The WILD COFFEELOCK - BG3 Honor Mode Build Guide - Sorcerer / Warlock

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide I hope you're all doing well today we're covering one of my very favorite builds in the whole game the Sor lock otherwise known as the coffee lock which I'll talk about in a second but if I've counted correctly this build will be going up Christmas day so if you are someone who celebrates Christmas then Merry Christmas and I hope that you all have a safe and pleasant holiday season whether or not you're celebrating anything right now um in the spirit of that I also want to take a moment to say thank you so much to Mi defon for the 25 polish zotes L liquin for the 100 pesos Caleb Stevenson for the $5 and Paul Bailey for becoming a channel member as well as mcdoa for staying a channel member for two months I was a little behind on thank yous but I really do appreciate it thank you all so much all right let's Jump Right In to building this character we are of course using will as the example character here because he's a warlock and while this build will end up more sorcerer than warlock it's going to be able to do both at pretty much the full effectiveness of both classes why is this called the coffee lock well that goes back to tabletop fifth edition where you can you aren't hard Limited in the number of long rests you can take in a given day the way you are in balder's Gate or number of short rests you can take in a given day the way you are in Boulder's Gate that means that warlocks who recharge their spells on a short rest can turn those spells into sorcery points and then as a sorcerer turn those sorcery points into spells effectively never needing to sleep hence lock so while that combo doesn't work exactly the same in balder's Gate you can still make use of the short rest availability of warlock spells plus a number of other really cool features that warlocks get to combo with sorcerer's uh metamagic features for some incredibly potent spell casting throughout the game this build does excellent damage will have access to incredibly High utility in terms of spellcasting is also just a really fun main character is one of the best characters for solo play in my opinion and just overall very solid all right let's get right into it first up we have to actually decide which of these two classes we are going to take first there's really two choices here actually um you could take s sorcerer at level one which gives you Constitution saving throw proficiency or warlock which gives you wisdom saving throw proficiency both of those are super important saves to have we're going to ER on the side of taking sorcerer here at at level one because you're going to be concentrating on SP so often and one of the Spells you're going to be concentrating on is haste which is extremely bad to lose concentration on um so we really want to make sure that we have conve proficiency to keep ourselves concentrating on it and keep ourselves acting twice in one turn even on honor mode you can while hasted cast two spells in one turn the honor mode Nerf to haste only affects attacks well we're not making attacks so we still have access to the fully powered haste uh unlike Marshal characters when we're playing a spellcaster and we are actually going to be making use of that quite extensively throughout this build which kind of sorcerer we pick is actually pretty interesting for this character all three have their points storm sorcery of course is the default best one because tempestuous magic is such a powerful ability draconic sorcerer is very good because you get uh draconic resilience and you can and that sets your AC to 13 although you can also do that just by taking a race that has light armor proficiency um and also a few additional hit points you'll end up with uh several additional hit points from dionic resilience but more importantly it will allow you to add your charisma to damage on certain Elemental abilities and on tactician difficulty or below there are ways to add Elemental damage to your eldrich blast that will trigger that draconic damage bonus but on honor mode I'm actually going to suggest that we take a very odd choice and that is wild magic this build is really good for wild magic for two reasons one we're actually making attack roles pretty frequently because eldrich blast is going to be a big source of our damage and so tides of chaos is very powerful for this character just in and of itself getting Advantage at will on an attack roll means you're very likely to land attacks secondly because this character is going to be using eldrich blast so frequently you have more control over when you uh actually have to cast a spell than most Sorcerers your default action in a turn is already very good so you don't necessarily need to cast leveled spells and risk a wild magic surge unless you think it would be helpful wild magic therefore synergizes actually quite well with this build and it's also one that doesn't get used that often so that's what we're going to go with for this build for our ability selection of course we need to fix this um I should also mention that if you are not not playing this for will then for a main character the best race by far is going to be half Dr the reason for this is that you get the light armor and shield proficiencies that humans get but also get access to an extra cast of Darkness every day and this build will be abusing Darkness as much as any warlock build will um and also you get uh but of course also the normal default best races are always good halfling for re-rolling ones and maintaining concentration on spells gith Yankee for once per day MTI step and medium armor proficiency dgar for at will invisibility or half wood elf for the bonus movement speed for our ability point spread we're going to go with 16 Charisma and 16 Constitution and then we are going to drop this down and go up to 14 dexterity we are or sorry not that this down and take 12 wisdom making sure that we have as much in wisdom saves as we possibly can you can do this build intending to take anti ethyl's hair and go to 17 Charisma if you do that just drop your wisdom down by two points um and then you will save a feat later on which can be very helpful this build is also a very good candidate for the gloves of dexterity since we'll be in light armor at Best in which case you would want to drop your dexterity down to eight and equip the gloves of dexterity to bring it up to 18 then you could add some extra points into wisdom or whatever for skills unfortunately the hum bonus skill proficiency is bugged it's stuck in Persuasion right now it used to be that you were able to move that and I hope they fix that soon if you can move the human bonus skill proficiency for will I highly recommend putting it in stealth this build does very well with stealth um although of course if Will is your main character or if you're building this for a main character you're going to want the dialogue skills anyways and this is one of the best characters in the game for dialogue skills so we definitely are going to want it to be our party face in general for our spell selection for can trips here we are going to take um the usual suspect although we don't necessarily need a damaging cantrip from sorcerer nevertheless I'll suggest that you take Ray of frost just for the utility because you can use it to freeze puddles and slow enemies and we don't need Firebolt really at all because we we will be getting elich blast which is just a better Firebolt in pretty much every way while it can't light things on fire it's a better damage type and it's going to be much much better damage later on in the game in addition to that we can take the normal utility ones of minor illusion and Mage hand which are very useful and then we can take blade Ward if we want the defensive ability friends if you are feeling lucky and uh can annoy everyone on honor mode but be very careful who you use this on um light which is always good or true strike to annoy people I will say this build actually has more use uses for True strike than most other builds uh um especially when you can't have stealth proficiency while you can usually just hide to gain Advantage rather than pre-cast true strike there's a couple Arenas where you can't hide and this build does want advantage on its attacks that being said don't waste your turn casting true strike I know you know I joke about it a lot but true strike is not going to be good and um in most cases just hide instead for your spell selection here we are going to take Shield of course because Shield is critically important for every character that can access it this build will end up with actually pretty good AC and shield is the best defensive reaction in the game extremely powerful and extremely valuable for every character that can access it very important to have that and then I will suggest taking magic Missile as well um just the 100% reliability of magic Missile is is too good to pass up on especially in the early game one thing you could do especially at level one is take sleep which is the best combat spell at level one and then uh swap it out when you hit Level Two sorcerer but because we are going to be delaying level two sorcerer for a few levels I wouldn't recommend doing that on this build even though you often will want to do that on a normal sorcerer at level two we're going to go into warlock because our early game combat power is actually going to be coming from eldrich blast rather than from anything we're doing with sorcerer we want to get our Warlock levels early but we took sorcerer at level one for the Constitution save proficiency for our subass here I'm going to recommend selecting the great old one the reason for this is the Mortal reminder passive um when you critical hit an enemy and we're going to be attacking a lot often with Advantage often many times per turn because eldrich blast as you level it up gains multiple beams multiple attack roles rather than just increasing the damage of one attack roll that increases the likelihood of your criticals of of your attacks to critical quite significantly and every time you crit the enemies have to make a wisdom SA or become frightened frightened is a super powerful condition especially when you're applying it for free for our krip selection for other cantrip we're just going to take whichever of these spells uh friends or blade Ward we didn't take from sorcerer make sure that you leave one of those unselected so you can take the other you will never need bone chill or poison spray cuz youve got eldrich blast and Ray of frost so don't bother with those um and then for our warlock spell selection we're going to make sure that we take the ones that are unique to warlock those being hex um which is going to increase your damage massively something to keep in mind in terms of damage in dungeons of dragon fifth edition and in terms of balder's gate is that a warlock with hex and agonizing blast is the Baseline character for damage if your character does more damage than a warlock lock with hex and agonizing blast then it's a high damage build and if they do less damage then it's either a build that's not focused on damage or you need to go back to the drawing board warlocks are sort of the the gold standard for consistent turn after turn damage with no resource expenditure and hex and eldrich blast are the reasons why then we'll take armor of agathys just to give us a little more survivability especially important if you're playing solo but just always important on honor mode at warlock level two we get two eldrich invocations and I just talked about this but we're always going to take agonizing blast of course it's by far the best even if you aren't intending to use eldrich blast extensively and this build is going to use eldrich blast extensively and then for our second invocation there's actually some interesting choices here um the main one that I'm going to recommend is going to be devil site because this will allow you to see through your own clouds of darkness and this build is one of the best at abusing Clouds Of Darkness you can concentrate on the darkness sit in it and continue to eldrich blast enemies they will not be able to range attack you back and you will have advantage on them because they won't be able to see you which in turn means that you will have more critical hits from for your goo warlock uh passive fearing enemies and so on if you find Darkness annoying to use and I've seen a lot of people comment that they don't like using darkness in in party builds then you won't necessarily need devil sight and if you don't want devil sight then the one that you're going to want is repelling blast which is also an extremely strong invocation being able to push an enemy back and with this build in particular if you are um pushing an enemy back with repelling blast and using expeditious Retreat or pushing an enemy back with repelling blast and then slowing them with a ray of frost uh that you cast off of haste then you can use this basically in place of a stun the enemy will be pushed backwards and slow to and unable to reach you in in order to attack you can kite them backwards pretty safely especially if they're melee enemies so this build will do very well with repelling blast but of course the devil site Darkness combo is just so ludicrously powerful that that's what we're going to go with here for our spell selection you're going to want expeditious Retreat I talked about this already um but this also combos extremely well with having access to Ray of Frost from sorcerer this gives you a way to kite enemies backwards and also just to leave fights if they're going badly you can Dash as a bonus action move as your move action and cast Ray of frost on an enemy with your action slowing them down preventing them from Catching you and letting you put a lot of distance between you and them letting you leave a fight if you are feeling in danger at level three we continue to take levels in warlock at least for one more level um although you could at this point not and go back into sorcerer if you wanted to get access to a feat earlier for example um then you could start going into sorcerer again I'm going to suggest taking the third level of warlock here just because the packed Boons are actually quite good and the one that we're going to want to take here is Packa of the chain Packa of the chain is synergizes very well with this build both because it gives you a free Scout and also because we aren't going to be progressing any further in warlock um meaning that we want the front-loaded abilities of being able to summon the quasit which can turn invisible um the invisible Scout that's the the invisible quasit Scout is invaluable on honor mode because it lets you determine the positions of enemies and stuff with the free invisibility allowing you to really plan your fights before they happen it also is actually a quite powerful combatant in the early game and totally free so this level of front-loaded power is something that a lot of builds don't get access to pack of the chain is really good for that for our spell selection of course we're going to pick up Darkness here and darkness is going to be super valuable again if you are someone who doesn't like to use Darkness then you could go with one of the other utility spells on the list and we're going to replace go ahead and replace expeditious retreat with Misty step giving us access to that spell as well which is of course uh extremely valuable for any character that needs to leave combat quickly or reposition Misty step is just one of the best spells in the game and you should always have access to it as early as you can at this point we go back into Sorcerer And now we can start building up our sorcery points the build at this point is is mostly playing like a warlock right you've got the darkness and eldrich blast combo with agonizing blast um so you're going to be able to be a very powerful warlock at this point but uh when you get access to sorcery points things get even more interesting so first up we get to take another spell um for sorcerer at this level some of the best U ility spells are going to be things like enhance leap disguise self if you want that for conversation uh for various conversations in the game remember that all of your spells are based off of Charisma so you don't have to worry about like not taking spells with with with spell DCS on one of these classes or anything like that you get to do that on on every class um here I'm going to suggest taking disguise self just for the utility or fog Cloud although since you have access to Darkness fog cloud is somewhat redundant you could also take chromatic orb which lets you create ice surfaces pretty easily all of these are pretty reasonable options for our metam magic here we're going to take distant spell of course and twin spell um I've talked extensively in my sorcerer guide about why these are the best but distant spell of course gives you access to hitting enemies that are further away which is very important and twin spell lets you double up you can't double up uh on El blast because it has multiple beams and you can't twin a spell with that gives you um multiple projectiles so it won't let you twin eldrich blast um because at level five we get uh second beam in our eldrich blast so now it has two Targets and is no longer eligible to be twinned but it's still extremely valuable to have twin spell for all of the spells that we are going to be picking up as we go to higher levels [Music] sorcerer level three we get access to the best meta magic Quicken spell you can Quicken eldrich blasts and so this lets you in in a pinch double eldrich blast although since it still costs three sorcery points to Quicken an eldrich blast you're typically going to want to spend your sorcery points on higher level spells but remember that you can convert your warlock spell slots in a slightly janky way into sorcery points so you will have more sorcery points to work with than other characters since you can regain them on a short rest and I'll talk a little bit about that when I start showing some specific combos for the build for our spell selection at level two you have a bunch of good options here um you don't need something like scorching Ray really because scorching Ray while strong isn't actually that much better than just an agonizing blast hex eldrich blast combo so it will do a little more damage but it also cost a level two spell slot you'd rather spend your level two spell slots on things you can't get just from your canant trip selection good spells to consider here are hold person attacks from within 10 ft are always Critical Hits so if you are con holding someone in place your Aldrich blasts will always crit that's a lot of damage that you are able to do with them off of that um cloud of daggers is just 100% reliable damage with no save invisibility is great utility web is a good control spell that you can use on large groups of enemies um overall I think your best bet here is going to be hold person but all of these have lots of utility at level sorcerer level four character level seven we get access to increasing our Charisma of course that increases the safety C of our spells as well as increasing our eldrich blast damage this is one reason this character is such a good candidate for Ethel's hair if you can manage it um and if you successfully make all those dialogue checks on honor mode which isn't 100% reliable then you may want to strongly consider respecing into a 17 Charisma setup and using Ethel's hair because this build does get its first feet quite late we're going to be playing with lower Charisma for a lot of the game um and you could also consider delaying your third level of warlock for that reason in order to get to a feat first you could also consider taking four your fourth level of warlock at character level five and then respecing back into this build at seven in order to get more Charisma early if you didn't value the sorcerer spells early on either of those could be reasonable changes to this build um and it's going to depend a little bit on what you actually want to do during the game for AR cantrip selection here we're going to just take whatever we didn't take before something like uh light maybe and um for our spell selection we'll take one of the spells that we haven't taken yet gust of wind is also very good utility but I'm going to or on the side of just taking invisibility here cuz it comes up a lot unless you're a dwar in which case you just get it for free sorcerer level five and warlock level three is where things get really spicy for this build because we get to take haste haste on honor mode does not let characters attack multiple times during the hasted action because they have nerfed haste for Honor mode however the sorcerer warlock combo gets to break that rule because we're making attacks just by casting eldrich blast eldrich blast's number of attacks is based on your character level not on how many attack actions you have in an action so you are able to still fire two eldrich blast beams or three at later levels um with your hasted actions this means that this character benefits more in terms of DPS from haste or potions of speed or whatever than any other character and like every other sorcerer you can twin haste on your yourself and an ally for even more power you also of course get to swap out a spell and we're going to swap out one of our lower level spells like say chromatic orb for a counter spell because counter spell is mandatory on every character that has access to it it's incredibly strong it just an incredibly strong spell one thing I will say about this build at this point is that you will only have a level three spell slot for counter spell and because we're level eight many enemies will be casting higher level spells you want to to see what spell they're casting before you decide whether to use counter spell or not cuz because counter spell can only counter spells of its spell slot or lower reliably so if they're casting a fireball or a hypnotic pattern you should always be able to counter spell that if they're casting a wall of fire you may or may not be able to counter spell it with a level three spell slot sorcerer level seven we get access to bend from the wild magic sorcerer which cost some sorcery points to basically give a bless or a bane to a Target not a terribly strong ability two sorcery points is the equivalent of a level two spell slot and um even though we can regenerate those on short rest with our warlock spell slots you'd still rather just cast bless less from a cleric Ally than use B luck so I wouldn't recommend using this ability in general for our spell selection here there's a bunch of options my personal pick is going to be hypnotic pattern it's just the best control spell in the game and while you could also take AOE damage from Fireball or a giant ice surface from sleet storm hypnotic pattern is just so powerful that you really want access to this somewhere in your build and your save DCs are going to be pretty good pretty soon so you can reliably put enemies out with the hypnotic pattern and then pick them apart one at a time with your eldr blasts every sorcerer level of course we get one more sorcery point which is very nice for quickening additional Spells at sorcerer level uh seven we get access to level four spells giving us a few more bonus options I am going to suggest that you on every character or at least somewhere in your party you take wall of fire and this character is fine to have it because there's a few encounters it just solves granted when you get access to it later on in the build you'll have passed some of those encounters so you may want to have invested into it on another character like a druid or something for act two um but still wall of fire is very strong greater invisibility is really nice I mean you can you can cast greater invisibility on yourself and then just eldri blast a whole bunch getting advantage and critting enemies causing them fear uh you can also banish enemies confusion is a very powerful control spell there's actually a lot of great options at level four for Sorcerers and so I suggest you experiment a little with what spells you want the most um given that we are arriving at these Spells at level 10 I'm going to suggest taking confusion and then we will maybe swap out hypnotic pattern because you don't really need both of those for something else like sleet storm or ice storm to make gigantic ice surfaces which can be super dangerous for for various enemies when an enemy slips on an ice surface and Falls prone on their turn they just lose the rest of their turn uh which means that making ice surfaces on the ground is a very powerful control effect for our feet we're just going to max out our Charisma here if you have taken Ethel's hair and have 20 charisma at this point then the best feed is going to be alert alert is just super powerful um on honor mode bonus initiative and can't be surprised is wildly important and if you are playing Solo with this character I'd actually recommend taking alert even before you take your first ability score Improvement because it's just that valuable for a Solo character but initiative is so strong in this game that it's worth taking alert if you have access to it no matter when you get access to it for a second spell here we can go back and take some of the utility spells we have pass on or take another level four spell to have more options banishment is very good CU it removes a target for two turns they only get one save and lose two full turns which is very good action economy um or we could just go back and grab wall of fire which is still very good damage any of these options are very strong finally at sorcerer level 9 we get access to fifth level spells which gives us uh a bunch of solid options not the most incredible options in the game but just very good ones like hold monster cone of cold or um telekinesis I'm actually going to suggest that the ones that you take that the one you take here because we have a lot of utility or a lot of damage already just from being an eldrich blast user we can take wall of stone which lets us block enemies off from getting to us eldrich blast them uh as they're coming around the walls of stone or eldrich blast their allies a wall of stone can solve a number of encounters just by dividing the groups of enemies in half and there's a couple of other encounters that it also stops from mattering completely especially if you have a way to shoot over or around it just to quickly walk you through sort of how the coffee Lock Works in Boulder's Gate it's a little bit janky but the way that it works when you are want to convert to convert a spell slot to sorcery points let me come on give me that ability here we go that's a bonus action for some reason all right anyways um when you do that it's going to eat your sorcerer spells first but you can do that repeatedly and then once you're out of sorcery spells of that level it will start using your warlock spells unfortunately there isn't a way to turn your warlock spells into um sorcery points preferentially so you have to heat through your sorcerer spells first but then you can start gaining sorcery points off your short rest recovering spells which will allow you to turn them into long rest recovering spells so we can turn these sorcery points into level two spell slots gaining long rest resources at the cost of short rests which is super powerful nevertheless while we can't sustain infinitely like the tabletop version of this character could if your DM was uh more permissive than most DMS will be um this is still a super valuable resource exchange for us turning our warlock spell slots into sorcerer spell Slots of higher levels potentially um obviously you could you don't want to turn these into level two spell slots because you can just use the warlock spell to cast that level two sorcerer spell slot but turning two warlock spell slots into a level three spell is potentially pretty useful depending on the circumstances for your typical turn in combat you are going to want to cast haste on yourself using twin spell on yourself and an ally and then when you have two hasted actions you can use those both on eldrich blast for three eldrich blasts each each of which adds your charisma to damage if you have the appropriate gear and the best gear for this character by far is the potent robe which adds your charisma modifier to damage on your cantrips then you'll be adding twice your charisma to damage dealing plus 10 damage on each of your Aldrich blast attacks so while hasted you can at minimum do six attacks Each of which adds uh d10 plus 10 damage which is going to be an average of 60 plus um 5 and 1 half * 6 which is 33 so an average of 93 damage um plus any additional damage that you have if you have hexed that enemy then they'll be taking an extra D6 on on every one of those attacks Each of which is very powerful and of course you're very likely to crit because you're often making all of these attacks with Advantage you can also decide whether you are going to attempt to trigger a wild magic surge based on whether you just use canant trips or use higher level spells wild Magic surges can only trigger on level one or higher spell casts so you have the option of whether you're going to Wild magic surge or not based on what you feel is appropriate to the situ ation other gear for this character you're just going to want um light armor and a shield for most of the game if you're a character that can equip that and you're definitely going to want a shield shield proficiency and a shield for the whole game and anything that increases your spell DC or damage or to hit rolls with spells like these Daredevil gloves damage dealt by spell casters are extremely powerful if you have an ally with bless and the staff of mistra then that adds 2 D4 to your attack roles with spell and that can be that will basically guarantee that you hit on every single attack with your eldrich blasts against almost every enemy if you have that bless effect active then you will uh only miss on a natural one meaning that you're an extremely reliable damage dealer and also a basically fully powered sorcerer with the additional resource economy of being able to turn some short rests into long rest spells for higher level spell slots all right my friends I hope that you have enjoyed this look at the extremely powerful and versatile Sor loock or coffee lock as always if you have then do please feel free to leave a comment rate the video and uh subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content and as I'm so bad at mentioning um if the if the Christmas spirit takes you and you feel like supporting me financially I would of course extremely appreciate that very much um you can leave a super thanks or become a channel member and I really want to thank everyone who's chosen to do that this year it means a lot to me that people enjoy this stuff enough to choose to support me you know with concretely not that I don't value the people who just watch and comment of course cuz I really do all right my friends I hope that you have a safe and happy holiday season do something kind for yourselves do something kind for someone else and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 60,736

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

Id: ZE9VIGoHgsk

Length: 32min 18sec (1938 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 25 2023