The Invincible TANK WIZARD - BG3 Gale Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today I'm going to be showing you how to make your wizard into an invincible tank this character is going to end up as both a fully functional wizard with a 12 level spellcasting extremely powerful spells as well as a nigh unkillable tank this I think is one of the best characters to solo tactician mode with if that's something you're interested in and also an extremely powerful and safe addition to any party it also has the advantage of involving no tricks needing no specific items and there are no exploits involved at all this is a totally uh plain build guide with completely item agnostic and only using mechanics that are intended to be in the game no exploits or tricks of any kind so that's one of the reasons I really love this build I'm using Gail as the example character because he is The Wizard Of The Party of course but also because human I think is one of the best races to use for this class humans get Shield proficiency which is extremely powerful on spellcasters and so that's uh a very high tier option for your character and the floating skill point can be useful but primarily the the best thing about that is The Shield proficiency if you're building this character from the ground up not using gaale then the best race is almost certainly half wood elth because they also get shield and light armor proficiency as well as having the additional five feet of movement speed useful both for casters to stay out of range and for us as a tank to get into to close distance with opponents all right so let's just get right into it and start building the character so first off as with all of the origin characters the first thing that we have to do with Gail here is to fix his stat spread this is going to end up as a pretty standard looking stat spread so we're just going to clear this and go with 16 and 16 this is is true of almost every Caster that you want 16 Constitution and 16 in your main casting stat and then you almost always want 14 dexterity especially for a character like this who's going to end only with light armor proficiency for our last four points I'm going to place those in Charisma because we are going to end up taking a level of sorcerer during this build and that will allow you to to cast the sorcerer spells although of course we won't be using sorcerer spells for their save DCS or anything here we are going to for our cantrip selection there's actually a really important one that we have to pick up because normally this is a pretty bad use of an action but for this character blade Ward is incredibly powerful we are going to be reaching the point where we take almost no damage from any attacks that actually land and of course because we have Shield proficiency and the shield spell very few attacks will actually land anyways blade Ward ends up being a pretty efficient use of an action on this character because it can prevent even the highest burst damage from doing damage to you and anytime you take a hit you're going to be returning enormous amounts of damage to that enemy so blade Ward actually ends up being a resource free way to remove any risk from this build so this is a a canant trip that normally isn't incredible and usually is a waste of an action but for this build it is incredibly valuable you always want Firebolt it's the best damaging canant trip you usually only need one Dam ding canant trip especially because we will have other ways to deal passive damage throughout this build um which will involve cold damage so Firebolt even has more utility on this build than on most builds but usually you just want Firebolt and then for the last can trip that you want to select one of the really excellent utility options like minor illusion or Mage hand is my pick I think minor illusion is slightly better but overall these don't matter a ton for our spell selection we're going to go with the the good old solid standard which it looks like the game has actually mostly called up for me here we want magic Missile fog Cloud grease and shield those are going to be your most important level one spells and then in addition to that I highly recommend for this build we want to take every abjuration spell we have available to us because of course we're using the ABD duration Wizard and this will allow us to spend our spell slots appropriately in order to generate Arcane Ward protection from evil and good can be cast out of combat without having to like take off your armor for Mage Armor or anything like that and so that can be used to generate your Arcane Ward and then finally for the last one we probably want something like expeditious Retreat this is really useful for casters and for tanks because it gives you a bonus action repositioning tool although your last spell doesn't matter and that much and of course you will be getting lots of different spells from Scrolls so you will have access to all of these eventually all right so that's our first level um for our skill spread I like having slight of hand on Gail I think that that is nice to have in a party um if you are solo on this character you are likely to want some kind of conversation skill so you could pick up one of those with your human floating skill point the knowledge checks are typically made during conversations so it's less important to have points in these for a character that's not intended to be your party face but still useful and of course for a Solo character as well stealth is incredibly valuable so you may want to pick that up anyways though this character won't be abusing stealth as much as most solo builds going to level to level two here level one you're going to play just like a very standard wizard level two you gain access to the Arcane Ward feature of the ABD duration wizard so how this works the tool tip does not tell you really what it does but how it works works is every time you cast an abjuration spell you gain points in Arcane Ward equal to the level of the spell up to a maximum of twice your wizard level so at level two we can have up to four points in this every time you take a hit the damage from that or any damage the damage from that attack is reduced by your Arcane Ward value so if we had four points in this any incoming damage would be reduced by four then it reduces the points by one so the higher you get this the both the more effective it is at each attack and the more you will have remaining after you take a hit so it's very important to get as many levels in ABD duration wizard as possible to build up our Arcane Ward because it Stacks extremely well with itself so that's the key component of the build blade Ward the reason we took this is it is applied before the flat damage reduction from Arcane Ward so if you have had incoming damage of eight you would have it from blade Ward and then reduce it by four at this level taking zero damage so already at level two it's quite powerful because most attacks at this level won't do that much damage an average a sort of standard incoming damage and a good threshold to consider for this character is a great sword attack which is 2d6 for an average of seven plus the wielder strength usually about three so you can consider that most attacks in the early levels are going to be for 10 or less damage so if you can get your Arcane Ward to the point where it reduces damage by 10 you will be more or less immune to enemy attacks so once we have 10 points in Arcane Ward at wizard level five we're going to uh swap the build although we could change that order a little bit but this is the current plan for the build just take whatever spells as you level up level three you are going to want to have access again it's important to make sure you have access to uh ABD duration spells that can be easily cast outside of combat at level two the best one for these is Arcane lock because you can spam this on a chest and you get two points in Arcane Ward um and then of course you just want the normal spells that are really good like cloud of daggers like flaming sphere those are just very powerful spells also bear in mind that you can swap your prepared spells anytime out of combat so you can prepare something like Arcane Lock cast it until you have full Arcane Ward and then swap in a better level two spell here I'll just take the other one of Mage hand or minor illusion that we didn't take take whatever from our level ups and there are two options for Feats this build will end up not needing to hit 20 intelligence I still prefer to just because being able to land control spells is so valuable and there are some enemies that your core combo won't work against mostly ranged enemies so having the ability to defeat those anyways is very valuable if you wanted to you could take a feat here of some other kind I think that the best options in that case are alert if you're solo because not being surprised and gain winning initiative is incredibly powerful in this game although again less important for this character than for many characters because you will be pretty much immune to damage um in the late game so enemies getting the first turn will not harm you overly much uh another option is warter just to make maintain your concentration but I think that the best option overall is going to just be to intelligence now that we've hit level five we can take some more abjuration spells the most important one of these is counter spell although I also quite like having protection from energy this is a concentration spell that you can keep up all day and will give you resistance to the energy type that you are going to be taking um from an upcoming encounter similarly to Blade Ward this is this damage resistance is applied before your Arcane Ward damage reduction and so it's incredibly powerful if you know you're going up against a fire based attacker to give yourself resistance to fire at level six we have two choices we could either continue to level six wizard to be able to gain projected Ward a level earlier or and this is my preferred option we could take our one Lev dip at this point to bring online the core combo of the class the reason I think this is a good break point to make that uh make that change is that we had now have access to Third level spells which obviously are extremely powerful gaining access to Fireball haste counter spell all of the key spells to that make a wizard a wizard and also because our Arcane Ward now is worth a maximum of 10 points which is extremely valuable because it by itself blocks a great sword hit like we discussed earlier or combined with damage resistance blocks up to 20 damage meaning that it will block all but four damage of an average uh um Fireball a fireball for example is 86 damage so if you gain which is an average of 28 if you gain fire resistance that gets haved to 14 and then subtract 10 from that meaning a fireball one of the most powerful damaging Spells at this point in the game will deal four damage to this character or a giant Smite from a paladin similarly would do significantly less damage so this is a good break point where your Arcane Ward starts really blocking almost all incoming damage and you start being mostly invincible so this at is the point where I like to make the change and pick up our one level of sorcerer the reason for this is that sorcerer gets access to a spell that wizard doesn't through the draconic bloodline subclass if we take as our draconic ancestor cold you get access to armor of agius this gives you temporary hit points which obviously combine extremely well with our damage reduction each hit point we have is super valuable because incoming damage is so um so reduced that each additional hit point we have is Multiplied massively by the damage reduction that we have from incoming damage as well you can upcast this you can cast this at any level for a significant uh bonus it will increase your Arcane Ward because it's an abjuration spell and it will deal cold damage to any creature that hits you with a melee attack at this level we'll be able to cast armor of agathys at level three which is by itself extremely powerful cuz any incoming damage will deal 15 back to the enemy which is already a ton of extra damage at by the time we hit Level 11 and can cast this at level six using a sixth level spell slot it will give us 30 hit points 30 temporary hit points and hit back for 30 which is an insane amount of extra damage coming from this spell as well as a ton of survivability you can also spend your turns recasting it if you start losing Arcane Ward because it is a level one spell that can be cast upcast to any level so you can gain the exact amount of Arcane W that you need in combat depending on how many times you've taken a hit just by choosing the correct level to cast this the one that stays active is always the highest level of armor of agathys that was cast so if you cast a level six armor of AG this and then take a hit and want to replenish your Arcane Ward by casting it at level one don't worry it keeps the higher level one active so it's extremely powerful for this character build for our sorcerer can trips we just take whatever um just avoid damaging can trips primarily because they're going to scale off your charisma which you don't have any of but you can take like light and friends and dancing lights and true strike to annoy YouTube commenters um another go one to have access to magic Missile doesn't care about your stat and shield um is very powerful to have as a sorcerer spell because it's sort of always prepared when it's a sorcerer spell so you don't have to spend a prepared spell slot on it you always want it available and then of course armor of agius is the one that you want otherwise other than that you don't really need to make any decisions but you need to take draconic ancestry cold and the draconic bloodline you also gain permanent Mage Armor which isn't terribly useful but does mean because you would be casting a Mage Armor on yourself anyways but it saves you a spell slot I guess um and the gain one additional hit point which is a very small benefit but on this character significantly better than it is on other characters because each hit point is so much has so much more value than hit points on other characters since incoming damage is reduced so heavily go back to wizard here so we're going to continue to just take whatever spells we want Glyph of warding is another ABD duration spell that can be cast outside of combat if you're looking for one of those at level four spells we could have learned this from a scroll one level earlier because of how Wizards work but here we're going to to pick up fire Shield um that's another way to return damage on an attack and then one thing that's really nice about this build is neither fire Shield nor armor of agathys are concentration spells so you can have other concentration spells up if you don't need a protection from energy to reduce incoming damage then you could have any other concentration spell that you want such as banishment for example going to continue to increase our intelligence although the same things apply if you're finding yourself losing initiative you can take alert if you're finding yourself dropping concentration you could take War cter you will always be being hit for the minimum damage um so the DC will almost always be 10 on your saves with warcaster plus and plus three con you are extremely unlikely to fail a save um I think that the the math works out to it's like one in 20 that you fail but uh I'm just doing that in my head so if anyone wants to actually do the math on warter with plus three con um then by all means take whatever spells and then as we continue to level up some more good spells to have access to uh level five spell is telekinesis which is another really good thing to be concentrating on um you could also use Stone skin as an ABD duration spell it's a concentration spell and it will have non-magical incoming damage but unlike uh blade Ward this one only works on non-magical damage blade Ward actually works on magical damage which is a little weird but that a level four spell does worse than blade Ward at the thing that they do um so I don't think that stone skin is usually going to be an efficient way to spend your concentration but it's worth mentioning another fun thing about this character is you can pretty easily stand in your own AOE effect if you uh gain poison resistance from something and then have damage you can stand in your own cloud kill and finally at level 11 we max out the build you get access to your sixth level spell which mostly don't don't matter because you've already got the core combo online there is a level six ABD duration spell but the level six ABD duration spell that you're always going to be casting is armor of agius so let's put it all together I'm going to cast armor of agius on myself at level six that gives me 30 temporary hit points and eight points of Arcane Ward and then we can just cast it using whatever combination of spells spell slots we want to use I typically uh to try to get to 22 cuz we have 11 levels of wizard and we need to get to 20 22 I think that typically you're going to be best off using level two and level four spell slots to do this these are sort of your least valuable spell slots overall so we can do like upcast protection from Good and Evil for for example do this [Music] twice saving one level four spell slot for something else that we want to do and then we need to cast three level two spells so we're just going to use protection from Good and Evil again three times this does eat a lot of your spell slots it's it's certainly true but you only have to do this once at the beginning of the day you also gain six every time you short rest or you gain uh I think 11 every time you short rest so you could also spend a short rest at the beginning of the day to gain some Arcane Ward but anyways however you get there the point is you want to build up 22 Arcane Ward outside of combat and then when you are about to go into combat you can cast on yourself flame Shield which uh I need to prepare here here we go usually you'll want to cast this for fire so that you're dealing both cold and fire damage back so now any enemy that attacks us we we have resistance to cold from our fire Shield which is good already right so we we have that from our fire Shield don't need to get that from protection um any enemy that attacks us is going to be taking 2 d8 fire damage and 30 cold damage and any incoming damage that we take is going to be reduced by 22 so we're nearly unkillable by any normal means as well as dealing a ton of damage back to any enemy let me show this happening so we're going to cast blade W blade Ward on ourselves as well giving ourselves the damage resistance and then I'm going to have MX oh Dale it's not your turn where you going oh no he's running away uh we're going to have MX come over and hit him this is using my MX build that you can find in a previous video it's one of the highest builds for single damage instances in the game so this is a really good test to see how well this works I guess I have to let's move end turn cuz Gail just ran away and then we're going to have M with great weapon master and everything on attack Gale and I will show you what that damage looks like like so that's a critical hit and Gail took zero damage so that critical hit would have been 27 points of damage and but that's reduced by 14 thanks to our slashing resistance and then subtract 22 from that because of our Arcane Ward causing Gail to take zero damage it reduces Arcane Ward by one and then mink took in return was that 47 damage because of rolling 48 fire that's slightly below average on the 48 fire and 31 cold oh I have an item equipped that increases cold damage should be 30 but anyways 47 damage is about average on return let's have mink hit him again just for fun see mink spending his whole turn on this and he took another 35 damage MX is almost dead after one turn and Gail has still taken zero damage so that's why this is so powerful as uh as an endgame build you are nearly invincible and you do tons of damage back to enemies and you are also during this entire time just a whole wizard who can do whatever he wants as a wizard um I should also mention that there is a version of this build or used to be a version of this build that used warlock because the warlock um invocation at that you can get at level two to cast Mage Armor used to let you cast Mage Armor infinitely now you can't cast it if you already have Mage Armor so the the Warlock version of this build no longer functions the way it used to but it's still um you could still do it but the sorcerer version is going to be way better I think um the amount of returning damage is too powerful to give up anyways all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the Invincible tank wizard uh this is I think a really fun build incredibly powerful and I really like that it uses no exploits at all um and doesn't need any specific items to work you don't need to increase your attributes at all just your natural attributes are good enough and you are going to end up as one of the strongest endgame character builds in the game all right my friends hope you've enjoyed this video and as always if you have do feel free to leave a comment rate the video hit hit the like button for the algorithm it helps a ton And subscribe to my channel for more Bal balers gate build guides and other strategy game videos and I'll catch you next time GG

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 22,817

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

Id: QuUxltyybPM

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023