The ULTIMATE BEASTMASTER - BG3 Honor Mode Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide I hope you're all doing well today I'm going to be covering the ultimate Beastmaster build for balers gate Beastmaster is one of the most interesting classes in balers Gate 3 because the fifth edition DND class that it's based on is completely different they actually totally reworked the class in order to make it for the video game and they did so in such a way that it is way way better Beast Master in fifth edition is honestly kind of a disappointing subass lot of people were pretty unhappy about how they implemented it in the tabletop game and laran totally reworked it to be more or less what it should have been from the beginning it also I think is one of the more interesting classes for a couple things if for a few reasons if you are playing on high difficulty settings one because it's one of the classes that actually benefits the most from staying single classed all the way through so if you're someone who dislikes multiclassing then a beastmas Ranger may be one of the best builds for for for you to take a look at and it has some of the things that make honor mode uh that that you really want to have access to on honor mode it has some of the best mechanics to play honor mode playthroughs those being stealth archery and of course this will be an Archer build as well as a summons which can benefit a lot from your party members Buffs and make it much easier for you to escape combat if things start to turn against you so this build is I think one of the safer and cleaner builds for playing honor mode with um whether for your main character or just to have in your party because you'll do tons of damage have lots of free CC effects which is another important mechanic on honor mode you get resource free crowd control and you can also very easily leave combat if things start to turn against you and not just lose your whole run if you have one fight go bad so let's look at The Beastmaster Ranger I'm using Minsk as the example character here because it's the subass that the game suggests for him by default fault but if you're playing this for a main character the best racial options are what they usually are although special mention for dgar for this one because turning invisible out of combat is insane for an Archer especially um also D has quite a lot of synergy with this build because we will be using Darkness alongside certain items so you could build for that um also of course all of the the standard excellent races are still good here wood elf is particularly powerful for Archers because being able to move faster meaning you can kite enemies more easily I fire an attack and run away and not allow them to get in range of you um halfling to reroll ones Nomes for better saving throws and stealth Advantage uh and gith Yankee for the Misty step once per day because this build otherwise won't get access to Misty step an extremely important spell for almost every character to have access to for our stats we are going to be wanting to change significantly the starting stats the ranger starting stats and and min's starting stats here are honestly just a mess um they're I think one of the worst starting stat spreads in the game so you definitely want to adjust your starting stats whenever you're playing a ranger to have just a better stat spread we're going to drop Charisma down we don't need that at all and we are going to remove the plus one bonus from here drop our strength down and bring our Constitution and dexterity up to 16 these are of course the most important stats for this build we then take 14 wisdom giving us reasonable save DC on our spells in the very early game um but later on we will not be boosting our wisdom so you won't want to be casting spells that have save DCS that's okay because this build is not going to be using aggressive spell casting anyways um and then with our remaining four points you actually get to kind of play around with those if you have ethyl's hair you could take 17 dexterity um possibly on a ree back later or you could just start with it and that will get you an extra feat or you could put these four points into strength to give you better jump distance and carry weight that's what I recommend if you're playing this as a main character you could of course also put these into Charisma if you wanted slightly better dialogue skills the last four points don't matter that much so this is the sort of optimal stat spread for a ranger for our skill selection here the only really important ones are you're going to want to take ensure that you have stealth I also highly recommend even with relatively low strength getting Athletics is just one of the ones that matters the most um and then of course we want perception survival because those skills do come up and they're something that Rangers can get and use with our relatively with our reasonable wisdom you won't have as good skills in these as say a druid or cleric that can get access to it because your wisdom won't be as high but perception and survival are use perception particularly is useful enough that you want multiple characters that can do it survival in this game is actually totally useless cuz all it allows you to do is find the hidden chests which you can just dig in the place where they are anyways even without succeeding the survival check for our favored enemy selection I will say that this mostly is for flavor so if there's one that really speaks to you just take it it will not change the power level of this build significantly but the best overall the best two overall are Ranger Knight giving you access to Heavy Armor um this build will in the late game switch back to medium armor because we're a dexterity based build so your best AC will be with one of the medium armors that lets you use your full dexterity bonus but having heavy armor access in the early game gives you a lot of options and there's always some cool heavy armors that you might want to use um and Bounty Hunter which in the very early game lets you use ins snaring strike ins snaring strike is a very powerful crowd control effect and with 14 wisdom and disadvantage on the saves enemies will fail the saves reasonably often however it's also concentration and because we're a beastmas ranger we are going to be want wanting to use um our concentration on Hunter Mark almost all the time especially in the early game because we can double up on that thanks to our companion so for that that reason I think that the best one of these is going to be Ranger Knight for our natural Explorer if you are Minsk you don't want to take Beast Tamer even though the game suggests you do that because he can already he can always sum Buu whether or not he has Fine familiar and you can't have both Buu and another familiar out if you aren't playing as mints if you if you aren't using this build for Minsk specifically then Beast Tamer is probably the pick um because this character will benefit a lot from having extra bodies on the field the best familiar if you are summoning familiars is the Raven it can blind enemies and that gives you advantage on your attacks from range which is extremely powerful and will let you land your very damaging ranged attacks much more frequently um if you already have uh have boo then you'll want to take Wasteland Wanderer fire it's the most common damage type in this game especially in the early game and so having resistance to it makes you actually quite a bit tankier in in a lot of fights when you need to resist fire all right let's get on to the next level and talk about how to level up our Beast Master [Music] at level two we get both spells and a fighting style so Rangers actually get quite a lot at level two which is kind of fun um for our fighting style of course we're a ranged build so we're going to go for archery one of the reasons that we go for a ranged build is how good the archery fighting style is there's basically no other way in the game to get a flat plus two bonus to just your normal to hit rolles and that's ridiculously powerful that you're going to hit 10% more often so um that increases your overall damage output massively when you have archery fighting style and it also lets you mitigate the downsides of the Sharpshooter feet which of course most archery builds are going to want to use and this is no exception for our spells you will always want Hunter's Mark this is one of the things that allows Rangers to do good damage and Rangers also don't have bonus actions good bonus actions to use otherwise one thing I talk about a lot and I say this almost every build guide is that every character wants to be using all five of its resources every turn of combat those are your action your reaction your bonus action your concentration and your movement um anytime that you leave one of those on the table you just haven't spent a resource that you have access to so you're just leaving value on the table making sure you have something good to do with all of these actions is one of uh really is a really important principle in character building and so Hunter Mark also gives you a bonus action which a very strong bonus action that you can use in a build that otherwise doesn't have like the second spell that you're almost always going to want to take here is long Strider unless you have it from another character long Strider is insanely good for uh archers and also for a Beast Master Ranger you get to double up on value something that's really cool about a Beast Master is you get a whole other character or two other characters if you have a familiar and so anything that can apply a buff to your whole party increases in value just for having a Beast Master in the party long Strider is a ritual meaning that it doesn't take a spell slot to use so you can cast long Strider on your beast and gain even more value than a normal character would from long Strider this goes double for spells like Aid or Paladin's auras um one of the best companions for a Beast Master is an oath of the Ancients Paladin who gets the Paladin auras and also the AOE healing all of which gets doubled up in value because your Beast Master is essentially two characters in one at Ranger level three we of course get to take the subass and we all know what we're here for we're taking Beast Master and the uh gaining access to the ranger companion there are five available Companions and you can swap between them at will uh on a short rest cool down so you can change what companion you have out based on the situation I'll talk a little bit about the strength and weaknesses of each companion kind of show them off at the end of the video I will say that by default the one that you are going to want to use most of the time is The Raven it's extremely mobile and can blind enemies and that combined with the familiar Raven gives you a lot of options to Blind enemies having advantage on all your attacks as a result and enemies having disadvantage on all their attacks and preventing them from making ranged attacks against you is ridiculously powerful it costs no resources to do this um and so it's just an extremely potent effect that your party gets access to for free when you have the raven uh animal companion out uh the all of them have their place but I think by default you're never going to be sad if you're using the Raven for our spell selection here a couple other options you can take fog Cloud you can hide in this and become completely immune to enemy attacks they won't know you're there because you have hidden inside the fog Cloud uh will prevent range attackers from getting to you and if melee attackers run in then they will be um blinded so you'll have disadvantage granted you will also be blinded until you get the eversight ring which is very powerful for this build so it's an item you should potentially be looking out for but once you do have that then you can blind them with no disadvantage ins snaring strike is still good especially if you took Bounty Hunter but generally speaking you're just going to want to take whatever is useful I honestly like speak with animals for the flavor here but um you will at this point be able to pick any of these spells you're going to be using your spell slots your level one spell slots pretty much exclusively on Hunter Mark so what you pick here doesn't actually matter that much Ranger level four we get our first feat and because we have Advantage from our companion because we're blinding enemies very frequently and the archery fighting style this build is actually the best at using sharpshooter in the early game Sharpshooter gives you a minus five penalty to your attack roll but for plus 10 damage which is is a massive damage bonus especially early and the earlier you can reliably land these Shar Sharpshooter attacks the better that flat plus 10 damage is in the late game your damage is going to be significantly higher because you're doing you're firing a better weapon you know you've got more flat damage on your gloves on your dexterity whatever the plus 10 damage is more valuable the the earlier it is in the game enemies have lower Health as well um so this build uses Sharpshooter a very powerful feat better than any other build because it's so reliable at Landing these Sharpshooter attacks Ranger level five you get extra attack which of course is an insane class feature um and your companion gets to add your proficiency bonus to its armor class and damage one thing that's really cool about this is that the proficiency bonus gets added after all other modifiers so there's uh one particular use case that I'll talk about later but any that like has damage if enemies have damage resistance for example the proficiency bonus gets added after the resistance is applied weirdly enough um so this is effectively pure damage that pierces all enemy effects um just I guess a weird Quirk of how they coded it extra attack you don't need to know why you know you don't need me to tell you why that's good two attacks is twice as good as one attack for our level two spell selection you are going to want two spells and I recommend that that the uh the two spells that you're going to want most of all are pass without Trace which is extremely useful if you want to attack from stealth um this also combos very well with an ally casting greater invisibility on you at later levels you can consistently make the stealth checks and get lots of attacks before enemies notice you um and the other one which we're going to replace whatever our third spell was here unless you haven't found another source of speak with animals or whatever is going to be Spike growth both of these are concentration so it's worth noting that you won't cast these that often and you could go with something else something situational like lesser restoration or something like silence which is also really good one thing silence doesn't let tell you too is that it's a ritual so if you cast it before combat starts it doesn't cost you a spell slot um with uh but Spike growth gives you a difficult terrain field which is super powerful for two reasons one if you're using a raven raven can fly over it they're just immune to the spike growth and two um you're an Archer so anything that can prevent enemies from moving towards you is really powerful enemy movement is Haled when they're on the spike growth and they take damage so especially in like long narrow corridors you can force enemies to move even if you force them to jump it uses up their bonus action and a lot of enemies have very powerful bonus actions that wasting their action to jump over the spike growth on wasting it to jump over the spike growth on is a pretty valuable effect for you and of course some enemies can't jump and those enemies will just get stuck Ranger level six we get another favored enemy and another natural Explorer um at this point it really doesn't matter what you pick for the favorite enemies so pick one based on Flavor um I will say I guess protection from evil and good comes up in a couple fights in the game though by the time you hit Level six most of those are finished but there there is some utility to having this uh at this point though these are very very marginal so pick based on Flavor more than practicality I think and you're going to want to start filling out your Wasteland Wanderers you could also at this point Respec out of Beast Tamer because you'll probably have scratch who's a better familiar than your uh Beast Tamer familiars um for most things so you can Respec out of this and take two Wasteland Wanderers if you so desire the second best is usually cold after fire Ranger level seven you get um the dash disengage and help as a bonus action on your animal companion this is if you have seen uh Rogues play Dash and disengage as bonus actions are incredibly powerful and also your Animal Companions mostly don't have other Bon bonus actions that they want to use help as a bonus action is also really nice especially on honor mode because it's effectively the same as having healing W you can get an enemy uh get an ally up from being downed with the help action stabilize them or um help them out of an entangle or something remove a stun from them as a bonus action which means that you aren't spending a real action on doing that in an emergency don't underestimate how good this feature is for our spell selection we're just going to take whichever one we didn't have before silence is always nice to have but um at this point the Spells are still mostly going to be being spent on Hunter Mark even though you don't gain benefit from upcasting Hunters Mark the benefit that you gain from applying it multiple times per turn and because we have extra attack we're applying it twice with our own attacks and then a third time with our animal companion attacks is really strong 3d6 damage every turn is a lot of extra damage so Hunter Mark is still just a really high value spell for you at this point in the game Rider level eight we get land stride difficult terrain which lets us walk through our own Spike growth um unphased which is particularly nice uh and also of course an extra feat the extra feat that we're going to get is simply to increase our dexterity one thing that's really nice about this build is because we're staying Ranger pretty much the whole way through there's an option to swap off uh later on but you'll want to be Ranger at least until Level 11 is that we actually get to take Sharpshooter and max out our dexterity which a lot of builds that a lot of Archer builds only end up getting two Feats this build gets the full three at Ranger level 9 we get access to third level spells unfortunately even though there's a couple that look really cool condra barrage and lightning Arrow are both fairly weak spells and just a worse action a worse use of your action than just attacking twice almost always the one that I recommend over all of the other third level spells is plant growth it's like a super Spike growth cuz it quarters their movement speed and this can bog down some enemies completely preventing them from ever doing anything and remember that your Raven flies over it and you move through it so you can ignore this effect at Ranger level 10 you get access to hide and plane sight um giving you invisibility while you're standing still sometimes this can be useful If you're sort of waiting for an enemy that has like a patrol path that you're trying to ambush in a certain location most of the time though uh this is not going to come up that often because you can't move while invisible so it doesn't do that much but you can hide in plain sight and have greater invisibility cast on you and it works um simil the the first stealth check bonus I believe does apply to your first attack so you can kind of double dip on that you can use that rather than pass without Trace I uh haven't recently tested that but I believe that's how it works if someone can confirm in the comments I'd appreciate that we get a third favorite enemy which unfortunately at this point are are totally meaningless but just take whatever you think would be most fun you know maybe at this point your character has spent the the time too much time talking to Gail and has learned gained Proficiency in Arana because he just really wants to tell you about all his favorite spells and then we will fill out our Wasteland Wanderer picks we'll take cold if you have respect out of Beast Tamer or we're playing m Minsk from the beginning then you can take poison having resistance to three damage types is actually incredibly powerful and because Rangers get decent hit point progress ression and you're going to have very high AC on this character you're going to end up quite tanky at the end of this build even as an Archer finally at Ranger level 11 we get the thing that keeps us in Ranger for this long unfortunately the tool tip for this is garbage and doesn't actually tell you what it does but the first thing that it does is give your beasts an extra attack this means you're making four attacks per round two from your main character and two from your Beast you're main character attacks are going to be stronger but it's twice as many chances to apply blind with the Raven or twice as many chances to disor prone with the bear um and it's twice as many a chances to apply Hunter Mark so even late in the game hunter Mark still ends up being really efficient damage for this build because you can concentrate on it and it increases your per turn damage by up to 4 D6 which is actually a a significant boost even all the way up into this late in the game you also get a deepened animal Bond unlocking their Inner Strength which tells you absolutely nothing about what it does but basically this unlocks new abilities for every animal companion you've also been getting new abilities for the Animal Companions as you level up and I'll talk a little bit about them when I go over the individual strengths and weaknesses of the companions in a moment but these are sort of their Capstone abilities that give you a lot of extra power for the Animal Companions and in particular The Raven which is the one that we want to use by default a lot of the time gets access to a free cast of darkness and darkness is one of the best the most powerful effects in the game because it is no save crowd control it blinds anything that's in it and you can hide in it and be completely immune to ranged attacks so both of those things are ridiculously powerful especially when it's applied by The Raven and thus doesn't take your concentration another character that works really well with a Beast Master is a warlock cuz they you'll be pooping out all these Darkness effects from your Raven and the Warlock will then be able to stand in them using their normal devil site and concentrate on something else giving you a bunch of additional utility for our spell here this mostly doesn't matter at this point um so we could have taken speak with animals and kept that for the whole game if you want that for role playing a couple other things that can be useful protection from Poison does give you resistance to poison damage which we just picked up from Wasteland Wanderer potentially but also just very useful in certain fights um daylight is always reasonable to have there's a couple uh encounters that are that it's very helpful to have that in protection from energy can help you cap out your um your resistances if you run up to into a if you run into a damage type that isn't covered by your resistances you can have resistance to that as long as you maintain concentration but for the most part again you're not going to be using these spells you can also take lightning Arrow which does have some impact or conjure barrage does have do have some uses but for the most part you'd rather just attack than cast those damaging spells and finally at Ranger level 12 we get to Simply max out our dexterity if you had antie's hair you could take alert that lets you double up and and 17 starting decks so you reach 20 decks you can take alert that lets you double up on initiative and basically always win initiative with this build with a plus 10 bonus you're going to beat everybody in initiative which is incredibly powerful that's the only other one I would really consider on this build if you want an extra feat uh if you have access to an extra feat that's by far the best of them as with most archers the way that you are going to play this uh the way that you are going to play this character is by starting fights in stealth so you want to always start start your fights in stealth before you begin them um giving you advantage on your first attack and you are able to then apply Sharpshooter damage very reliably to certain enemies even carlac with her extremely high AC we have a 75% chance to hit similarly lasel Gail with slightly lower AC because of his character build here we are extremely likely to hit and then any enemies with lower AC you are extremely almost guaranteed to hit even with the Sharpshooter penalty because we have advantage on all of our attacks for gear for this build you're just going to want the best bow you can find you will also always want a shield because you can have a shield and benefit from the AC of a shield while using a two-handed ranged weapon um and so that's an extremely powerful effect that you will always want to make use of you still gain the benefits of The Shield to your AC this build ends up with some of the highest AC in the game because in the late game you can swap to one of these medium armors that allows you to apply your full dexterity and have a shield getting up to 24 AC with the armor of agility which is better than a character in full heavy plate in heavy full plate and a shield so you're going to have better AC than the tanks you'll have resistance to a bunch of different damage types and quite High hit points because you're a high hit point character 112 uh hit points with 60 in Constitution giving you actually quite a lot of damage resiliency on this build the best damage setup for a bow is to use an elixir of strength combined with the Titan string bow or to wear have in your main hand a club of Hill giant strength um though many bows any decent bow is going to serve you very well usually you're going to want a two-handed weapon rather than a dual hand crossbow setup but this build can also use a dual hand crossbow setup because you don't have a lot of uses for your bonus action after you've cast Hunter Mark and that will will allow you to apply Hunter Mark more often and apply Sharpshooter more often as well so consider that as a an additional consideration if you have two hand crossbows that you want to use other than that uh just the normal stuff any bonuses to hit are incredibly strong and any bonuses to your um damage output add a lot also Buffs that you can cast on yourself and allies are very good so if you get items that allow you to do that of course then you can double up on Buffs with your allies all right let's talk about the animal the ranger companions so I'm just going to quick save here because we'll have to resummon them a couple times but the ranger companions when you summon them there are five options bear boar wolf spider dire Raven and wolf of these the the ones that are most interesting most of the time are Raven and bear the Bear's goting Roar is one of the few true tanking abilities in the game it allows you to force enemies to attack the bear and so it is resource free crowd control preventing enemies from doing anything other than just attacking the bear ridiculously powerful if they fail the saving throw the Raven if you summon it has the fly action but notice that this fly is different from other flies in a couple important ways one it's 60t distance meaning the Raven is incredibly mobile and two it leaves two turns of Darkness at its Landing location if you land on an enemy it pops a cloud of Darkness out on them you can also use it to land on an ally protecting them inside of a cloud of Darkness one of the other best items for this character is the eversight ring which I don't have that here let me uh I I forget who I have that on in the save right now I think it's jira is the eversight ring yes this one which makes you immune to Blinded when you are wearing the eversight ring and standing inside of a cloud of Darkness you are immune to the blinding effect of Darkness meaning you get the full benefits of Darkness as though you were a a warlock with devil sight you can use that just as well as a warlock with devil sight notice that we are not blinded also of course your Raven is immune to their own blind which is incredibly powerful as well so not only um are they immune to the darkness effect Ravens are actually immune to the Raven familiar is actually immune to all blinding effects something else to keep in mind when you have all of these companions is that they benefit extremely powerfully from party wide Buffs so you're going to want to cast Aid on them and that increases their health bar Aid normally if a you cast a level two spell of Aid on a four-person party it's plus 20 hit points for your party if you cast it on a five or six person party it gains that much more value if you have a bunch of other summons and are hitting it with hitting 20 things with it right it can be a few hundred hit points worth of value from a single spellcast beastmas Rangers let you do that and any other party-wide effect let you double up on those as well one other funny trick with Aid and let me hit uh I think we're let I just going to hit song of rest here real quick so we can refresh our character summon or our companion summon is when you summon the ranger companion a really funny interaction occurs where and this is this is a bug but I just thought I would mention it so if you don't want to abuse a bug don't do this but when you summon when you replace the summon what it does is it sets the corvis familiar to zero hit points um and set and it sort of uh hidden behind the scenes sets it to untargetable but if you cast the summon the companion summon and Aid at the same time I haven't been able to consistently duplicate this but you can end up with two familiars one of which has the maximum health that the aid value the aid spell provided so if you cast a level two Aid spell you'll end up with a five Health Raven in addition to a bear if you abuse that glitch um obviously that's a glitch but it's just really funny so I thought I would share it the bear here is the other one that I think is most often the one you'll want to cast because of goding Roar it taunts enemies for two turns on a wisdom save and um the notice how massive the AOE is you also can summon extra Bears starting at level 11 and have the honeyed Paw attack starting at level five which disarms your target disarm is a super powerful effect and if they aren't holding a weapon they fall prone um later on you can do both in one turn when you get access to two attacks in a single round uh knocking the enemy disarming them and knocking them prone both of these are incredibly powerful CC effects the other companions like the uh the wolf is really good with melee allies because it gains Advantage when it's adjacent to other melee characters the wolf spider I think has less impact overall but does have the most powerful crowd control effect of any of the companions with its cocoon ability um and the boar is the tankiest of them because it can gain damage resistance so if you're just using your companion to soak uh enemy aggro then the boar is the one you want to go with but because the bear can force enemies to Target it it's usually the better of the two Justice truth and the virtue all right my friends I hope that you have enjoyed this look at the Beast Master and I really hope that you enjoy playing this character it's a super fun character the number of cool tricks you can do when you have two characters on the field at once is basically unlimited um and this character gives you a ton of options for cc for free and using these beasts in interesting and creative ways as always if you've enjoyed the video of course please feel free to comment and you can of course leave a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content cheers my friends and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 27,389

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

Id: RNd_qJV_fnE

Length: 33min 36sec (2016 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023