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

hello my friends and welcome back to another Boulders Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today we're going to cover my pick for the best sorcerer build in Boulders Gate 3 this is one of the most requested build guides for me to do because my very first Boulders gate video that I did on this channel was where I right after the game came out suggested that sorcerer would be the best class to play through tactician mode with in that video I did a very basic level one build skeleton but did not do a level by- level breakdown and so today we're going to cover for every level and every decision will make along the way in order to maximize sorcerer this is going to be a part of my basic builds Series so we are going to be focusing on maximizing the strengths of sorcerer using their class features and levels in sorcerer to the highest possible effect and create a character that is extremely viable one question that people will have of course is do I still think that sorcerer is the best character to play through tactician mode with and the answer is basically yes Sorcerers have several main advantages as a main character one they are the second or third best party face in the game meaning they'll get the best access to dialogue skills after only BS and possibly warlocks so they make an excellent main character allowing you to win your conversation skill checks and uh get out of combat or talk your way into new and interesting situations and experience more of the game two they are secretly the best support class in the game and we'll talk about more about why that is as we go on but basically they have the strongest ability to manipulate action economy available in balder's Gate action economy is essentially how many turns are you taking compared to the number of turns your opponents are taking and Sorcerers get several effects that make them really good at getting your team to take more turns than your opponent is taking whether by stopping enemies from acting or allowing yourself or your allies to act more often they're also excellent damage and have a lot of Mobility giving you a ton of optionality in fights they don't get as much optionality as prepared casters like wizards but still with good spell selection we can make sure that we're always doing interesting things and always have a lot of choices so I think overall yes Sorcerers are still probably my pick for the best character to play through tactician with you'll notice here that I'm using the halfling hling as the example character for this build and the reason for that is that halflings make excellent Sorcerers so much so that I think it's the best race to pick for sorcerer in the game um halflings get a major advantage that works well with a main feature of the sorcerer one thing that Sorcerers get that other spellcasters don't get is that they start with Constitution save proficiency this means that they have Proficiency in the save that you use to maintain concentration on spells which is extremely important whenever you're concentrating on a spell if you take damage you have to make a concentration check or or you lose access to that spell and it's especially punishing with the spell we're going to be concentrating on most often because we have Constitution proficiency though we are much less likely to fail those checks and a halfling gets to roll any natural ones that you roll on any 20-sided die rooll which includes concentration checks making you much less likely to drop concentration on spells sorcerer also gets to mitigate the main downside of halflings because you going to have better Mobility than a lot of other characters and the main downside of halflings is that they have 25t movement speed so halflings actually make excellent Sorcerers I would probably suggest choosing the strong heart halfling over the light foot halfling because the abilities of the subrace are a little more uh relevant to you poison resistance and advantage on saves against poison are going to come up more often than advantage on stealth checks since this won't be a sneaky character but overall halfling is going to make the best choice for a race for your sorcerer other good options are of course gith Yankee like I said in my previous video because astral knowledge is broken and more Mobility is excellent but we won't need the armor proficiencies as much cuz we're going to be getting those later on in the build and wood elf because wood elf is just the top tier for pretty much every class additional movement speed is good slightly less important for Sorcerers than other classes but still extremely important all right so let's get right into building this character first up we need to look at our stats so the stats for sorcerer are a little closer to what you would want than many of the starting stats these are at least the three uh abilities that you actually want to raise are the highest starting abilities but they there's definitely still some changes we can make in order to optimize this for one thing we have three odd numbers and you never want odd numbers and for another thing we have 12 intelligence which is a totally useless stat for Sorcerers so we can get rid of that let's remove that and go up to 14 dexterity and 16 Constitution making our concentration saves better as well as giving us more hit points and more AC and more initiative here we're actually going to leave Charisma as an odd number although if you intend to pick up the method in act one whereby you can increase a stat by one you could leave charisma at 16 or if you're not the main party face you could leave charisma at 16 and if both of those things are true you can go back up to 17 but just in general this is the build that we're going to go with wisdom we're leaving at 10 because it's the most important save and also because we're going to you need some wisdom later down the line um if you are dropping Charisma to 16 then you would increase your wisdom to 12 for our subass selection we're going to take the by far best sorcerer subass to storm sorcery the reason for this isn't the damage output although that is also nice storm sorcery get gets bonus damaging effects but the ludicrously powerful tempestuous magic feature after you cast a level one spell you can fly as a bonus action which doesn't provoke opportunity attacks the fly distance is always 30 ft so combined with your 25t halfling movement speed you get 50 ft of mob 55 ft of Mobility which means that you mitigate the main downside of halflings using this ability you can also position yourself in places where enemy melee characters simply can't reach you up on high ground or and so on as well you can leave melee contact with enemies without provoking opportunity attacks which is incredibly valuable for casters so this is the reason that we pick storm sorcery primarily although of course the other subass features are very good but tempestuous magic is ridiculously strong for our uh skill selection the only important thing is that you want to avoid performance and deception because we'll get those later on in the build so you're actually also going to want to avoid taking a background like this character comes with that has uh proficiencies in either of those skills I think that the best background is probably going to be Guild Artisan getting you persuasion and insight Insight won't be tremendously useful but will come up some because you won't have a huge bonus in it but will come up sometimes in dialogue but generally speaking sorcerer is best served when making dialogue checks and so you're going to want those to be your highest uh skills I would suggest selecting intimidation and persuasion for our canant trip selection we need to have a default action in combat so assuming that we don't have a spell we want want to cast we want one of our can trips to be a good action to cast in combat and the best of these by far is Firebolt 60 foot range does the most damage just a very solid spell we then want the two really strong utility spells Mage hand and minor illusion that there are so many uses for these in the game and I highly recommend having access to these in every single party and Sorcerer of course is one of the best characters to use these minor illusion can be used to group enemies for your AOE effects pull enemies into dangerous locations shove them off cliffs and so on Mage hand has so many uses and a hidden use for this is that enemies that can see it will often attack it so you can actually use it to distract the distract enemies with C invisibility um by placing a mage hand next to them for your fourth can trip I think there's a few options if you want access to an alternative damage type Ray of frost is the best and also has some utility I'll talk about that a little bit later um but also friends is very useful for a party face do be careful who you cast this on of course because they might get mad at you and blade Ward does have some uses although less so than for other characters because we don't intend to be in melee that often so overall I think my pick is probably going to be Ray of frost but you can definitely pick friends as well for our level one spell selection there's one that's critically important and that we will keep throughout the game and then we'll probably want another combat option just to make sure that we have things to do with our level one spell slots the most important spell and every character that can take this should is shield shield is a reaction that increases your AC by five and especially since we'll be in robes in the early game meaning we'll have only 12 AC Shield gives us the option to avoid taking hits an enormous percentage of the time this is the single best defensive action in the game and also gives you something to do with your reaction which Sorcerers otherwise don't really have good uses for every character in Boulders gate has access to five resources every five things every single turn of combat your movement your bonus action your action your reaction and your concentration Sorcerers have great uses for all of these except for your reaction um but Shield gives you an opportunity to do something with that resource maximizing your turns since Sorcerers are so focused on maximizing action economy compared to enemies it's really important to make sure that you're using every single uh opportunity available to you to do something on your turns for our second option my personal favorite for early levels is chromatic orb the reason for this is not the damage although the damage is pretty reasonable but because the ice version of chromatic orb leaves an ice surface on impact and this is also why having Ray of frost can be useful because if there's water on the ground you can turn it into ice ice surfaces are ridiculously strong in this game because they an enemy walking on them has a chance to fall over and if an enemy Falls prone on their turn in this game they lose the rest of their turn the entire rest of their turn is wasted so if you cast in an ice orb on someone leaving an ice surface underneath them and then they walk forward uh towards you and fall prone you've cost them an entire turn while still doing a turn's worth of damage and there's a decent chance they're still on the ice surface and need to make the check again next turn all right so that's level one let's go to level two level two we get access to the thing that makes sorcerer so good and that is sorcery points sorcery points have so many uses in this game but the big one is going to be metam magic which metam Magics we pick is actually pretty easy because there are two that are way better than the other two um twin spell is the most important of these because remember how I've talked about action economy twin spell basically lets you take two turns for the price of one if you turn on Twin spell then any spell that targets a single enemy will be able to Target Two um and a single Ally will be able to Target two if it's a buffing spell this will come up quite a bit later on doubling the uses of your spell as well as the value of your spell slots is obviously incredibly strong the second of these that I think is particularly useful to have is distant spell although there are some uses for extended spell but distant spell means you will more much more reliably be able to apply the effect of your spells having 90t range instead of 60ft range means you outrange every other effect in the in the game because in Boulders Gate 3 almost everything caps at um at 60t range so this means that Sorcerers are also the longest ranged class in addition to being the one that takes the most turns over the course of the game um meaning that you will very reliably be able to apply your effects even in large Arenas I I really this is also uh very cheap to use it only costs one sorcery Point per spell and you get two sorcery point you get one sorcery Point per level of sorcerer you have so this ends up being a pretty easy effect to apply whenever you need it something to keep in mind is that you can spend spell slots to gain more sorcery points you can uh spend a spell slot to gain a sorcery Point equal to the level of the spell sorcery points are generally a more valuable resource than spell slots later on in the game and so you will often want to consider doing this if you're running low on sorcery points because so often what you're spending them on is Twin spell meaning that the sorcery points you're spending are basically a whole extra spell slot anyways that you get to take in one turn instead of in two turns so consider them uh consider your sorcery points to be an extremely valuable resource and consider using lower level spell slots to gain more sorcery points to activate twin spell more often for our spell selection here this is where things get a little tricky there's several that are really strong and we only get access to three of them so the ones that I think you want to pick from here are Mage Armor really good to have up all day because it just makes you harder to hit and that's obviously very good very great defensive spell magic Missile which is extremely reliable damage um and also by itself solves certain Encounters in the game and fog Cloud which has a ton of utility uh can you can stand in it and enemies can't range to attack you then you step out of it and cast a spell then step back into it because you can move cast a spell and then continue moving um meaning you will effectively be immune to ranged attackers if you have fog Cloud up uh and of course it also blinds melee attackers meaning that they have disadvantage on attacks against you making it much easier for you to avoid them generally though I think the one I'm going to pick here is magic Missile it just has too much use and having a reliable damage source is really strong at this level though Mage Armor if you are finding yourself taking hits is very strong as well another consideration is uh and depending on your team makeup you may want fog Cloud we're not going to replace a spell at this level cuz we've already taken the three best level one spells for us so that's totally fine sorcerer level three we get access to the next incredible uh metam magic and this is the thing that makes Sorcerers even better at manipulating the action economy Quicken spell costs three points per spell unless you cast it as a bonus action there's no restriction on the number of spells you can cast in a round which differs from tabletop Dungeons and Dragons so you can use this on your highest level spell and then cast another spell of that level effectively doubling the number of turns that you're taking between this and twin spell you will on your on your Nova turns as in the turn turns where you are spending all of your resources to try to immediately win a fight be able to take effectively three turns for the price of one with a twin spell a Quicken spell and uh with a twin spell as your main action and a Quicken spell as your bonus action we'll actually even be able to get up to four turns for the price of one later on in the game for our spell selection here we get access to level two spells and there's a few that are really interesting um I will just quickly mention the best of the level two spells cloud of daggers is very reliable damage it has no save it's something to concentrate on which you want and uh is just very strong scorching Ray is the best single turn damage option that you have at this point in the game if you hit with all three Rays it's uh 66 fire damage which is very good for this level and also can be quickened allowing you to double cast it in the opening rounds of combat if you just really need something dead Misty step gives you additional mobility and you're definitely going to want access to this at some some point in the game and uh web is actually a pretty good way to stop enemies from moving of these four at this level I think you actually want your sorcerer mostly to be contributing damage at this point so the ones we're going to take are cloud of daggers and we're actually going to replace chromatic orb here with scorching Ray giving us access to a lot of damage then we'll grab utility as we continue to level up level four sorcerer you get an extra sorcery point you also get to take a feat this is why we took an odd number in Charisma because now we can take the actor feat um I think overall this is a little better having expertise in deception and performance as well as giving you Proficiency in those you don't need to have Proficiency in these skills in order to gain expertise in them uh meaning that you're going to be the best party face available at this level uh I think this is worth more than the extra one point of wisdom although if you don't if you aren't a party face you could have taken the other stat split for our next can trip selection uh at this point you will probably know what you're missing if you need a source of light light is very good if you find yourself failing dialogue checks you may want friends I'll probably just take friends here for our spell selection you definitely need to have access to misy step at this point so we're going to add that in we don't need to replace any spells we've got a pretty good spell selection uh going at this point so I'm pretty happy with this here is where you will start to suffer from having low AC so you may wish to find a scroll of Mage Armor and just use that on um every day in order to maximize your AC or have an ally cast it on you if you have an ally who has access to it uh or um bark skin something like that from a druid Ally but Shield is still going to serve you better for avoiding damage typically and you're going to play pretty far back using the high mobility of this character to avoid enemy damage level five is where you get the really exciting things uh and for most spellcasters this is true level three spells represent a geometric increase in your power level um they are wildly more powerful than their level two equivalent and give you tons of additional options the best one for Sorcerers is the one that makes this build really tick and that is haste haste gives you a whole second action which can be used to cast a spell you can twin haste on an ally you can Quicken haste as a bonus action and then cast two spells so twinning haste is probably the single best action that you can take in the game um because it it gives you a whole second action as well as well as giving an ally two actions if your party wins initiative then you can choose to have your source act before your other characters meaning that you'll get the full benefits of haste on them the opening turn um so initiative is very strong on on sorcerer anything that you can find that increases your initiative is going to be very good for a replacement spell we're going to take the other really important spell and at this level I will probably suggest removing um cloud of daggers since we're going to be concentrating on haste just about every round of combat you remove cloud of daggers and pick counter spell counter spell is the single best reaction in the game very important in certain fights gives you a lot of utility with your reactions and just very important to have access to this spell some other options to consider are Fireball of course just a very good spell overall uh the gold standard for AOE damage pretty much throughout the game and hypnotic pattern which helps you win in terms of action economy by taking enemies out of the fight for two turns obviously this is extremely strong hypnotic pattern is also the single best argument for taking extended spell but I think overall distant spell is still going to be more powerful at uh level six now that we have access to level three spells we get to make our make a choice because Sorcerers only need to hit Level 11 um in order to get access to their sixth level spells we have room for a onlevel dip if we prefer that to aat overall I think there is a one-level dip that justifies taking it over a feat and that dip we're going to take at level six now that we have access to third level spell slots the class of course is cleric the best one L dip in the game which gives you access to Heavy Armor if you take uh life Tempest war or nature domains as well as Shield proficiency increasing your AC significantly it also gives you access to a really good alternative concentration spell in the spell bless um still one of the best things to be doing with your turns is concentrating on bless and some healing options most notably healing word for our domain selection the best one level dip usually is going to be life domain I will mention that there is a broken combo you can do with Tempest domain and I'll do a separate build video on that but life domain is going to be the best for sort of the general purpose sorcerer giving you access to a little bit of healing through healing word and that's the one you're going to want to prepare because you also get bless prepared don't take uh spells that require save DCS because you're going to only have 10 wisdom at this point or maybe 12 depending on your initial stat split and so the save DCS will be really low on your cleric spells um but this gets you heavy armor and a bunch of really useful can trips as well the best of these is guidance which is very important for every party to have and you also get to now take blade Ward if you didn't from your sorcerer levels thury gives you advantage on intimidation and performance checks making you even better at passing dialogue checks for your deity selection I think salune and um mistra have the most role playing opportunities in the game so I would probably go with one of those two I've often said suggested taking saluna so this is a a Magic character let's go with mistra here then you can chat with Gail about how much you love mistra although not probably in the same way he does back to sorcerer for sorcerer level seven and we get our subass features that give us a bunch of Lightning Spell options um giving you the local storm as well as resistance to lightning and thunder damage resistance to lightning and thunder damage is really strong this will come up quite a bit and this is also a good reason to have access to a uh an additional spell you get call lightning which which is great so we definitely want that um because call lightning is going to be another really good thing to spend your concentration on although again Sorcerers just love concentrating on haste so much that you will usually want to do that but because the call Lightning Spell does synergize with storm sorcerer it's worth considering that as well here we're going to take a replace we're going to take Fireball as our spell although you could also take lightning bolt but Fireball is just so strong that I think you prefer it even with the lightning Synergy from Storm sorcerer and at this point I actually think you don't want to replace anything this spell list is pretty optimized and so having getting more top heavy at level three you would prefer not to do level seven sorcerer gets you access to fourth level spells fourth level spells are generally not as gamechanging as third level spells although there's a couple that are still really really strong um some that are really worth mentioning are wall of fire which single-handedly solves certain Encounters in the game um ice storm which creates a huge ice surface which uh we've talked about how good ice surfaces are before confusion which uh I have had the experience of it sometimes not working but many people have said that it works just fine for them so if it's working fine for you this is the best control spell in the game they only need to fail one save for three turns of three full turns of disable and that's extremely powerful um banishment is also very good against single strong enemies but overall I think that the best spell to pick here is going to be confusion assuming that it's working for you I also at this point recommend leaving again the rest of these uh although you could replace scorching Ray which has started to fall off in terms of damage for something higher level like let's say wall of fire if you happen to um want that wall of fire is really good in certain encounters it will single-handedly solve some encounters uh by itself in particular ones that take place in narrow corridors or have lots of low Health enemies coming towards you level eight we get our feet or level nine we get our feet which of course is going to be a Charisma increase if you went with 17 Charisma and took anti-th deal at this point you will have and didn't take actor you'll already have 20 Charisma and the best feat to take in that case is alert by far I've talked about how good winning initiative is ad nauseum in all of my videos so I'll spare you that discussion again but winning initiative is even better for Sorcerers than it is for other characters because your first action so often is buffing your team for our next level of spell at this point it's really about what you feel you have a Hole uh in your build for and actually something that I kind of like at this level is going back for fog Cloud which has so much utility that it's really worth having um although there's a few other options here by this point in the game you should have a pretty good feel for what you're missing if you need more control you should pick something like hypnotic pattern if you need more damage you should take something like ice storm or lightning bolt although you shouldn't need more damage at this point in the game um and if you need more utility fog cloud is pretty good sorcerer level 9 gets us access to fifth level spells and here is where spells do start to fall off a little bit um as you level these up you will often want to consider is it better to just go back for a lower level spell because so many of the strong Spells at these levels are concentration and sorcerer's concentration slot is basically locked into t T taste cuz it's just so powerful um you want to generally avoid taking too many concentration Spells at this level so something like Cloud kill has a lot less utility for you than it does for other characters similarly hold monster or insect plague um generally I will say wall of stone despite being concentration there are again some encounters that this solves all by itself but you're probably going to want to go back for something like ice storm uh at this level or one of the other util spells that we skipped over in favor of more damage another option is to take uh telekinesis again concentration but just a very cool spell that gives you a bunch of options in combat cone of cold is good damage but generally speaking just upcasting a fireball is going to be equivalent damage at this level uh slightly worse but it's much longer ranged and better although distant spell with cone of cold is pretty cool because it makes the cone Giant overall though I think making a giant ice surface and causing enemies to slip is going to be one of your better bets our canant trip selection at this point again you should really know what you want I'm going to take true strike to annoy everyone in the comments and our spell selection here you want either burst damage or just some utility spell that you are missing from your party um we're going to probably select wall of stone at this level because there are some encounters that it solves all by itself but generally you will be able to figure out at this point what you are missing and it's really going to depend on what your party has access to what you want to pick uh at this level we also get access to another metamagic and extended spell is definitely the best of these I think although um heighten spell is mildly interesting giving enemies disadvantage on saving throws is very good against certain control spells like hypnotic pattern or confusion so I think it's going to be a choice between these two if you've found a lot of gear that increases your spell DC then heightened spell is less useful um and remember that a lot of the effects that you really care about people failing saves against our concentration like hypnotic pattern or confusion or whatever um and so you are going to typically not be using those on a sorcerer because again you're going to be concentrating on haste so extended spell gives you the option to give you uh a little more utility there but generally your sorcery points are going to be spent on quickened spell and twin spell much more often than these so this selection doesn't matter as [Music] much finally we hit character level 12 gaining access to another subass feature giving you uh when you're hit by a melee attack you can push them away this is fairly relevant uh occasionally or sorry fairly irrelevant it occasionally comes up but by this level the damage return is not going to be uh extremely valuable to you um but the I mean you'll take every little bit you can get and of course we're really in this for access to six level spells chain lightning of course is excellent for a storm sorcerer it's a really good use of your action The Tempest in combination with chain lightning lets you create a giant field of electricity which is really fun so this is probably the spell that I would pick although there's a bunch of other options that are pretty cool too um you're going to want to avoid things that are concentration like Sunbeam or globe of invulnerability but uh ibite despite being concentration is really fun to use it just gives you a cc option that you can use every turn generally though I think you're going to want just chain lightning at this level and we don't need to replace any spells because I think our spell list is pretty optimal at this point so here's the final spell list plus the additional spells that you get from being a storm sorcerer which include call lightning just going to quickly show you some options for gear that are fun although one of the cool things about sorcerer is that you are very gear independent you will have at this point 11 sorcery points and remember you can spend sorcery Point spend spell slots to increase your sorcery points you're going to want the best uh heavy armor that you can have access to at this point and that combined with a shield is going to give you 20 base AC which plus the shield spell means you actually have pretty respectable AC at this level um a spell that is part a shield that's particularly good for you is the Sentinel Shield because uh I talked about just how good initiative bonuses are on this character and this is going to be the best Shield for spellcasters through most of the game um I also wanted to mention the Pyro quickness hat because you will be doing fire damage with spells pretty frequently and an additional bonus action can be an additional Quicken spell um although do be careful because when you take damage from the fire you may lose concentration on a spell because taking damage forces you to make a concentration check uh a typical round in combat is going to look like you starting with TN spell on and then you are going to cast haste on yourself and on an ally as something to concentrate on then you're going to Quicken a damaging spell effect like ice storm and then cast a normal spell effect additionally um or even just a can trip at that point giving you a ton of burst damage and actions in your opening round of combat you're effectively taking four turns here for the price of one turn by casting two spells with twin spell and then um an additional Quicken spell you can also twin your damaging spells although generally I think that's not a great use of your actions um in particular it doesn't work with or actually I don't know if I've tried it with chain lightning give me one second let's see if it works with chain lightning okay so you can twin chain lightning um so actually that's a great use of your your spell twinning a level six spell slot is of course incredible so uh that's going to double the damage output to an enormous margin uh giving you tremendous burst damage on the opening round of combat as well as massive utility uh you won't be using your Mobility from tempestuous flight in the opening round because you're going to be casting a Quicken spell but you're basically taking five turns for the price of one here so we can probably get away with not doing that all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the source and as always if you've enjoyed this video please do feel free to comment uh like the video and subscribe to my channel for more of this and other more Boulders Gate 3 builds and other strategy game content cheers my friends and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 63,981

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

Id: QVmE8bj9w0U

Length: 35min 11sec (2111 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2023