The BEST ROGUE in Baldur's Gate 3 - Honour Mode Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today we're going to be covering my pick for the best rogue build in Boulders Gate 3 as part of my basic builds series the purpose of this build is to showcase the power of Rogue as a class and as such we will also be taking the majority of our levels in the actual Rogue class if you're looking for sort of a powered up multiclass abomination build you can check under power Builds on my channel but this is more for geared towards players who want to to actually take levels in the Rogue class and maximize the strengths of Rogue for aaran or your their main character to be the best rogue available to the party Rogue is I think the hardest character to follow the basic build restrictions with because it's one of the characters that most benefits from multiclassing but there are still very solid reasons to continue with levels in Rogue and we're going to be doing that also because I am going to be building for Honor mode where you can't go back necessarily if you missed some items or something this this build will not be using any specific items has no specific requirements for gear or exploits or anything like that this is a solid simple build designed to get you through the game on the hardest difficulty setting while making sure that you are playing the Rogue that you always wanted to play all right let's get right into it so first up uh I should mention that if you are building this for a main character the best races to play here are going to be Wood Elf or deep gnome which gains advantage on um on saving throws which is very important or uh Lightfoot halfling which gets advantage on stealth checks and also can reroll ones those are often the three best races in the game anyways just the some of the most powerful but especially valuable for rogue because the ability to reroll ones for example with light foot halfling is very important to Rogues since Rogues are all about setting up one huge powerful attack that you don't want to miss so throughout this build we're going to be trying to maximize our ability to land a gigantic sneak attack rogue's signature ability sneak attack requires you to have advantage against an enemy or an ally within 5T of them threatening them with a melee weapon um and for you not to have disadvantage there's a lot of ways to achieve this but the easiest way is to make sure that the rest of your party also has good initiative because if you and your party memb go before the enemies then you get to choose which order your characters act in and you can move say your fighter or whoever adjacent to an enemy before you fire off your rogue's attack guaranteeing sneak attack the other easy way to do this is to start fights hidden because when you're hidden or they can't see you for whatever reason you'll have advantage on your attacks and so we're going to be maximizing both of those factors in order to maximize sneak attack damage which is of course the point of Rogue aarian of course ALS also makes an excellent Rogue because he has the happy ability that gives him plus one to hit and every point we can add to our ability to hit lets us maximize sneake attack damage all right let's get right into building this Rogue and we'll start with some stats as always with the origin characters we need to fix their stats and asarian are actually some of the worst um in terms of the starting stat spread so let's get rid of these odd numbers the reason that we want to do this is because you will notice that when we have 17 dexterity checks we get plus 17 dexterity we get plus three to dexterity checks but at 16 dexterity we still get plus three you only gain a benefit from even numbers so you always want to try to have your stat spread be as include as few odd numbers as possible we're going to take uh Constitution rather than intelligence because intelligence is actually pretty useless to a rogue and we'll get that to 16 as well to maximize our hit points and with our remaining points we're going to place those in wisdom up to 14 because it's the most important remaining saving throw and then we're actually going to drop Charisma and put our remaining points into strength the reason we put these points into strength is not because we use strength for anything in particular but because it gives you jump distance which is actually very valuable for a rogue the extra Mobility that you get from being able to jump further can help you get into good areas to hide good situations to gain advantage and and all sorts of other useful abilities as you go for your skill selection the default skill selection here is actually pretty good um slight of hand of course is one of the things that you want as a rogue so you want to take expertise in slight of hand and you want to take expertise in stealth because remaining hidden is one of the best things you can do if you're a main character you may want to put some of these points into Charisma and then take some points in the conversation skills for aaran you get perception already which is something that you will want to try to get if you are a uh if you don't have the backgrounds that give it to you because perception lets you see traps and stuff and your Rogue will often be scouting ahead hidden so you want them to be able to see traps since we also get to put a lot of points into wisdom since Rogues are uh we will also have decent perception we get to do this because Rogues are what's called single attribute dependent or sad which is actually a good thing um because they only need dexterity basically all of their abilities key off of dexterity your AC your initiative your to hit chance and your damage all key off of dexterity so the only stat you really need to raise is decks and of course Constitution because every character needs hit points you can also put uh Proficiency in athletics being able to sneak up behind an enemy and shove them off of a cliff for example can be very valuable for a rogue and finally with your remaining point you can take a conversation skill or just put it um anywhere that you think is going to be useful that the rest of your party doesn't cover in this case I'll just put it in Insight because it's the one that we'll have the highest bonus with all right so the these are our starting stats let's level up our Rogue typically for Rogues you have two choices and that is are you going to be using daggers or short swords more often just finesse weapons in melee or are you going to be using a bow and the answer for this character is we're going to be using both with when you using ranged attacks with Rogue however I think that you will often want to be using two hand crossbows one in each hand because if you miss with your first attack that still gives you a chance to apply sneak attack it's not really important that your individual attacks do huge amounts of damage it's important that you get to hit with at least one attack around because any turn that you actually miss all your attacks you're giving up your whole sneak attack for that turn and sneak attack is where all of your damage is going to come from at level two Rogue we get to take uh we get another huge bonus for Rogues and the biggest of these cunning actions is cunning action hide this lets you spend your bonus action on hiding meaning that you can as long as you're obscured hide yourself before a firing your attack gaining advantage on your next attack both making it more likely that you hit and allowing you to trigger sneak attack The Cutting action Dash gives you lots of extra Mobility very powerful ability and Mobility is extremely strong on every character and cutting action disengage makes you able to leave combat this is the one you'll use least often but is still sometimes useful for when you don't want to trigger an opportunity attack definitely make sure that you are thinking about what you want to use your bonus action for on every turn of combat something that's also very important and let me just uh exit out of the level up screen here so that I can show this to you is that if you have two weapons you want to turn off dual wielding the reason is uh using this button right here the reason is that if you don't do that when you fire a weapon attack the game will automatically fire your offhand attack at the same time but you have all of these great uses for your bonus action you can see here we have 10 different uses for our bonus action on aarian uh starting only at level two and you not the game should be making the decision as to which of these you're going to use all duel wielding does is make the game automatically use your bonus action for the off-hand attack so you want to turn this off so that you can decide whether you're going to make the offhand attack typically you're only going to want to use your offhand attack if you miss with your main hand attack or if an enemy is close to death and you can bring them down with the off-hand attack otherwise you will often get better value out of one of these other bonus actions to reposition to hide for next round or to push an enemy jump jump to High Ground to get away bonus action Dash to move yourself out of danger of being attacked by enemies very important to consider always how you're going to use every resource on every turn of combat to the maximal effect and you don't want the game deciding uh how you're going to use it for you at Rogue level three we get to make the most important decision that we're going to make when we are playing a rogue and that is what subass to be the game is going to suggest that you take Arcane trickster but unfortunately that's the weakest of the three subclasses both thief and assassin are extremely strong and you might think we want thief because we are dual wielding uh daggers and dual wielding crossbows and that will give us a second offhand attack but the reason we dual wield is just to maximize our chances of hitting with one attack not so much making multiple offhand attacks and so I'm going to suggest taking assassin there's two really solid things that assassin gives you actually SE several really solid things that assassin gives you first you gain advantage on attack rolls against enemies that haven't taken a turn yet very powerful Advantage allows you to trigger your sneak attack and also makes you more likely to hit so it's basically two Advantage attacks are as likely to land a a single hit as three non- Advantage attacks roughly speaking the odds are pretty close um so you you get gain the same likelihood of applying sneak attack that you would with the third attack from thief because of the advantage from assassinate you also get a critical hit against every surprised enemy and if you start a fight from stealth then enemies will be surprised and critical hits double the damage that you do with your sneak attacks Critical Hits are extremely valuable for rogue because of they double the dice that you roll when you do damage and Rogues add a whole bunch of extra dice to their attacks because they're rolling the sneak attack damage finally you also get an additional action and bonus action at the start of combat meaning that you can fire your first attack before combat starts and then immediately fire another attack which is an extremely powerful ability very few characters actually get to make two fully powered attacks right at the uh starting at level three most characters have to wait until level five to get two fully powered attacks but assassin on the first round of combat get to just make two fully powered attacks provided that you start the combat provided that you start by firing with your Rogue from stealth before combat begins so that gives you a huge amount of power and is a big chunk of what makes Rogue so powerful next we go to Rogue level four um because we want to get a feat as soon as possible and the feat that we are going to take here is actually Sharpshooter now this one is a little hard to use uh sometimes so you will want to be a little bit careful with this because it gives you a minus5 penalty to your attack roll in exchange for 10 damage this is a huge boost to damage and remember that we're going to be able to make multiple attacks um frequently and because we have the offhand attacks we get to add the 10 damage to these offhand attacks as well um though so the while this does decrease our chance to hit since we'll be making just about all of our attacks with Advantage um you will still hit very frequently and you do tons more damage when you have Sharpshooter if you're worried about missing you can take an ability Improvement and just add to dexterity but I highly recommend getting access to Sharpshooter early it's going to increase the damage that your character does massively overall uh the earlier that you get it and the chance to hit is the penalty to hit is not as bad as it sounds because you're making basically every attack with Advantage at this point though we've actually gotten a lot of what we need out of Rogue in the early game and so we can get a more a solid benefit by moving into another class before finishing off our Rogue levels the second class that we're going to take is going to be the Ranger Ranger gets us a few things that are really nice we get a favored enemy and the one that you want to take here is Ranger knight uh it feels a little bit counterintuitive to take heavy armor proficiency with Ranger um because you're a rogue but the penalty that you gain from to your stealth checks only matters if you have the heavy armor a a body heavy armor equipped there are lots of boots helmets and gloves that count as heavy armor that you want Proficiency in heavy armor to be able to equip and it's actually not as bad as it sounds to have disadvantage on stealth checks when wearing heavy armor if there's a heavy armor that's good for you typically you won't want to do that just because there are better light and medium armors for your build but there are occasions when it's actually better to have a heavy armor equipped and take the disadvantage on stealth checks because so many of your stealth actions will not actually require checks at all you'll just be sneaking by not entering enemy line of sight where they never cause you to roll a die for your natural Explorer action here we want to take Wasteland Wanderer fire fire is the most common damage type so you want to gain resistance to that and you gain a few uh extra skills survival is nice to help you dig up chests since we have decent wisdom anyways at level two you get a fighting style and this the one that you can take here is archery archery fighting style is really powerful for um Rogues to have because it offsets two of the five points that you are losing when you have Sharpshooter activated in this way archery fighting style is the same as gaining Four Points in dexterity so it's very valuable to move into a charact into a class that gains access to archery fighting style so that you can mitigate the downsides of taking Sharpshooter and guarantee that you are going to hit your attacks much more often with advantage and archery fighting style you're going to be applying the plus 10 damage from your Sharpshooter attacks very frequently and making sure that you're getting the extra d6s from your sneak attack much more more often for spells there's a couple that are really valuable here you can take Hunter's Mark which requires your concentration but adds an extra D6 so it's basically like having an extra die of sneak attack whenever you're able to spend a bonus action on Hunter's Mark and you get to keep this up all day and another one that's extremely valuable to have access to is fog Cloud you can place the fog cloud and then hide in it as a bonus action becoming completely invisible to enemies because you're heav heavily obscured when you're in the fog Cloud area then you can move out of the fog Cloud on your turn shoot and move back and then hide in it again as a bonus action preventing enemy ranged attackers from ever attacking you and giving uh blinded and disadvantage to enemy to melee enemies that try to get to you because you'll be hidden inside the fog Cloud another really good option is long Strider which doesn't take a spell slot and gives you plus 10 ft of movement speed since we're ranged build being able to kite enemies backwards by firing in moving backwards is extremely powerful as well at Ranger level three we get the reason that we moved into Ranger in the first place and that is to take the gloomstalker subclass gloomstalker lets us double up on burst damage before combat starts and at the start of combat because you get the dread ambusher feature dread ambusher gives you plus three to initiative and remember right at the beginning I talked about just how good initiative is when your whole party wins initiative it lets you apply sneak attack also you can drop an enemy before they ever act and you gain additional movement speed you remember that we got uh we talked as well about how good movement speed is and you get an attack that deals an additional 1d8 damage the tool tip here is actually a little misleading cuz what it doesn't tell you is that this is an extra attack for free requiring no action or bonus action or anything in the opening round of combat you just get to make a whole extra attack this is an extremely powerful feature and will let you basically make three attacks or four attacks counting your offhand attack uh at the beginning of combat from the Assassin and gloomstalker features working together you also get to double up on bonus action hide which is not particularly important um since this is redundant with your uh Rogue feature but gaining dark vision can be very useful in some areas and becoming invisible lets you position yourself in the perfect place to start combat from from you can become invisible move to somewhere you can hide very easily maybe in the dark because you now have dark vision and then start Combat on your terms we'll take the last of the spells that we didn't take that I mentioned already and then continue to level Ranger because we get access to another feat the feat that we're going to take here is just to improve our dexterity to 18 remember like I said Rogues are uh single attribute dependent so increasing our dexterity is really powerful I will also mentioned that if you are taking anti-thy hair you could have 20 dexterity at this point if you start with 10 strength and 17 dexterity you can eat the hair to go up to 20 dexterity which is also extremely powerful of course and a a solid boost if you can manage it on honor mode that's not 100% reliable cuz you can fail the dialogue check or accidentally kill her so we don't plan to have that but if you aren't if you're on tactician or below and can reload until you get it you can include that in your build finally at Ranger level five we get extra attack which just lets us hit more times per turn and that's of course extremely valuable we also get access to Misty step from being a gloomstalker ranger which is extremely strong as well your spell selection here you can take something like Spike growth it's another concentration spell but does prevent enemies from melee enemies from getting to you by setting up a field and also lots of utility spells are available stuff like lesser restoration is very important to have in your party um aaran can use this to remove the bloodless debuff that he himself applies so he can pull his own weight in that respect but probably Spike growth is the most powerful another option is pass without Trace which gives you plus 10 to stealth checks allowing you to basically Auto pass every stealth check so if you want to happen if you want to use your character to just kill enemies without them ever knowing you're there you can concentrate on pass without trace the entire day and drop enemies so actually I think that's what we'll pick but Spike growth or lesser lesser restoration or also very powerful options at this point we go back into Rogue to increase our sneak attack Dice and also gain access to uncanny Dodge we've now also gained uh shield and medium armor proficiency from Ranger and Ranger gets pretty decent hit point progression as well so we've beefed up our hit points a little bit uncanny Dodge having incoming damage once per turn multiplies very well with the increased hit points that you get from high Constitution and from Ranger meaning that you actually become quite survivable and I will talk as well about how survivable you are at the end of the build when I talk a little bit about items at Rogue level six there's nothing that you particularly get although you do get um a few more uh skills which is always always nice but at Rogue level seven we get to max out the build and gain access to two more great features from Rogue going up to four D6 sneak attack uh because you get one D6 of sneak attack per two levels of Rogue so this means you add an extra 4 D6 damage on any time you choose to sneak attack and you also get evasion meaning you take no damage from enemy Fireballs if you pass a save only half damage if you fail it and since you have dexterity saving throw proficiency and high dexterity you're going to pass the save very often so you should be more or less immune to enemy dexterity targeting spells which is most damaging spells is very valuable this character actually ends up quite resilient even aside from just being in stealth all of the time a couple other things to mention about this character you want to start every combat hidden so you're going to start outside of Enemy Lines of sight and then make an attack another thing you're going to want to do on this character is go into your character sheet go to your Spellbook Tab and set your reactions to ask you whether or not to use sneak attack and whether or not to use sneak attack on a critical hit this will let you choose to apply sneak attack and you can choose not to apply sneak attack if you still have some attacks left and are fishing for a critical hit when you add in some gear that increases your chance of critical hitting which is very good for Rogues that type of gear and when you have advantage on every attack you're making you're very likely to be able to apply a crit and when you crit you can use sneak attack uh on the crit doubling its Effectiveness you can also just apply sneak attack on normal attacks if you want to be safe and make sure you get to use it so since we will typically get three attacks around I like to use it on the second attack if I haven't gotten a critical hit on the second attack just to guard against missing with my third attack and not getting the sneak attack I'll show you an example here so we're going to fire a ranged attack notice that carlac who has something like 24 AC just very very good AC on on the build on carlac that we have here we have a 44% chance to hit with Advantage um if we didn't have Advantage let's say we weren't hiding we would have a 25% chance and if we turn off our sharpshooter in the passives tab here we can bring that up to I'm going to guess 75% yeah 75% so you can decide on a caseby Case basis whether you want to use Sharpshooter I will say the average damage is almost always higher to just leave Sharpshooter on all of the time um even if you miss a few more times because it's so valuable to do that extra 10 points of damage you'll also probably see better values than this in the actual game because you'll have gear that increases your chance to hit and so on um when we fire our attack the game will now ask us whether we want to use sneak attack and if this was a critical hit we could choose to use it and since it's not we'll choose not to use it and then fire a second attack sneaking again IDE with Advantage again from assassin ideally um because they won't have acted in this combat and that one if it rolls a critical hit we can then use uh sneak attack on it and if it doesn't we could even fish for a third hit with our offhand attack to try to get sneak attack to maximize the chances of critting with our sneak attack just small optimizations you can do in order to maximize the damage output of your character finally for gear for this character uh like I mentioned things that you're going to want to look out for are anything that increases your chance of a critical hit like this covert cowl like the shade Slayer cloak um anything that that increases your initiative roles is very good although of course your your high dexterity will be good also something like the cats Grace armor that increases your dexterity is very good because it increases your chance to hit anything that increases your hit chance as well is very powerful another option is you could use the gloves of dexterity to set your decks to 18 and gain access to a couple other feat um you could take dual wielder or um alert both very powerful feat uh if you don't need to be putting points into dexterity you also get to increase your other attributes a little more if you want to use the gloves of dexterity and reduce your dexterity to eight finally another thing to keep in mind is that you also get to equip melee weapons and you can attack with them you you don't have to just attack with your ranged weapons you can attack with your melee weapons just fine um and melee weapons with passive benefits like the knife of the undermountain king you can still benefit with from on your ranged attacks you also while having your ranged weapons equipped can still benefit from the armor class from a shield so you can see even though we've got our ranged weapons equipped we can increase our AC significantly furthermore because we're a dexterity based build but we also got medium armor proficiency from Ranger we can use the medium armors that allow you to use your full dexterity bonus like the Yuan scal mail or the armor of agility and end up with very high a AC 21 AC with uh a shield and a medium armor or 23 AC I think with the armor of agility which is actually better than a character in full plate with a shield will get so you end up as one of the hardest to hit characters in the game plus you end up reasonably tanky because you have uncanny Dodge and a decent hit point pool thanks to the high Constitution that you took so it can be very valuable to to up your AC like that using these medium armors all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the best rogue in Boulders Gate 3 just a really great build that will work very well in any party and a solid build to see you through the game if you're looking for a slightly powered up version of the build go check out my guides to the Arcane Archer or uh just the best archer in Boulders gate which use the addition of fighter levels to add another layer to this character but this build is a great way to use Rogue and will be very powerful powerful for you we'll see through the whole game very easily cheers my friends and if you've enjoyed the video of course do feel free to leave a comment like the video both of those things help a ton with the algorithm and you can subscribe to my channel for more balers Gate 3 builds and other strategy game videos cheers my friends I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 48,314

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

Id: RgnzLIzNGRQ

Length: 27min 45sec (1665 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023