The ULTIMATE COMPANION - BG3 Lae'zel Honour Build Guide

all right let me show you how this build completely shuts down all melee enemies rendering them entirely helpless and unable to do any relevant actions while the rest of your party points and laughs and then destroys them at your leisure let's start a fight here vient we have to wait for aaran who's just going to sort of run around doing stuff y they've changed it so that your your allies do uh support you if you start a fight with the oathbreaker knight in combat it used to be they would join in on his side which is pretty funny anyways so now we' just position our character so that the circles overlap where he wants to move but he's not currently in our threatened area and then we can just pass a turn of course we could take our attacks before doing this but just to show you how this works we can do this you can also pair this with um field effects like we could place say an ice knife wall here or here to stop him from moving let's just do that just to show you what that would look like and notice that we've now built a wall where the enemy has to either cross uh cross an icy surface or a pass through our threatened area in order to move and then when he does do that we hit him with an opportunity attack which traps him in this area outside of range of any of our characters and unable to act we can do this turn after turn after turn stopping the enemies from moving ever or relevantly entering our uh range while the rest of our party just uh just slowly beats him down from range of course the oathbreaker knight's going to put lasel in fear so we'd have to have a way to remove that but other than that this character is not going to be able to make any relevant actions and one of the most powerful melee characters in the G game is completely helpless just because we're standing near him all right my friends let's get to the build hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 character build hope you're all doing well today we're going to be covering one of my favorite combos from tabletop Dungeons and Dragons which I haven't yet done a build guide for because up until patch six enemy movement was uh broken and inconsistent in several ways that made this build not work but they've done a lot of optimization for enemy movement in patch six which has made this combo much more consistent to actually activate in combat this character I think is one of the best characters to slot into just about any honor mode party because it fits with every other every possible party composition and works with pretty much any other character does a great job of keeping your other party members safe in particular squishy ranged characters and also has no specific item requirements whatsoever you need one particular weapon type but it can be any weapon within that category so so you will never conflict with the item and gear needs of your other party members that means that this character is kind of the ultimate companion character which you can slot into just about any party and do really well this character is a master of Battlefield control keeping enemies trapped helplessly at the point of your spear unable to move or act and costing them turn after turn after turn throughout combat in fact if you want an idea of the kind of nonsense that I think about uh one of the reasons I'm calling it The Ultimate companion is as an oblique reference to Alexander the Great's companion Cavalry who fought alongside Pike armed soldiers who were used to control ground in his battle formations much as this character will be just the kind of stuff that goes through my head I guess we're using LEL here is the example character both because it fits I think with her character and lore very well her Mastery of warfare and also because gith Yan is one of the best races for this character although of course if you are building this for a main character uh any of the High tier races will apply very well in particular I would recommend wood elf because they're this character is entirely based on your positioning and the Tactical options that that gives you um and so having the additional movement speed or the gith yanki racial Misty step helps a lot with where you're able to position this character and take control over territory and the battlefield dungeons of dragons combat can be thought of as an exercise in reducing the number of relevant turns that your opponents are taking as much as possible there are several ways to do that one is with overwhelming damage so they're dead before they ever act one is with control spells but another is with stopping them from being able to perform any relevant actions on their turns and this character excels at that by trapping them in Corners preventing them from moving stopping melee enemies from getting to you and otherwise disrupting their plans for that reason it also pairs extremely well with ranged characters that have Battlefield control effects or field effects that you can keep the en enemies trapped in so I would recommend pairing this with a warlock for range damage and stuff like hunger of Hadar that you can trap enemies in with this character or um a druid who has Spike growth combos very well and you can use it to channel enemy movement into places where they really don't want to be all right let's get in and start building the character of course we have to start by fixing lel's attribute distribution because it is not good to start and we need to fix that so let's do that immediately since this is a strength-based melee character it does also benefit extremely strongly from elixir of Hill giant strength which will let you get extra Feats although for this build that's not necessary it will improve the power of the build by giving you access to a couple more Feats over the course of the the game if you want to use Elixir you would select eight strength and put the other attributes elsewhere but since this build doesn't need Elixir and one of the great things about it is that it doesn't need the Elixir per se and one of the great things about it is it's almost completely independent of items we're going to go for a non- Elixir build here I'm just mentioning that because of course you can power up the build by using the strength Elixir to gain 20 strength every day we will be going for a very standard attribute selection of 16146 8128 this gives you uh good strength and Constitution which of course are the most relevant attributes for a fighter good initiative which is very important for this character which wants to be positioned before enemies move and you will want if you don't need it for another character to place any gear that you have that increases initiative on this character because being able to move to where you can prevent enemies from relevantly acting is going to be very important in how this character plays out and of course you want good uh hit points and the highest wisdom save you can get since that's the most important saving throw for our skill selection the only important one is Athletics um for your astral knowledge actually one thing that's kind of nice about doing this with a gith Yankee or with LEL specifically is that you can use astral knowledge on dexterity combined with your 14 dexterity and get decent slate of hand if you don't have another slight of hand user in your party so this this character can fill that role you could also put it on wisdom um but you can also just take points in perception and that will be fine as well you should definitely get perception in some way on this character because it's the only other relevant skill um so I would probably take this and then for your last one this is really just flavor where you put this it will never come up since you aren't using this character for dialogue so we can just put the Point wherever we want for our fighting style even though we are using a two-handed weapon on this character I'm going to recommend defense because since we're using pole arms this is going to be you are almost always going to be attacking with a weapon that rolls a d8 or a d10 as its damage die meaning that the likelihood of rolling a one or a two and getting the great weapon fighting benefit is not that high whereas an additional AC is always good and will help this character stay alive of course and since enemies will often be forced to attack you rather than your allies the higher the AC you get the better and the fewer enemy attacks are going to land at fighter level two we don't have any decisions to make but of course we get the single best class feature in the game in action surge getting us an entire second turn once per short rest which is extremely useful um this is one of the most powerful abilities in the game and is going to give us several extra attacks in a given round later on at character level three we have to choose our subass and the subass that we're going to choose to fit with our theme of controlling the battlefield is of course Battle Master this will allow us to use these Maneuvers regularly both to do extra damage but also to ensure that we are landing attacks and to keep enemies from acting all of which are very important in particular there are two two Maneuvers that do extremely well with this character um and I'm going to highly recommend that you take menacing attack on this character because you're attacking with a pole arm preventing enemies from moving uh at the end of your pole arm range will often trap them outside of range of being able to attack you you can combine this with the Sentinel attack that we're going to get later to keep two enemies locked down and unable to move preventing multiple melee enemies from acting every single round which is extremely important frightened is a very powerful condition because enemies can't move it gives uh advantage on all sorts of um uh it gives them disadvantage on their attacks which is also very powerful and so it gives you a lot of additional options and utility to have menacing attack of course trip attack is also very powerful and we want that and we are we should always take Precision attack whenever we take a Battle Master because the ability to hit with your attacks is very important this character also will will be delaying your Asis a little bit so you'll have a slightly lower hit chance than some other characters Precision attack can make up for that uh nicely by giving you a bonus four average of four and a half for your attack with your superiority die incidentally an average of four and a half from rolling a d8 on the Precision attack to hit is almost exactly equivalent mathematically to having Advantage um against most enemies and so you can think of it basically as giving you Advantage a couple times per rest on your attacks but it also combines with any other sources of advantage that you might have such as knocking enemies prone with trip attack at fighter level four we take our first feat and we intend to be fighting with a two-handed pole arm and so of course the feat that we are going to take is pole arm Master this gives you two options one you get a bonus uh action attack with the butt of your weapon when you attack with a glaive halir Quarter Staff or spear or Pike that it's not listed in the description but it does work with Pikes um and you can also make an opportunity attack when a target comes within range that's why when we were selecting our Battle Master Maneuvers we didn't take uh repost which normally I take pretty highly but we will be using our reaction attack on this opportunity attack every single turn if we position correctly how you're going to fight with this character and I will do a little demo video of this somewhere in this video as well either at the beginning or the end um is going to be to attack an enemy at the maximum range of your pole arm and then step backwards when the enemy comes towards you or towards your allies you'll get a reaction attack with polar master that guarantees that you're using your reaction every single turn of combat which is extremely powerful and getting effectively an additional attack every single round extra attack obviously are very good you now have three attacks per round with the bonus action polar AR master attack and the reaction attack plus your normal attack um which is even though one of those is a slightly lower damage attack an incredible amount of value from a single character you're getting a lot of extra actions out of this character and soon we will be preventing our enemies from acting as well and we we're already in fact preventing our enemies from acting with menacing attack but we'll be able to do so even more effectively as we continue to L up at fighter level five we get extra attack and we get access to misy step which allows our positioning to be basically perfect um misy Step you can always use to position yourself where you want to be in order to block enemies off when you're are fighting with this character you're going to want to think of your character spacing as being basically a wall so your position and the reach that you have with your pole arm is going to be a wall and you should think of that bubble as being equivalent to something like a spike growth or something that you actually place on the ground that will prevent enemies from moving through it however the enemy AI is not terribly efficient at not moving into your opportunity attacks and so you are going to be able to get lots of extra opportunity attacks you can position exactly where you want to be because you have the racial Misty step from being a gith Yankee and of course extra attack gives you more damage which is what part of what we're here for at fighter level six we get our second feat and uh which is great because it lets us get the core combo of the build online much earlier and the second feat is going to be Sentinel Sentinel gives us two things one we get or three things but two really important things one we get advantage on our opportunity attacks that means even though we only have 16 strength at this point whereas a lot of characters would have 18 um we are are going to be hitting it basically constantly with our opportunity attacks um Advantage is a huge bonus and will when combined with any plus one weapons or bless from an ally or whatever make us basically guaranteed to land every opportunity attack and secondly when we do land an opportunity attack the enemy has to stop moving since we're using a a weapon with reach a pole arm an enemy enters our longer attack range and gets hit by our Sentinel attack and then is stuck in place unable to attack so even if we don't have a battle Master maneuver to hit them with menacing attack this will allow you to trap an enemy and depending on enemy initiatives you can often trap two enemies in place for a single round um while hitting them four times per round at this point because we have two attacks with our main weapon a reaction attack and a bonus action attack which will allow us to pretty much kill anything that we um are attempting to kill very easily don't forget also that you can use this to trap enemies next to you you don't have to just use this when enemies approach you with your polar AR master attack you still get normal opportunity attacks so you can place this character next to an enemy Mage or Archer and hit them while they're running away keeping them trapped and furthermore you can stop enemy movement inside of field effects which is why this character pairs so well with say a druid's wall of fire or you know wall of fire or Spike growth from a druid hunger of from a warlock or any number of other field effects that you put on the ground cloud of daggers and so on um you can keep enemies trapped inside of those for multiple turns taking constant damage enemies who are trapped in this way you can also pretty safely just ignore and focus your attention on other enemies in the fight because you have removed their ability to act a party with this character in it will never fear melee enemies um provided that your positioning is is good because the enemies will not make any effort to to go around you in in Boulders gate usually they'll always trigger the opportunity attack and you can trap them in place thanks to some movement optimizations in patch six this will reli fairly reliably trap them before they get in range of you one reason I didn't recommend this build beforehand was that sometimes enemies would just be a walk right up to melee range of you anyways despite the The Sentinel attack and that was frustrating but that seems to have mostly been resolved in my testing though I'm sure it can still happen in some circumstan Es at fighter level seven we get to take two additional Maneuvers and of course pushing attack gives us the option to force enemies to leave our range then they will have to reenter that range and get hit again by our reaction pushing attack is also really really good for this uh this character at this point we could also take repost we could also take a goting attack this gives you um just a little bit more abilities to protect your allies but I think overall the best one is just disarming disarming is just a very powerful effect that's very good against lots of enemies even though you'll mostly be locking down melee enemies disarming attack is very good especially because you can make it at range so this character will sometimes want to be making ranged attacks as well um just every character will have a bow and sometimes your positioning will be such that you won't you will want to say block a a corridor or choke point rather than walk up to an enemy and just being able to make a relevant bow attack during those turns is very good although of course you can also do things like cast Scrolls or throw potions on those turns as well fighter level eight gets us another feat and here we're just going to improve our strength so that we're hitting more often um other options though are you can always take alert and level eight is is kind of the latest that I would consider taking alert or um if you want to take alert it's often good to take it by level eight so here is where I would probably take it if you want to take multiple extra Feats you probably will want to use Elixir so for this version of the build I'm just going to go with bonus strength but alert is never bad of course great weapon fighter uh great weapon Master excuse me also works very well with uh with this character because we are using a two-handed weapon though it's worth noting that the Bon attack from Polar AR Master is bugged and doesn't get the plus 10 damage from this attack um so that Synergy doesn't exist but we still get several attacks per round which we can apply additional great weapon Master damage from I think this character in general prefers alert to Great weapon Master although both are very good and if you're the Elixir version of the build you're going to take both of those by the end of the build anyways here though we're just going to take plus uh two strength [Music] fighter level 9 we get indomitable which is incredibly powerful for a character like this because one of the few things that this character actually does Fear since you're basically immune to melee enemies is control effects from ranged enemies um since your saving throws are are decent but not incredible against certain wisdom targeting saving uh saving throws you are going to suffer but Fighters get indomitable giving them it not giving you advantage on every saving throw but it's actually even better than Advantage because it Stacks with normal Advantage um so this gives you the ability to shrug off a lot of control effects that would otherwise hurt melee characters because you're just leveling up in [Music] fighter here we get two more Maneuvers at this point you probably know which maneuvers you like um and are the ones that you take at this point are not going to be ones that you're going to use that frequently but there's some some others that do have some fun implications goting attack is pretty nice to help protect your allies so I might pick that and then probably at this point we'll just take repost for the times when for whatever reason you're next to an enemy rather than having them approach you and you want to use your reaction there um though at this point like I said it's it's really up to you which ones you think are going to get used the ones that you're going to use by far the most often are going to be trip and um menacing and precision and then of course pushing also comes up sometimes past that they are going to be very situational at fighter level 11 we get our third attack giving us five attacks per round when using our bonus action and reaction which of course is incredible um this is the most attacks that most characters can get in a round without any like haste or elixir of blood lust again one of the great things about this character is how completely independent of support you are you need almost no help from your party you need almost no specific items you can power yourself up with a haste or an Elixir or something from a party member but you don't need it to be effective basically all you need to be to be effective is present on the battlefield you don't actually need to uh do anything else specific with this character because just by existing they deeply constrain enemy tactical options preventing enemies from doing it what they want to do and keeping your party safe finally at character level 12 we simply max out our strength although again if you are going for Elixir or have the strength gauntlets at this point um I would recommend taking alert and great weapon Master as my other two Feats those are by far the best uh other two Feats so I wouldn't really consider any others Mage Slayer can also be kind of fun if you're having trouble with enemy spellcasters since you are doing reaction attacks and you're positioning yourself near enemies but that does start to run into the problem of you have too many good reactions because you get reaction attacks from enemies approaching you from normal opportunity attacks or from enemies attacking allies uh and so Mage Slayer adds in yet another reaction attack um again if you don't like using alert or great weapon Master don't want to use them for whatever reason then you could go with honestly there's really not that much else that's particularly valuable for this character um you could take heavy armor Master for example to G give yourself some damage reduction but I would highly recommend taking alert or great weapon master and that's pretty much it one of the great things about this character is is how simple it is so while it gives you lots of tactical options it is extremely simple to build and requires no fancy multiclassing requires no specific items slots very well into every party the only requirement is that you need a a weapon that works with polar Master like a glaive spear Pike uh Etc um and the Drake throat glaive is a pretty solid one this will work well throughout most of the game um but there are plenty of those so if there's any conflict with another character say you want the returning Pike as well for a thrower then you don't need that weapon for this character you only need uh just any pole arm for this character so I like the the Drake throat glaive buffing itself just because it gives you plus three to hit which is very good but depending on what you have you know you'll have Sal Spears or whatever um those can be very useful as well it any specific you don't need any any specific pole arm as for other gear you just want the best heavy armor you can find with the highest AC uh a decent ranged option for the turns where you are not able to get into range although of course you can throw stuff or use Scrolls or potions and any gear that you have that increases your initiative in particular uh or gives you an additional hit chance is very powerful if you aren't using the gloves of dexterity for this character or for another character they do work well on this character of course because they work well on everybody improved initiative and extra hit chance is good but otherwise you are very happy to just use uh whatever gear is left over from the rest of your party on this character bonus um I guess one special mention for the gauntlets of the warm here just because you are a Battle Master fighter and those are synergistic with Battle Master Fighters all right my friends I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the ultimate companion this build I think is excellent to slot into any party um will do very well requires no spe specific like fancy multiclassing which is pretty nice and also it gives you a lot of strategic and tactical options and therefore is extremely fun to play you can discover new things that you can do with this build in basically every single combat which I find extremely satisfying as always of course if you've enjoyed the video please feel free to leave a comment and like the video both of those things help a ton with the algorithm and of course you can subscribe to my channel for more balers Gate 3 builds and other strategy game content cheers folks I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 41,046

Keywords: Etarran, Cephalopocalypse, Baldur's Gate 3, Larian, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Build, Guide, Strategy, Tactics, Tutorial, Jaheira, Minsc, Astarion, Gale, Karlach, Shadowheart, Minthara, Wyll, Halsin, Lae'zel

Id: fcHp3JXF_6Y

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024