The CONSISTENT KILLER - BG3 Honour Mode Thrower Build Guide - Lae'zel / Fighter

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today I'm covering one of my favorite classes and one of the best damage dealers for Honor mode the throne weapon fighter which is one of the best ways to deal damage with with a marshall character in this game um and a really fun character to play now you might be asking hey if you think it's one of your favorite classes why haven't you done a guide for it up until now and the answer is that up until honor mode released the throne weapon attacks in Boulders Gate 3 were incredibly bugged in fact they still are in tactician and Below they haven't fixed all of the the bugs with them and they were bugged in such a way that was causing their attacks to do hundreds or even thousands of damage more than they should have if you're interested in more about that you can Google damage Rider Source uh that's the name of the effect that people were using to abuse that bug though to be honest if you want to abuse the bug to deal 10,000 damage you can also just install a mod that makes you invincible or download cheat engine or whatever you'll probably save a lot of time I find it pretty boring to optimize that kind of bug to the point where the game becomes completely trivial to play and so I was waiting for them to fix these bugs in order to make a throne weapon build they have which I'm really excited about and so now we can build this character for Honor mode and play it the way it was intended to be played this is an extremely powerful character nonetheless even of course without the bugs and so it's really exciting to be able to jump in and actually play it the way it's supposed to work there's really two ways that you can build a throne weapon character one is with fighter and one is with Barbarian I'll be doing builds for both of them but we're covering fighter first because I think overall it's a little more versatile and it gives you a few more options um in particular because we use eldrich Knight for this build you can use any Throne weapon not just ones with the returning tag and have it return to your hands letting you turn any weapon you find that's good for throwing characters into your favorite weapon this gives you a lot more options as to what weapon to use and makes the character I think a little more fun to play than the Barbarian version all right let's get right into it and start building the throne weapon fighter right off the bat actually something that's pretty interesting about lel's starting stat spread and of course we're using lasel here because she's the fighter of the party but if you want to build this for a main character um the best race is is as it almost always is wood elfelf or half wood elf for the bonus movement speed halfling to reroll ones gnomes to reroll saving throws or dgar to be invisible any of the the top tier races are just going to work very well for this character it's pretty independent because you get all of your proficiencies from fighter anyways um one thing that we'll notice right off the bat here is that lel's starting stat spread is actually very very close to the optimal stat stat spread for a throne weapon character which makes me think hey maybe she's intended to be a throwing weapon user right away we're going to fix these odd numbers though so let's do that and we can drop intelligence down to eight um take 14 dexterity and 10 wisdom and 16 Constitution we only need eight intelligence even though we're going to be an eldrich Knight because the number of spells you can uh you're we are never going to use spell DC effects on l Knight and the number of spells that you can cast as an eldrich Knight isn't affected by your intelligence so we can we can take eight intelligence and still gain all of the benefits of being an eldrich Knight which are in this case actually quite plentiful for our fighting style we're going to use defense rather than the default great weapon fighting the reason for this is that when you throw a weapon it counts as being held in one hand even if you were holding it in two hands ahead of time you can actually use this to gain the dueling damage if you hold a weapon in each hand a a one-handed weapon in each hand but this will prevent you from using a versatile weapon as your um as your throne weapon because that wouldn't get the dueling damage and I think overall the plus one AC is going to be better uh the throwing weapon character is also a great candidate because you can carry a shield for the protection fighting style you actually gain quite a lot of benefit from taking this as well because you're going to be standing back with your backline often since you are functionally arranged character so this lets your tough fighter also help their allies so if you are playing in a party and want a little more protection for your party you can take protection and um you know you should always use protection it's very important um but overall as just a a default Choice defense is going to be the most powerful all right let's level this character up and get to the point where we get to throw weapons at fighter level two there's no particular choices that we need to make we get action surge which allows us to throw our weapon twice in one turn um throwing a weapon uses an attack action so it's based on the number of attacks that you can make in an action if you have two attacks in an action then you can throw your weapon twice and if you then action surge you can throw it four times on tactician or below you can then use elixir of blood lust or haste from an ally to throw the weapon even more times um and you can still do that on honor mode but it won't benefit from extra attack So currently at level two we get two thrown weapon attacks in a row though at this point we don't yet have a returning weapon so you're probably best off just making melee attacks until level three when we get to choose eldrich Knight the reason we want to be an eldrich Knight of course is that we get access to the weapon bond weapon bond lets you choose a weapon and ritually bind it in your uh it's whichever weapon you're holding and ritually bind it to you which means that it will come back to your hand when you throw it this lets you take any weapon with the thrown weapon property and turn it into a returning weapon letting you use uh any weapons like a hand ax or a dagger or just anything you find but especially the most powerful weapons that you're going to find throughout your your run at their maximal effectiveness and multiple times in a turn because they'll come back to your hand when you throw them you also get some cantrips and we're going to take blade Ward here blade Ward is actually really good for Fighters because you have a pretty high HP pool um typically a bad use of Your Action in combat but one that can uh can definitely help out if you need to tank for a bit and one of of the great things about being a throne weapon character is you can also just mix it up in melee no problem I mean we're still just a fully functional fighter with a weapon and shield so we can get into melee cast blade water on ourselves and distract the enemies for several turns if we need to and then for our second cantrip I'm going to select minor illusion you can use this to group enemies move them into dangerous locations this one's always powerful and versatile useful to have another one that you could take is Ray of frost um which would allow you to freeze puddles you will never be able to cast this on an enemy but the ability to just freeze wet surfaces is often very powerful and this gives you that sort of for free but I think overall you're going to get more use out of minor illusion for our spell selection you are always going to take Shield that's one of the best reasons to be an eldrich Knight and since we are wielding a shield wearing heavy armor and have the shield spell whenever we cast Shield we're going to have at least 25 AC which makes us actually extremely hard to hit um 26 with the defense fighting style 25 with the protection fighting style so having a reaction to do this is very valuable as well and for our second spell there's actually a couple really good options here magic Missile is always good and doesn't require doesn't uh use your intelligence for anything so you you don't need to worry about having eight intelligence with the magic Missile um it will always hit and always do damage and there's a couple encounters it's really good in protection from evil and good is a concentration spell because you're a fighter you have Constitution save proficiency which makes you good at concentration spells you'll be able to keep this up pretty much all day and so it's actually worth picking this up because it prevents you from you can cast it on yourself prevent yourself from being Charmed or frightened with only 10 wisdom we have a fairly bad wisdom saving throw so having protection from evil and good good up makes us a lot safer throughout the day from our expanded spell list there's a few cool options here um fog Cloud for all the reasons that fog cloud is normally good but probably the one that you're going to want to go with most of all is long Strider long Strider gives you uh a resource free way to increase your movement speed which is of course incredibly powerful increasing your movement speed on a ranged character like this character also lets you kite enemies back and forth uh getting away from them with your enhanced movement speed you can throw your weapon it will return to your hand then you can back away using your fast movement speed and stay out of the reach of enemy melee characters that being said that's less uh powerful for this version of the character than it is for um other ranged characters because you do just fine in melee you don't really have to worry that much about enemies getting into melee but long Strider is still just very powerful and extremely useful overall enhance leap tripling your jump distance well you're going to have an insane jump distance because of your high strength um because we are a strength build and of course uh so that will let you get into locations you wouldn't otherwise be able to get into um overall though I think you're going to be best off with long Strider every party should have access to this and this is a good place to grab it [Music] from at level four we get to take uh the most important feat for every throwing build of course because it says throw right on it and that is Tavern brawler this is one of The Usual Suspects that shows up over and over again in balers Gate 3 because it lets you break what's called bounded accuracy bounded accuracy is the concept in Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition of it should effectively it should never be too easy or too hard to hit an enemy in order to keep combat dramatic they want to keep your hit chances between 6 and 14 on a D20 pretty much always but Tavern brawler doubles your to hit chance from strength completely breaking bounded accuracy when you have Tavern brawler throwing builds you're going to very regularly have a 95% chance to hit enemies because you're adding a huge to hit bonus in addition to the uh hit bonus of your weapons the to hit bonus of your character your proficiency bonus and so on it's a just an extremely power F effect that also doubles the damage you add to your weapon so now we are de dealing plus eight damage on every attack because of course we increase our strength to 18 at the same time hence the 17 that we took initially allowing you to deal not only very high damage but also extremely consistent damage with this character for our spell here I'm just going to take magic Missile whichever one we didn't take earlier we're going to pick up and level four is also a good reason good time to get magic Missile because of a specific uh boss encounter that it's particularly useful in you'll probably do around level four at level five we get extra attack so now on our action surge turn the opening turn of combat usually we're going to be able to make four Throne weapon attacks each of these is going to deal the damage of our weapon plus twice our strength modifier dealing something like 50 damage in the opening uh Salvo of combat taking out most enemies in an in the initial Salvo right away and that's without factoring in any other Buffs we might have from gear from our party members from the the actual weapon that we're using and so on um if you are playing lasel you also get Misti step which is extremely powerful or whatever other ability you might get from level five of your race invisibility if you're playing a dgar um and so on is also really good no no need to replace spells we already have all the best ones at level six we're actually going to take one deviation because we can get access to additional power if we dip into another class obviously we want to be attacking more times per turn so let's take a class that lets us do that the class in question of course is going to be cleric not only is cleric one of the best onlevel dips in the game and almost every build can benefit from considering taking a level in cleric it also in this particular case has a unique interaction because we can take the war domain uh subclass giving us access to three times per day a bonus action attack the way that the war domain bonus action attack works is different from other sources of extra attacks in the game in that you just make the attack as normal and if it works it consume and and if you have a bonus action and a charge it consumes your bonus action that means effectively that you can use it to throw a weapon something that not every source of extra attacks allows you to do but three times per day with the war domain you can throw uh a weapon as a bonus action allowing you to in your opening round of combat make five weapon attacks two with each action uh which you get two of because of action Surge and then an additional one with a bonus action in subsequent rounds of combat you get to make three attacks um up until the third round of combat compare this to a a barbarian a throwing Barbarian who gets to make a bonus action an attack with a bonus action every round well that Barbarian in the opening round of combat only gets two attacks because they have to spend their bonus action raging and then in every subsequent round they get three attacks so on the first turn they get two second turn they've had five third turn they've had eight and 11 and and so on the fighter version of the build on the first turn has made five attacks on the second turn eight on the third turn 11 and on the fourth turn 14 it takes five turns of combat for the Barbarian Build to catch up with you um so in general I think that up until the very late game the fighter build is going to outperform the Barbarian and then right at the end game The Fighter build will overtake the Barbarian once again although the Barbarian gets a ton of utility I think it's worth comparing these two because often you'll see that people say that the only viable throwing build is a Berserker Barbarian Thief Rogue and I just wanted to go into the math a little bit to talk about why that's not actually true all right let's take a look at our can trips here of course we're going to take guidance because every party needs access access to guidance we already have blade Ward so we we will take say resistance again we are avoiding things that require a save like sacred flame because our wisdom is very low so our our saves are not going to be high but getting access to light is also very useful in certain encounters and you can use this until long rest it's totally free great uh spell to have somewhere in your party as well for our prepared spells we're only going to have one because we only have 10 wisdom and one level of cleric but the ability to prepare and cast bless on yourself is extremely valuable you could also use healing word um personally I would probably go with bless you can pre-cast it ahead of time and it does increase the attack role of your throne weapons although given that you are a uh Tavern brawler user you don't really need the help to hit things but either way is very good it gives you a lot of utility if you don't have a source of bless already in your party you should take it if you do then maybe go with healing Ward another alternative is create or destroy water if you need another easy way to apply the wet condition to enemies at level seven we go back to fighter and we get access to a feat you could take this feat if you want the extra strength earlier um that one is that would be totally reasonable or if you want access to alert alert is almost always going to be extremely valuable so if you are worried about losing initiative you could take alert instead of this uh ability Improvement and in fact actually I I'm changing my mind from what my build notes say here we're going to take alert rather than the ability Improvement at this level um because it's so valuable for Honor mode and because we're going to get another feat soon but if you just want more damage you could max out your ability scores something else that's worth mentioning of course that I didn't mention at the beginning but that is always worth talking about with these with any strength based build is you can do this with Elixir if you do you want to drop your strength to eight take 16 dexterity 17 con and then bump it to 18 with Tavern brawler and uh you get a little more wisdom or intelligence whichever you want at fighter level seven we get access to second level spells which is pretty nice although in general we're going to be using our spells all on Shield anyways it's by far the most useful spell these all require saving throws for the most part um although if you have a source of immunity to Blind like the there is a ring that prevents you from being blinded you can use Darkness Darkness is of extremely powerful for tons and tons of reasons um and I have talked extensively about that in various warlock builds so I won't reiterate this but it's the best defensive tool in the game still worth taking even if you aren't immune to Blind but even better if you are and then for your remaining one you're going to want to take something with utility so we could potentially take um there really actually isn't a lot with utility we could take chromatic orb to make ice surfaces for example but actually the eldrich Knight spell list is pretty bad at this point uh Arcane lock unfortunately does not have any use in this game so there's not much point in taking it though for flavor you could pick it up but we'll probably just take chromatic orb to apply certain surfaces to the ground which can be useful in some circumstances fighter level eight we get another feat and here we're going to max out our strength and for our expanded spell list we get a few more good options again avoid things that allow saving throws if you don't have Misty step from your race you'll probably want to take Misty step you may even want to take misy step even as a GI Yankee because using it more than once per day can often be very valuable and so I'm going to suggest taking that here anyways but some other options are things like invisibility for utility if you aren't a dgar um blur is actually a pretty good defensive spell especially with the Fighter's ability to concentrate on spells pretty well so there's a few other options here but Misty step is going to be the one with the most utility overall for a fighter build at level nine you get access to indomitable which is is one of the best class features in the game one of the reasons to go deep on fighter is to get access to this ability um being able to roll this and it also Stacks with Advantage so if you have uh Advantage from being say a a deep gnome getting advantage on your mental saving throws then you can still use indomitable in addition to that uh which is extremely powerful you also get an extra level two spell slot which is is nice and no need to replace spells cuz again we just took the best ones at every level fighter level 10 we get eldrich strike um when you hit a creature with a weapon attack it has disadvantage on its next saving throw against a spell you cast completely useless this class feature is a trap never cast a spell with a saving throw on this character um for our remaining can trip we'll probably just take Ray of frost here again because freezing surfaces can be useful but at this point in the game it just does not matter what you take you could also as always take true strike to annoy people and finally at fighter level 11 we get the real Gem of playing Fighter the for this long which is improved extra attack allowing you to throw your weapon three times in a single round uh or in a single action with action surge that goes up to six times seven times with your bonus action War cleric attack um on tactician mode or below if you add haste and an elixir of of blood lust that gives you 13 attacks all of which are hitting all of which add double your strength bonus to their hit and to your damage as well as any additional effects that you might have uh allowing you to output something like an average of two or 300 damage in a round um in your opening round of combat on honor mode you only get to nine attacks per round because the haste action and the blood lust action only give you one extra attack each so you're going to have to settle for a mere 200 damage or so in your opening round of combat uh before adding in any bonuses from your allies or anything like that and for our spell selection of course at this point it really does not matter what you take so take whichever one you think looks the coolest I personally think Mel's acid Arrow has a really cool animation and doesn't get cast cuz it's a bad spell so let's take that and you can play with it how this character plays out so notice that we have these uh War priest extra attack charges so I'm going to enter a um enter turnbas mode and show you how this character will play out notice that we have a returning weapon in this case nyona which is one of the best uh best in slot for throwing builds probably the in slot for throwing builds um but you'll be using any weapon that you've applied your packed Boon to in your main hand and then you are going to throw that weapon gives you throw that weapon here we go notice that even despite the very high AC of the main character here we still have an incredibly High hit chance because of the tavern brawler bonus and this is before advantage or any other bonuses that we might have have to go over here because one thing that is an issue sometimes with the throne weapon build is that when you throw something it does describe an arc so areas with low ceilings like this Archway can block your weapon attacks in ways that are sometimes a little unintuitive and the game doesn't do previewed movement the way it does for archery attacks so you have to be a little bit careful about how you position and in order to guarantee that you actually are able to land your attacks when you are trying to find where to attack an enemy from notice that it actually does draw the line so if I try to hit carlac in the head here it it's blocked but if I try to hit her in the foot which is just as good then we can make that attack so do spend some time pixel hunting to see if you really can't make the attack or if the game will let you that is one of the more annoying things about playing this character but it's definitely worth keeping in mind and doing you know what to do the amount of damage that we do on every attack is going to be pretty significant so so here you can see that we rolled a 34 to hit because we're adding our strength bonus twice as well as 12 damage it adds the strength modifier and then it adds The Tavern brawler in a separate line so we did 23 piercing damage from our attack plus some additional Thunder damage because of naira's special ability um that 17 or 24 damage we can do four times before we even have to action Surge and then an additional three times so that right there is not quite 200 damage already um but getting getting pretty close uh and that's before any modifiers on tactician or below you might see this line with the tavern brawler appear multiple times that's because of the damage Rider Source bug I talked about earlier where you might be applying that more than once if you have certain damage Riders on your character um you can mostly just ignore that and and you'll get a little bit of extra damage but if you want to optimize to do hundreds and hundreds of damage that is possible another thing to uh to mention on this character is that you do at eldrich Knight um one of your eldrich knight effects is the ability to cast a krip and then still make a bonus action attack you can do that uh but it does have kind of a weird interaction because it's going to use your War priest attack before it uses your eldrich knight attack so it's going to eat the war priest charges to do that and also in general that's not a good use of your action if you cast a can trip and then make an attack um because you'd rather just make two or in the late game three throwing attacks than cast any kind of canant trip there's just no spell that it's better to cast than to make three throwing attacks for for something like 100 damage for gear for this character you you can use any weapon with the throne weapon tag and you're just going to want to use the highest damage one that you can very useful to be able to do that um because these weapons deal the same damage they would for a melee attack you don't because you're an eldrich Knight you can use any of these weapons as long as you remember to packed bind it first so put it in your main hand and use weapon bond um to guarantee that that is a returning weapon that way you can apply the damage and effects of any weapon that can be thrown which is an extremely powerful effect for the other gear for this character just anything that applies damage so weapon stuff that applies to weapon attacks um like these hell dusk gloves for example these will work very well uh the Ring of flinging of course specifically applies to throne weapon attacks and so that one's really good um but for the most part you're just going to want the heaviest armor the best Shield that you can find because you're a totally you are also a tank and the best weapon that you can find with the throne weapon tag and you will do very well off of that all right my friends I hope that you have enjoyed this look at the throne weapon eldrich KN and as always if you've enjoyed the video do please feel free to leave a comment uh like the video both of those things help a ton with the algorithm and I appreciate it very much and you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content cheers my friends I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 38,424

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

Id: OhL_PvKULYY

Length: 28min 33sec (1713 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2023