The ZEALOT OF ZARIEL - Karlach Honour Build Guide

hello my friends and welcome back to another balers Gate 3 build guide hope you're all doing well today we're mixing two classes that you don't often see mixed together in a build that I'm calling the Zealot of zarel before I jump into the build I do have a couple quick things to talk about because this is the first video I'm recording in 2024 for balers gate and people were super generous over the holidays so I have some thank you to give out I especially appreciate it because something that you may not actually know is that ad revenue for videos dro precipitously at the end of the year the same number of views in December is worth about twice as much as it is in January so if there are content creators whose work that you are enjoying um now is a really tough time of year for people who do this for a living so it really helps out if you want to donate to those people um at this time of year it's super appreciated so thank you so much to iron bar 2 200 uh Ken RQ and Kenneth Shockley who became channel members um that brings us up to five and eight channel members we get a little panel that shows off the number of channel members so if you're on the fence now's a good time also you can fight off the encroach of the the Kens because 40% of my channel members right now are named Ken so it's getting really dangerous in here if your name isn't Ken you can you can stop the Ken takeover um and thank you also to Chris clug for the $10 and mandragora for the 2500 pesos I really appreciate the donations thank you so much my friends if you didn't hear your name I'm splitting these thanks across multiple videos so as not to waste too much of everyone's time all right with that out of the way let's jump in and talk about the build so for carlac I think one of the really interesting things about carlac character and while this build will work very well for a main character as well it's really based on a a facet of Carl's character is that at the core of her character there's mechanically speaking there's a contradiction as a barbarian carlac needs to use use rage but as a zaral tling she gets Smite attacks at level three and at level five these Smite attacks are cast as bonus actions and are and count as spells so you can't cast them while you're raging you can't use your racial Smite attacks while you're raging as aaral tling and because they're a bonus action they conflict with the bonus action that you spend raging so you can't like use a Smite attack on the first round and then rage for subsequent rounds you have to actually dedicate an entire turn to using one of these Smite attacks this contradiction is why zaral teelings are probably the worst race for Barbarians in the game um and that's an interesting mechanical core for this build so I'm asking the question what it would it be like if rather than resenting zarel and escaping the blood War and and fleeing aeres carlac had instead embraced her role as a general in the blood War and become a true champion of zarel so we're going to BU make a build based on that concept this build will still be super functional for for Honor mode don't get me wrong this build still kicks ass but we're primarily basing it on on that flavor concept the build is going to mix Barbarian and Paladin to get that Smite Synergy alongside Barbarian rage because unlike the zaral tling smites Paladin smites you can don't count as spells you can use them while raging just fine and there's actually quite a lot of synergy there because paladins more than any other class except Rogues love to have Advantage because critically hitting with a paladin Smite is so powerful since that doubles all your damage Dice and paladins roll lots of damage dice whenever they're smiting so reckless attack from barbarians has a lot of synergy with Paladin smites and we can build a create a build based on that concept that does tons of damage while also mixing two classes that you really don't see mixed very often if you're playing this build from Level 1 to 12 then I think that the most optimal route that will give you the best sort of strength per level is to play simply as a standard barbarian from level one to level five to get your fastest access to extra attack so we're going to begin as a barbarian that gives us a few more hit points and also lets us use a much cleaner stat spread as our initial stat spread because paladins require five different stats barbarians only really need three so you can get away with a much better stat spread for your Barbarian than you'd be able to take for your Paladin like all strength based characters this build will benefit extremely heavily from use of strength Elixir if you want to drink a strength Elixir every day you can drop your strength to eight and put those points elsewhere or the gloves of dexterity and in the late game I think you will want the at least the gloves of dexterity in order to smooth out the pretty high stat requirements for every Paladin build I'll talk about that a little more when we get there for now let's just use a very standard stat spread for barbarians and go with 16 146 8128 this is the optimal spread for almost all melee characters giving you the best access to hit points as well as AC and dexterity and keeping your important wisdom save relatively high for our skill selection the only important one is that we have Athletics although this build will later on get decent access to conversation skills and if you wanted to play this as a main character then I would recommend starting as Paladin so that you can take the Paladin conversation skills put a few more points in Charisma all right let's go on to level two Barbarian Level Two gives us access to a really important feature for this build so while we don't have any decisions to make it's important to talk about what makes this particularly good Reckless attack gives you advantage on your next uh on all your attack roles for that round including any opportunity attacks that you might make but enemies also have have advantage against you something that is uh while this makes it easier to land your attacks and you can use it in response to missing to roll the die something that you might not consider about this is that when you have Advantage you're rolling two dice and picking the higher two dice is twice as many chances to roll a critical hit that as rolling one dice cuz two is twice as many as one come here for more stunning insights like that one and so that means that builds that gain significant amounts of damage from getting a critical hit benefit extremely strongly from having Advantage if you can then increase your threat range for critical hits by using some of the gear that makes you roll Critical Hits more often then you gain even more Advantage from Advantage giving you access to many more frequent and more reliable Critical Hits since Smite attacks add damage dice to your attacks this build benefits very heavily from critically hitting because because it's going to double that much more damage you also get danger sense which is actually better for this build than it is for other builds um because later on we're going to get damage resistance to spells and so having advantage on Deck saves against spells and damage resistance means that you'll often be taking only one quarter damage from most dexterity saving thr targeting spells like a fireball for example meaning that you can basically ignore damaging spells from enemy spellcasters that's pretty nice uh compared to most other characters one quarter damage is more or less Irrelevant for most damaging spells so you gain a lot of Advantage from danger sense normally an ability that isn't particularly important at Barbarian Level three you get to pick your subclass and one of the cool things about this build is it's actually very flexible in terms of Barbarian subass you could benefit very strong Wild Heart either from Tiger heart allowing you to make smite attacks against multiple enemies in the same turn with the Tiger's bloodlust AOE attack or be heart giving you damage resistance on every incoming damage spell of course beart uh on on all incoming damage bearheart is extremely powerful for Staying Alive you can also of course benefit very strongly from Berserker Berserker lets you make a second attack well that second attack can also include a Smite so that will let you apply your smites twice as often in certain circumstances this build also actually has quite a lot of synergy with wild magic Barbarian the redheaded stepchild of Barbarians and you know carlax got red hair so it's appropriate wild magic is one that you don't often see picked for barbarians but because it has some Synergy here and it's one that we don't get to use that often I'm going to go with wild magic Barbarian perfect build how Wild magic works is when you activate rage a random effect happens a random magical effect but something that kind of of interesting about the wild magic Barbarian compared to the wild magic sorcerer is all the effects are beneficial there's no wild magic Barbarian effect that's just bad for you some of them are bad for adjacent creatures so you do want to make sure that you rage away from the rest of your team but you'll typically want to be doing that anyways because you're a Melee character so you want to get up next to the enemies activate rage the wild magic effect may be quite bad for them there are eight possible wild Magic effects and I won't go through all of them but some examples include additional damage on your attacks for the rest of that combat difficult terrain appearing around you which is very powerful if you are not next to your allies damage dealt to creatures around you um and so on and so it's really uh wild magic Barbarian is much less dangerous on honor mode than wild magic sorcerer because the negative effects uh because there are no purely negative effects and the negative effects that there are are you can activate only in circumstances where they'll only affect enemies you also get magic awareness which gives you additional bonuses to your saving throws against spells if you have a bonus action to spend on it um this is a a quite useful ability against enemy spellcasters easy to forget so don't forget that this one exists you can use it to gain one turn of additional uh proficiency B of additional saving throws against spells which can really save you in certain circumstances Barbarian Level four we get our first feat which will be an ability Improvement for strength if you have are drinking strength Elixir then there's a bunch of other cool options for Feats like most Paladin builds this build benefits quite heavily from Savage attacker since that lets you reroll the dice on your um on your Smite attacks increasing your average Smite damage this build also benefits as with every character in the game from from alert alert is the best feat by default so anytime you have a spare feet you should consider taking alert winning initiative is incredibly powerful for any number of reasons but especially for melee characters that want to get adjacent to high threat enemies before they can act to maximize your chances of making good opportunity attacks this also gives you the option to get up next to enemies and activate your rage before the rest of your party goes so you know what magical effect you're working with for that combat um allowing you to make better decisions with the rest of your party and finally great weapon Master if you are using a two-handed weapon although something that's kind of interesting about this build as well is that you don't have to use a great uh a two-handed weapon for this character necessarily and I'll talk about that a little more when we get to items that being said if you aren't using Elixir you're just going to want to increase your strength so you do more damage and hit more often at Barbarian Level five we get extra attack and also fast movement um fast movement is is incredibly strong for all the reasons that it's normally incredibly strong and extra attack is the single best class feature in the game other than maybe action surge so you are obviously going to try to get this as soon as possible on most melee characters at this point we can now deviate from taking Barbarian levels and mix in the Paladin levels at Paladin level one we don't get access to Smite attacks yet but we do get to choose our oath there's uh this is again quite flexible and so I recommend taking this based on kind of flavor and preference uh primarily although I will say that I would avoid the oath of Vengeance because the thing that it gives you mostly is easy access to Advantage and this character already gets easy access to Advantage on every attack from Reckless attack so the oath of Vengeance has the least Synergy with this build but any of the other three Oaths including the hidden oathbreaker Paladin can synergize extremely well with this build for this one I'm going to go with oath of the Ancients because the healing Radiance ability is a really nice one to use during combat um you can you won't be able to activate it on your first turn of combat usually because you'll be spending your bonus action raging but it gives you a pretty solid boost for your your hit points and can let you get downed enemies back to their feet having a bonus action heal on a Melee character like this is very useful because the characters that are most likely to go down in a bad round of combat are squishier characters your Rogues and wizards and so on and so having carlac able to run over and heal them just with the healing Radiance is extremely useful and makes oath of the Ancients a pretty good pick for this uh for this build this also gives you the oath of the Ancients Aura which is very powerful later on at level two we get access to Divine smites you'll only have two of these at this level but even twice per day 2 d8 extra damage is very very useful and of course as we level up we'll get additional spell slots any gear that you can find that gives you additional spell slots or if you're not using a strength Elixir and elixir of Arcane cultivation can be extremely powerful because a extra spell slots let you smite more often which lets you increase your Alpha strike damage significantly for a fighting style you will want great weapon fighting if you're going for a two-handed weapon or defense if not um since this build will actually often want to switch between using a two-handed weapon and a one-handed weapon and shield you're going to want to use I think defense more often just as the best um the the overall best pick plus one AC is slightly less valuable to you than other characters because enemies will so so often have advantage on hitting you but because of that they will much more often Target you which means while the plus one AC is less likely to prevent an attack from hitting it will be applied to many more enemy attacks over the course of the game and so you're going to get more value out of that uh that plus one AC in total even if individually it's less useful than it would be for characters that don't provide advantage to enemies as frequently for our spell preparation currently we only have eight Charis and so we're only going to get one spell per day that's totally fine we don't actually benefit very strongly from casting any of these spells because almost all of the good Paladin spells either have save DCs so you would need High Charisma to benefit from them or our concentration like say protection from evil and good since you can't concentrate on a spell while raging you will lose access to these spells um and you can't cast a spell while raging so even the non-concentration Spells you wouldn't be able to use so you most likely want to equip bless for cases where you might be out of rages and bless is just very good um or cure wounds for an emergency of some kind you could you could keep equipped but since we're the oath of the Ancients Paladin you won't need that as often um but again your spell slots are going to be spent on smites pretty much 100% of the time Paladin level three you get access to Nature's wrath and turn the faithless these are based on your charisma the DC for these are based on your charisma um and they both require an action so I recommend never casting these uh you generally speaking will not succeed on these and you're better off just killing something than trying to inflict medium strength conditions on them prevention preventing disease from afflicting you does matter in some cases you also get speak with animals which is a ritual so it doesn't cost you a spell slot to use and is a dayong buff that actually let let you overcome a few Encounters in the game without needing animal handling or whatever so this speak with animals can be very useful um it's more useful than the other oath spells mostly at this point in the game but uh overall the again your spell slots will all be spent on smites Paladin level four we get a second feat and increase our lay on hands of course and once again if you are not using strength Elixir you're going to Simply want to increase your strength if you are using strength Elixir then you are going to want to take either alert or one of the two damaging Feats that I mentioned earlier Savage attacker or great weapon Master another option for this build is actually Sentinel Sentinel can give you uh a little more control over where enemies move on the map and you can Smite on opportunity attacks which will give you more options more opportunities to use Smite attacks but overall I think uh if especially if you are one using mostly one-handed weapon Savage attacker is going to be the best damage and if you aren't using strength Elixir you're just going to want to increase your strength Paladin level five gets you second level spells giving you more access to Smite attacks and also um gives you Misty step which is one of the few oath spells that you will actually use another reason why oath of the Ancients is pretty good here Misty step is something that every character should have access to if possible because it's incredibly powerful also on honor mode is a good way to get out of Dodge quickly if things are going wrong for your um for your party you can Misty step away and more easily leave a combat that's going badly so having access to this while it does cost you a level two Smite so you should use it judiciously only if you really really need the repositioning it is cuz it costs you a lot of damage it is very much worth having access to misy step again what our prepared spells are don't really matter because all of the Paladin good spells are concentration you can see they're pretty much all concentration I would prepare protection from Poison this could theoretically come up Aid could come up although you're better off getting that from a um from a cleric Ally and lesser restoration is again situational one of the nice things about this character is that you get to prepare these just situational spells and use them like protection from poison or Aid or lesser restoration use them if you need them but otherwise spend it on spites at Paladin level six we get the aura of protection and at this point you're going to want to Respec your stats to give you Charisma what you'll want to do by default assuming that you haven't equipped the gloves of dexterity is simply move the four points from wisdom into Charisma AA of protection gives you a bonus to your saving throws equal to your charisma bonus meaning that you will gain the same wisdom saves from having 12 points of Charisma as you will 12 points of wisdom but also gain plus one to all your other saves at this point also it could be worth considering dropping your dexterity or Constitution down to increase your charisma further because R of protection saving throws are so valuable but uh by default I think the best pick is just simply going to be to remove four points from wisdom and add four points to Charisma I'll show you alternate stat spreads that use the gloves of dexterity as well at the end of the video no change in prepared spells or anything like that at this point again you have a choice you could continue to Paladin level seven to gain Aura of warding which gives you half damage from spells and is incredibly powerful or you could go into wild magic Barbarian 6 giving you uh bolstering Magic Boon which is an action basically to cast a non-concentration version of bless on one Ally That's incredibly strong as well as bolstering magic letting you recover a level one and a level two spell slot once per day basically this adds a level one and a level two spell slot um to your character or but you can use it on an ally if you want to you also get an additional rage charge which is pretty useful if you do that so this gives you more smites per day this gives you half damage on incoming spells or if you were to have taken oathbreaker Paladin it can give you Charisma TI your damage and and so on an alternate split for this character that's worth talking about um and you may want to consider respecing once you hit Level 12 is to go to Barbarian Level uh only take Barbarian to level three and take Paladin to level 9 to get level three spell slots um I'm going to show you the Barbarian 5 Paladin 7 split in this guide but uh I think the Barbarian three Paladin 9 build is also extremely strong because level three spell slots give you better Smite attacks how this character plays out is pretty cool and something that's important to note about this character is like a lot of smite or or Reckless attack characters you want to have your abilities used um when you want to so it's very important to go to your reactions tab of your Spellbook here and set Reckless attack to ask and check this off and divine Smite to on and ask every time this will allow you to make Divine smites and Reckless attacks in the same turn something that the game otherwise won't really let you do um because you will only be able to select one ahead of time this way we can make an attack and then if we miss it the game will prompt us to use a reckless attack and if we hit the game will prompt us to use a Smite so uh that gives you a bunch of additional options for how you want to combine those attacks together something else that's worth keeping in mind is that you will often on this character want to activate Reckless attack even with you without missing so to actually use this button to make a reckless attack rather than attacking and waiting to see if you miss that's because it doubles your chance at getting a critical hit because you're rolling two dice in advance rather than waiting to see if a die uh waiting to see if you hit before rolling the second die there's been some confusion about that so I'll I'll talk a little bit about that one cuz last occasionally when I mention this people say no it doesn't work like that don't worry it definitely does basically there's three cases when you make a reckless attack um if you have it on reaction either you miss and then you roll another die getting two chances at a critical hit you critically hit in which case you're good or you hit but don't critical in which case you don't get the opportunity to roll a critical hit with your second die if you activate it ahead of time all three cases give you the opportunity to to critically hit with your second die roll so you increase your chances of critically hitting by activating Reckless attack ahead of time if that didn't make any sense don't worry all you really need to know is just push this button ahead of time if you want to do the most damage possible when we actually do that attack let's let's just go ahead and make an attack and start a combat here you can see it prompts a a critical hit option so we can choose to do that we can make an attack um with advantage and use a Divine Smite on our second attack even while raging so let's go ahead and activate rage and having entered a wild magic rage we get a wild magic surge which creates a a random effect this is probably the best of them honestly the plus 1d6 Force damage because this build benefits so strongly from um Critical Hits additional damage dice like that are really powerful and any add any gear you can find that adds additional damage dice will work out very well for your character you can then make another attack and again we will have advantage on our second attack because of Reckless attack and we can choose to use a Divine Smite based on our opponent's Health this will give us the opportunity to for example finish off a low Health enemy because you actually get to see the D the damage roll so if we'd rolled three more damage on this attack we wouldn't need to waste a Smite on it um whereas in this case let's say this was an important enemy we were trying to kill for sure this round we might want to consider using one of our spell slots on the Divine Smite so notice that while we are raging the only thing we can't do from our Paladin abilities is actually cast spells we can use smites we can activate our our lay on hands our he heing Radiance our other Divine abilities Divine sense abilities and so on those all work just fine while you're raging the only thing that you can't do is actually cast spells so that's why we take spells we prepare spells that you'd only want to cast out of combat anyways I I I forgot that uh actually killing an innocent there would would break my Paladin oath uh don't worry though this is all taking place in a closed time Loop so she'll be alive again after I have finished recording this video guide something that you do have to remember when using these Paladin auras is you have to activate them manually the first time they'll stay on forever after that you don't have to reactivate them every uh long rest but it once you level up and gain access to R of protection and a of warding you do have to actually manually activate those abilities in order to gain the benefit something I'm actually not sure of is why it's giving me a plus one bonus to saving throws here we have negative one Charisma so we should not be getting any bonus from Aura of protection um I don't know why it's actually doing that that's a that's an odd bug that might in need some more investigation um it should be based on our Charisma bonus which we have minus one of so why it's giving me plus one and you can see it is actually giving us the plus one to our to all of our saves uh is something I'm not 100% sure of what if I increase my Charisma doing science in real time here didn't change anything if we increase our Charisma funny all right well if anyone knows why that was happening do let me know in the comments um as for gear for this character I think there are really two important uh types of gear to have you want a a good weapon and I actually recommend for this character that you carry both a solid two-handed weapon and a solid one-handed weapon and shield combo or just a versatile weapon and a shield the reason for this is that this character actually benefits pretty strongly um this character gets a lot of your damage from smites so you don't actually need a two-handed weapon in order to have high damage output having the shield can be more important in some engagements against Mages or archers enemies that won't be attacking your AC you're going to want a two-handed weapon so you can just unequip the The Shield have lower AC and use say Roma in two hands or um use your two-handed weapon but against uh enemy melee characters that you are worried about having your AC attacked you may want to equip a shield this way the enemies will be attacking you frequently even with high AC because you're giving them Advantage frequently and you can you can benefit pretty strongly from that uh High AC that that way you can prevent enemies from hitting you because you have defense style High AC so even with the advantage they're going to be missing a decent number of attacks and that way this character can be tanky for your team by attracting enemy fire and still causing it to miss you also benefit of course extremely strongly from increasing your armor with the gloves of dexterity like other characters that get medium armor and uh that get medium armor access the best armors are the ones that have uncapped dexterity when combined with the gloves of dexterity giving you very high AC you can reach 25 AC with defense style a shield and the gloves of dexterity that also lets you move these dexterity points into other stats so you can increase your charisma um and gain more more saving throws uh for example so what you would want to do with the gloves of dexterity is drop your base dexterity down to eight and then increase your charisma up to 14 to increase your your saving throws overall other good items of course like every other strength based character you can benefit from strength Elixir anything that increases your charisma will give you additional saving throws which are very powerful with s such as this Birthright hat so if we wear the gloves of dexterity and the birthright hat you can have 16 Charisma giving you and your allies all plus three to your charisma saves also plus three to damage if you are an oathbreaker Paladin all of that does add up very well other than that you're going to want an armor of agility or another armor with uncapped uh uncapped a from dexterity you need to be in medium armor otherwise you can't rage all right my friends I hope that you have enjoyed this look at the Zealot of zarel I think this build is super fun will be totally reasonable on honor mode or any High difficulty setting because you get a lot of cool goodies and it also gets us using some classes that we wouldn't otherwise see that wouldn't otherwise see a lot of play and wouldn't otherwise see a lot of play together if you have enjoyed the video of course please feel free to leave a comment like the video and you can subscribe to my channel for more of this and other strategy game content also if there are other games that you want to see me cover I'm looking to to expand the channel to cover a few more games not at the expense of balers gate or anything like that don't worry um balers gate is here to stay but I am very interested to see what other games you'd like to see my take on so if there's a game that you want to see me cover uh let me know in the comments below all right cheers my friends and uh welcome to 2024 I'll catch you next time

Channel: Cephalopocalypse

Views: 28,109

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

Id: ZKBSe6y4Bac

Length: 31min 27sec (1887 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024