The BEST WIZARD in Baldur's Gate 3 - Gale Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today we're covering the best wizard in balers gate I'm of course using Gail as the example character since he comes as a wizard and this build is intended to allow him or a main character to be the team's Wizard and help out this build is also I would say viable but somewhat difficult for soloing tactician mode because Wizards get most of their power through versatility you will have to use some creative methods to overcome certain challenges in Solo tactician but because you're a full caster and wizards are so versatile there shouldn't be any problems that you encounter that you can't overcome the build does not change significantly between the team version of the build that's intended to be used with a group and with a full party and the solo version of the build but our spell selection will change somewhat I should also mention that this title is very slightly click baate because we aren't building the actual best wizard build Because the actual best wizard build in the game is one level of wizard followed by 11 levels of cleric because Wizards use their Aster level rather than their wizard level to determine what spells they can learn from Scrolls this that build still gets you level six wizard spells as well as level six cleric spells more HP of course and the very good class features of the cleric but that's based on something that's sort of arguably a glitch and that aot of players think is somewhat cheesy myself included so we're going to be building the best wizard that actually takes levels in the Wizard class so what do wizards get well Wizards get the best access to spells in the game this is because they can learn any spell that you find in a scroll that's on the wizard spell list including some that you can't learn from leveling up there's several unique spells you can discover in the game as well as ones that you can get from other classes spell lists that you will aren't able to normally learn but can learn from Scrolls if you happen to find them this means that you'll have the ability to solve any problem that you come across and because Wizards are so versatile and because the game allows you to swap your prepared Spells at any given moment uh as long as you're out of combat not just at the beginning of the day you should be able to change your current spell selection to face whatever need you might have whether that be to invisibly sneak by a group of enemies whether that be to open a lock whether that be to teleport behind a barrier or whether that be to fry a bunch of goblins with a giant Fireball Wizards they've got it all so let's take a look at what we need to do to make Gail or our main character into the perfect wizard so first off Gail is a human and human I think is actually pretty close to a top tier the top tier racial choice for a wizard because in this game they get Proficiency in light armor and shields Shield proficiency is incredibly strong for casters because because there's no penalty to having a shield in your offhand you can use a Quarter Staff as a versatile weapon and a shield in your offhand as a full weapon uh with full spell casting and everything and it just gets you your additional 2 AC while still allowing you to cast all of your spells no problem armor proficiencies are extremely good because of course you want to be wearing the heaviest armor you have available to increase your AC Wizards do get Mage Armor and I'll talk about that in a second but for the most part the Light Armor Plus Shield proficiency is going to be more AC as well as giving you the option for very powerful magical effects on Armor and shields so it's going to be better for you to generally have armor and shield proficiencies than the Wizard's default no armor proficiencies at all so human is very good I think the actual best choice and you'll have heard me say this a lot if you've watched any of my other guides is the half wood elf because they get both of those armor and shield proficiencies as well as the 35- Ft movement speed that wood elves get which is incredibly powerful positioning of course is key to a spellcaster since you need to stay out of melee and the additional movement speed allows you to do that very well so if you're a main character half wood elf is the best choice and I think human is actually quite close um I also like halfling because lucky is quite good and preventing preventing you from failing concentration checks on rolling a natural one can be very important as well so halfling gets the nod as probably the third best choice but I think the armor proficiencies are good that being said we will be getting heavy armor and shield proficiencies later in the build so the strongest endgame build is probably going to use full wood elf or halfling all right so Gail also starts with bad stats like all the origin characters they've given them all three odd numbers to start with so the first thing we need to do is fix that you never want odd-numbered stats in this game cuz they don't give you any bonuses so we're going to get our intelligence up to 16 that's very important and our constitution up to 16 almost every character in the game is going to want this split unless they need something particularly uh different and then we're going to get our dexterity up to 14 also extremely important and finally we have four points to play with we can put them in any of these typically you're going to want to put them in wisdom because wisdom is the most important saving throw but for a main character you might want them in Charisma to help you with conversation skills um and you might want them want two points or so in strength just to increase your jump distance jump distance is quite useful in this game and especially if you're planning to play solo carry weight is kind of annoying to play with very low carry weight so you may wish to move some points into strength as well but the 14 16 16 on decks Constitution and intelligence I think are mandatory for our skill selection the only important one I think and the sort of unusual one is that I actually really like having slight of hand on Gail this lets him serve as a lock picker and prevent you from needing another dedicated slight of hand character since he won't be making conversation checks or anything you actually don't need the intelligence the knowledge skills that he gets as badly um because those are mostly made during conversations so for your other skills selection you can pretty much take anything it doesn't really matter just whatever is most interesting to you but slate of hand and stealth are the two most powerful outof combat skills so for a Solo character I would take stealth and for Gail in a party I would take slight of hand then we get to choose the good stuff from Wizards it's the spells for a spell selection you'll notice that there's an array of damaging spells all across the top we only need one of these CU you'll just be using whatever the best damaging cantrip is every turn um unless there an enemy is particularly resistant to that damage type but the best damaging cantrip is Firebolt it's 60 foot range and has the best damaged ey of any of the cantrips so that's the one you're going to want to take and then for your other two can trips I suggest Mage hand and minor illusion these are both incredibly useful for getting for finding secrets on the map with maage hand distracting enemies because enemies will often attack it if they can see it and minor illusion be used to pull enemies into dangerous locations where you can then use a gust of wind spell or something to knock them into a pit if you want to or just pull enemies out of the way for your spell selection remember that we'll get access to all of these through Scrolls pretty much but which ones you want to learn and have prepared is really important you will absolutely need shield and I also highly recommend having magic Missile these are the two sort of most important spells for you to have access to Magic missiles uh inability to miss helps a lot in all sorts of combat situations and shield is the best or second best defensive option in the game it increases your AC by five which makes enemy attacks 25% less likely to hit you at all um so that's incredibly useful I also highly recommend grease and fog Cloud the utility on these spells can't be overstated you can use them to block doorways fog cloud has a whole bunch of uses but one of the best ones is to cast it on yourself and then stand in it to prevent ranged attackers from being able to attack you on your turn you step out of it fire a shot and then step back into it before ending your turn which stops ranged attackers from being able to see you gree of course lets you block doorways and enemies that fail the saving throw and fall prone lose their whole turn so that's incredibly powerful pushing enemies into grease Fields can often be very useful as well finally your last two spells matter a lot lot less one that's worth mentioning though is find familiar this has a ton of utility for scouting for giving your Rogues advantage and and stuff like that um it is kind of annoying to use so it's probably the most powerful option but you will have to kind of look deep into yourself and see whether you have the mental fortitude to go with that um and then I also highly recommend expeditious Retreat this is one of your best movement options in the early game and very useful to have some other options worth mentioning are Mage Armor there are cases where you want that over the shield and light armor but um the or over the light armor but the Mage Armor will usually not be increased AC in the early game it can be though so keep it keep in mind that that can be very useful um long Strider is a day long buff and those are always good it doesn't cost you a spell slot to use you just have to know it so if you get access to Long Strider you should make sure to use it on your whole party right away all right that's level one let's go to a level two wizard at level two we get to make the most important choice that Wizards will make and that is which subass we're going to be there are eight subclasses and they each have their own advantages and disadvantages I won't talk about all of them but I will mention three that I think are going to be the most likely ones that you're going to want one is evocation if you just want to blast things and you're a little lazy about where you put your other teammates evocation is good CU it lets you ignore you can drop a fireball right on top of an ally and they won't take any damage that's incredibly powerful if you're dropping Fireballs on your on your allies um but usually you should be able to avoid doing that just through good placement of spells and good placement of your characters so I think that evocation is typically overshadowed by the other two that I want to mention necromancy is very good not for the level one ability which is pretty or level two ability which is pretty bad but at level six you get additional Summons of zombies whenever you use animate dead and dayong summons are quite powerful especially for a Solo character because they can really help keep you alive avoid losing hit points as well as just give you an advantage going into a fight extra action economy is always really good anything that your enemies are focused on that isn't you is good so extra summons is quite powerful and finally the one that we're going to take is divination divination is a little bit complicated because how it works is at the beginning of every day you roll two d20s mark down those numbers and then any D20 roll that your character sees for the rest of the day you can use a reaction to replace one of those replace that roll with one of the numbers that you rolled so you can turn misses into hits you can turn hits into misses you can turn uh saving throw failures into successes and most importantly you can force if you have a low Port portent die you can force enemies to fail saving throws there's a lot of spells that you'll have access to that if an enemy fails a save like hold person or hypnotic pattern they're instantly out of the fight so the ability to guarantee that they'll faill that save is super important divination wizard I think is probably the most powerful in the game and it's also in my opinion the most fun to use because just saying no you can't do that is so much fun for our other two spells we'll just keep taking ones that we haven't had access to yet such as long Strider and let's say ice knife the surface the cold surface from Ice knife is still quite good for a prepared spells we're going to take oh that's a little weird that it's showing me all of the all the highle spells here but but for our prepared spells we definitely want shield and we definitely want magic missile we're going to want fog cloud and we're going to want um grease and then the last ones I think will base depend on the situation that you're in we're now going to level up again and we get to choose two more spells and remember that you'll have continued to get more of these spells just from finding Scrolls you always want to learn every spell you see it's really important to have the versatility wizard what Wizards get compared to other characters is versatility they will have less overall power but they will have more spells in a day and more spells known than any other character so you will be able to have the right spell even if it does a little less damage than a sorcerer's version of that spell or a tempest cleric version of that spell it will be the right one for the occasion I highly recommend learning flaming sphere enemies will Target this and it's incredibly valuable to have on the field also just good consist damage that doesn't take your turn and I like cloud of daggers a lot although many of these other spells can be quite useful as well web is worth mentioning as well at level four we get to upgrade our cantrip and so we're just going to take whichever one we think is most useful here again you don't really need a second damage canant trip so I recommend taking something with utility like light or friends if you happen to be a party face usually the wizard shouldn't be but sometimes it does happen and blade Ward can also be quite useful just because resistance is so powerful but um that will it does take an action so you will have limited options to use it I'm just going to make sure we're taking more spells and I definitely like to get gust of wind in there moving enemies has a lot of utility knock can be very useful outside of combat although I do recommend making this character also a lock picker for our feet we're going to take bonus intelligence although if you are doing this build solo you might consider taking alert another option to take um for the solo version of this character alert because it gives you basically you win initiative every time which is super important for a Solo character another important feat to consider on casters and this does require moving some stats around is the resilient feat you get to choose an ability and gain a stat in it but more importantly gain Proficiency in its saving throws so you'll gain one point of Constitution and that gives you Constitution save proficiency which makes you much less likely to lose concentration when you take damage that's incredibly important for this character since you'll want to be concentrating on a spell every round of combat losing concentration is really bad for you so gaining resilient Constitution can be worth a lot if you do this you'll want to move some stats around so that you have an odd number in Constitution cuz you're only gaining one point of constitution so you'll want to go to 15 con that being said for most of the time the correct Buy on this character is just going to be two more intelligence so we're going to do that very important to max out your casting stat on these characters because your casting stat is determines the save DC of your spells which means that enemies are more likely to fail against your spells the higher your intelligence is at level three we get access to some of the most powerful spells in the game Fireball is the gold standard for AOE damage just a really good spell animate dead has a lot of utility because you can use it to distract enemies move them around the battlefield the zombies can absorb hits haste if you are in a party is the best support spell in the game and often the best thing for your character to do is to spend their turns concentrating on haste on a damage dealer and finally counter spell is maybe the single most important spell in the game to have access to because shutting down en enemy counters enemy spells is so important counter spell is the best thing you can do with your reaction because it costs the enemy their entire turn and you should learn the mechanics of counter spell and kind of get a sense of what level enemies might be casting their Spells at so you can appropriately select the level of counter spell to use in return you want to counter with a spell slot of at least the level of that spell so if an enemy casts Fireball you can probably use a level three counter spell if they cast wall of fire you should cast counter spell at level four to guarantee that you counter the spell so we'll take counter spell and haste for our support build but for a another build you might want Fireball remember again that we are going to get access to all of these spells so which one we take on level up is less important but these are the ones you definitely want at this point also it's worth going over what our prepared spells should be um we're still going to want these four because they're super powerful but at level two you absolutely need to have Misty step this gives you a ton of mobility and that's super important highly recommend having flaming sphere equipped as well scorching Ray is really good just CU it's very consistent damage output and haste is like we mentioned the best support spell in the game and counter spell of course is very important as well you could also take down say grease for flaming sphere and I probably would say to do this for one more control spell from the level three spell slot and hypnotic pattern is the best of these it only requires the enemies to fail one save they don't get a save on subsequent turns unlike many other control spells um and you can use your portent dice to guarantee an enemy goes out of the game when you hit them with hypnotic pattern do remember that it takes concentration though so you're are limited to Casting that you can't have this and haste or this and flaming sphere up at the same time at this point we're at an interesting Crossroads we only need to get to wizard level 11 to hit six level spells which means that we probably are going to want a onlevel dip in another class when we take that dip is pretty interesting for this character at level six we get our subass feature which is an extra portent die for divination Wizards strong but not incredibly strong so having just gotten access to level three spells I think that the best place to put our one Lev dip is starting at level five going to level six you will often if you especially if you're solo and if you don't think this is cheating which it sort of is want to Respec on odd levels to remove your cleric dip to spoilers we're going cleric to get access to the next level up of wizard spells but remember that you can still learn that level of wizard spells from Scrolls so the one level of cleric doesn't slow your spell progression the way it would for another casting character if we had six levels of sorcerer or five levels of sorcerer one level of cleric sorry six levels of sorcerer one level of cleric we'd only be able to cast level three sorcerer spells but with wizard we can still cast level four wizard spells so we're going to take a level of cleric here you could move this level significantly earlier for that reason but assuming that you want to keep this build relatively pure in Wizard um I like getting the five levels of wizard it just feels more wizardy but it is probably more optimal to take this cleric dip on level one or level two the reason for this is that the cleric domains give you access to armor proficiencies as well as a bunch of really powerful class features so we want to take one of life Fe Tempest or War domain because those all give you access to Heavy Armor Tempest and War give you access to Marshall weapons Which is less important but the other two are quite useful nature domain giving you Druid canant trips is not particularly valuable and getting Proficiency in animal handling nature or survival basically doesn't matter for most characters so I think that the best of these is the life domain getting bless means that you have yet another one of the best support spells in the game available and getting access to uh cure wounds and more importantly healing word with the bonus healing from the life domain cleric ability is super powerful you also get uh single utility spell don't take anything that requires the enemies to make a save DC CU we're not going to have the wisdom to do that but you can take something like healing word Sanctuary is incredibly powerful um when used in the right situations so I would take that and just use that situationally and then you also have a little bit of healing and the Very powerful bless for your can trips you'll take guidance and resistance getting those is incredibly good and then just whatever for your third one and then we're going to go back to wizard here we'll just take any spells and we get access to our level six wizard feature giving us three portant dice which is quite useful and the ability to recover them occasionally just getting more dice means a higher chance of having a really good number like a one or a 20 come up extremes are better than middle numbers so also when you're using the portent dice something to keep in mind is the game only gives you the prompt if it would change the result so if an enemy attacks you and hits and it prompts you to use a portent die that is it's saying you can change this hit to a miss and if it lets you do that with like a 10 or 11 do it because that the the 10 is not super valuable if it lets you do it with a one think about it cuz the one might be more important on a different spell on a different effect here we are going to get access to higher level spells notice that we didn't get to choose level four spells on level up last time but we could at wizard 6 cleric 1 learn these level four spells from Scrolls so which spells you choose is going to be somewhat dependent on what Scrolls you've already found and learned condra minor Elemental has a lot of utility so I like having that one available and then uh banishment is quite good ice storm is good the most important is wall of fire which my gaale here already knows but it's very very powerful and will solve a lot of encounters all on its own evard's black tentacles is also quite strong because it prevents enemies from moving and taking actions which is super powerful a little weird showing these level UPS because it's only offering me to learn the Spells I haven't taught him from a scroll so we're having to to switch to the prepared Spell section to see what we're actually getting here of course we're going to continue to boost our intelligence although at this point you'll have a better sense of whether you want to get resilient in Constitution or whether you want to get alert um warcaster is good because it gives you advantage on saving throws for concentration but resilience I think is typically better because it also gives you the point of Constitution which lets you improve your attributes elsewhere like we could have 16 decks in and 16 in con with resilient and it's about the same bonus warcaster is typically a slightly higher bonus to your concentration checks but overall it's better to boost your all of your attributes as well but we're just going to get to 20 intelligence [Music] here continue to learn more spells as we level up Cloud kill I think is a pretty good level five spell so I would try to have that prepared as well um that will give you quite a lot of options because it does tons of damage and it forces enemies to move you can also take your action to move at 10 ft which is not great but useful sometimes cuz enemies will often stop just slightly out of your spells so this is a really good damaging option we'll continue to take whatever can trip we happen to want doesn't really matter at this point and finally we are going to level up and get access to level six spells level six spells carry with them a bunch of options create uh mummies is really powerful especially if you went The Necromancer route um disintegrate because enemies will often fail the save thanks to your if you are a divver means that you are going to be doing a ton of damage to them another really important spell to have access to is globe of invulnerability this can be a ton of utility in various fights and I really like having access to this spell because it often the AI just doesn't know what to do about it so you can really make them give them problems and then finally Autos irresistible dance if you can force an enemy to fail the save with your divver spell just takes an enemy instantly out of the fight super powerful to do that um so irresistible dance is one of the best spells to have on a divination wizard especially because any enemy that fails the spell will lose the fight immediately so there you have it that is my pick for the best Wizard and sort of why we're taking each spell and what you can do with them I will also mention very quickly two items that are particularly interesting for this character and those are the gloves of dexterity which you get late in act one or early in act two depending on how you count it um this will allow you to reduce your dexterity to eight and still have 18 dexterity gives you a ton of extra AC when using light or medium armor and or no armor of course with Mage Armor as well as helping you win initiative those are super valuable and the bracers of Defense which you get earlier and can often make your make the difference between wanting to wear sort of medium quality light armor like this 13 armor that the Mage Armor Plus the bracers of defense will often be more AC so you should keep an eye out for whether you are gaining more AC this way or the other way you can also with this build if you want more power move the cleric level to level two or level one even um that will get you heavy armor earlier as well as all of the cleric boosts while still giving you all the wizard goodies because of how wizard works but I really wanted to Showcase a build that kind of focused on Wizard and used it as the primary feature of the build and of course if you don't want to do that there are lots of options for taking things like five levels in eldrich Knight to gain action Surge and so on but those will be builds that will show up in the future all right my friends thanks so much for watching and if there's a build that you'd like to see me cover in future I'm very open to requests so do let me know and of course you can like the video leave a comment for the algorithm because that helps a ton with the algorithm and I appreciate getting those And subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content cheers my friends and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 41,646

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

Id: bCypZ8vPf1s

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023