The SAFEST CHARACTER in Baldur's Gate 3 - Paladin / Minthara Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide I hope you're all doing well today I have for you my pick for the safest and easiest character to play in balder's Gate if you're looking for a character that's resilient and extremely forgiving of mistakes this is the one for you this is also a very powerful addition to a party for advanced players but in particular I think this is useful because it lets you get get out of bad situations so well and is extremely forgiving of misplays bad die rolls buggy lines of sight buggy movement all of which are known to happen in this game and so I think that even in heavily optimized parties this is an excellent addition to a party that will keep your other party mates alive and be just an incredibly safe way to play through the game this is a great pick for an honor mode party if that's something you're going for especially if you're not like 100% confident in your uh perfect tactical plays which nobody should be and also just an excellent addition to any party overall because it will help keep your party alive even if things go horribly wrong the character that I'm talking about is a paladin specifically an oath of ancients Paladin and so we are going to demonstrate this character using Menara but I also think this makes for one of the best maybe even the best main character in the game if you are just looking for a a smooth and easy way to play through the game you get access to Great dialogue skills as well as being extremely tanky resilient and providing a lot of support to your party let's Jump Right In and build this character first up if you're not playing this on Menara then for racial options the usual best races all apply um but special option for Gnome in this case because advantage on saving throws will really lean into this character's goal of being as safe as possible so gnomes get advantage on the mental saving throws as a paladin you're going to have excellent saving throws so you'll basically never fail mental saving throws um but other great options include wood elf for bonus movement speed GE Yankee for Misty step which is good for getting out of bad situations and also extra skill proficiencies which can be used for dialogue skills or anything else you need um dgar for atwi invisibility or halfling to roll ones which again plays really well with the character's idea of trying to mitigate the bad RNG or bad luck as much as possible for our subass selection we are going to go with the oath of the Ancients Paladin this is the defensive Paladin option and the reason for that this is good is there's a couple abilities that you will get much later on that are extremely powerful from oath of the Ancients but even right from level one you get an extraordinarily powerful ability for keeping your teammates alive that is healing Radiance which is a bonus action that costs a channel oath charge and heals you and every Ally Within in 10 ft for five hit points as a bonus action and then next turn it does it again one of the single best spells in the game is healing word a bonus action that costs a spell slot and Only Hits one target this is healing word on steroids it hits everybody it doesn't cost a spell slot meaning that you can bring down allies back to life with it you can keep an allies alive and you can even cast it in advance because it lasts for two turns gaining uh so you cast it have an ally go down on an enemy turn and then they'll pop back up at the beginning of your next turn when the healing Radiance effect goes off this is an incredibly powerful ability that really makes your party much safer in the very difficult early levels and of course the first three levels of the game are the point where the game is hardest especially on honor mode so having this sort of safety bubble or safety button emergency button is extremely powerful for any character to any party to have you also just as a Paladin get um access to lay on hand so some additional healing don't use this in combat uh unless you need to get an ally up from the ground but this is very useful for removing poisons and diseases um and just having some emergency healing in your back pocket is also very powerful and divine sense which is an ability that's very easy to forget but there are a lot of fiends and Undead in this game and a bonus action to get advantage on attacks against them for two turns is also extremely good and so that you should really keep in mind um use this frequently because it's free to use it just costs your bonus action but doesn't take a resource or anything like that and so it will allow you to gain advantage on those attack roles uh very often meaning that you more likely to hit and more likely to critically hit with your Smite attacks for our ability selection we're actually going to do something a little nonstandard for this character because paladins are what's called multi-attribute dependent or mad what that means is that they want five of the six attributes to be high at all times and often when I say this I'll get people in my comments going paladins aren't multi-attribute dependent they only need five of the attributes like yes that's that's what that means they need five of the attributes that's a lot of different attributes but we can mitigate this actually by using a specific weapon category if we use finesse weapons and because we intend to be using a one-handed weapon and a shield throughout the game we have access to all the best finesse weapons in the game and not all of the best strength based weapons then we can make our attacks using dexterity instead of strength this does three great things for us one it lets us get very high dexterity which is the best of the six attributes dexterity controls your initiative and initiative roles are incredibly important for tanks especially but also for any other characters it also lets us use the medium armors in the game that have uncapped dexterity bonuses to their AC letting us actually get higher Armor class as a dexterity charact dexterity based character than even a heavy armor user we will still have heavy armor proficiency as a paladin so you'll want to be swapping back and forth whether you're using heavy armor or light or medium armor based on what the best armor set you actually have at that point in the game is but this will let you reach a higher endgame AC than any other character in the game it also stops you from having to chug strength Elixir every day which is something that paladins often want to do otherwise but you you can still do that if you are if you really want to use a strength based weapon you can drink one of the elixir of Hill giant strength and and use that um but this character actually works quite well with just a normal stat spread because we can drop strength down to eight you will still do great damage because most of Paladin's damage come from their Smite attacks not their actual weapon attacks so you will be able to bring out high damage spikes whenever you actually need them while still providing a ton of utility and not costing your party resources this way also if you have a monk or a barbarian or somebody else who really wants those strength elixir in your party you can feed them to them and not have to stock up on twice as many which just gets pretty annoying to manage all right let's build the actual stat spread so we're going to start with 16 dexterity 16 Constitution to max out on hit points 12 wisdom and 14 Charisma Charisma is really important for paladins later on you could leave this lower for the early game because we're not going to take spells that actually require enemies to make a Charisma saving throw um but Charisma will be really good for us as we level up so we're going to want as much of it as we can get items and stuff that increase our Charisma will also end up being pretty good for us later on this stat spread gives us great initiative great hit points good saving throws in the most important saving throws and good Charisma which will give us even better saving throws once we get access to our AAS later on for our skill selection the really important one of course if you are a main character and this character is very likely to be your party face doing a lot of your dialogue checks you're going to want persuasion and intimidation is also really nice to have um one thing that you can also do is play a zaral tieling to get uh racial access to the thury cantrip giving you advantage on intimidation checks that can be pretty powerful Athletics is worse on this than it is on most melee characters because our strength will be low so will be taking an Athletics penalty it's still not a terrible pick but generally speaking I'm going to suggest for a main character you're going to want Insight intimidation and persuasion um you could take a background that gives you persuasion and insight like Guild artisan and then put the extra skill points elsewhere um Guild Artisan is probably the best background for this character but in general you're going to want to put your points in dialogue skills for for this character since it's going to be doing a lot of your talking as we level up we get access to two really important things for paladins well three really we get spells we get smites and we get a fighting style level two is one of the Paladin is one of the single best levels in the game just because you get so many different things at this level for our fighting style here we're actually going to take protection this character does not end up with great reactions and so having protection to give disadvantage on an attack against an ally within 5T can be extremely powerful you could also take defense or dueling if you want more damage or more armor but protection fits with the theme of trying to keep our party alive and does really well paladins really want to have other melee allies working with them so this character will work very well with say a lazel carlac aarian sort of Team um something along those lines because they want their allies to be grouped next to them for their auras when those allies are next to them for the auras you also gain the advantage of the protection fighting style as long as you stay within 5T of them and can protect allies from dangerous enemy attacks imposing disadvantage is one of the most powerful things you can do as a reaction and this character does not otherwise get great uses for its reactions so this is extremely strong I talk about this a lot but every character has in every turn of combat five resources that they want to use action bonus Action Reaction movement and concentration and you should try to have good uses for all of them so adding protection fighting style into this character gives them a great use for their reaction a resource they wouldn't otherwise be using for your prepared spell list you will primarily be using these on Smite attacks because we have lower damage output turnto turn than other paladins um because we're using a one-handed dexterity based finesse based weapon rather than a a two-handed grape sword or something along those lines it will be more important that you spend smites when you are trying to actually bring an enemy down or do damage but there are still some great options to have as spell selections for you one of course is thunderous Smite which does not take your concentration and can knock an enemy prone as well as pushing it which is just very powerful it's um very slightly less damage than a normal Smite attack which is 2 d8 radiant damage but it's a better damage type fewer things resist Thunder than radiant and it knocks the enemy's prone and has a lot of utility um bless is of course excellent great thing to concentrate on Shield of Faith lasts your entire day which is pretty nice so I would recommend having that up and protection from evil and good can really save you in certain encounters so that's always good don't bother taking cure wounds by the way you have lay on hands and healing Radiance which is plenty of healing for your character at Paladin level three we get access to a couple other things Nature's wrath and turn on the faithless because we are a an ancient Paladin if you've been if you have found ways to increase your charisma these end up pretty good because restrain is a very powerful effect but generally you're going to want to spend your channel oath charge which are pretty limited there you only get one at these early levels and it's on a short rest cool down on healing Radiance rather than on these two abilities so you can mostly ignore these abilities you do also get uh in snaring strike but again that requires a save from the enemy and we're avoiding spells that have saves because the save DC is based on our Charisma which we're not raising as much as we're raising dexterity so that we can hit things go first and have good AC you also get speak with animals which is a really nice addition to any main character so if you're playing this as a main character you don't have to find another way to take this or remember to drink a potion every day for our last prepared spell we can add in it really doesn't matter at this point cuz these are ones where we're going to be spending them on smites almost definitely so you want to take situational spells that are really good in some encounters for your prepared spells um but uh so like something like heroism if you know you're going up against an enemy that frightens could be good but generally speaking you're going to spend all of your spell slots on smites on this character not on actually casting these spells usually your decision is going to be is it better to use just a normal Smite or to use thunderous Smite in other words does the prone and push matter or do you just need more damage at character level four you get an extra lay on hands charge which is also really good just a little more free healing throughout the day as well as a feet for a feet we're simply going to increase our dexterity which is very powerful let us hit more often and uh do more damage when we do hit as well as giving us better AC and better initiative again I should mention that you will want to check frequently whether which suit of armor is the best suit of armor for you in the early game this is usually going to be a piece of medium armor until you get the good heavy armors then briefly it's going to be Heavy Armor uh and then in the late game it's going to be medium armor again when you get the magic medium armors that let you use your whole dexterity modifier there may also be some weird points depending on the order you play through the game when you're actually best off in light armor just because you have so much dexterity at palad in level five you get access to extra attack one of the best features for every Marshall character of course and really increases your damage output but also really importantly for our goal of being safe and staying alive we get as an ancient Paladin Misty step Misti step is a bonus action teleport so you can use this and then still move and then still dash for a total movement of 120 ft more if you have long strier or a Wood Elf or something like that um meaning that if your fight if the fight starts to go back you can Misty step out and run away on honor mode this is something that is really really good to have access to running away from fights is an important skill that you should develop if you're playing on honor mode you also get moon beam which you usually shouldn't use on this character enemies get a save for half which is based on your charisma bonus so they'll always take half damage and you're better off just attacking um and spending this spell slot on a Smite but having access to Misty step is never bad you should usually during your adventuring day try to save a level two spell slot in case you need an emergency misy step for our actual level two prepared spells we get to take a couple here so let's pull off some of the least useful ones and think figure out what we need um branding Smite is actually pretty good against certain encounters it can prevent enemies from going invisible while it's again less damage the and requires your concentration preventing an enemy from going invisible there's no save against this this effect is pretty useful in some encounters so you could use it in those encounters protection from Poison is quite good in also certain encounters mostly though your level two spells are all going to be smites you can use Aid if you want a few more hit points but you're better off casting that from a cleric Ally typically so I would prepare stuff that's going to be very situationally useful like lesser restoration protection from Poison and heroism not for the hit points the temporary hit points from heroism but for the immunity to fight frightened uh which you can use to knock a frightened condition off an enemy or branding Smite if you're facing something that likes to go invisible Paladin level six we get the feature that makes paladins amazing aura of protection you and any nearby allies within 10 ft get a plus zero bonus to saving throws this bonus is actually not plus zero the tool tip is just broken it's plus your charisma bonus so with 14 charisma we're getting plus two to all of our saving throws um meaning that our saves are going to be incredible one other thing that paladins get that's really nice is that you have wisdom save proficiency you have high Constitution and this version of the Paladin is taking High dexterity meaning that the three important saves Dex con and wisdom which are the saves that will you will use much more often than the other three you have very very high numbers in and then you increase those even further by adding your charisma bonus to them as well as helping out your allies this is why we want our allies to be in melee alongside us um because they if you group in a bubble together then you can apply your aurs to your melee allies rendering them very very resilient to danger if you are going alongside damage dealers and so on then your allies can benefit from having a tank like this in your party because you provide so much support to your party members at Paladin level seven the ancient Paladin gets access to Aura of warding which does the same is the same 10-ft area but also you and nearby allies only take half damage from spells so suddenly all of your allies have plus minimum plus two more if you've found ways to increase your charisma to all of their saving throws and against damaging spells they only take half damage that means you can safely ignore a lot of enemy spellcasters because you can pass the saves you can remove enemy frighten frightened or something like that that they apply to you using um a spell like heroism and you if you they do fire a damaging spell at you you only take half damage an enemy Fireball does 8 D6 of damage for an average damage of what's that um 28 so the 28 average damage that's incoming to your Paladin or your party at level seven is going to be haved if you make the dexterity saving throw pretty easy to do when you have 18 dexterity plus two saves from your charisma and then even easier potentially for um your allies who might have Proficiency in deck saves so you'll take half damage for 14 and then you'll take half damage again for only seven so the enemies will be spending a level three spell slot to do seven damage to you something that you can ignore or just heal off with healing Radiance um as a bonus action this is means that you can safely run through walls of fire you can safely ignore most enemy spellcasters you also don't need to take evocation on your Wizards even if you do sometimes accidentally hit your allies with spells because you will be able to just ignore the damage that's incoming from your evocation wizard um a wall of Fire cast on top of this Paladin will deal like five damage to them Mor meaning that an enemy who's trapped in there with you is taking tons and tons of damage while you are pretty much ignoring the incoming damage um just a very powerful effect to have for your party extremely extremely useful Paladin level eight we get another feat and we're simply going to increase our dexterity again another option here if you are feeling like you're already hitting your your attacks and stuff this isn't what I would recommend but I should I should mention it if you want to move this earlier in your build it's definitely an option to do so is to pick up the Sentinel feet Sentinel gives you advantage on opportunity attacks and when you hit an enemy with an opportunity attack they have to stop moving if your main combo is stuff like trapping An Enemy Inside wall of fire and having your Paladin ignore it or just having an evocation wizard who doesn't do damage to your Paladin then you can um take Sentinel to keep enemies trapped in damaging spell effects with you that's very very powerful it also helps protect your allies and when you're grouped up next to your allies you're likely to get the uh the opportunity attack reaction as well when they try to Target an ally given that we're a protection fighting style character though you're usually going to want to impose disadvantage rather than make an attack for not much damage although at later levels we'll start doing more damage as well even with our basic attacks so that can be more useful depending on the situation by default though we're just going to take an ability Improvement and increase our dexterity at Paladin level 9 we get access to third level spells and you could at this point have deviated from Paladin if you want to dip another class level eight is the time to get out of Paladin because you've already gotten everything that you came for you've gotten your two Feats you could take four levels of fighter for Action surge four LEL levels of a full casting class in order to increase your spell slots for higher level smites and more utility um but I actually think that you're you will want to stay in Paladin for a couple reasons um one it's kind of nice that you just aren't multiclassing with such a powerful build and two you get access to a few goodies later down the line unfortunately for the ancient Paladin the goodies are not your oath spells protection from energy and and plant growth are both very good but you don't have any way to become immune to difficult terrain easily on this character you would need items for that um so plant growth is less powerful for you than it is for Druids it can keep enemy melee characters trapped next to you uh or enemy characters trapped in melee with you by slowing their movement but it makes you much slower at moving around the battlefield if you try to cast it on yourself still an excellent spell but not the the most amazing spell and protection from energy is good to have for certain Encounters of course but not um one that you're going to cast that often however at Paladin level three you do also get access to a bunch of other great utility spells um like remove curse and Warden of Vitality um Warden of Vitality gives you a bonus another bonus action heal which is basically a healing word every turn for the entire fight that can sometimes be useful in some encounters that want you to heal very often or if your party members are starting to drop you can use this generally you're going to want to just use healing Radiance instead of this but this is an option in some encounters so I wouldn't I don't hate picking this up um I wouldn't recommend Crusaders mantle it requires your concentration and you'll do more damage just using that spell slot for a Smite daylight is very good obviously in some encounters of course um an elemental weapon does give you an additional bonus to your attack roles which will let you hit more often with your smites it also uh lasts all day which is very powerful so you can use this as long as you don't lose concentration on it you'll be very good at passing concentration checks on this character of course because you have bonuses to all your saves and high Constitution um so Elemental weapon is an option again your level three spells you're mostly going to spend on smites but for certain situations they can be very [Music] good Paladin level 10 gets us Aura of Courage making you immune to frightened which single-handedly wins one of the harder boss Encounters in the game or not not wins entirely but removes the hardest as aspect of one of the hardest late game Boss Encounters in the game um so that by itself itself is really nice uh and it also just makes your character way more resil your whole party way more resilient to a lot of dangerous Mental effects that can be applied you can just ignore half of the spells in the game now because you're immune to charm you're immune to frightened and and so on collecting your party around to Paladin just gives you a great Anchor Point for your combats as well so it it really makes you safer in a lot of ways at Paladin level 11 we get the best reason to stay in Paladin though which is improved Divine Smite this makes all your attacks not just Smite deal an extra d8 of damage that basically raises the level of all your smites by one and just makes all your attacks do I guess a level zero Smite uh is one way to think of it if every attack is doing a level zero Smite it's just a lot of extra damage any way you have to apply multiple attacks in the in a fight is very powerful so this character works very well with haste and elixir of blood lust especially at lower difficulties at where you get multiple attacks from those extra actions um and this character benefits very strong WR L from uh just having extra damage dice because normally your weapon attacks are slightly weaker than other characters since you're going other melee characters since you're using one-handed finesse weapons but the extra damage dice work really well you're already fishing for criticals to double your Smite damage so extra damage Dice from improved Divine Smite works extremely well with that and then since we've already gone for Paladin level 11 we might as well round it out with level 12 taking a feat and the feat that I recommend here is going to be Sentinel there are bunch of other really good options though if you find you are still losing initiative alert is incredible of course you are never wrong to take alert um and a couple other options you could pick up Savage attacker as well if you want more damage Savage attacker is incredibly good for paladins especially where most of your damage comes from smites because it rerolls all the damage dice that you're doing with your smites um allowing you to effective ly increase your Smite damage by about uh 25% it's it's a little under 25% on average but it's still very good um and that that means that your average damage on this character goes up by a lot especially because it rolls the damage I from and improved Smite I think that Sentinel actually has a little more utility than just doing more damage because this isn't primarily a damage-based character it's primarily about keeping your other three party members alive while they their thing but if you're finding that this character could just use a little more damage then Savage attacker is also a great pick and there you have it that's a level 12 ancients Paladin which I think is one of the safest characters you can possibly play a couple tips for this character as well and then I'll talk a little bit about gear and items one thing that you need to remember is that you have to activate these auras they will stay activated after you get them but the first time you level them up you have to activate them which is very irritating and easy to forget but if you don't do it you won't be getting the benefits of them so make sure you cast Aura of protection cast Aura of warding cast um Aura of Courage the first time you level them up to keep them online for the the game there um you won't have to this do this every time you long rest but you have to do it when you level them up also very useful for paladins is go to your spell book go to the reactions tab of your spell book and make sure your Divine smites are always set to yes and ask the reason for this is that then you can make your attack and decide whether to use Divine Smite based on whether it hits and how much damage it hits for so if we were to make an attack with our weapon here against uh Withers we can choose uh yeah we can choose whether to use look at the far realms we hit and then we can see how much damage the attack did before we decide whether we're going to waste a Smite attack on it or not this way if an enemy is at low Health you can use a Smite if you want to try uh to attack again and get a critical hit with your second attack you can use Divine Smite on a critical hit and you should pretty much always use Divine Smite on a critical hit so also things that guarantee Critical Hits like the elith power luck of the far Realms um this one there we go uh guarantees a critical hit like having an item like the killer sweetheart ring anything else that guarantees Critical Hits very powerful on smites because Critical Hits double every die you roll so a level three Smite which does four d8 of radiant damage plus one d8 from your improved Smite feature does 10 d8 of radiant damage on a critical hit Smite that's an incredible amount of extra damage other tips mostly is just consider keep this character tightly grouped with your allies so that you can use protection and so that they benefit from your auras um in combat so this plays best with other melee characters it's not like you can't have a backline but you definitely want to have a backline use lay on hands and healing Radiance both for downed allies especially if an enemy if an ally goes to zero hit points you can get them back up into the fight with these but a 48 Point healing burst on on lay on hands with multiple charges throughout the day is really powerful you can use this if if a character takes a really bad hit you just want them to be at full health many characters this is going to get back to full health from most attacks in the game in one go it wastes all your healing for that day but it's just something to keep in mind that that's one of the biggest heals in the game just on using all of your lay on hands for gear for this character you're going to want to to use either heavy armor or medium armor depending on the stage of the game Heavy Armor in the mid game medium armor in the early game and when you get access to the medium armors that let you have uncapped dexterity so you can see here with a heavy with the protective plate that does gives you 18 AC and doesn't let you use your Dex bonus we have 20 AC with the Yanti scale male which has 15 AC and lets us use our full deck bonus we have 22 AC with the armor of agility which you get later on you can have 24 AC AC making you the highest AC character in the game on this character 25 if you took defensive fighting style instead of protection you will also want a a finesse weapon of some kind so you need a one-handed weapon with the Finesse weapon tag in the early game the best of these is f Alo because it also gives you a ton of utility party Buffs and extra damage while being a plus one long sword so it's got a good a really good damage die for a finesse weapon as well this is the only finesse long sword in the game um but it's notable in in that it is a finesse long sword later on you'll get daggers rapers short swords Etc which are all finesse weapons and just use whichever one does the most damage um which particular weapon you use is not going to be terribly important although there's a Rapier that gives you multiple reactions that is also very good in the late game other than that your gear doesn't matter um in particular things that increase your charisma are very strong items that give you addition saving throws are very strong and items that let you cast spells that don't require saves are very strong this also this character also makes a good utility spellcaster for concentration-based Scrolls so if you find a scroll of haste or something and you want to use it on an ally um this character is one of the best characters in the game at maintaining concentration because of your very good saves so worth having Scrolls and utility items on your character this character does solid damage very good at keeping your party alive extremely forgiving of misplays and bugs and tactical errors in the game and I think one of the best characters that you can have on honor mode you won't be the highest damage output in the game but you're a very very safe character and especially good for new players you also get a lot of the the really important dialogue skills so you get to play the game in uh one of the most fun ways by making all your dialog checks all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this video and as always of course feel free to leave a comment subscribe to the channel for more of this and other strategy game content and I will catch you next time cheers folks GG

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 28,855

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

Id: ac0lC0oHwZA

Length: 33min 36sec (2016 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2024