The BEST WILD SHAPE DRUID in BG3 - Lore Friendly Halsin Build Guide

[Music] 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 build and most lore friendly build for playing houseen on tactician when I started doing these build guides I didn't really have a long-term plan I was just putting up builds that I thought were cool but one thing that's really resonated with people is these lore friendly builds so I'm going to do one for every companion as well as a basic build guide for every single class so you can look forward to that in the future just kind of wanted to let you know what the plan is as we go I'll also of course still put up other cool builds like the owl bear jumping build or the fart Druid build or the tank wizard build that have been really fun ones to put together and that I think are really strong but for now we are going to focus on hson and building him as the character he was meant to be in the game when we're looking at Hon's lore we have to kind of think about what we know about him he's an arch Druid and he's a shape shifter um he's lived a very long life so we can probably justify him having learned a few other things over the course of his life than just Druid levels but for the most part we know that he is as druy as they come because he's a shape shifter when we first meet him he's in bare form and then later on uh when we meet him again he's he's in bare form again um we know that he's going to spend most of his time shape shifted into various animal forms he also has a special wildshape form that only he can use so in my opinion the only appropriate Druid subclass for him is circle of the Moon Druid we're going to try to maximize his shape-shifting abilities while still making him a viable character Druids are an interesting class for wild shape because while wild shape in Boulders Gate 3 tends not to be incredibly strong they do have a couple neat things going for them one they're very very tanky because each time you wild shape into a wild shaped form you get all the HP of that form in addition to your your base Druid HP so when they knock you out reduce you to zero Health you just get knocked back into your Druid form and still have all your HP left that means you basically every short rest have three full health bars that you can go through um before you are in danger of dying another thing is that you are you have the distinction of being the only class in the game other than fighter that gets to make three attacks with a single action and you actually get to do it one level earlier than Fighters do there's the pack to the blade warlock with a multiclass can get three attacks at level 10 also but Druids are the only class that just by taking 10 levels of that class you to make three attacks with a single action that means they're one of the best characters to wear haste because actions are so valuable on them and it also means that we really want to maximize the uh attacks that we're doing with our character because we are going to be able to attack more frequently the various special forms that you get from Moon Druid also provide a ton of utility so we are going to be able to make use of H's utility there as well let's get into the build guide and of course the first thing that we have to do as always is fix these stats I will say that housin starting stats are better than most starting stats the the Druid stats are much closer to correct than almost every other starting stat in the game but in order to squeeze out some optimization from uh this build we can actually do a pretty weird stat spread that you usually won't see me do the advantage that Druids have is that when they're going to spend all of their time in Wild shape form they replace all of their physical stats with the wild shape with the stats of that wild shape form so normally we could consider just taking mental stats and using our wild shape forms to provide physical stats that being said the mental stats for Druid do not add much because you are going to have High wisdom always and intelligence and Charisma are not important saving throws to raise in particular and so you already have the best mental stat because it's your casting stat we can actually gain quite a bit of benefit by going the kind of weird stat spread of 17 of 15 16 8 178 or sorry 8516 8178 the reason for this is that we will never use our strength on our basic character but we will use dexterity and our health bar of course because dexterity lets us win initiative and also not die before combat starts because we'll have good AC your Druid will always be in medium armor which means that you want at least plus two dexterity to maximize your AC even if you're not uh for when you're not in Wild shaped form and you want as much health as you can to maximize the usage of your three health bars so that you don't die obviously every character wants I Constitution but it's especially important for Druids because we'll also be concentrating on spells all the time though when you're in Wild shaped form you'll use your wild shapes Constitution to Ru your conve but it's still really important because it determines the hit points of your character obviously when we want to maximize wisdom to maximize our save DC and also for another reason that you'll see down the line and this way we can with our first ASI increase our wisdom to 18 and our dexterity to 16 while dumping three stats that don't matter for this character for our skills uh for hon he already starts with the most important skills for a druid you have um perception and survival unlocked obviously you're just going to want wisdom skills because that's the stat that is highest for you uh if you are not playing as hon and using this build for another Druid you might want to consider because we are going to get pretty good um dexterity later on in the build you could consider making them your slight of hand user and then they can pick locks although though because you are going to spend a lot of your time out of combat wild shaped as well and you can't pick locks when you're wild shaped you don't want to waste wild shape charges by doing outof combat utility stuff you just want to stay in Wild shape unless you have a plan to cast a spell at the beginning of combat something that I should also mention is that the play pattern for Druids especially Moon droids involves casting a lot of concentration spells because you can maintain concentration on those spells while you are wild shaped and that's of course incredibly powerful cuz it lets you start the combat with a very strong effect a concentration spell which is usually one of the most powerful things you can be doing and then also turn into a powerful melee combatant so you get to be basically both a full spell cter and a tank and melee combatant for our spell selection at level one we will almost always be wild shaped so I recommend against taking shalele we're going to want to take something like guidance for out of combat utility and then you either want Thorn whip because it's kind of cool utility Thorn whip it's one of the few abilities that let you reposition enemies or just a a normal attack like produce Flame or poison spray um produce flame is probably better just because it lets you throw this a little further but again you're not going to be fighting in your human form or wood elf form that often so it doesn't particularly matter hson also has the advantage of being the best starting race for Druids it wood El get bonus movement speed um and that's more or less the only thing that's going to matter because again you're going to use the movement speed of your wild shaped form more frequently but wood elf has 5T more of movement than some wild shaped forms like Bears only move 30 ft so this lets you get a little extra movement before you wild shape if you're a Wood Elf all right so that's the starting build let's keep on go in of course we are selecting the circle of the Moon subass and this really enhances the play pattern of your character so now obviously we have wild shapes we've got our main combo online or our main the main thing that our character does online which is turn into an animal and fight you also have some outof combat utility wild shapes like turning into a cat um though I generally think that these are not incredibly useful the best one starting at level two uh is going to be the bear wild shape because it's just very good combat potential although wolf having the ability to um to trip is pretty useful as well or no sorry wolves don't have the ability to trip I I forget which one I'm thinking of but uh wolves having the ability to distract uh can be useful as well the spider web can come up sometimes but generally I think you're just going to want to turn into a bear and hit hit stuff at this level that's going to be your most powerful ability overall also remember that hon has a special bear wild shaped form that's better than every other bear he can turn into a Cave Bear as opposed to a polar bear and just get a little bit more power out of that for our prepared spell list you want at least one concentration spell that you're going to start off most combats with in this case I think you have two options between or three options between entangle fog cloud and fairy fire and honestly I like to just prepare all of these and choose which one I'm going to concentrate on based on the combat um and then for your other options every character that has access to it should take healing word and if you don't have it elsewhere in your party you will definitely want long Strider long Strider stays on your wild shaped form after you cast it and it's a ritual so it costs no resources to cast long Strider meaning that you just get 10 ft of extra movement speed on your wild shape forms which is incredibly powerful at level two we get to add a bunch of cool concentration spells also to our repertoire although there's a couple that are worth mentioning as not working particularly well with Druid so anything that gives you a reaction or a a bonus action or an additional action you can't use in Wild shape form so for example moon beam you can concentrate on wild concentrate on it in Wild shape but you can't use the action to move it this is different from how this works in tabletop I assume there was some kind of coding restriction that prevented them from doing from allowing you to do this because it is a pretty significant Nerf to the power of Druid concentrating on moon beam while in Wild shaped form was like the basic play pattern for tabletop Druids so not being able to do that in Boulders Gate 3 does make them a little bit weaker than their tabletop counterparts um but that being said you still get access to a bunch of great concentration spells that are really powerful to have up hold person is of course excellent you can cast that and then bonus action wild shape in the opening turn and I didn't mention this when we clashed into Moon Druid but one thing that mid gets is the bonus action wild shape meaning that your opening turn of combat can be casting a spell that you're going to concentrate on and then also turning into your wild shape form which is much better action economy than the other two Droid subclasses so you get to do two powerful actions in the first turn of combat and then a lot of wild shaped forms also just have good bonus actions later on so unlike the other Druid forms you're going to be maximizing your bonus actions as well as your actions uh the other Druid sub classes um I say this a lot but every character in Dungeons and Dragons have has five resources that they can use every turn in combat your action your bonus action your reaction your concentration and your movement Druids get to use their actions extremely well by casting spells or attacking with their wild shape forms they get to concentrate on a spell every turn of combat Moon Druids get to bonus action wild shape which is extremely powerful the one thing that you don't have a great use for on Druid and that you actually cannot get a good use for is your reaction and the reason for that is that wild shape forms can't take most reactions in the game and so you will fall behind in terms of action economy there uh on the other hand you get excellent movement options so your use of your movement resource every turn of combat is actually stronger than most other characters uh that being said at level two the spells that we're usually going to want to have prepared I like flaming sphere you can concentrate on this and it will do a lot of work for you and hold person is particularly good as well for this character um just because it's something that you can concentrate on and then you also benefit very strongly from the critical hits if if the opponent fails their saves you can then hit them in your subsequent turn of combat and gain Critical Hits most casters rely on allies to really gain the ma maximum benefit from hold person but because you are also a powerful melee attacker if you're holding on to if you're holding an enemy paralyzed and then getting Critical Hits yourself that's going to be a lot of bonus damage so it's very much worth having that prepared some other good utility options that are worth having are you can cast um bark skin but you'll lose concentration on it eventually just CU you're going to take a lot of hits most wild shaped forms are not good at not taking hits so you're going to take damage on this character and you'll lose concentration we also as a druid do not get con uh con saave proficiency which means that our concentration checks are not going to be amazing um but overall you get to uh so I would generally avoid bark skin uh but Spike growth is always really good having enemy movement speed and dealing damage to them and the 20ft radius makes it an enormous field is incredibly strong a lot of wild shapes can also jump most notably the owl bear but also the uh Dilophosaurus has a pounce ability when you get that later on which means that you can reposition around your own Fields very more easily than most enemies can while still doing damage level four we get to improve our abilities and so now we have 16 dexterity and 18 wisdom and again we took this split just to win initiative because of course if you're concentrating on a powerful control spell you want to win initiative so this is the the thing that will help you most in combat you could also go with 14 decks and more Charisma if you're a main character uh that's a totally viable pick as well because you then you would want dialogue skills but for hon specifically I think he's unlikely to be doing a lot of your dialogue so you generally speaking are going to want to just maximize his combat potential also starting at level four you get access to the Deep Ro and dire Raven wild shaped forms dire Raven has some utility just for moving around um but mostly for combat you're still just going to be going with bare form at this level for other can trip selection you just take whichever one you haven't picked although resistance can also be useful it's a concentration spell but it does come up sometimes in dialogue where you have to make a saving throw during dialogue um there are certain certain times when you have to do that like if someone is trying to read your mind or something and having a character with resistance can help with that Dre level five we get uh our second attack in Wild shape as well as third level spells and and this is where things get pretty exciting normally again and I should I should mention this as well uh Druids would be concentrating on call lightning but you can't use the subsequent casts of call lightning while wild shaped in Boulders Gate 3 uh even though you can in tabletop so you want to avoid call lightning um instead your concentration spell options at this level are plant growth uh sorry not that's not concentration but are uh sleet storm and protection from energy both of which are incredibly useful I also highly recommend taking plant growth on every character that has access to it it is an incredibly strong spell the quartering enemy movement speed means that you can prevent enemies from getting to you or from getting away from you since remember you're a powerful Melee character um you also have a bunch of fun options if you took uh produce flame as a cantrip you can set the plant growth or are using um flaming spheres you can set the plant growth field on fire to trap enemies in a field of fire um giving you a bunch of extra utility with sort of surface options generally speaking setting a fire on surface is not a great use of your time it's just not very high damage but there are times when it can come up especially if the area is full of grease or has explosive barrels or whatever around there are times when you'll want to be able to light those up and just fill the whole room with explosions or fire Druid level six we get access to our owl bear form and also magical attacks which is extremely important in this game there are a lot of enemies that have resistance or immunity to non-magical damage so Primal strike actually comes up a lot more than you might think um basically how this works is that your wild shape attacks count as magical for bypassing things like Stone skin or immunity to non-magical damage like the Arcane eyes have um that are floating around a lot of areas in this game and so this feature actually comes up quite frequently most importantly though you get access to Owl bear form which is going to be your best combat form um although the invisibility of the panther also is quite useful as well at this point we have a choice you can either take a dip into another class because we only need to get to 11 levels of Druid to get six LEL spells or we can continue down the path of Druid you definitely want to reach at least level six before you take your one Lev dip and um I will tend to think that you should take your dip as your last level and just continue down the Druid path as far as it goes because you want to get to level 10 as soon as possible to unlock your better wild shape forms as well as your triple attack um but this is one point where you could if you wanted to take a take a dip into the other class that we will be taking spoilers for later down the build I'm not going to do that though because uh I don't recommend it as the build path but just wanted to mention it as an alternative if you like that more level four spells give you actually a lot of very cool stuff for this character for one thing you get conjure Woodland being which itself conjures another um another whole unit so it it will summon a woodw the ability to spend a level four spell on just having two extra units is incredible and one of the best recommendations for having a druid in your party these guys are really powerful they're actually quite good fighters on into the late game both of them and just having two extra units for the cost of one spell is really good there's so much you can do with extra units you can reposition enemies by drawing them in to attack them you can do all sorts of uh flanking for your r R just the ability to have more actions in round is incredible um they can do a lot of other utility stuff like running around and these ones even come with some great spells Woodland the Woodland be comes with entangle which is actually at this level still an extremely powerful control effect and that will remain relevant throughout the game being able to make fields that CC enemies crowd control enemies is one of the most powerful things you can do and you just get these guys all day alongside you so this is really great use of level four spells another great use of level four spell is wall of Fire by itself this is going to solve a lot of encounters and uh there there are several fights in especially act two that just casting wall of fire will instantly end the fight in your favor um in particular one fight that houseon can't actually participate in because he's involved in it elsewhere for story reasons but if you have a wall of fire caster for that fight you just just instantly win it and then later on in act two there's a bunch of them um polymorph is also a very good control spell although I think generally speaking you will actually prefer hold person on this build even though hold person allows two saves you pretty much just want to be hitting stuff that you're controlling but polymorph is also very good um confusion I have found to be somewhat bugged some of the time because enemies will sometimes just act normally but I've heard reports I mentioned this in my in my Bard uh build act normally even more than they're supposed to right they're supposed to have a one in4 chance of taking a normal turn and my experience with confusion has been that enemies just act normally 100% of the time but if it's working in your game this is one of the best control spells out there it's a huge AOE and it can take a whole group of enemies out of the fight so while I haven't myself been able to make this work do try it and if it's working in your game that's incredible because it's one of the best control spells you can have um and you can concentrate on it while in Wild shape and just bopping these enemies who are going to be wasting their turns hitting each other or just skipping their turns level four is just an excellent spell level for Druids overall the summons confusion and Wall of fire are kind of the uh the highlights polymorph as well is very good freedom of movement also comes up pretty frequently so my advice is you're going to want to swap out a bunch of your prepared spells you'll always want conjure Woodland be you'll probably want uh confusion and polymorph you'll probably want wall of fire definitely experiment with these spells because there are so many that are so good at level four Dre level eight we get to maximize our wisdom which is obviously really good and this character other than Fighters gets to reach its maximum ability as soon as possible um as in you get to take two Feats as early as you can in this game unless you're a fighter which means that we get to max out our wisdom score as soon as we can so we'll have very good spell DCS for this level as well as a bunch of of prepared spells which of course is great we want lots of options because you're going to want to choose which spell you're concentrating on based on the fight so even though this prepared spell list is very heavy on Con ation spells I think that that's actually right because you usually won't want to cast one shot spells in a fight you're going to want to cast a concentration spell and then switch to Wild shape form in the opening turn of combat and then hold concentration on that spell while you beat things down as a bear or as a tiger also at level eight you get the saber-tooth tiger which is going to replace your your combat wild shape form as the best combat wild shape form uh shred armor is actually very powerful reduces enemy AC the saber-tooth tiger gets multiple attack tiger gets multiple attacks and can also knock enemies prone something that's not listed in the tool tip here is that it has the ability to knock enemies prone gaining advantage on hits against them it also regenerates hit points every turn meaning that your three health bars are going to last even longer if you're wild shaped into a sabertooth spell level five isn't as as strong for you as spell level four was but does still have some hits wall of stone has a ton of utility for a lot of fights you can just lock whole groups of enemies off from your fight and take the fight in sort of two halves obviously reducing the number of enemies you have to face by half is incredibly strong so wall of stone is a very good spell um other than that insect plague is okay the difficult terrain is generally worse than plant growth because it's half movement instead of one quarter movement so enemies will usually be able to to leave uh the field here you can also just take conjure Elemental and have yet another giant summon and just be a character that runs around with tons of summons following you which is very powerful as well my pick is probably going to be condra Elemental and Wall of stone here as your two options wall of stone will again much like wall of fire just solve certain encounters and condra Elementals just a great dayong buff at level 10 you get what we're really here for all the special wild shaped forms the different meridon forms they cost two wild shaped charges to use so generally speaking I think you're actually better off most of the time wild shaping into a Dilophosaurus or an owl bear or a saber too because spending two wild shaped charges on these maradon forms you don't actually get that much stronger although they have a bunch of utility spells that are particularly useful um the water meridon in particular can set up a lot of uh water surfaces they make everything wet which can be very useful if you have a wild uh a lightning Caster in your party because enemies that are wet are vulnerable to lightning and cold damage so you can do double damage to them um or sorry are V vulnerable to lightning damage so you can do double damage to them um the generally the best one of these I think is going to be the fire meridon in terms of combat power but the water meridon has more utility overall I highly suggest experimenting with all four of these wild shaped forms but usually I think you're going to want to be just a Dilophosaurus the ranged attack on a wild shaped form is quite useful the pounce that can knock enemies prone is very very good and its attacks are just very strong the Sabertooth also is still just very good because the knocking enemies prone shredding their armor and then having regeneration is very powerful as well for Ouran trip selection we'll probably just take produce flame it has the most utility at this point now you've gotten all the best things that Druids offer but there is I think Druids are one of the classes that has one of the better level six spell selections um both because wall of thorns is actually very good that it entangles enemies and then does deal damage to them every turn they stay in the wall of thorns and entangle keeps them there so it's one of the the wall spells that has sort of double utility by entangling them and then dealing tons of damage to them you can also a lot of your wild shaped forms are good at pushing so you can push enemies back into them using your sometimes also the jump ability ities that knock enemies prone if they're on the edge of the wall will reposition them into the wall just because of sort of buggy physics in the game basically but enemies enemy AI will often step just outside of a damaging field and then if you jump on them and knock them prone it can knock them back into that field even without a pushing effect which is kind of a cool Synergy between your characters heroes Feast is actually really worth mentioning as a spell because there are some encounters in the game that just being immune to fear solves entirely and one thing that Druids really excel at is just kind of solving encounters um and then Sunbeam is very good you can't recast it but if you are for whatever reason out of wild shape forms but still have a level six spell slot this is going to be your best bet for doing damage for our last level we have a choice between three different possibilities Choice number one I think is the easiest one and that's to just take another level of Druid and take alert alert is the in a vacuum the best feat in the game winning initiative is incredibly powerful um for obvious reasons you can concentrate on a spell and especially because many of your Druid spells are things like confusion wall of thorns or wall of fire that you want to cast before the com before the enemies have had a turn because it either controls them or does damage at the start of their turn um winning initiative is incredibly strong and that's why we spend so much effort on dexterity in this build um another option is to take Tavern brawler so Tavern brawler will give you an odd number of points so you'll want if you do this to Respec and probably get uh take two points out of constitution go to 15 Constitution and then buff it back up and then you can put two more points into intelligence or Charisma whichever ever one you think you need more of um but the reason that Tavern brawler is so powerful is that the attacks of your wild shaped forms sort of count as unarmed attacks how Tavern brawler works is it doubles your strength modifier for unarmed attacks and uh improvised or thrown weapons meaning that it does double to hit and double damage on wild shaped forms it works somewhat differently it doubles your to hit chance from strength but not your damage chance so that's still incredibly it doesn't uh but not your damage that's still incredibly strong doubling your to hit chance from strength one of the things that wild shaped forms really suffer from is just having low hit chances on their attacks and so if you are finding that you are missing attacks a lot just taking Tavern taking the 12th level of Druid and taking Tavern brawler is probably the most powerful option here and this is what I will most likely recommend that hon does um so this is this is going to be the the best bet for your build the other third option if you're would rather focus on being tanky than on dealing damage is to take a level of Monk the reason for this is that monks get the unarmored defense class feature which lets you use your wisdom modifier instead of your dexterity or in addition to your dexterity to calculate your armor class since we have 20 wisdom that means we will have plus five Armor class now this interacts a little weirdly with how Wild shapes work and I'm just going to take this level even though I recommend taking Tavern brawler instead um I'm going to take this level just to show you how that functions in game cuz it's worth just knowing how this works so as long as we are not wearing armor before we enter wild shape we get to add our AC our wisdom to our AC which gives us very good AC out of combat because we have have three decks and five wisdom so we'll have excellent outof combat AC then when we wild shape say We'll turn into a bear here actually this might have been a bad one to demo with but I I'll show you the other way in a second we you can see that we are adding five wisdom to our Armor class so we have multiplied this Bear's AC by one and a half times however this has a weird interaction with some of the other wild shaped forms that have higher base ACS so if we were to turn into come on um let's say a saber-tooth tiger the saber-tooth tiger has 12 base AC and a pointed from dexterity so you would think that we would be getting 18 AC on this but you'll notice that we're only getting 16 the reason is that the unarmored defense bonus replac is natural AC from the uh wild shaped form so it's not going to give you plus five AC on every wild shaped form only on the bear or anything else with 10 base AC is it going to do that but it's still going to be a pretty solid boost to your AC on every wild shape form you can see here we're getting two higher or three higher than we would otherwise on the saber-tooth tiger and three higher means we are 15% less likely to get hit in strong and will keep you in Wild shape form and also keep your concentration spells up much longer um I think you get plus one on most of the meridon that have higher base AC so that's another reason to kind of avoid those similarly the dilophosaurus I think has 15 base AC which goes up to 16 um with the wild shape form but generally speaking this is going to boost your AC by somewhere between one and three points in all of your wild shaped forms if you take a level of Monk which is incredibly strong so I think the three options for hon to finish off the build are either doubling your strength bonus to hit chance which is obviously really good on this Sabertooth for example that's a plus4 to hit on every one of your attacks which as you can see is going to be really important because our base attacks uh do not have a great to hit chance so plus4 here is going to be to hit is going to take this 30% to 50% and so that's why I recommend Tavern Brawlers on against an enemy with pretty high AC cuz obviously all the builds that I have my characters as have high AC but it would take this 50% to 70% it takes this 90% up to 95% and so on um alternatively if you prefer to be a little tankier you can take a level of Monk all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at a solid and lore friendly build for hon the arch Druid and as always if you've enjoyed this video do please feel free to leave a comment uh like the video both of those things help a ton with the algorithm and you can subscribe to my channel for more lore friendly character builds more basic builds for every character class and more strategy game content cheers my friends and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 29,318

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

Id: Pj5rhmjEU4o

Length: 35min 13sec (2113 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2023