Baldur’s Gate 3: Your Average Psychic Terminator [build]

Let me say right here – this build highly depends on specific items and thus infeasible if the items aren’t acquired in your walkthrough

The idea comes online if you had ever saw these two items together – Shadow Blade Ring and Resonance Orb

So the ring allows you to cast Shadow Blade spell which puts the Shadow Blade (what a surprise, lol) into either your offhand or main hand, depending which is available at the moment.
The latter needs some explanation so I’ll put it here right away:

• if you are not wielding any weapons while you are casting – then obviously Shadow Blade will appear in your main hand
• if you are wielding one-handed weapon, then it will be replaced by Shadow Blade
• if you wielding two-handed weapon, then it will be replaced
• if you are wielding weapons in both hands, regardless of their size – weapon in offhand will be replaced by Shadow Blade

With that out of the way we can proceed into characteristics that Shadow Blade has

• Deals 2d8 psychic damage
• When attacking target in non-bright area the attack will be performed with advantage
• Can be equipped and unequipped, but must remain on person who casted the spell otherwise will dissapear
• Can be cast once per short rest
• Requires concentration, without concentration the blade wil dissapear

Now, you may start thinking – c’mon bro? Concentration? How am I supposed to use that if I lose concentration at so much as walking into fire puddle? But bear with me, you will see how it shines after all is said and done.

Now to next item…

All the problems with this blade are solvable! It’s the neat part, but now to the resonance orb, and it’s characteristics:

• grants advantage to all physical ability checks (for reference, physical checks stem from STR, DEX, CON stats, including Sleight of Hand and Stealth)
• grants disadvantage to all mental saving throws (for reference, mental saving throws stem from WIS, INT, CHA stats)
• every being in short radius suffer vulnerability to
  psychic

  damage

Without context of Shadow Blade ring, and Psychic damage this item grants right off the bat:

• free advantage on disarming traps and lockpicking ability checks,
• but in turn you will be prone to various CC spells which most of the time will trigger WISDOM saving throws and you really don’t want that to happen
• also INT saving throws most of the time are caused by Mind Flayer abilities and you don’t want that too. Githiyanki are doing great deal of INT saving throws too.
• Also Bards aren’t good enemies too, they can easily deal ton of psychic damage too, and you don’t want to be there

Good advantage for looting and exploring, but really bad when it comes to fighting specific enemies. But when we look at combination of these two items, they do seem synergize so well, you almost want to say – to hell with this, I’m making this work! And so I did!

Now let’s start with what we want with Shadow Blade:

1. we want to deal as many attacks with this weapon as possible
2. we want to avoid as much damage as possible to avoid stray saving throws and losing concentration as a result
3. we want to maximize damage done with this weapon
4. we want to be as mobile as possible
5. we want to look cool doing so (ok this is my thing probably)

.

• Shadow Step from Way of Shadow is our main source of mobility (check bullet 4 and 5). It allows to teleport anywhere without breaking invisibility or other statuses as long as 1 character stands in non-bright area and 2 place he wants to teleport to is also non-bright
• Shadow Step also grants advantage on next attack roll after it was used. It’s nice feature and we will make maximum use of it
• Cloak of Shadows – free invisibility in obscure areas. As long as character stays in obscure area it will not wear off. Only disadvantage it poses that it uses Action point, not Bonus! Keep it in mind

All the aforementioned skills are obtainable when you advance monk to level 6. At that point you will also gain free attack (so two attacks total from single Action point)

Okay, now we are monk who can stealthily approach and attack targets with a lot of upperhand, but let’s look at the economy of such monk:

• Shadow Step – as one would expect, it spends one Bonus point
• Cloak of Shadows – spends Action point

Am I only one seeing something here? Maybe it’s just me but I see that we can’t attack at all! We spend both points to just stealthily approach the target. And no spare room to deal anything else. If we are holding Shadow Blade we also can’t cast almost anything cause most useful spells require concentration. We also can’t compromise on wasting one turn to just approach target and spending another to actually attack because enemies tend to move around, change positions, engage in melees and etc.

Let’s fix our economy issue by taking (it’s kinda obvious)

which yields:

• Bonus action point. Yay
• +2d6 Sneak Attack damage
• Use Disengage/Hide/Haste as Bonus action (which we really can do without but nice to have)

3 levels of Rogue/Thief is obvious multiclass for any monk, no surprises here. But I’ll elaborate anyway how these gains from Rogue 3 will work for us

We have advantage at least once per turn thanks to Shadow Step. We may even have every attack with Advantage IF we attack target in obscure area thanks to Shadow Blade feature. This grants us Sneak Attack every turn for free, no need for Risky Ring. Or is it? But again, bear with me.

So sneak attack is nice addition, but real game changer is Bonus point we can spend to move around battlefield like crazy person. Literally, we will become most mobile character ever and that includes Sorcerer with Storm Sorcery subclass.

Only issue is that we still have to spend Action point to gain invisibility and that kills vibe. However, there are workarounds I came up with

• Use one Bonus point to approach target with Shadow Step
• Spend second Bonus point to attack with Off Hand weapon, in which we should put our Shadow Blade
• Use Cloak of Shadows to avoid all targeted damage. Spends Action point
• Preferably move avay from area where you went into invisibility on foot

There are caveats, however, to this tactic, first of, we can attack only once when we initially approach target.

Things get better if we are in immediate vicinity to enemy but this is rare case, because as high DPS character we want to eliminate most important target which most of the time aren’t frontliners. Frontliners also tend to attack back especially in Act 3. Frontliners should be held back by your own frontliners that’s the rule.

Second caveat – we depend on obscure areas WAY TOO BIG. If we approach enemy and where he stands there is just one small spot of obscure area we will be in very bad position. Literally 90% of enemies can easily detect invisible units with no problem at all and good luck if you were in fact spotted.

If you feel comfortable with these two caveats, then your build is basically finished. All that’s left for you to do, is take another 2 levels of Thief to get another +1d6 Sneak Attack damage, additional feat/ability improvement and Uncanny Dodge (which will be very helpful if an attack landed on you).

You will also gain a lot if your cleric or mage casts Darkness for you to freely move around battlefield or most dangerous enemies. Then you advance your monk to level 7 to avoid AoE damage and gain additional Ki point (well we don’t have much use for Ki points but, eh, nice, I guess)

• Use Shadow Step to advance to target
• Attack with main hand twice, in which you should have Shadow Blade. Spends Action point
• Use second Bonus point to Shadow Step away to safety
• Pray to not get killed or worse lose concentration while you are exposed

This is where the build starts to actually shine since we have a lot of upsides: Additional attack, easy positioning every turn, very little dependency on obscure areas.
But we are always exposed.

Sigh… But we are going to fix this too!

• Very obvious, but Deathstalker Mantle which Dark Urge receives very early into the game. However this isn’t mandatory but very nice to have
• Cloak of Displacement. Only bad that it can be acquired only in Act 3, Rivington
• Dark Justiciar Half-Plate. Surprisingly, it compensates our flaws so good that it’s basically ideal armor

While first two are interchangeable, Deathstalker Mantle is much better cause we not only can turn into invisibility without spending anything it also suits our play style and role-playing and allows to approach our target on next turn without spending Bonus point on Shadow Step.

Cloak of Displacement is good cause it allows for us in some cases tank some attacks and stand face to face to enemy and spend both Action and Bonus points to deliver damage, resulting in 4 attacks per turn if we didn’t spend anything during turn except moving.

And

is our killing machine backbone because, he-he, it grants us Advantage on Constituion saving throws (which is basically same as War Caster feat), and it’s additional room to not lose concentration.

With cloak of displacement we now pose difficult task for enemy to make us lose Shadow Blade concentration. Not only they have to roll enough attack dice with disadvantage to land an attack, they also have to hit bad enough to make saving throw with Advantage to fail.

Phew! That was a lot to cover! But we have just made our build

, if only we could improve it at bit more…

For this we need:

• Fighter, 3 levels, subclass – Champion
• Dead Shot longbow, acquired from merchant near Lorroacan store in Act 3
• Knife of the Undermountain King, drops from githiyanki merchant Ajakneera (whatever her name is, I don’t remember) in Rosymorn Monastery/Creche Yllek/Githiyanki Location. Or you could just buy it, lol
• Covert Cowl. Dropped from Meenlock in basement of Last Light Inn
• Elixir of Viciousness – crafted from Vitriol of Shadowroot Sac which are all over the place in Act 2. Very easy to stock up until endgame, just have to pay attention. Also sold by many merchants

All of the above is standard approach to gain maximum Crit Chance, but having Fighter 3 allows us to also gain Action Surge, which will make us insane killing machine every short rest.

4 attacks with advantage, with vulnerability on target and maximum crit chance,

There aren’t many enemies in whole game who can survive this, mind you. Mainly constructs, and anyone with psychic protection.

These are

you would need special loadout to deal with but usually it’s just one item to have instead of Shadow Blade – Sword of Life Stealing.

Yep, you will steal deal insane damage, just not as impressive as with Shadow Blade.

And I almost forgot the sweet part – abilities and feats:

• STR 17 + Hag’s Hair (+1) + Arai Oblodra’s Elixir (+2) total 20
• DEX 14
• CON 14
• we don’t care about WIS since we don’t use features that rely on it. Yep. But we do rely on WIS saving throws, so at least +1 would be nice.
• the rest to your liking
• we will have only one feat in this build so we will choose Savage Attacker to further amplify damage done in single turn

There is a host of variations to this build, if you take into account legendary items from House of Hope, some other items you can buy, but generally we want either STR or DEX maxed out and CON at least 14 to not have much problem sustaining concentration.
We can also swap out our Armor items Covert Cowl and Dark Justiciar Half-Plate to regain our speed of monk
We can also wear Ring that adds 1-4 psychic damage while concentrated but it’s easily changeable with some other rings.
You could also change levels to Monk 6, Fighter 2, Rogue 4 to get second feat. Second feat could be Resilient: Constituion to make chances of losing concentration even less.

With all this considered, you will find that our sneaky basterd who deals insane damage and very hard to catch is almost unkillable unless… we faced WIS/INT saving throw we weren’t ready for.

So let’s get ready

We need to withstand basic saving throws while having resonance orb on our person. At the very least we need to not have disadvantage on them

Which is fixable by

• – acquiring Gith’zerai mental barrier at the end of Act 2 (google it)
• – Amulet of the Harpers – can be bought from Quartermaster Talli in Last Light Inn

  These two will provide us with advantages on INT and WIS saving throws respectively. In ideal world the first one we never lose because we don’t die, but if you do… well, there’s actually nothing it can be replaced with.

  So don’t die.

  I didn’t find any way to emulate Gith’zerai mental barrier so this is it.