The REAL MAIN CHARACTER - BG3 Honor Mode Build Guide - Bard / Paladin

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 the ultimate main character for balers gate the bedin or Bard Paladin multiclass paladins are the most popular class according to laran Stats and Bs the second most and of course the charismatic sword wielding leader is so archetypal for this game that I think this class if you were to sort of put together a canonical Tav for balder's gate this multiclass would pretty much be it I'm manthara is the example character here because I think it also fits her lore very well and for another lore friendly option you could go with will or even aaran for this build I think there's a lot of characters that kind of fit this archetype of the charismatic dashing swordsman in uh in amongst the Companions and all of whom will fit this build very well this of course is also an extremely powerful build extraordinarily damaging and very powerful for Honor mode gives you access to excellent dialogue skills so we be really good if you want your Tav to be able to pass dialog checks and it's just an extremely powerful build overall all right let's just jump right in and start building the bedin so first off we have to take a look at our character stats these are going to need to change significantly because one of the things that makes this character combo so good is that just like all of the other Charisma based classes in balder's Gate Paladin Warlock Sorcerer And Bard you can mix and match these two classes in just about any combination and have them synergize well together paladins by default suffer from what's called multi-attribute dependency or mad that means that they want lots and lots of different attributes to be high in order to be effective but mixing Paladin with Bard lets us focus on fewer attributes so that we don't need to spend as many points and can become a little more single attribute dependent or sad it's like I always say it's bad to be mad and it's rad to be sad right here you will want to look at the the reason that we get to do this is because we are playing a Bard we can play a dexterity based Paladin paladins normally are going to want to have high strength because they'll often be two-handed weapon users or be using heavy weapons um but the ability to drop strength to eight on this character gives us a lot of free points to play with when we are increasing dexterity normally paladins want strength for damage dexterity for initiative Constitution for hit points H wisdom for saving throws and Charisma because all of their spells and their saving throws and class abilities are all based on that the bar version gets to cut out one of those attributes and regain some of those points requiring fewer points spent so we can change our attribute spread to something a little cleaner that doesn't require so much investment into a stat that's mostly not going to have high impact for for us we're going to go ahead and take 16 Constitution and 16 dexterity so you'll be using a finesse weapon to apply your dexterity to your melee attacks and 16 Constitution is very important because you'll almost always be concentrating on a spell with this character you don't want to lose concentration on your spells um especially in the late game there's some important spells that you really don't want to lose concentration on and you're going to be relatively low hit point for a Melee character because you're taking a lot of levels in Bard which has a lower hit point total per level so having high Constitution is critically important for this character we then take 14 Charisma and you can take 12 wisdom to maximize your saving throws you could also put some of these points in strength if you want a little more jump distance or carry weight stuff like that this character also does benefit very strongly from the um from elixir of strength just because you're a Melee character that gets Athletics proficiency and having an elixir of strength on your character gives you the additional option to push enemies of course you can also still make strength based attacks if you drink an Elixir but you don't need to because we're going to be building primarily for dexterity for our subass you are going to want to take in my opinion the best of these when you're only taking a couple levels of Paladin is oath of the Ancients this lets this character double up as actually a pretty good support character in the early game a bonus action heal is extremely powerful and this is two bonus action heals for only um one channel oath charge cuz you get it one turn and then you get it the next turn super powerful for bringing downed enemies back to light or down allies back up um incredibly strong just to give yourselves a little more buffer in combat just a really good ability at one point you also get these tenets which you're going to need to follow cuz you don't want to break your oath on this uh version of the character although you could potentially do a multiclass with oathbreaker that's not what we're going for here though the other thing that you get from Paladin is lay on hands which is pretty useful because it gives you another support option for healing also lets you remove aarian bloodless debuff uh for a very cheap resource cost that's something that people don't always know about this ability it removes diseases and that counts as a disease so you can remove that for basically for free and don't forget Divine sense it's easy to forget this but this game has a lot of combats against fiends and Undead and Advantage for two turns against them at the cost of only a bonus action is extremely powerful especially for paladins who really don't want to miss their attacks we then take a second level in Paladin getting access to smites which is what we're really in Paladin for as well as a fighting style um we also get to take a bunch of spells which is pretty nice here as well so let's talk about our fighting style first we are going to want to take either defense or protection here depending on whether you intend to be a sword and board user or a two weapon user this character actually gets to choose between those two and I'll talk about which one you would rather be um when we get to the sword barard levels but if you are a sword and board user protection fighting style is pretty good for this character because you usually won't want to be the only Melee character in your party with this character since you are not like a main tank because of your relatively low hit points um this will allow you to stand adjacent to your other melee allies or adjacent to your ranged allies you can play sort of a a hit and run style where you run in kill an enemy with your extremely high damage and then run back to hang out with your ranged allies providing them protection with your Shield defense is going to be sort of the the default best strategy but this character also does not get a lot of uses for its reaction and it's it's important in character builds to have uses for all of your combat resources your action bonus Action Reaction concentration and movement and so adding protection gives you a good use for your reaction which this character otherwise doesn't really have I'm going to take defense here just as sort of the default best choice but I want to mention both of them as being very good picks we are going to then pick up a bunch of spells and of course you're going to want to have access to bless every character that can take bless should have access to it this is going to be your default concentration in the early game very strong to have one thing to keep in mind is that we because we only have 14 Charisma our saving throws will not be incredible so you want to avoid spells in that have saving throws associated with them um Divine favor costs concentration but gives you quite a lot of extra damage in the early game especially if you are wielding two weapons your offhand weapon will also get the additional radiant damage and because we are using finesse weapons you can use a two light weapons and get the off-hand attack for some additional damage here I'm going to suggest thunderous Smite as well which does not require your concentration so you can use it while concentrating on bless unlike uh searing Smite um and knocking an enemy prone and pushing them is an incredibly powerful effect so you definitely want access to Thundurus might for the fourth spell there's a couple options you could take something like Shield of Faith while your concentration saves are not going to be incredible because we don't get conve proficiency um this is to AC until you lose concentration on it and lasts all day which is pretty nice you could also take protection from evil and good there's definitely some fights where this is very very important um overall you're going to want to prepare your spells remember you can always change your prepared spells when you're not in combat uh you're going to want to prepare your last spell based on the situation but a reasonable default is just to have Shield of Faith you aren't going to need cure wounds because you have lay on hands so you already have an action for healing if you desperately need one and as a an ancient Paladin you get the healing Aura which gives you a bonus action heal which is much much more useful than an action heal you also get these Divine smites which lets you spend your spell slots on smites you will mostly be using these level one spell slots for Smite attack attacks rather than casting these spells but it's nice to have the options to when you need these spells when you need a particular spell having gotten access to our smites we are immediately going to take a dip over into Bard and continue with Bard for the rest of the character we for our cantrip selection again you're going to want to steer clear of things that have a saving throw associated with them but as a melee character with okay if not incredible hit points blade Ward can be very powerful for you paladins do also benefit quite strongly from Advantage so you could take true strike um as a Melee character you won't always be able to hide so you could use this to gain advantage on your first attack that being said true strike is pretty bad overall so we're going to take minor illusion I don't want to trick people you know I know I joke about true strike a lot I don't want to trick people into using it because on the on some characters it actually looks pretty reasonable um but it's still just a bad use of an action so we're going to take minor illusion here as the most powerful option now we get another bonus action heal from healing word which is another incredible way for this character to support your allies you also get long Strider which is a ritual so it does not cost a spell slot meaning you can still spend that uh which it's irritating that that's not in the description but uh it that is true um you can have long Strider prepared gain 10 ft of movement speed on your entire party for the entire day and then still spend that spell slot on a Smite attack or on another spell so that's super powerful I personally like to have speak with animals available because there's so many cool conversations with animals and for a main character who has decent Charisma skills and decent um and a reasonable value of Charisma speak with animals makes lot of sense to me and then for our last spell you're going to want something relatively situational remember you're pretty much always going to be spending these spell slots on smites so you don't necessarily need to have spells that are good all the time you want spells that are good that when you want them you really want them so you could take something like disguise self which is useful if you're trying to speak with dead something like that another uh ritual spell that doesn't cost a spell slot or feather just in case any of those could be reasonable op options also get to add some more skills in here and one thing I should have mentioned as well is that this character does very well just in general as a conversationalist so you can take your conversation skills and we will be able to increase those as we level up Bard level two we get song of rest which is pretty good for any party to have access to and this is a very powerful supporting ability it gives you a third short rest in the day so not only does this recharge all of your characters spells it also basically is a huge heal for your entire party once per one an additional time per day that as long as you're not in combat which is extremely valuable and can prevent you from having to spend too much time long resting in order to heal you also get Jack of all trades giving you reasonable skill proficiencies in just about everything especially the dexterity based skills because we are going you don't um get access to most of the dexterity based skills but you can still pick locks with this character because of Jack of all trades you have half your proficiency bonus plus you'll be a full decks build so you're going to end up with a reasonable slight of hand score a reasonable stealth score because of Jack of all trades you still won't be making knowledge checks with your intelligence at eight but um the addition of Jack of all trades to your dexterity scores actually G gives this character another set of D another dimension to its play in terms of making stealth or making slight of hand checks for our spell here it really at this point I don't think matters we're again focusing on things that don't have saving throws so you could take charm person or sorry not charm person you could take um uh featherfall or heroism whichever ones you are looking to take that you haven't taken already to be honest it really you will by the time you get down to the fifth level one Bard spell you're just never going to be casting this spell and we'll probably be replacing it with higher level spells later on so it doesn't matter take whatever you think is going to be fun to play with B level three we get to take our subass and of course you know what subass we're going to take on a Melee character it's going to be the College of Swords College of Swords bars gets access to these slashing flourishes um or gets access to these flourishes which let you spend an inspiration die which currently you get back on Long rest but later you'll get back on short rest and then you have song of rest to get those back more frequently to add your inspiration die to the damage of an attack and to have an effect slashing flourish lets you attack two enemies at once like a cleaving attack defensive flourish gives you four Armor class which on this build is actually quite valuable because you'll be in melee and have quite good armor class by default so you can make yourself extremely hard to hit with defensive flourish and then mobile flourish um lets you push a Target and then teleport to them also quite useful for repositioning enemies the melee version of this build unlike the ranged sword bars is actually going to use all three of the flourishes range sword bars just Spam slashing flourish because the ranged one is coded to allow you to attack the same enemy twice uh which is definitely a bug or an odd decision by larion it certainly should not work work that way but it does um whereas the melee version won't let you double up on attacking the same enemy and is much more uh in line with sort of the level of power that a character should have ranged sword bars are broken and of course you can see um that in my build the Bic machine gun if you're interested in more about that but slashing flourish also interacts very interestingly with Smite attacks the melee version of slashing flourish because you can hit two enemies and if you have your Smite set to a reaction you can Smite both of those enemies this is going to allow you to cast two smites or three smites if you have an off-hand attack um in your opening round of combat against two enemies paladins usually suffer against multiple enemies because they're so single Target damage focused but the melee slashing flourish of the sword Bard really lets us get around that by attacking multiple enemies at once for our fighting style we really have a choice and this is why we took defensive Style earlier we can either take dueling if you want a sword and shield or two weapon fighting if you want in to use a main attack and an offhand attack once we get access to our second attack we are going to have two extra attack at B level six we're going to have so much damage on this character that in my opinion you don't need the two weapon fighting for the additional offhand attack um and this character makes one of the best sword and board characters in the game sword and Shield character um and so I would recommend dueling which lets you add two damage to all of those this will be multiplied of course every time you like slashing flourish or whatever and hit multiple enemies um but both builds are very viable if you want more damage go to weapon fighting if you want more tankiness and a little more team utility go dueling for this build I'm going to recommend dueling but both again both builds work very well whether you're doing two weapon fighting with an offhand weapon or dueling with a uh a shield in your off hand for our level two spell here there's a few options that are really good invisibility is great cloud of daggers does not have a saving throw associated with it and so it's just 100% reliable damage and really nice for every character to have especially a character with somewhat weak ranged options like this character although remember you're a dexterity based build and now we have range slashing flourish so you can just attack twice using a a bow and it will be just as good as your melee attacks you won't be able to use smites on them but as a default action in in combat your ranged attacks with a good bow are actually going to be better overall than your melee attacks because you're going to be able to use a a heavy crossbow or the Titan string bow with an elixir of strength to actually do more damage with your ranged attacks than your melee attacks you can also double up attacking the same enemy with range slashing flourish this character gets to operate both at range and in melee extremely well your main damage of course is going to come from Smite attacks in in the late game so you're going to do more often melee but don't forget that you have really powerful ranged options on this character that being said I still think you're going to want to take something like cloud of daggers and then we'll replace say featherfall with invisibility here just for the utility though there's a lot of really good options again just focus on things that don't have saving throws associated with them so you're going to want utility spells rather than ones with saves at B level six we get a feat and get to increase our dexterity up to 18 here um there is an option to take dual wielder if you are going for the two-handed weapon build so you get one AC which is the same as you get from boost your dexterity by two you do lose a little bit of hit chance but you don't but you also get access to um higher level to to non-l weapons uh dual wielding so it doesn't actually cost you that much to replace the ASI for dexterity with dual wielder if you're dual wielding um that said I really like hit chance on this build it's so painful to miss when you need to land an important Smite so I would recommend going for dexterity even over dual wielder but I just wanted to mention that as a viable and Powerful option in itself for our K trip here now I'm going to take true strike to uh for the haters and then we're going to take something like knock for utility again you're going to be spending your spell slots primarily on smites so something that doesn't have a save and has utility in situational combats can be very useful see invisibility for example silence is very good against certain enemies knock of course gives you outof combat utility for the best combat power we're going to take silence here but there's a lot of different options and these are all spells you won't be casting that often because you have smites at level five barard you get font of inspiration so now we get our slashing flourishes or our flourishes back at on short rests rather than long rests letting us spend those pretty proflat which is really nice you can do a lot of burst damage against multiple enemies you can pretty much always slashing flourish if you're worried about getting hit you can always defensive flourish um and the bonuses increase to a d8 which basically means a flourish is like a A plus one level of a Smite attack cuz every level that you every spell level you spend on a Smite increases the Smite damage by a d8 so you're effectively always smiting at plus one when you're using a flourish here for our spell selection again we're looking for things that don't have that have utility in some situations it's like situational spells that don't have saving throws the premier example of this is plant growth there are some encounters that this will just completely ruin it doesn't take concentration makes a huge AOE that slows your enemies a lot and your level three spells are again mostly going to be spent on Smite attacks B level six we get extra attack from leveling up in Sword bard of I don't need to talk about why this is so powerful but you know it's extremely powerful on tactician or below this character also becomes one of the best recipients for haste because you can well on every level this character is one of the best recipients for haste but on tactician or below with extra attack you can make four attacks and in a fight where you really really want to kill something those four attacks can all be smites in the opening round of combat which can give you burst damage starting at level eight with a haste or a speed potion of um if you spend two level three spell slots and two level two spell slots for just about 200 damage in the opening round of combat on average ludicrously powerful effect that gives you um incredible burst damage still true on honor mode though on honor mode the haste action will not allow you to use the second attack from extra attack but it's still a very good spell for this character especially because it increases your AC and this character will be a very high AC build that will rarely take hits as a result for our second spell here the level three spells almost all have saving throws associated with them so there's really not much that you particularly want from level three we could go back for a utility spell like enhance ability something like like that or detect thoughts for conversations any of those are fine though again you will be spending your spell slots primarily on spites B level seven you are going to want to pick up um my one of my favorite spells and one that I think is actually extremely underrated in this game is freedom of movement movement it lasts until long rest it does not take uh your concentration and you cannot be paralyzed or restrained and you move through difficult terrain well we can create difficult terrain with our plant growth so if you have freedom of movement on yourself that gives you perfect movement through your own plant growth or any difficult terrain that's on the battlefield or an effect from an ally it also prevents you from being paralyzed obviously we're fighting mind flares who paralyze pretty frequently or restrained and if you don't pre-cast it then you can um snap an ally out of stun which obviously is one of the most dangerous effects in the game and one that the most dangerous enemies in the game apply very frequently so I quite like having freedom of movement greater invisibility along with this builds decent stealth checks and um very good ranged attacks can actually be quite useful you can often get some attacks from outside of combat with greater invisibility before before the enemy notices you cuz you do have just very powerful ranged options on this character um dimension door I probably wouldn't take although having a Teleport is pretty good but we're going to go with freedom of movement and probably replace one of the more situational lower level spells with greater invisibility at this point something like enhance ability and you'll again most of the time you're going to spend your level four spell slots on smites but when you want these spells they're really really nice to have level eight bar we get to max out our dexterity meaning that we are going to be hitting very frequently for very high damage with our finesse weapons and we get to take another spell here um we can go back for whatever utility spell we didn't pick up earlier let's take I don't know lesser restoration although you don't really need that on a paladin because actually you you really shouldn't take less restoration because you have Layon hands and that more or less duplicates the effect [Music] B level 9 we get access to fifth level spells and fifth level spell slots so one thing to know about paladins is that a fifth level spell slot is the same as a fourth level spell slot for smites um you smite attacks can only go up to 5 d8 which you get at fourth level spells so you're going to want to use your fifth level spell slots if you can on on a spell cuz you're going to have more um utility out of that though there's no certainly no shame in just using it for a Smite attack something like uh the and of course the one thing about bards is that they get pretty bad fifth level spell options at least in The Bard levels the only good ones require saving throws and even then hold monster and dominate person are both duplicated pretty well by lower level effects so I would here take something like Mas C wounds maybe it'll come up but most of the time again you're going to use this for a Smite attack at least at this level but next level things get pretty interesting because you get access to magical secrets and we can now take a fifth level spell which we can use on something else now there's one in particular that is incredible and also very very cool that this character gets to use that other characters do not and that is banishing Smite this is a ranged attack but we've got 20 dexterity so we can just banish enemies and it does plus 5 d10 Force damage which is incredibly powerful that's a huge damage boost to our already quite reasonable ranged attacks and they can be uh if they have 50 points or less uh 50 hit points or less they get banished removed from combat for two turns this is a paladin only spell that paladins don't get in this game because they never reach fifth level spell casting in Boulder's Gate uh so the only way to get access to this spell is to be a bar that a 10th level Bard with magical secrets for that reason in part because it's cool and also because it's just very good we're going to be taking banishing Smite and for our second spell slot there's a lot of uh good options here um the magical secrets are super powerful and there's lots of great stuff you can take other spells that have that are very hard to get access to like hunger of Hadar is unique to um certain characters guardian or sorry not guardian of Faith um Crusader mantle normally only paladins can get and this gives you extra damage to your whole party not amazing but okay Warden of Vitality gives you a bonus action heal but we already get a bonus action heal Aura so I wouldn't worry too much about that I think your options here are going to be something like condra Elemental which just gives you a a summon that lasts all day and it's always is going to be good um whereas banishing Smite is maybe a little more situational haste which is just the best spell in the game even on honor mode um and very very powerful for every character you can concentrate on it on yourself or cast it on an ally granted this character is less likely to want to self-cast haste because your concentration saves are not amazing and getting stunned is quite painful for you but it's always worth considering counter spell which every party should have access to although since you only reach this at level 12 hopefully you have had counter spell on another party member for much longer than this um but more counter spells is always more good um and then a few other really cool options like wall of stone can be useful for certain encounters the there's so many cool things that you can do with the magical secrets that you should really base this on what your party needs and what you feel like you want another fun one is uh spirit Guardians that you can selfcast we're going to be in melee a lot so having Spirit Guardians on lets you do a lot of damage just by walking around this character also makes multiple attacks frequently so even the humble hex from a level one spell slot can be very good uh I could go on and on and on and I I already have so we'll move on from the magical secrets and take let's say counter spell as a reasonable default but definitely take the time to explore that list we take kind of whatever from our B spells going from the very cool magical secrets back to the somewhat disappointing level five b spells always stings but we'll just take a utility spell here and then for our last can trip we're going to take uh let's say Mage hand you also get to have expert or additional skills so we can uh we get expertise in skills so we can expertise some of our skills that we have Proficiency in I'm not why why is it not letting us expertise the persuasion skill that's buggy cuz we do have we do have persuasion proficiency um I think it's only looking at the skills we yeah it's not letting us put expertise in skills we got from our background so that's that's kind of funny weird bug here but we can take like Athletics even with low strength expertise Athletics is still pretty useful expertise dialogue skills expertise uh perception hopefully they fix that bug there have been some bugs with the skill selection in this game lately that I really hope they resolve soon a couple other things for gear for this character you are going to want a good ranged weapon cuz like we talked about ranged weapons are very powerful and you have heavy armor proficiency but we're also a 20 dexterity character so often on this character it's going to be better to use one of the medium armors that gives you full dexterity Bon your full dexterity bonus so you can see by equipping the Yuan scale male we go up to AC compared to having a full plate equipped so you're going to want to decide what um decide which of the armors you're going to use on a caseby casee basis depending on whether you have better heavy armor or better medium armor at that point in time if you are a sword and board build you're going to want a finesse weapon in the main hand and a shield the best Shield you can find in the off hand this Shield of devotion or other Shields that give you a shield like this that gives you an additional spell slot well one more spell slot is one more Smite so that's always nice um and remember you also get six level spells because at level two Paladin you get a six level slot because at level two Paladin you count as a level one spellcaster and then you have 10 levels of Bard so you still reach six level spell slots in in the game um you also if you're a two-handed weapon build you're just going to want another light and finesse weapon in your offhand um anything that allows you to guarantee a critical hit like this killer sweetheart multiplies extremely well with the very very high damage of your Smite attacks something that's also very important on this character is that you go into your character sheet go to your or sorry your spell book go to your reactions and set all of your smites to on and ask this way when you use a slashing flourish and hit an enemy so we're going to just set all of these when you attack an enemy it will then pop up the question do you want to use a Smite see we can now choose what level of smite we want to use and so this lets you decide whether to Smite based on sort of you already get to see the damage that your your default attack did so you can choose the level of Smite based on what you think you need and it also lets you if you have it on reaction when you use a flourish attack you can still Smite if you don't have it on reaction the game will not let you both Smite and flourish on the same attack but if you set your your smites to to be a reaction and ask you to use them then it will allow you to choose to Smite on a flourish attack very very important for this character so you absolutely have to do that it it will be a little Annoying that it's going to pop that message up every time but I personally prefer that just because you can then actually make the decision based on what you need in that combat if you're playing manthara specifically then the or any other character with ithd powers the luck of the far Realms elth power is incredibly synergistic with Paladin because any critical hit doubles the damage of your smites and when your smites are doing plus 5 d8 damage That's goes up to plus 10 to8 damage doing massive damage so guaranteed criticals are extremely powerful for this this character as well all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the sword Adin the the sword Bard um Paladin and as always if you have enjoyed this video do please feel free to leave a thumbs up comment on the video I do read all of your comments although the channel has grown enough that I can no longer reply to every single comment I read them and I really appreciate them so thank you so much for taking the time to comment both of those things help a ton with the algorithm I can't over how much it helps to have engagement on these videos it's one of the primary things YouTube looks at when it decides whether to recommend a video so I really appreciate you taking the time and if you you know just want to support any content creator not just me that's the best way to do it is take 10 seconds just to leave any comment on their video and of course you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content and I'll catch you next time cheers my friends GG

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 91,096

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

Id: 4O_KrBfWsrk

Length: 35min 53sec (2153 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 27 2023