because much like uh The Witcher which is in many ways based on a d andd Ranger I think you will end up with very good uses for potions and elixir especially in this game so I'm going to talk about a couple of those that are really good a couple other items that are worth mentioning any piece of armor that lets you add your full Dex modifier to AC is very valuable let's say this Yuan scale mail which is uh 15 uh just a normal 15 base medium armor gives you 20 AC without a shield and 22 AC with a shield something that's worth mentioning is that in Boulders Gate 3 you can use your you can benefit from the AC bonus of a shield while having a ranged weapon equipped which somewhat differs from how it works in tabletop and so you basically get two more AC than the equivalent tabletop character would have meaning that at this level we have better armor class than a heavy armor and shield user would since we get 15 plus 5 from our dexterity plus the two from our shield and that's without any magical effects enhancing our armor class we can continue to increase that so between that your excellent saves you're decent although not spectacular but it but pretty solid HP pool and um your resistance is to many damage types this is actually one of the most resilient characters that you can build some other items worth mentioning are anything that increases your damage like these gloves of archery of course are custom made for you um and you use certain Elixir better than pretty much every other character most notably the elixir of blood lust this gives you an extra action every time you kill an enemy and you will basically kill an enemy on every action you take because you don't typically have to move to chain your kills from one enemy to another unlike a Melee character you'll be able to attack pretty much everything across the battlefield at once since or uh on a single turn since you're range you just move to the middle of the battlefield and then launch all your attacks and the elixir of blood lust will let you chain kills between various enemies guaranteeing that you can take out a large number of the enemy groups at a time similarly the potion of speed or haste from an ally are both incredibly strong for you because your actions are so strong and you don't have a way to get more actions or additional attacks in on this build uh anything that gives you those from potions of speed and elixir of blood BL lust are very valuable a special arrow that I wanted to mention is the arrow of Arcane interference I talked a little bit more about this in my Arcane Archer build but the special arrows are extremely worth using for Archers there's a lot of cool combinations you can do with them and if you want more info on that watch my build on Arcane archers um but this one's really worth mentioning because it silences an enemy and breaks their concentration and this effect has no saving throw it's based on just hitting them with the arrow so so you can guarantee breaking enemy concentration and applying silence to them which is very powerful of course just by hitting them with this another cool specific damage combo that I wanted to mention is the Titan string bow which let you add additional damage equal to your strength modifier as well as the strength Elixir the hill giant strength or later on cloud giant strength Elixir would let you do an additional five damage on every attack or later eight damage Dage on every attack in addition to your Sharpshooter bonus 10 damage this will mean every attack hits for a massive boost of damage so just worth mentioning that that specific combo is good although I think typically you're going to want to just use a different bow and use an elixir of blood lust instead of the strength Elixir um you will also get access to strength gauntlets in the end game that you can use instead of that uh meaning that the Titan string bow can come back in Vogue when you get the the strength gauntlets later on all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the my pick for the best Ranger this is a fun build because it actually used 12 levels of Ranger which honestly I didn't expect to do when I sat down to make this guide I was expecting to deviate out in multiclass but this uh this build is so powerful when you just take 12 levels of Ranger good for soloing good in a party great for archery damage and great all around all right my friends thanks so much for watching and if you've enjoyed the video please feel free to leave a comment hit that like button hit that like button um both of those things help a ton with the algorithm and you can subscribe to my channel for more balers Gate 3 build guides and other strategy game content I also have some other cool balers gate stuff coming up so if you're just here for balers gate I will be doing things in addition to just the build guides um more news on that shortly cheers my friends and I'll catch you next time he

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 20,847

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

Id: URPPvhmkcAw

Length: 32min 28sec (1948 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2023