Hey pals! Quick update to prevent confusion here. The newly released Honour Mode has some exclusive balance changes, among which is not allowing Pact of the Blade's Extra Attack to stack with other sources. On Tactician or lower, this build will still work perfectly as presented here, but on Honour mode you'll only get 2 attacks/action. In general, I think you will *still* be best off with Paladin 7 Warlock 5, as that gets you two level 3 smites per short rest, but other breakpoints like lock 3 pal 9 are more viable now.
Hey I may be late to ask but when I select smites It dosent let me select from the warlock spells, im doing 8 pal 4 warlock so i can get the 3 feats so 4 into char and 1 great weapon master but i dont know what to do with the -5, im early act 3 about to go to lower city
@@Sirfrigth Hi, check if your reactions are properly set, also imo 7/5 is better, as 3d attack is superior option to 3rd feat, if -5 makes you miss too often you can switch it off in passives tab
@@adamnowicki1425 but I'm responding to the part where he said "on honour mode you'll only get 2 attacks/action" which is incorrect. You only get 2 attacks on your first action in a round, in honour mode.
Thanks for the build! A quick tip to break Minthara's oath more safely: respect to oath of ancients or devotion, go to the docks at moonrise towers, question the worker there about the cargo, tell him to wash off the worms. That's it, no dogs must go to heaven.
@@TheLostShoes I tried to replicate this with Minthara yesterday evening but it did not work but she doesn't have the same oath. It happenend with Karlach when i made a build with a mix of Barbarian and palladin.
@@kukipettthe most ridiculous part of this is that the scrying eyes are controlled by gortash (or at least by someone employed by gortash) so it is now canon that gortash is an innocent
Quick tip to make Minthara an oathbreaker: If you just got to moonrise and immediately recruit Minthara there, you can head right over to the moonrise tower kitchen where the halfling lady is controlling the gnolls, and just play as Minthara and help her keep her control over the gnolls. That will break the oath of vengeance (and then you can interact with the halfling with a different character if you want to make the gnoll kill her)
Yeah it said that for me too, but so far I haven't seen anything negative happen, even when I took Minthara with me up to talk to Z'rell. Other than her initial breakout, nobody at Moonrise has noticed she's with me at all despite the game warning me. @@davidgreedy8920
I like that your builds really seem to click with the companions and that they don’t overly rely on elixir or broken item combos. The companion you showcase makes me feel like it’s believable for them and that is really satisfying
Just wanted to say thanks for this build! I am doing my first tactician run and I’m finally getting to the point where the build really comes together. It’s fun, powerful, but still has some versatility, which suits my playstyle nicely. I also really appreciate that this doesn’t rely on a bunch of elixirs or specific pieces of gear to work well. Thanks!
You can also infinitely break the Oath of Vengeance on a certain locked cage door in the Emerald Grove. Even if the door is wide open after you do it the first time you can touch it over and over again to keep re-breaking your oath. Attacking the dog caused the other potential party members in camp to become hostile and attack me.
technically any of your companions can get the hags hair. The hags hair is just an item reward, so if you explicitly plan to aquire a future companion who you want to give the hair to, you can just select the stat you want to boost for them and hold onto the hair item until youve recruited them.
@@Chonusyeah thankfully patch 6 fixed that. I lost 2 hours of gameplay once I realized that happened and went back. Thankfully it wasn't more than that
Thank you again for your lovely build guide. 104% appreciated. One thing: Tried to get the Oathbreaker Mintara in Act 3 and just followed your guide. Killing an innocent is not the right oathbreak for vengance (damn .... half of the city is dead until i figured that out). To save some time: in act 3 you can break the vengance oath if you go to the windmill in rivington - let the new born mindflayer alive and give him a fresh dead body.
Thanks, glad you liked it! Good to know - I'm not sure what happened there though, because killing an innocent *should* still break vengeance - I wonder if everyone in the city isn't properly marked as innocent for some reason.
Hmmm - after i killed half of the town i finally asked google. And all guides say that to break the vengeance oath you need to make a an "unholy" decision when you see a crime. Like freeing Sazza - or in my case helping the new Mindflayer. Maybe its in your case just working cause you killed scratcher? Some people say scratcher is a special case. @@Cephalopocalypse
Thanks! Yeah, I try to at least have some justification why we're building this way - it doesn't matter to everyone but for the people who like it, it helps a lot!
@@Cephalopocalypse Personally, I don't really think Minthara would sign a pact with a devil after what she's been through with the Absolute (Wanting to be herself again) but not everything needs to be lore friendly. I do very much like your rogue cleric build for SH though. Fits her pretty much to the letter
This is a very articulate bot wishing to thank you for your numerous build guides. As for the effect on the UTube algorithm, this bot cannot compute. Hopefully, the readers under sarcasm. If not, then perhaps this verbose reply helps the Utube calculations more
FYI. The easiest way to break oath is to switch to devotion, toggle on non-lethal, knock out an enemy, and execute them after battle. Can be done at pretty much any point in the game, so this seems like the most reliable way to become an oathbreaker.
This Paladin build is great, but my favorite build with Smite is 2 Pal/6 Bard/ 4 Sorc (you could also switch Pal and Sorc levels up to you). The idea of this build is to have the most Smites per long rest and to abuse crit gear and savage attacker to crit at least once almost every round. Savage attacker is a necessity because it rerolls all damage die and picks the highest one (including Smite). Which gives you bonkers crit damage. The crit gear is knife of the undermountain king, blood thirst, saravok helm, deadshot You should have 20 dex and at least 16 charisma the rest is up to preference. You will also have very high AC thanks to the Armor of agility late game and the Yuan-ti scale male in Act 2. Both of these don't cap dex bonus to AC Two good ring options options are risky ring and mystic scoundrel The only downside is that this comes online pretty late and it feels more like a bard with Smite than a Paladin. Nevertheless, this is the build I've had the most fun with in this game
As a side note, you get a scimitar off the first combat in the nautiloid which is finesse. Its not wonderful, but you do decent damage with it and can even go dual scimitars before you get to the second round of combat if you so choose.
What is the point of going back to level 1 before becoming oathbreaker? Is there some reason you need to go back through the levels as an oathbreaker paladin rather than just keeping the choices you already made and becoming an oathbreaker? I get that you can no longer respec as an oathbreaker, but why do you need to respec in the first place?
It's not actually necessary, it just makes it easier to make sure you have everything right, and made the video work a little better - I've also heard some reports that it can be buggy if you're already multiclassed when you break your oath, where some people will lose levels or have them converted to paladin, so I figured better safe than sorry. You can see even at level 1 it's buggy because it shows the character as being level 2 in the oathbreaker screen.
You can easily break any of the paladin oaths early, specifically the vengeance oath by freeing sanza in the druid grove, of course thats if your're running this build as a main character from the start of the game, you just need to open the cage and the oath will break
True! For Devotion, it also breaks if you *leave* her in prison (not sure about Ancients). There's a ton of story methods of course - killing an innocent is just the one you can most reliably time to when you want to switch builds. I think there's one oath that breaks if you leave shadowheart in the pod on the nautilus, so I *think* that's the fastest way, but haven't tested it myself.
I would argue that because you will have level 1 and 2 spell slots from your Paladin class, it’s most appropriate to keep hex because one cast can last you the entire long rest if you keep applying it on targets and now you’re getting a damage buff on multiple targets which is arguably worth more to the build than a single level 1 smite would be. Also, thunderous smite doesn’t require concentration which makes for a good opener because if they fall prone, you can have a better chance to crit on the follow up attack
Sure! I don't think keeping Hex is wrong at all - the main downside is just that it's concentration, which in this build is almost 100% spent on Darkness. When it comes up it can be a nice little boost though! Great call on thunderous smite, I totally forgot it wasn't concentration and you should definitely bring it.
I kind of think 3/9 and 7/5 are completely different builds. The 7/5 build capstone is Aura of Hate from Oathbreaker 7. Without it, there's really not much point in going Oathbreaker. With 3/9, I think Oath of Vengeance or Oath of Devotion are better options for Vow of Enmity or Sacred Weapon, respectively.
I'm curious how do you use darkness with this build? It seems to me that your action is better used on your smites instead. Because you can't attack on the same turn that you cast darkness, and on the next turn enemies will just run away from the darkness cloud anyway, thus giving you no advantage, well aside from your defensive perks. But I feel like that sort of gives you a very passive playstyle because you'll want to chase after the enemies that ran away from the darkness in order to melee attack them, no? I wish you could include some gameplay examples in your build, that will give a clearer picture of how they're supposed to play imo.
Yo early Happy New Years man. Just want to say that I appreciate the videos that you make for these builds. I love how you make them viable but not cheesy or broken. I honestly would love to see a lore friendly Minthara build from you. I want to make a new playthrough and have her recruited in my party all throughout the campaign. Anyways, thank you for making these videos and Happy New Years.
Hey, thanks so much for the support! I really appreciate it - happy new year to you too! Really appreciate the kind words as well. I actually think my recently posted bardadin build would work very well for Minthara's lore, though I'll also have a more paladin-centric build for her soon!
I just found your channel today, and have watched at least 5 of your videos. You make the best build vids I’ve seen, and I’m very excited to try them out! Thank you for your hard work! Question: with Pact of the Blade extra attack and Paladin extra attack not stacking in Honor mode, do you think going strength based and Pact of the Tome might be better for a Lockadin? Maybe not, the stat point distribution might screw too many things up.
I don’t believe it stacks in honor mode and once you break your oath you can’t respec until you pay 1000 gold to take back your oath. Then pay to respec and then break it again.
diadem of arcane synergy is broken for blade warlocks. adds another charisma modifier to weapon damage (so for this and GWM it would be +25 to each hit) when inflicting a condition. with the illithid power displace and repelling blast, every eldritch blast gives you two turns of arcane synergy
wonderfull build Gave me and my friend an easy time against a certain old friend in act 3 Now I have a question regarding the giant slayer with this build we have negative str so does that mean we lose the dmg bonus from this weapon ? does that also nerf our dmg ? (I know I can just use some potions to buff her to +27 str but I m still curious)
Awesome vid! Another thing to remember is Patriar's Memory from the Mirror of Loss which gives a +1 to CHA, freeing up the Hag Hair for someone else while getting you the same benefits elsewhere. Went with 8/14/16/8/10/17 for this with plans to get to 20 after ASI (CHA) and then Patriar's. That said, it's a very very finnicky thing requiring save-scumming so I get not wanting to rely on that. How do you feel about Great Weapon Master versus Alert?
A build I have been very interested in trying! What is the other build that does equal DPS? I was planning a Sorlock machine gun for my next run, but this is tempting.
This one is super fun! Definitely recommended if you love doing damage and making the AI go crazy (thanks to darkness). The other build I was thinking of was Tavern Brawler thrower, it also gets to apply double attribute mod on a 2-handed weapon three times per turn - full build guide coming soon!
@@DavionAngeles I get the three attacks plus bonus attack plus action surge, and that is pretty amazing. But how does the EK-WC match the damage boost from smites?
Armor of Agathas(spelled wrong) does way more than just give you a few hp. It last until long rest and does 5 points/level cast to anyone who hits you. Upcast this at the highest level you can and it is just guaranteed damage each time you are hit. Solid build though.
Yeah I've started playing the game for the firs time recently and based off the tooltip description of the skill I thought it was going to be a one time thing and that the armor was gonna run out when the temporary hp did and the cold damage on hitting my character would go away. It seems it stays... So they just take damage for hitting me every time lol.
Another build straight out of my current playthrough. My favorite build for Tav. Charisma based so you are the face of the party, heavy focus on one primary attribute, incredibly powerful both offensively and defensively for the entire party. That said, I prefer to start as a Warlock and level all the way to level 5 before adding Paladin. This gives you the extra attack with your Bound weapon as early as possible, as well as level 3 spells/spellslots. This means that once you hit level 7(Paladin level 2), you can Smite upcasted to level 3 right away. I also prefer to take Friends at Warlock level 1. This makes your Cha skills almost always succeed from early on. Also... you monster.
Sure! Honestly, I think the levelling order makes a pretty small difference, though level 1 paladin can make the nautilus tough on tactician. The only downside of starting warlock is losing heavy armor access - personally, I think it's worth delaying the build one level to get that, but the difference is very small imo. My suggested order also gets you to warlock 5 / pal 2 at level 7, so at that point the builds are identical, but with slightly different skill and armor proficiencies. It was the only way!
If you want a story-based method, one thing that's very helpful is the wiki (bg3wiki, not the fextralife one - I'd link but youtube would remove it) has a list of all oathbreaking actions under each oath. It's not complete but still super useful!
Are there any noteworthy gloves this build should be using? If not, you could use the Gloves of Dexterity from the creche and fix the only real downside the build has which is the abysmal STR score. It works perfectly fine for a companion, but having a shitty jump on top of a really low carry weight is torture for a (party face) PC.
Like your videos and your way of thinking. But dude, you didn’t say a WORD about savage attacker feat. But this feat is a must for any paladin. And why did you dump your STR to 8? Wouldn’t be better to leave it at least at 10 to avoid str and melee attack penalties?
SA is a reasonable pick for this build if you have another way of reaching 20 CHA (Ethyl's hair, for example), but it mostly gives you higher average damage on smites, which doesn't patch any of the weaknesses of the build and instead doubles down on something it already does more than enough of - Alert will make you much safer and more effective overall if you have an extra feat. You don't need strength for this build as it uses charisma to calculate attacks.
Hi how does this build compare to 2Pala/ 8Swordsbard/Fighter? Swordsbard give you much higher Smites Fighter for Action Surge And you can use Gauntletss of Giant Str for your Attacks And ofc Eversight Ring for Darkness Extra Atk Stacking doesnt work in Honor Mode after all
I wonder if it's possible to safely stand in your own Hunger of Hadar instead of Darkness? Maybe with enough frost resistance + some damage mitigation from armor, boots with immunity to slows and dark vision?
Love your videos. I watch you more than any other bg3 peeps. But please, can you make a video about savage attacker? Like how good is it mathematically? It just sounds stronger than +2 str over all but not sure. Help senpai!!
Hello, just wondering something if I use Hill giant strength potion in the early game would it be possible to go with the paladin levels first? 🤔 And also I prefer sword and shield for paladins would it still be good with this build if I take duelling instead of great weapon fighting? 😊 Thanks in advance!
I went dark urge for oathbreakee and I killed the strange ox at last light through dialogue. That broke my oath and you dont have to hurt anyone "innocent". You could also go vengeance and stop the tiefling in the druid grove from killing the captive goblin.
Itemization-wise, using this exact build with Gauntlets of Hill Giant Strength from House of Hope and the Balduran's Giantslayer from Ansur would add ANOTHER flat +6 source of damage, an extra +1 to hit, and opens up great weapon master even more. Since the greatsword adds your strength modifier to your damage twice, it doesn't use your charisma anymore but Aura of Hate still applies and obviously all of your spells still exist. It's probably the best weapon to pair with this build if you're using great weapon master. Otherwise, it's probably Belm or Duelist's Prerogative. As a side-note: I think mathematically speaking, while this build does have slightly higher PEAK damage assuming maximum rolls, you'll do far more average damage taking Savage Attacker even instead of a +2 charisma ASI. All it has to do is average +6 damage, which it will easily do given the sheer amount of damage dice involved with everything the build does, especially with how often you'll be critting with darkness advantage and all the crit range increasing gear in the game. Savage Attacker is almost always a must-pick for Paladins because it rerolls smite dice as well-- even more-so if you're running a 2d6 weapon!
True! I try to steer clear of specific items for these builds where possible, but those are all excellent suggestions! Savage Attacker instead of an ASI is something I honestly hadn't considered. I have just done some very rough math and if I'm right you get: ~even (technically -0.06) avg damage on normal attacks ~ +2.5 damage on a level 1 smite, and +1.25 damage per additional smite level However, that isn't taking into account Great Weapon Fighting, which doesn't play very well with Savage Attacker, so the actual change is something like: ~ -1 damage per normal attack ~ +1 on a level 1 smite, +0.5 per smite level. All of this at the cost also of -1 to hit. Overall I think the ASI is better for *this* version with Aura of Hate, but if you didn't have that, Savage Attacker would probably be better. Interesting!
so if i dont want to play with darkness can i still use great weapon master or is the advantage to important because otherwise i miss to often? or would you say with 20 charisma -5 isnt a problem? because in my book hitting 3 times is better then hitting 2 times with 20 extra dmg or 1 time with 10. i know about ring but that thing is for asterion 😁
Yes Giantslayer is insane, but you would lose extra attack from pact of the blade if you don't bind it as a pact weapon. Just bind Giantslayer and you should still add your normal 1x strength modifier to damage. 2x str mod ain't worth losing the extra attack from pact of the blade.
@@kenzovich9225 this is incorrect :D you would bind the weapon with pact of the blade, of course, but a bound weapon will still use your Strength/Dexterity score for the weapon if it is higher than your charisma-- it doesn't override it to charisma regardless of your higher stat! The weapon itself still adds +STR to the damage as part of it's own feature, so it functions exactly as I described :D Do note, however, that Pact of the Blade's extra attack NO LONGER STACKS with regular extra attack from fighter/paladin/ranger/barbarian in HONOR MODE! In all other difficulties it still stacks for three attacks.
@@Cephalopocalypse With how DRS works in all difficulties OUTSIDE of honor mode, savage attacker applies to all branched effects! This includes things like Phalar Aluve, the various +1d4/+1d6 effects like hex, hunter's mark, divine favor, etc, as well as like 20 different pairs of gloves and rings! I know the video isn't assuming specific items, but it'd be nothing short of a crime to assume the character doesn't use ANY items! Definitely worth mentioning :) Honor mode messes with this a fair bit-- just like it messes with everything else posted before its release... lol-- but definitely still worth mentioning and hopefully helpful to anyone who reads this and is still playing on balanced or tactician! Keep up the good work Ceph! Always a treat to catch your videos :D
I don’t understand the purpose of the level 4 oath breaker save and respec. I was 1 paladin/3 warlock when I broke my oath, doesn’t the game simply change that original lvl 1 paladin level to oathbreaker?
At the time this was recorded there were a *lot* of bugs with oathbreaking (you can even see we're briefly level 13 in the character creation screen here, which should be impossible). The respec was for safety with those.
@@Cephalopocalypse epic, thanks for the quick response. Starting a duo tactician run with this oathbreaker and the gloom stalker from your recent video. Noticed the Lockadin in that video is now devotion. Any changes to this build or does this still work?
Just wanted to say, great guide, but you can actually respec as an oathbreaker. You have to renew your oath at the oathbreaker knight, it justs costs 1000 gold so early in the game it is pretty expensive.
What do you mean you can't respec oathbreaker? If I pay the 1000 to attone, then respec and break oath again, doesn't that work? I was hoping to get the 23 charisma neck then respec on my pure oathbreaker paladin to this.
You can also get the +1 and + 2 carisma boost from the end of shadown heart quest (just be sure to only use the religion check after geting the +1 bonus) thus making the hag bonus not needed/almost useless fir minthara
You don't really *need* to but there's so many bugs with oathbreaking I've found it's safer - you can see even here the game thinks we're level 2 even though we're level 1 in the level-up screen. Some of these have been fixed since this was recorded but the game would invent phantom levels out of nowhere or refuse to let you fully replace levels sometimes, so it was just safer to respec
My next playthrough will be a Durge Paladin/Warlock build. The idea of being a corrupted Paladin who is fighting his evil nature while trying to do good is RP gold for me. My plan was to use a One-Hand weapon(most likely a warhammer) and shield. This video only helps cement that but I'm assuming I'd lose out on some damage with the loss of Great Weapon Fighting, while taking Dueling - which I'm assuming is the next best choice?
Dueling with a shield is definitely powerful enough with this build, even if it’s not totally optimal. I played a very similar build using Astarion as player character using a 1h and shield for the majority of the game until I got the Duelist’s Prerogative in act 3 and dropped the shield. Still VERY powerful.
Sounds very fun! Yeah, Duelist or Defense are you best bets for a one-handed build, and while you do get a little less damage, you do also get access to some very cool shields. Two that come to mind are the one that boosts initiative, a weak point for this character, and the one that gives enemies disadvantage on saves vs fear, which you will be causing a *lot* of.
I really do love warlocks so much but man I wish they got one more spell slot pretty much only being able to use those slots for darkness and misty step a good amount of the time kinda sucks and you don’t get the third one until level 11
Ok so apparently i got minthara the game breaking way and the only ways i have to break her oath currently are unavailable so do i just follow the build and respec the next time im able th break the oath?
Now that Honor Mode is out, of all the builds you know of, which do you think would have the best chances to succeed in a solo honor mode run (without relying on stuff like barrelmancy cheese)?
Without knowing what the new legendary actions are yet, I can't guarantee that solo Honour mode is possible - there might be something like an unresistable stun for example, but my assumption is the ranged stealth attackers and Darkness users are still your best bet. This build should be a very good candidate thanks to Darkness and great saves and damage, or something like the blaster Warlock or Gloomstalker Ranger builds I've posted should be great as well. For an alternate take the Tank Wizard build may still be very good, though if the damage numbers scale too much higher than your Arcane Ward that may not work as well.
@@Cephalopocalypse That's what I thought as well; pending more information on the legendary actions, some version of a paladin, like this one, seems like the best bet. It almost feels certain or obvious that Larian will give at least a few of the major bosses the ability to see through or remove invisibility/stealth, so I'm expecting stealth-based builds to be less viable for a solo playthrough than usual. The wizard tank could be an interesting contender, though! I cannot WAIT to see the changes Larian's made for honor mode!! It's so exciting!!!
@@VDViktor oh yeah, you totally can! There's plenty of people who've completed solo tactician runs without using barrelmancy at all! It's difficult, and takes a whole lot of planning and strategy, but people have done it a bunch!
I have finished all the quests in the first region and just reached level five. I have no idea who to kill to break my oath. If I attack scratch in the camp all the other party members get hostile. I killed a couple of the druids in druids grove but that did not trigger the oath breaking. Help.
That's odd! I thought killing any nonhostile NPC would break it. Maybe because the druids can become hostile, they don't have the same flag? The wiki (bg3wiki, not the fextralife one - I'd link but youtube would remove it) has a list of oathbreaking actions under each paladin oath - it's not complete but might give you an idea of when you can do it next. Spoiler-heavy of course, however! Also just to check: any fights you start through dialogue won't count, you have to actually attack them unprovoked. You can also probably use Scratch's fetch mechanic to move him to somewhere in camp no one can see you, though that starts to feel pretty macabre :P
@@Cephalopocalypse I attacked the two druids sitting at the table where you speak to the guy that gives you the info on the nightsinger. I did not speak to them first and i was the one that initiated the battle and got the final kill. I also killed the boar that is wandering at the top of the hill near the gate. I am pretty frustrated at this point as I spent a lot of time reloading and getting nowhere, I feel it may be better just staying vengeance but I have already done a play through as one, perhaps if I swapped to one of the other oaths first it may be easier.
Why is nobody ever talking about Bardadins? They're far stronger than Padlocks in this game. Especially when going for Dual Wield. The can use 3 (5 when hasted) smites a turn with 16 smites per long rest. On top of that you get 15 bardic flourishes per long rest which you can use together with the smites. They simply obliterate bosses. Padlocks lack the sheer number of spell slots to keep up. On top of all that, you're also a skill monger thanks to being a bard.
Indeed. After 600+ hours in this game i think 2 or 4 levels in paladin + 10 or 8 levels in college of swords bard (dual wielding) is by far the strongest and funniest option for a smite build.
Yep. My current is bard 8/paladin 2. Swords bare for extra attack. It works exceedingly well. Duelists Prerogative, bhaals armor, horned helmet, crit bow, risky ring makes for a crit machine. Savage attacker makes those crits hit hard af.
Bugs and glitches, it was before the fixes. Nowadays works fine. Nowadays Bardadin feels better, but Oathbreaker Lockadin is still a very good frontliner or capable of bursting just about anything, depending on what you want him to do.
I don't know if my game is just bugged or what the deal is. I was trying something similar to this.. but for some reason my bound pact weapon, in this case I was trying the Everburn blade. Said as my pact weapon it would do like 7-19 damage, however upon numerous hits I've noticed it only doing like seven damage a hit plus the extra damage from the fire which is a different calculation. Do pact weapons just do less damage then they say they do or is something just wrong with my game? I should note I tried this on about 20 - ish targets all with similar numbers. Always hitting for either 7 or 8 damage and never getting anywhere near 19.
The figure in the menu aggregates both the weapon damage and the fire damage. For the everburn blade, that’s 2d6 plus 1d4-so 3-16 damage without a STR modifier. It can be a little difficult to track outside of the combat log since the onscreen numbers are so small and disappear so quickly. An average of 7-8 damage per hit is reasonable for the everburn blade, then the added fire damage usually adds another two damage for a total of 9-10 damage per swing. Naturally, this will go up when you have a positive STR modifier (or down if it’s negative). Some feats can help up the average damage. For example, savage attacker rolls your damage dice twice and discards the lowest result, so your average damage will increase.
Wait, are you talking about melee swings or throwing the weapon? Because if the weapon doesn’t have the thrown property, it won’t do the same damage if you throw it-it does damage based on its weight instead of.
if you're gonna just keep it in your bag, forget about the owlbear cub questline because there's a bug where the game automatically feeds the hag hair to the cub during cutscene and it's gone forever lol..
Hey @Cephalopocalypse ! Currently trying this build out in an honormode run with a couple of friends. I'm having a hard time figuring out why we're respeccing at all? There aren't any choices to make as oathbreaker and we don't change any stats or the likes. How come we need to be so meticolous. Is it not just a matter of breaking the oath when you reach lvl 5 so that you have pact of the blade
Hey! It's not really required most of the time, but there's several bugs with oathbreaker that it can avoid (you can see even here, when we do the oathbreaker screen it shows us as level 2 instead of level 1, because the game can sometimes invent weird phantom levels). It's just for extra safety!
I think Swords bard/lock with duelist prerogative and bhalist armor beats this. 4 attacks per round with all enimies vulnerable to piercing dmg. Plus slashing flourish can hit 6 total enimies for a burst instead of smites.
Builds using specific items are definitely going to have great damage! I try to keep these builds item-agnostic as much as possible, since not everyone will find every item on their playthroughs. Bard / Warlock build coming soon! :D
This build gets even stronger with a single dip into War Cleric, both for an extra attack and the Guidance cantrip. 4 warlock and of course 7 Paladin for aura of protection or aura of hate.
Doing this exchanges extra attack always for only 3 extras per long rest, as well as losing repelling blast for guidance which you can get on an item in act 1 or on a companion.
That's never a bad idea - fighter 2 is of course excellent. It's hard to give up any levels from this build though, since you lose level 3 spells/smites (and the extra attack on any mode below tactician) if you sacrifice warlock levels, and you lose Aura of Protection and Aura of Hate from paladin if you sacrifice those.
@@Cephalopocalypse according to reddit this bug never got fixed since launch. Basically the act 2 camps and even the camp outside Balder's gate just doesn't have oath breaker, it broke my Paladin run because of it.
Wouldn’t it be stronger to just go 6 levels straight into paladin to get the extra attack earlier, then just respec to 2 levels in paladin and 5 in warlock later on?
Yeah - I think I fall in the camp of "it's good to have the evil playthrough cost you, but Minthara's cost is too high." It's hard to ever recommend it for someone's first playthrough because of how much content you miss, which cuts off some options for people who would otherwise prefer an evil run. Build should work perfectly for Wyll as well though!
I haven’t had the time (or willpower) to do a fully evil Minthara playthrough yet. But I did a very similar build to this using Astarion and it was a blast. Especially choosing certain options at the end of his quest to gain extra 1d10(?) necrotic to all attacks.
The game will use your spell slots of that level from other classes first before letting you use your warlock slots - it's annoying, but doesn't actually change the number of smites you get per day
is 20 charisma that important? im playing a solo run, was considering going alert into gwm, would that leave my ch too low to hit things? its a darkness build of course not sure if the advantage is enough, or even if it'll get bodied by devil sight enemies on 18 ch
@@Chonus ended up picking alert. Was insanely powerful. Run successful o7 funnily enough i completely forgor about the gith patrol on act 2, so that would have ended it all right then and there had i not gone for it, aside from just the ever present initiative being just good
![BREAK THE LOCK(ADIN) - [Updated] BG3 Minthara / Wyll Paladin / Warlock Honour Build Guide](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kmos-qryuF4/mqdefault.jpg)
![BREAK THE LOCK(ADIN) - [Updated] BG3 Minthara / Wyll Paladin / Warlock Honour Build Guide](/img/tr.png)
Hey pals! Quick update to prevent confusion here. The newly released Honour Mode has some exclusive balance changes, among which is not allowing Pact of the Blade's Extra Attack to stack with other sources. On Tactician or lower, this build will still work perfectly as presented here, but on Honour mode you'll only get 2 attacks/action. In general, I think you will *still* be best off with Paladin 7 Warlock 5, as that gets you two level 3 smites per short rest, but other breakpoints like lock 3 pal 9 are more viable now.
Hey I may be late to ask but when I select smites It dosent let me select from the warlock spells, im doing 8 pal 4 warlock so i can get the 3 feats so 4 into char and 1 great weapon master but i dont know what to do with the -5, im early act 3 about to go to lower city
@@Sirfrigth Hi, check if your reactions are properly set, also imo 7/5 is better, as 3d attack is superior option to 3rd feat, if -5 makes you miss too often you can switch it off in passives tab
You wouldn't get two attacks per action. You only get your "extra attack" once per round that's part of the balancing.
@@whale4191 it still works in tactician, only honour mode is affected
@@adamnowicki1425 but I'm responding to the part where he said "on honour mode you'll only get 2 attacks/action" which is incorrect. You only get 2 attacks on your first action in a round, in honour mode.
Thanks for the build! A quick tip to break Minthara's oath more safely: respect to oath of ancients or devotion, go to the docks at moonrise towers, question the worker there about the cargo, tell him to wash off the worms.
That's it, no dogs must go to heaven.
My paladin broke his oath by just destroying a spying eye, that's weird and i was flabergasted when it happened it the moonrise prison.
@@kukipett oh, that's funny. I usually kill all guards and eyes before freeing the tieflings and that never happened for me.
@@TheLostShoes I tried to replicate this with Minthara yesterday evening but it did not work but she doesn't have the same oath. It happenend with Karlach when i made a build with a mix of Barbarian and palladin.
@@kukipettthe most ridiculous part of this is that the scrying eyes are controlled by gortash (or at least by someone employed by gortash) so it is now canon that gortash is an innocent
Quick tip to make Minthara an oathbreaker:
If you just got to moonrise and immediately recruit Minthara there, you can head right over to the moonrise tower kitchen where the halfling lady is controlling the gnolls, and just play as Minthara and help her keep her control over the gnolls. That will break the oath of vengeance (and then you can interact with the halfling with a different character if you want to make the gnoll kill her)
You sure it’s telling me to go in at my own risk by myself which I don’t want to as I’m in honor mode
Yeah it said that for me too, but so far I haven't seen anything negative happen, even when I took Minthara with me up to talk to Z'rell. Other than her initial breakout, nobody at Moonrise has noticed she's with me at all despite the game warning me.
@@davidgreedy8920
Thank. I couldn’t bear with harming Scratch. lol
Thank you.
@Cephalopocalypse Please pin that comment, it's very helpful.
I like that your builds really seem to click with the companions and that they don’t overly rely on elixir or broken item combos.
The companion you showcase makes me feel like it’s believable for them and that is really satisfying
Just wanted to say thanks for this build! I am doing my first tactician run and I’m finally getting to the point where the build really comes together. It’s fun, powerful, but still has some versatility, which suits my playstyle nicely. I also really appreciate that this doesn’t rely on a bunch of elixirs or specific pieces of gear to work well. Thanks!
You can also infinitely break the Oath of Vengeance on a certain locked cage door in the Emerald Grove. Even if the door is wide open after you do it the first time you can touch it over and over again to keep re-breaking your oath. Attacking the dog caused the other potential party members in camp to become hostile and attack me.
Good tip!
technically any of your companions can get the hags hair. The hags hair is just an item reward, so if you explicitly plan to aquire a future companion who you want to give the hair to, you can just select the stat you want to boost for them and hold onto the hair item until youve recruited them.
Of course! I honestly forgot it was a consumable rather than a dialogue choice - I've never delayed taking it :P
There used to be a glitch where the owl bear would eat it during a cut scene, I lost it on my first playthrough like that.
@@Chonusyeah thankfully patch 6 fixed that. I lost 2 hours of gameplay once I realized that happened and went back. Thankfully it wasn't more than that
I'm happy that you don't need the hags hair for this build. A lot of builds uses them and there is only one hag, but a lot of chars
Thank you again for your lovely build guide. 104% appreciated.
One thing: Tried to get the Oathbreaker Mintara in Act 3 and just followed your guide. Killing an innocent is not the right oathbreak for vengance (damn .... half of the city is dead until i figured that out). To save some time: in act 3 you can break the vengance oath if you go to the windmill in rivington - let the new born mindflayer alive and give him a fresh dead body.
Thanks, glad you liked it! Good to know - I'm not sure what happened there though, because killing an innocent *should* still break vengeance - I wonder if everyone in the city isn't properly marked as innocent for some reason.
Hmmm - after i killed half of the town i finally asked google. And all guides say that to break the vengeance oath you need to make a an "unholy" decision when you see a crime. Like freeing Sazza - or in my case helping the new Mindflayer. Maybe its in your case just working cause you killed scratcher? Some people say scratcher is a special case.
@@Cephalopocalypse
I love that you made these builds lore friendly
Thanks! Yeah, I try to at least have some justification why we're building this way - it doesn't matter to everyone but for the people who like it, it helps a lot!
@@Cephalopocalypse Personally, I don't really think Minthara would sign a pact with a devil after what she's been through with the Absolute (Wanting to be herself again) but not everything needs to be lore friendly. I do very much like your rogue cleric build for SH though. Fits her pretty much to the letter
@@welkingunther4298 great old one wouldnt be signing a pact with a devil tho
@@Joci445 Okay, but I still think warlock is still not really her thing. Strong multi class though.
@@welkingunther4298 She could be Paladin/Bard, she has the lyre, but Cephalopocalypse build would work perfectly on Wyll
Can't wait to try this build in my next playthrough
It's super fun! Glad you enjoyed the video :D
You deserve way more subs, thank you for being very specific in your builds unlike other videos
This is a very articulate bot wishing to thank you for your numerous build guides. As for the effect on the UTube algorithm, this bot cannot compute. Hopefully, the readers under sarcasm. If not, then perhaps this verbose reply helps the Utube calculations more
Thank you friendly robot! :D
FYI. The easiest way to break oath is to switch to devotion, toggle on non-lethal, knock out an enemy, and execute them after battle. Can be done at pretty much any point in the game, so this seems like the most reliable way to become an oathbreaker.
I plan on putting this build on a pretty pink Asmodeus tiefling. Total opposites from build to character appearance, thank you for the build!
This Paladin build is great, but my favorite build with Smite is 2 Pal/6 Bard/ 4 Sorc (you could also switch Pal and Sorc levels up to you). The idea of this build is to have the most Smites per long rest and to abuse crit gear and savage attacker to crit at least once almost every round.
Savage attacker is a necessity because it rerolls all damage die and picks the highest one (including Smite). Which gives you bonkers crit damage.
The crit gear is knife of the undermountain king, blood thirst, saravok helm, deadshot
You should have 20 dex and at least 16 charisma the rest is up to preference.
You will also have very high AC thanks to the Armor of agility late game and the Yuan-ti scale male in Act 2. Both of these don't cap dex bonus to AC
Two good ring options options are risky ring and mystic scoundrel
The only downside is that this comes online pretty late and it feels more like a bard with Smite than a Paladin. Nevertheless, this is the build I've had the most fun with in this game
Thanks! Bard / Paladin build will be coming soon as well :D
Killing scratch almost made me unsub ngl😂 unforgivable
As a side note, you get a scimitar off the first combat in the nautiloid which is finesse. Its not wonderful, but you do decent damage with it and can even go dual scimitars before you get to the second round of combat if you so choose.
Oh this is fun, this is exactly the build concept I was thinking of making for my evil playthrough, good to find some help optimizing
What is the point of going back to level 1 before becoming oathbreaker? Is there some reason you need to go back through the levels as an oathbreaker paladin rather than just keeping the choices you already made and becoming an oathbreaker? I get that you can no longer respec as an oathbreaker, but why do you need to respec in the first place?
It's not actually necessary, it just makes it easier to make sure you have everything right, and made the video work a little better - I've also heard some reports that it can be buggy if you're already multiclassed when you break your oath, where some people will lose levels or have them converted to paladin, so I figured better safe than sorry.
You can see even at level 1 it's buggy because it shows the character as being level 2 in the oathbreaker screen.
You can easily break any of the paladin oaths early, specifically the vengeance oath by freeing sanza in the druid grove, of course thats if your're running this build as a main character from the start of the game, you just need to open the cage and the oath will break
True! For Devotion, it also breaks if you *leave* her in prison (not sure about Ancients). There's a ton of story methods of course - killing an innocent is just the one you can most reliably time to when you want to switch builds. I think there's one oath that breaks if you leave shadowheart in the pod on the nautilus, so I *think* that's the fastest way, but haven't tested it myself.
Sazza
@@Cephalopocalypse fastest way in my experience has been to kill the tieflings guarding Lae'zel. Works for every oath too.
@@Cephalopocalypse
I recently did a Devotion run and I saved Sazza but I left her in prison and my oath did not break fwiw
@@christinehede7578I wondered how I did that
I would argue that because you will have level 1 and 2 spell slots from your Paladin class, it’s most appropriate to keep hex because one cast can last you the entire long rest if you keep applying it on targets and now you’re getting a damage buff on multiple targets which is arguably worth more to the build than a single level 1 smite would be.
Also, thunderous smite doesn’t require concentration which makes for a good opener because if they fall prone, you can have a better chance to crit on the follow up attack
Sure! I don't think keeping Hex is wrong at all - the main downside is just that it's concentration, which in this build is almost 100% spent on Darkness. When it comes up it can be a nice little boost though!
Great call on thunderous smite, I totally forgot it wasn't concentration and you should definitely bring it.
@@Cephalopocalypse I forgot about the goal being concentration on darkness. That does render hex pointless
would love an updated version of this build based on the 3 paladin / 9 warlock split you suggested in the 11 best builds video!
I kind of think 3/9 and 7/5 are completely different builds. The 7/5 build capstone is Aura of Hate from Oathbreaker 7. Without it, there's really not much point in going Oathbreaker. With 3/9, I think Oath of Vengeance or Oath of Devotion are better options for Vow of Enmity or Sacred Weapon, respectively.
I'm curious how do you use darkness with this build? It seems to me that your action is better used on your smites instead. Because you can't attack on the same turn that you cast darkness, and on the next turn enemies will just run away from the darkness cloud anyway, thus giving you no advantage, well aside from your defensive perks. But I feel like that sort of gives you a very passive playstyle because you'll want to chase after the enemies that ran away from the darkness in order to melee attack them, no? I wish you could include some gameplay examples in your build, that will give a clearer picture of how they're supposed to play imo.
Yo early Happy New Years man. Just want to say that I appreciate the videos that you make for these builds. I love how you make them viable but not cheesy or broken. I honestly would love to see a lore friendly Minthara build from you. I want to make a new playthrough and have her recruited in my party all throughout the campaign.
Anyways, thank you for making these videos and Happy New Years.
Hey, thanks so much for the support! I really appreciate it - happy new year to you too!
Really appreciate the kind words as well. I actually think my recently posted bardadin build would work very well for Minthara's lore, though I'll also have a more paladin-centric build for her soon!
I just found your channel today, and have watched at least 5 of your videos. You make the best build vids I’ve seen, and I’m very excited to try them out! Thank you for your hard work!
Question: with Pact of the Blade extra attack and Paladin extra attack not stacking in Honor mode, do you think going strength based and Pact of the Tome might be better for a Lockadin?
Maybe not, the stat point distribution might screw too many things up.
2 questions. 1: Does Extra extra attack onLockadin stack on honor mode? 2: Why did you respecc before going Oathbreaker?
I don’t believe it stacks in honor mode and once you break your oath you can’t respec until you pay 1000 gold to take back your oath. Then pay to respec and then break it again.
diadem of arcane synergy is broken for blade warlocks. adds another charisma modifier to weapon damage (so for this and GWM it would be +25 to each hit) when inflicting a condition. with the illithid power displace and repelling blast, every eldritch blast gives you two turns of arcane synergy
wonderfull build
Gave me and my friend an easy time against a certain old friend in act 3
Now I have a question regarding the giant slayer with this build
we have negative str so does that mean we lose the dmg bonus from this weapon ? does that also nerf our dmg ? (I know I can just use some potions to buff her to +27 str but I m still curious)
Awesome vid! Another thing to remember is Patriar's Memory from the Mirror of Loss which gives a +1 to CHA, freeing up the Hag Hair for someone else while getting you the same benefits elsewhere. Went with 8/14/16/8/10/17 for this with plans to get to 20 after ASI (CHA) and then Patriar's. That said, it's a very very finnicky thing requiring save-scumming so I get not wanting to rely on that.
How do you feel about Great Weapon Master versus Alert?
A build I have been very interested in trying!
What is the other build that does equal DPS?
I was planning a Sorlock machine gun for my next run, but this is tempting.
This one is super fun! Definitely recommended if you love doing damage and making the AI go crazy (thanks to darkness).
The other build I was thinking of was Tavern Brawler thrower, it also gets to apply double attribute mod on a 2-handed weapon three times per turn - full build guide coming soon!
Eldritch Knight 11 War Priest 1 throwing build is the next highest damage build.
@@DavionAngeles I get the three attacks plus bonus attack plus action surge, and that is pretty amazing. But how does the EK-WC match the damage boost from smites?
@@OakandIV it stacks damage riders.
Armor of Agathas(spelled wrong) does way more than just give you a few hp. It last until long rest and does 5 points/level cast to anyone who hits you. Upcast this at the highest level you can and it is just guaranteed damage each time you are hit. Solid build though.
Yeah I've started playing the game for the firs time recently and based off the tooltip description of the skill I thought it was going to be a one time thing and that the armor was gonna run out when the temporary hp did and the cold damage on hitting my character would go away. It seems it stays... So they just take damage for hitting me every time lol.
you could also if you're really stretching out attack number get a 4th one with a offhand hand crossbow if you're not using bonus action
Looking very forward to the house of grief fight now with this build
Another build straight out of my current playthrough. My favorite build for Tav. Charisma based so you are the face of the party, heavy focus on one primary attribute, incredibly powerful both offensively and defensively for the entire party. That said, I prefer to start as a Warlock and level all the way to level 5 before adding Paladin. This gives you the extra attack with your Bound weapon as early as possible, as well as level 3 spells/spellslots. This means that once you hit level 7(Paladin level 2), you can Smite upcasted to level 3 right away. I also prefer to take Friends at Warlock level 1. This makes your Cha skills almost always succeed from early on.
Also... you monster.
Sure! Honestly, I think the levelling order makes a pretty small difference, though level 1 paladin can make the nautilus tough on tactician. The only downside of starting warlock is losing heavy armor access - personally, I think it's worth delaying the build one level to get that, but the difference is very small imo. My suggested order also gets you to warlock 5 / pal 2 at level 7, so at that point the builds are identical, but with slightly different skill and armor proficiencies.
It was the only way!
im dumb cause i dont understand dnd mechanics but does this still work if you break your oath earlier on? or do you have to wait to get to lvl 5?
Ok, different ways to break Minthara's oath suggestions..... GO!
If you want a story-based method, one thing that's very helpful is the wiki (bg3wiki, not the fextralife one - I'd link but youtube would remove it) has a list of all oathbreaking actions under each oath. It's not complete but still super useful!
@Cephalopocalypse Done and done. I put a certain "Distressed Patient" out of his misery, so to speak....
Knock out an enemy with non-lethal, then execute them after battle. (Breaks of Devotion, at least)
Super high quality video here man, keep up the good work
Are there any noteworthy gloves this build should be using? If not, you could use the Gloves of Dexterity from the creche and fix the only real downside the build has which is the abysmal STR score. It works perfectly fine for a companion, but having a shitty jump on top of a really low carry weight is torture for a (party face) PC.
Strength elixir
look away? nah it'll be fine whats the worst... YOU BASTID!! :P great video thank you
Like your videos and your way of thinking. But dude, you didn’t say a WORD about savage attacker feat. But this feat is a must for any paladin. And why did you dump your STR to 8? Wouldn’t be better to leave it at least at 10 to avoid str and melee attack penalties?
SA is a reasonable pick for this build if you have another way of reaching 20 CHA (Ethyl's hair, for example), but it mostly gives you higher average damage on smites, which doesn't patch any of the weaknesses of the build and instead doubles down on something it already does more than enough of - Alert will make you much safer and more effective overall if you have an extra feat.
You don't need strength for this build as it uses charisma to calculate attacks.
@@Cephalopocalypse now I see your point. Thank you
if you want the hags hair for Minthara, you can get it, select charisma and keep it in your pack until you get her.
I wanted to do an oathbreaker for my durge. Glad i finally found your build for it your others hacnt failed me yet.
You monster! Cant believe you broke your oath like that.
Luckily when the timeline collapsed he was fine!
You killed Scratch! John Wick would like a word with you. Lol 😆
Hi how does this build compare to 2Pala/ 8Swordsbard/Fighter?
Swordsbard give you much higher Smites
Fighter for Action Surge
And you can use Gauntletss of Giant Str for your Attacks
And ofc Eversight Ring for Darkness
Extra Atk Stacking doesnt work in Honor Mode after all
Nice build, I've played a very similar one in tabletop DnD and its a lot of fun.
I wonder if it's possible to safely stand in your own Hunger of Hadar instead of Darkness? Maybe with enough frost resistance + some damage mitigation from armor, boots with immunity to slows and dark vision?
When you killed Scratch it was painful... But then you say "you wouldn't be able to redo your character from Scratch" i started crying and laughing 😢😂
I love your channel. Love love love!
Thanks so much! Really appreciate the kind words :D
You can also respec to Oath of the Ancients and ressurect Mayrinas Husband to break your Oath at Level one. That way Doggy stays alive. :)
23:46
I think you get the hair as a consumable item that you could just hold on to until you wanted to give it to Minthara. 🤔
Love your videos. I watch you more than any other bg3 peeps. But please, can you make a video about savage attacker? Like how good is it mathematically? It just sounds stronger than +2 str over all but not sure. Help senpai!!
Hello, just wondering something if I use Hill giant strength potion in the early game would it be possible to go with the paladin levels first? 🤔 And also I prefer sword and shield for paladins would it still be good with this build if I take duelling instead of great weapon fighting? 😊 Thanks in advance!
Sure! Those would both be just fine. Once you have pact of the blade you can just switch to a different elixir
@@Cephalopocalypse Great! Thank you for the quick answer 😊
Any recommended "innocent" npcs for minthara to eviscerate? I don't wanna hurt best boi 😢
I went dark urge for oathbreakee and I killed the strange ox at last light through dialogue. That broke my oath and you dont have to hurt anyone "innocent". You could also go vengeance and stop the tiefling in the druid grove from killing the captive goblin.
Itemization-wise, using this exact build with Gauntlets of Hill Giant Strength from House of Hope and the Balduran's Giantslayer from Ansur would add ANOTHER flat +6 source of damage, an extra +1 to hit, and opens up great weapon master even more. Since the greatsword adds your strength modifier to your damage twice, it doesn't use your charisma anymore but Aura of Hate still applies and obviously all of your spells still exist. It's probably the best weapon to pair with this build if you're using great weapon master. Otherwise, it's probably Belm or Duelist's Prerogative.
As a side-note: I think mathematically speaking, while this build does have slightly higher PEAK damage assuming maximum rolls, you'll do far more average damage taking Savage Attacker even instead of a +2 charisma ASI. All it has to do is average +6 damage, which it will easily do given the sheer amount of damage dice involved with everything the build does, especially with how often you'll be critting with darkness advantage and all the crit range increasing gear in the game. Savage Attacker is almost always a must-pick for Paladins because it rerolls smite dice as well-- even more-so if you're running a 2d6 weapon!
True! I try to steer clear of specific items for these builds where possible, but those are all excellent suggestions!
Savage Attacker instead of an ASI is something I honestly hadn't considered. I have just done some very rough math and if I'm right you get:
~even (technically -0.06) avg damage on normal attacks
~ +2.5 damage on a level 1 smite, and +1.25 damage per additional smite level
However, that isn't taking into account Great Weapon Fighting, which doesn't play very well with Savage Attacker, so the actual change is something like:
~ -1 damage per normal attack
~ +1 on a level 1 smite, +0.5 per smite level.
All of this at the cost also of -1 to hit. Overall I think the ASI is better for *this* version with Aura of Hate, but if you didn't have that, Savage Attacker would probably be better. Interesting!
so if i dont want to play with darkness can i still use great weapon master or is the advantage to important because otherwise i miss to often? or would you say with 20 charisma -5 isnt a problem? because in my book hitting 3 times is better then hitting 2 times with 20 extra dmg or 1 time with 10. i know about ring but that thing is for asterion 😁
Yes Giantslayer is insane, but you would lose extra attack from pact of the blade if you don't bind it as a pact weapon. Just bind Giantslayer and you should still add your normal 1x strength modifier to damage. 2x str mod ain't worth losing the extra attack from pact of the blade.
@@kenzovich9225 this is incorrect :D you would bind the weapon with pact of the blade, of course, but a bound weapon will still use your Strength/Dexterity score for the weapon if it is higher than your charisma-- it doesn't override it to charisma regardless of your higher stat! The weapon itself still adds +STR to the damage as part of it's own feature, so it functions exactly as I described :D
Do note, however, that Pact of the Blade's extra attack NO LONGER STACKS with regular extra attack from fighter/paladin/ranger/barbarian in HONOR MODE! In all other difficulties it still stacks for three attacks.
@@Cephalopocalypse With how DRS works in all difficulties OUTSIDE of honor mode, savage attacker applies to all branched effects! This includes things like Phalar Aluve, the various +1d4/+1d6 effects like hex, hunter's mark, divine favor, etc, as well as like 20 different pairs of gloves and rings! I know the video isn't assuming specific items, but it'd be nothing short of a crime to assume the character doesn't use ANY items! Definitely worth mentioning :)
Honor mode messes with this a fair bit-- just like it messes with everything else posted before its release... lol-- but definitely still worth mentioning and hopefully helpful to anyone who reads this and is still playing on balanced or tactician!
Keep up the good work Ceph! Always a treat to catch your videos :D
I don’t understand the purpose of the level 4 oath breaker save and respec. I was 1 paladin/3 warlock when I broke my oath, doesn’t the game simply change that original lvl 1 paladin level to oathbreaker?
At the time this was recorded there were a *lot* of bugs with oathbreaking (you can even see we're briefly level 13 in the character creation screen here, which should be impossible). The respec was for safety with those.
@@Cephalopocalypse epic, thanks for the quick response. Starting a duo tactician run with this oathbreaker and the gloom stalker from your recent video. Noticed the Lockadin in that video is now devotion. Any changes to this build or does this still work?
Just wanted to say, great guide, but you can actually respec as an oathbreaker. You have to renew your oath at the oathbreaker knight, it justs costs 1000 gold so early in the game it is pretty expensive.
What do you mean you can't respec oathbreaker? If I pay the 1000 to attone, then respec and break oath again, doesn't that work? I was hoping to get the 23 charisma neck then respec on my pure oathbreaker paladin to this.
You can also get the +1 and + 2 carisma boost from the end of shadown heart quest (just be sure to only use the religion check after geting the +1 bonus) thus making the hag bonus not needed/almost useless fir minthara
dont they stack
For tactician, i would do 2 sorcerer, 5 paladin, 5 warlock. Converting those sorcery points into smites is just too damn good!
24:06 You could get the hair and then just not use it until your Tav or Minthara gets to the point of where you want to use it
24:00 Couldn't you just hold on to the Hag's Hair item you get from Ethel until you recruit Minthara?
I'm curious as to why you respecced to level 1 before breaking your oath? In my experience, that isn't necessary.
You don't really *need* to but there's so many bugs with oathbreaking I've found it's safer - you can see even here the game thinks we're level 2 even though we're level 1 in the level-up screen. Some of these have been fixed since this was recorded but the game would invent phantom levels out of nowhere or refuse to let you fully replace levels sometimes, so it was just safer to respec
If you don’t want to use a spell slot for darkness you can have someone carry darkness arrows
My next playthrough will be a Durge Paladin/Warlock build. The idea of being a corrupted Paladin who is fighting his evil nature while trying to do good is RP gold for me. My plan was to use a One-Hand weapon(most likely a warhammer) and shield. This video only helps cement that but I'm assuming I'd lose out on some damage with the loss of Great Weapon Fighting, while taking Dueling - which I'm assuming is the next best choice?
Dueling with a shield is definitely powerful enough with this build, even if it’s not totally optimal. I played a very similar build using Astarion as player character using a 1h and shield for the majority of the game until I got the Duelist’s Prerogative in act 3 and dropped the shield. Still VERY powerful.
Sounds very fun! Yeah, Duelist or Defense are you best bets for a one-handed build, and while you do get a little less damage, you do also get access to some very cool shields. Two that come to mind are the one that boosts initiative, a weak point for this character, and the one that gives enemies disadvantage on saves vs fear, which you will be causing a *lot* of.
bring wyll with you in Act 2 to save the "captured infernal agent" and you can get a Rapier that can use Cha instead of str or dex
Great video!
Thanks!
Because we can càst Enmity on ourselves would I it not be better to go and stay Ven
If using gloves of dex. Could u put 8 dex and use some points elsewere? What would you recommend?
Yep! You can pick up additional wisdom to boost your save, or extra strength for the jump distance and better chances to shove/resist shoves.
I really do love warlocks so much but man I wish they got one more spell slot pretty much only being able to use those slots for darkness and misty step a good amount of the time kinda sucks and you don’t get the third one until level 11
Ok so apparently i got minthara the game breaking way and the only ways i have to break her oath currently are unavailable so do i just follow the build and respec the next time im able th break the oath?
Now that Honor Mode is out, of all the builds you know of, which do you think would have the best chances to succeed in a solo honor mode run (without relying on stuff like barrelmancy cheese)?
Can u even solo tactician without barrelmancy? Im pretty sure u have to ise barrels at some point just to get through
Without knowing what the new legendary actions are yet, I can't guarantee that solo Honour mode is possible - there might be something like an unresistable stun for example, but my assumption is the ranged stealth attackers and Darkness users are still your best bet. This build should be a very good candidate thanks to Darkness and great saves and damage, or something like the blaster Warlock or Gloomstalker Ranger builds I've posted should be great as well.
For an alternate take the Tank Wizard build may still be very good, though if the damage numbers scale too much higher than your Arcane Ward that may not work as well.
@@Cephalopocalypse That's what I thought as well; pending more information on the legendary actions, some version of a paladin, like this one, seems like the best bet.
It almost feels certain or obvious that Larian will give at least a few of the major bosses the ability to see through or remove invisibility/stealth, so I'm expecting stealth-based builds to be less viable for a solo playthrough than usual.
The wizard tank could be an interesting contender, though!
I cannot WAIT to see the changes Larian's made for honor mode!! It's so exciting!!!
@@VDViktor oh yeah, you totally can!
There's plenty of people who've completed solo tactician runs without using barrelmancy at all!
It's difficult, and takes a whole lot of planning and strategy, but people have done it a bunch!
Have you considered using Shar's spear of night for this build? You can cast darkess for free every turn. So it might be a thing worth trying.
True! Should be an excellent item for the build, even giving you additional damage dice if they enter the darkness.
You mention one other build that can do the same damage. What build is that?
I have finished all the quests in the first region and just reached level five. I have no idea who to kill to break my oath. If I attack scratch in the camp all the other party members get hostile. I killed a couple of the druids in druids grove but that did not trigger the oath breaking. Help.
That's odd! I thought killing any nonhostile NPC would break it. Maybe because the druids can become hostile, they don't have the same flag? The wiki (bg3wiki, not the fextralife one - I'd link but youtube would remove it) has a list of oathbreaking actions under each paladin oath - it's not complete but might give you an idea of when you can do it next. Spoiler-heavy of course, however!
Also just to check: any fights you start through dialogue won't count, you have to actually attack them unprovoked. You can also probably use Scratch's fetch mechanic to move him to somewhere in camp no one can see you, though that starts to feel pretty macabre :P
@@Cephalopocalypse I attacked the two druids sitting at the table where you speak to the guy that gives you the info on the nightsinger. I did not speak to them first and i was the one that initiated the battle and got the final kill. I also killed the boar that is wandering at the top of the hill near the gate. I am pretty frustrated at this point as I spent a lot of time reloading and getting nowhere, I feel it may be better just staying vengeance but I have already done a play through as one, perhaps if I swapped to one of the other oaths first it may be easier.
Why is nobody ever talking about Bardadins? They're far stronger than Padlocks in this game. Especially when going for Dual Wield. The can use 3 (5 when hasted) smites a turn with 16 smites per long rest. On top of that you get 15 bardic flourishes per long rest which you can use together with the smites.
They simply obliterate bosses. Padlocks lack the sheer number of spell slots to keep up. On top of all that, you're also a skill monger thanks to being a bard.
Indeed. After 600+ hours in this game i think 2 or 4 levels in paladin + 10 or 8 levels in college of swords bard (dual wielding) is by far the strongest and funniest option for a smite build.
Yep. My current is bard 8/paladin 2. Swords bare for extra attack. It works exceedingly well. Duelists Prerogative, bhaals armor, horned helmet, crit bow, risky ring makes for a crit machine. Savage attacker makes those crits hit hard af.
Why would you have to choose? Bardadin guide coming soon!
Why respec to level one before oath breaking? Do you not get the level rewards?
At the time there were a lot of bugs with oathbreaking, so it just made it safer
Bugs and glitches, it was before the fixes. Nowadays works fine. Nowadays Bardadin feels better, but Oathbreaker Lockadin is still a very good frontliner or capable of bursting just about anything, depending on what you want him to do.
I don't know if my game is just bugged or what the deal is. I was trying something similar to this.. but for some reason my bound pact weapon, in this case I was trying the Everburn blade. Said as my pact weapon it would do like 7-19 damage, however upon numerous hits I've noticed it only doing like seven damage a hit plus the extra damage from the fire which is a different calculation. Do pact weapons just do less damage then they say they do or is something just wrong with my game? I should note I tried this on about 20 - ish targets all with similar numbers. Always hitting for either 7 or 8 damage and never getting anywhere near 19.
The figure in the menu aggregates both the weapon damage and the fire damage.
For the everburn blade, that’s 2d6 plus 1d4-so 3-16 damage without a STR modifier. It can be a little difficult to track outside of the combat log since the onscreen numbers are so small and disappear so quickly.
An average of 7-8 damage per hit is reasonable for the everburn blade, then the added fire damage usually adds another two damage for a total of 9-10 damage per swing. Naturally, this will go up when you have a positive STR modifier (or down if it’s negative).
Some feats can help up the average damage. For example, savage attacker rolls your damage dice twice and discards the lowest result, so your average damage will increase.
Wait, are you talking about melee swings or throwing the weapon? Because if the weapon doesn’t have the thrown property, it won’t do the same damage if you throw it-it does damage based on its weight instead of.
If we are planning on using auntie ethels hair for charisma what should our starting stats look like?
Broke menthara’s oath of devotion by stabbing he who was after bringing him the ledger. No scratch killing needed
You can SAVE the HAG hair if you want to use it on Minthara later...just keep it in your inventory.
Yep - when making this video I just plumb forgot it was an item for a moment
if you're gonna just keep it in your bag, forget about the owlbear cub questline because there's a bug where the game automatically feeds the hag hair to the cub during cutscene and it's gone forever lol..
I have completed 4 playthroughs now and have never lost the hag hair. Are you sure that bug has not been fixed? @@tetefather
@@stephenjudaysr8915 happened to me 3 days ago
Hey @Cephalopocalypse ! Currently trying this build out in an honormode run with a couple of friends. I'm having a hard time figuring out why we're respeccing at all? There aren't any choices to make as oathbreaker and we don't change any stats or the likes. How come we need to be so meticolous. Is it not just a matter of breaking the oath when you reach lvl 5 so that you have pact of the blade
Hey! It's not really required most of the time, but there's several bugs with oathbreaker that it can avoid (you can see even here, when we do the oathbreaker screen it shows us as level 2 instead of level 1, because the game can sometimes invent weird phantom levels). It's just for extra safety!
I don't understand why it is important to break your oath at level 1 paladin.
I think Swords bard/lock with duelist prerogative and bhalist armor beats this. 4 attacks per round with all enimies vulnerable to piercing dmg. Plus slashing flourish can hit 6 total enimies for a burst instead of smites.
Builds using specific items are definitely going to have great damage! I try to keep these builds item-agnostic as much as possible, since not everyone will find every item on their playthroughs.
Bard / Warlock build coming soon! :D
@@Cephalopocalypse ahhhh that is fair. Bard/lock with savage attacker and 20 chr is noice
Does dark justiciar set activate when in the darkness cloud?
Would GWM fit into this build? It seems to lead to more damage due to the easy advantage.
Yeah not taking GWM here is insane. It's the best melee feat in the game
This build gets even stronger with a single dip into War Cleric, both for an extra attack and the Guidance cantrip. 4 warlock and of course 7 Paladin for aura of protection or aura of hate.
Doing this exchanges extra attack always for only 3 extras per long rest, as well as losing repelling blast for guidance which you can get on an item in act 1 or on a companion.
is not having advantage on all your attacks really worth 5 or 6 damage per attack?
idk how the math works
isnt great weapon mastery better than 2 more charisma points?
For your final 2 levels why not take fighter for action surge?
That's never a bad idea - fighter 2 is of course excellent. It's hard to give up any levels from this build though, since you lose level 3 spells/smites (and the extra attack on any mode below tactician) if you sacrifice warlock levels, and you lose Aura of Protection and Aura of Hate from paladin if you sacrifice those.
@@Cephalopocalypse I mean in place of lvl 6/7 paladin cause on tactician its literally 6 hit turn and +1ac.
How do you make oathbreaker with minthara when you the oathbreaker is bugged and only show up in act 1 camp?
I haven't personally had that bug, but I'd look online to see if there's a way to fix it!
@@Cephalopocalypse according to reddit this bug never got fixed since launch. Basically the act 2 camps and even the camp outside Balder's gate just doesn't have oath breaker, it broke my Paladin run because of it.
Wouldn’t it be stronger to just go 6 levels straight into paladin to get the extra attack earlier, then just respec to 2 levels in paladin and 5 in warlock later on?
I can't afford the Minthara tax so I'll just build Wyll the exact same way (and I can test if letting Karlach join as Wyll breaks any oaths 😋)
There is a way to get her and not losing the tieflings, Karlach & Wyll but it is technically breaking the game.
Yeah - I think I fall in the camp of "it's good to have the evil playthrough cost you, but Minthara's cost is too high." It's hard to ever recommend it for someone's first playthrough because of how much content you miss, which cuts off some options for people who would otherwise prefer an evil run.
Build should work perfectly for Wyll as well though!
I haven’t had the time (or willpower) to do a fully evil Minthara playthrough yet. But I did a very similar build to this using Astarion and it was a blast. Especially choosing certain options at the end of his quest to gain extra 1d10(?) necrotic to all attacks.
Do i have to one shot the innocent npc? I always end up fighting them and once they get killed, it doesnt break my oath.
Nvm it worked on scratch
@@ludvigtheowopaladin On Scratch? You evil bastard.
you can respec an oathbreaker, you just need to redeem their oath first.
Is it just me or can you definitely not use your warlock spell slots for smites…?
The game will use your spell slots of that level from other classes first before letting you use your warlock slots - it's annoying, but doesn't actually change the number of smites you get per day
my buid you can also make on warrior combo. warlock 5 warrior 6.
is 20 charisma that important? im playing a solo run, was considering going alert into gwm, would that leave my ch too low to hit things?
its a darkness build of course not sure if the advantage is enough, or even if it'll get bodied by devil sight enemies on 18 ch
I think Alert would be more important in a run like that, being surprised can be game ending losing +1 is not.
@@Chonus ended up picking alert. Was insanely powerful. Run successful o7 funnily
enough i completely forgor about the gith patrol on act 2, so that would have ended it all right then and there had i not gone for it, aside from just the ever present initiative being just good
SCRATCH! YOU MONSTER!
Okay, so NOW my only problem is IDK what npc to kill haha, in act 2 so I am a bit lost lol