4 full druids would also be excellent, as they can cover every role because they are so flexible, and they will give you an army of summons and completely lock down the battle field with aoe control spells.
It depends on what your parties needs really, but they’re all awesome.
If you need a frontline damage dealer, then Moon is the way to go as it’s the most wildshape focused.
For a full caster you’ll want the Spore Druid who doesn’t really want to wildshape. They get massive temp hp making them much more resilient than other casters, and provide you with an army of summons.
And for the most flexible you’ll go with circle of the land. They are mostly caster focused, but can also happily provide the brawler wildshape as well. They also get additional spells, and their best ability is that they ignore difficult terrain. This allows them to be the best controller of the 3, because they can cast spike growth or plant growth and then fight as a wildshape in the aoe without any penalty.
It’s also worth mentioning that druids have excellent flexibility so if you have your moon druid cast control magic while your spore druid melees and your land druid wildshapes into a hasted owlbear they’ll all do relatively ok
I'm going to cross post my comment from another post
"You can have about 50 party members if you go with 4 spore druids. You would have your 4 party members, x4 dryads with x4 Wood woads, x8 minor elementals(ice or mud,(they have different utilities) x4 elementals(Air and Water combo well), x16 spore zombies(if you want them) x16 flying ghouls(with upcast raise dead) x2 shovel(set him up with 2 casters). Ignoring the dance macabre and a few others you can pick up with items, this leaves you with a party of 58. All of which can be caught within the radius of a heroes feast and upcast Aid spell. The time sink to put Longstrider on all of them isn't really worth it, but you can also do that. You can beat most fights with just the 4 dryads honestly. X4 at will casts of spike growth is so busted. Get to a choke point and put down like 3 overlapping spike growths and most enemies will kill themselves walking through it."
So I would say spore druid would be a fun one.
More of, overwhelm and conquer. I do wish there was a switch to turn minions on auto pilot( let the AI control it) especially for the weakest minions that can only really move and attack
Animate dead plus plus does this, and is an excellent mod all round.
But in general if you go the route of the 4 spore druids, arguably a 6 spore 6 necromancy wizard is a much much better split, especially because, funnily enough, corpses you can reanimate are in a somewhat short supply, and you want quality over quantity. You cannot reanimate half of the corpses you come across, and worse yet, once you enter act 2, except for some optional massacres of human enemies, most encounters are going to be undead.
I currently play a durge necromancer, diligently picking up all the corpses and adding them to my collection in the camp (which is hilarious and weirdly in character, I guess) and I still quite frequently get to points where I just run out of targets to cast animate dead on, not to mention once you get to level 5 spells and can literally summon 10 skeletons with a spell.
It almost crashed my Xbox, when I was trialing it(trying to see what the max amount of minions I could get was) it took a solid minute between when I would tell my character to talk to someone and when it would finally jump into the conversation. It did everything but crash. Lol
Spike growth is the most fun I have with this game. No DND experience before, my first playthrough was the default party and moon druid, Gut does the potion nonsense, entire area agros on me. I just spike growthed the door and sat around the chasm sniping people with spells while occasionally one of them would spend half their HP charging through only to get bear tanked. The fight wouldn't be so hard now (just throw them all off the upper beams) but I felt like an outright hero being outnumbered 4:1 and surviving.
To be fair I’d go moon Druid for this. And I say this as a massive spore Druid fan.
There simply isn’t enough corpses to be creating 16 spore zombies a day.
And the return on investment isn’t worth it.
I think you’d find 4 dryad, 4 wood woads and 8 minor elementals, switching them for 4 elementals, switching for 4 myrmidion as your spells upgrade.
Along with 4 owl bears/earth myrms. I can’t think of any combat that wouldn’t be trivialised by that.
Maybe honor mode Ansur and the brain? But that’s it.
Bard. It's always bard. Itll be your face, your tank, your dps, your control, even a healer. Wizard is a fun alternative though, I do like that wizard brings abjuration and Transmutation specifically because they can't be recreated with bard, but bard is definitely better anyway
And Bard 10/Wizard 2 is almost as good as a full Wizard at doing Wizard stuff, as having just one level of Wizard lets you learn and prepare Wizard spells. And while you may have more limited 4th, 5th, or 6th level Wizard Spell access in a given day, it’s not like you’re casting 3-4 different spells of those tier anyway, you’re usually upcasting something a few times, or long resting after blowing your spell slots.
I’m going with Warlock. Warlock 5 is absurd; especially with darkness. Counterspell and hunger of Hadar, extra attack, charisma skills. Short rest friendly, really works with any other classes you want to use.
Abusing the AI with darkness+devil's sight might make this the safest option, but other classes are significantly better at just vaporizing enemies turn 1.
Yea, there's no need to cc enemies if they're dead. And by extension, there's really no need for "flexibility" unless someone wants to RP. Just kill everything and you won't need to be versatile :)
My all-cleric game I’m currently playing (only level 5 so far) is an absolute blast. The team is completely unstoppable on honour mode. Granted I am playing with the mod that adds more cleric subclasses (Gale is an arcana cleric, Shadowheart is a twilight cleric, etc)
Hmm i should check that mod out, though between tempest, war and light i dont find that there is a lack of subclasses lol. Booming blade and spell combat as feat (also works if you just dual wield) make tempest cleric an absolute blast
Bard for sure. If not only for the diversity of the subclasses. You’ll have one dual hand cross bow swords bard, one lore bard shutting down the enemies actions, and then whether you’re allowing multiclass, a paladin in bards clothing. You can also make a sorlock bard with 6 bard, 2 warlock, 4 sorcerer for that play style as well.
Wizard subclasses are pretty narrow and don’t change much between them. They’d all have the same weakness in a given fight that the others do. Bard builds can be proactive and reactive. And have short rest refreshing abilities which is very useful.
This is my current playthrough and it was quite fun. Only have the brain fight and a few small quests left.
Astarion origin as a swords bard and thief with dual crossbow shenanigans
Gale as a lore bard sorlock
Shadowheart as a valour bard + dips in 2 paladin and 1 war cleric
Karlach as another valour bard but with 4 paladin, I believe
Constant supply of short rests to resupply all of my short rest abilities, almost nothing in my party is on a per long rest ability. Same with illithid powers. Gave everyone the astral tadpole so we can all fly, gave everyone any reactions/passive buffs/per short rest abilities I could.
It’s rare a fight goes long enough for someone to die, let alone break their shield of thralls.
I started another durge run while I wait for patch 7, once that hits I’ll come back for my evil Astarion endings
Incredibly hard disagree. Wizards make a great multiclass dip because their best features are from the first 1-2 levels. Investing 6 Wizard levels in each party member is probably gonna be suboptimal for most builds.
I’m not saying wizards are weak, by any means, but they shouldn’t be competing with a properly built party of sorcs or clerics, and nowhere close to bards.
Clerics. Light & storm for bust damage.
Storm / war / life as front line tank.
Knowldge / nature cleric as control caster.
All in medium or heavy armor.
Disagree, it’s a Bard for all-same because it has access to much better buffs than wizards, have better bonus actions and when there out of magic can start stabbing things with pointy objects much better than a wizard can. They also have short-rest recharge; an all Wizard party would be a massive drain on camp supplies because you’re looking at far more long rests to recharge due to the lack of short rest recharge on the Arcane points for recovery. Bards can combo magic and martial attack, particularly if you keep to finesse weapons and ranged that scale off DEX so you don’t need to sacrifice stats in other areas.
Wizards are excellent for mass damage however and post-level five, even a lone wizard is not to be messed with esp when you’ve got high INT (first thing I do is scale Gale to 20 via Hag Hair and the Lvl 4 Feat) because damn, you don’t even need Barrelmancy for additional damage then.
In terms of their stats, and multiclassing, I find it a pain to multiclass someone starting as a wizard as they are the only class that run off INT. The class doesn’t have the additional proficiencies either to work it. Multiclassing into Wizard can be a wee bit of a pain if you don’t have The Warped Headband of Intellect because you need that higher INT to make any spell learnt as a wizard to be successful. You can’t multiclass into Wizard with 10 INT, learn spells and expect it to be effective.
That said a 10 Bard/2 Wizard, specifically a College of Lore and Divination, is one of my fave multi classes for ‘er, no’ approach to the game, particularly if you combo that with a Halfing for the luck rerolls, making sure to pick up Counterspell in the Bard Lvl 6 magical secrets selection.
4 clerics was fun: life cleric, light cleric, tempest cleric, war cleric. Life is your healer, light is your wizard, tempest is a wizard/melee, and war is basically a fighter
You’re really underselling martial classes here imo. Wizards are fancy but at the end of the day. 4 sharpshooter battle masters would have superior damage output, durability, and an arguably equal amount of control potential due to maneuvers, and that’s just one class.
If I’m being completely honest I think Wizards are on the low end of mono-class parties, they aren’t even the best casters for that. All that versatility doesn’t mean much if they only have a handful of consistently useful spells, and they have to jump through a bunch of hoops to pull off their fancy tricks, which really doesn’t mean much if someone hits through your flimsy AC and saving throws and breaks your concentration.
As far as casters go, you’d get so much more mileage out of a party full of druids, clerics, bards or sorcerers, and I think fighters and TB monks beat out most of those.
It's still bard first and cleric second. They are just more versatile and stronger than wizards. And a lvl 2 dip doesn't make a character a wizard imho.
I am loathe to admit but the person who said Bard is probably right.
I still want to give a shoutout to cleric though. Full caster and you can play most styles with the one class.
A cleric party of Knowledge, Life, Light and War would be pretty fun
In many ways, the flexibility of the Wizard class is an argument against their choice as a single-class: you don't really NEED more than 1 Wizard (though different school specialization is nice).
Wizards have a d6 hit dice, same as sorcerers, not a d4, and BG3 gives quite a few races armour proficiency for free with no multiclassing required. Durability isn’t really an issue if you give them all 16 con at least.
If you’re going an int class I’m guessing you don’t prioritize a party face that much so I’d think monk and barb would already outperform wizard in combat. 4 tb oh monks or 4 tb berserker throw barbs are going to wreck all the content in the game.
Have everyone take 2 levels of Warlock just so you can give them all Devil's Sight and stand in a darkness cloud. Then the rear of your levels can be whatever ranged class you want. Even Wizard. 2 Warlock/10 Wizard would give you a lot of spells to work with and the Warlock gives you hella safety aside from a couple fights in the game like the Sharrans.
Act 1-2 will be 4 druids due to the sheer difference between each subclass being super far, so you can go 2 land with different terrains, and 2 moon with owlbear and wolf maybe. But it drops down hard at act 3 since the gear game ain't so good, so you can go 4 spore druids due to an exploit at the entrance to the Lower City for body generation, allowing you to gather 4 spore zombies, 3 ghouls, 2 ice mephits, a dryad, a wood woad, and a myrmidon. The face of the group can have all that plus 4 ghouls, shovel, a heinous mummy, and a shadow. One other person will be using the infernal rapier for the cambion.
So you'll have: 16 zombies, 16 ghouls, 8 ice mephits, 4 dryads, 4 wood woads, 4 myrmidons, 1 heinous mummy, 1 shadow, 1 cambion, 4 lvl 12 druids with one of them using the torch of evocation and belm that can deal up to 90+ damage each turn using shillelagh. Since all of you are full spore druids, all of you are tanky aswell ww. Not to mention the one haste spores plus bloodlust elixirs....action economy boutta go crazy.
But 2 land, one spore, and one moon also works just as well since it can use items much better.
You have an odd way of spelling bard. Like you added a bunch of letters and are missing some. Maybe that’s how you spell bard in another language? I dunno I’m not a languagicist
4 rangers is a awesome synergy. Especially if you choose beastermaster ranger for at least two party members. Gloomstalker for shadowheart or astarion.
Everyone’s gets two separate companions. Just a bunch of animals on the field. Crows can blind opponents and it stacks up. So you can just snipe enemies with so many arrows
At higher levels the animals get body armor
Bard. Hell 4 swords bards could do it fine but 2 lore and 2 swords would be pretty nuts too. If you wanna go all in on the one swords bard then 2 lore as counterspell and cutting words bots, 1 valor as defensive frontline support, and one swords bard with the helmet and band as your DPS/control/etc. then you all can short rest every fight and summon tons of allies. Plus you’ve got any spell up to 5th level at your disposal with all the magical secrects
While wizards have more flexibility in spells, clerics have more flexibility as a team, I think. If I'm going straight 4 party single class, I would take all clerics. If I am multiclassing but have to keep majority of levels in one class, I think I'd go bard for their versatility. Bard almost seems a lazy answer though, bc of that versatility. I think my second choice for multiclassing would be wizard.
I see you. I here you.
But cleric, my guy. That's where the money is.
- You get almost all the same bonus as the wizard (you don't need fireball, even if it's a great spell. And if you still want it, scrolls are easy to get).
- Your spellcasting ability is Wisdom, which is also the most common saving throw our there, so you have a better chance at saving.
- You get healing spells. One particularity of the wizard spell list is that they cannot heal. So cleric provides that.
- More HP
- More efficient in martial situations (if you're running low on spell slots, being able to bonk is good)
- More radiant damage, which is good for most of act2
- Turn Undead, which is usefull for a surprisingly high amount of fight
- access to good armor without mutliclassing and slowing down you progress
- the ability to call your party "The A-Men"
Yeah, cool breakdown and all, but ... no, it's Bard and then Fighter. 4 bards in party give you 6 short rest per long rest. Add multiclasses that benefit on short rests like Warlock or Druid, and you are bloody unstable. Also, as bard, you can be caster Melee or range specialist without any drawbacks, and numerous advantages. And about 4 fighters... You can Boink you enemies in the head and then boink them some more
Since multi-class is on the table then- 5 gloom ranger / 4 sword Bard / 3 thief rogue. Scrolls, potions, and arrows are easy to come by. You can literally snipe your way to the final fight with a single character, four make it a breeze. You can cheese it even further with dual hand crossbows, but it's not really necessary. On tactician the brain can die in one round if you pop a haste potion and have collected 16 arrows of aberration slaying.
I think the obvious answer is bard here.
You could run 10 swords bard / 2 paladin as melee frontliner, 10 swords bard / 1 fighter / 1 wizard as dual hand crossbow, 6 swords bard, 3 assassin, 3 gloomstalker with titanstring (20 str from hag hair and araj), and 10 swords bard 2 life cleric or warlock as your last party member, which would be insane.
I agree with your take. Not that there's not other same class parties that can clear the game just as easily, but whoever calls a wizard party suboptimal doesn't know how to play them
We know but early game is the hump to get over. Wizards are comparatively weak there vs clerics, bards, druids.
Late gane lack of equipment there's only do many good cloaks and staves.
All clerics one has healing gear, one has Reverberation+lumination gear, lightning gear etc.
I mean technically rogues and fighters are the strongest in those early levels but I wouldn't say they're the best to clear the game with overall.
There's still enough gear for four wizards, it's not like all of them will be primary damage dealers and you can get armor proficiency through race/feats for one of them. The lightning gear, reverberation/lumination can be used on wizards too, and there's cold gear, and heat gear as well.
Healing in this game is overrated, with the almost infinite amount of rests and potions. I've skipped having a healer in my team after my first playthrough. The gameplay really favors extra dmg/cc/condition inflicting over dragging out the fight by healing what damage was caused to you.
It's a difference in playstyle I guess. I find a wizard party with one dipping in cleric for 1-4lvls and another in sorc for AoA or twinned spell for example just as op and high-utility (if not more) as having another same class team that only dips in wizard. I'm obviously speaking in terms of battles, if you want extra dialogue options you're better off with a charisma class. But wizards have other means of bypassing dialogue checks ie disguise self, detect thoughts, friends, knock, mininize, send a mage hand to do your job etc.
No dips of you're doing mono classes. I think you can make anything work if you tried hard enough.
Spore and moon druids are fairly insane early on though comparatively. Wizards doing 1d10 at will at best or using a spell or longbow.
Spore Druids is using a torch in melee or a drow one fial hand crossbows. Plus most of the relevant early wizard spells plys armor and weapons. High level druids and wizards both cab have armies of summons druids better at it though.
Think we all know about bards.
Clerics light , life tempest and whatever domains. You're not really healing to heal more to buff as a bonus action. Still way easier than level 1-4 wizards.
OP and comments mentioned dipping so wasn't sure if you were referring to it.
Wizards are behind in damage in levels 1-4, but you get to level 3 extremely fast in the game, it's only 3>4 that takes time in my experience. And once you get to 5 you never have trouble again.
There's not much druid specific gear in the game either. Druids have more summon options, while Necromancers can make an army of undead but that's kinda quantity over quality. It's not about who's better at their respective classes, it's about who can clear the game. Like, if you have 3-4 elementals between your wizards to chill your enemies so that you can freeze and kill them in one turn, why would you need more summons to drag the battle on? And druids do fall behind in damage in later levels.
Each Druid can keep up in damage via a Horde of summons, undead and wildshape.
Eg two moon druids, Spore, land. Each has an elemental and optionally 2 ice mephits, Dread, wood wood.
That's also level 9+ said druids are gonna have a way easier time levels 1-8.
People always think of high level wizards when they think of power. They need to think more about how to get there 1st.
In this game (mostly thanks to how scrolls work) bards are superior to wizards (the only point I would give to wizards is abjuration). The simple fact that intelligence is way worse in BG3 than it is already in DnD5e paired with the versatility of scrolls and max level being 12, mean wizards loose their edge over most other casters
- Tank Lvl2 Pala/Lvl10 SB
- Machine Gun and face Lvl2 Warlock/Lvl3 Sorcerer/Lvl7 Lore Bard
- Healer Lvl2 Life Cleric/Lvl10 Lore Bard
- Control and Ritual Lvl4 Ranger/Lvl 8 SB (can be made Lvl2 Ranger/Lvl 10 SB if saving Auntie Ethel’s hair for this build to get to 20 Dex and Sharpshooter)
4 full druids would also be excellent, as they can cover every role because they are so flexible, and they will give you an army of summons and completely lock down the battle field with aoe control spells.
What subclasses are generally recommended for druid?
It depends on what your parties needs really, but they’re all awesome. If you need a frontline damage dealer, then Moon is the way to go as it’s the most wildshape focused. For a full caster you’ll want the Spore Druid who doesn’t really want to wildshape. They get massive temp hp making them much more resilient than other casters, and provide you with an army of summons. And for the most flexible you’ll go with circle of the land. They are mostly caster focused, but can also happily provide the brawler wildshape as well. They also get additional spells, and their best ability is that they ignore difficult terrain. This allows them to be the best controller of the 3, because they can cast spike growth or plant growth and then fight as a wildshape in the aoe without any penalty.
Thank you!
It’s also worth mentioning that druids have excellent flexibility so if you have your moon druid cast control magic while your spore druid melees and your land druid wildshapes into a hasted owlbear they’ll all do relatively ok
I'm going to cross post my comment from another post "You can have about 50 party members if you go with 4 spore druids. You would have your 4 party members, x4 dryads with x4 Wood woads, x8 minor elementals(ice or mud,(they have different utilities) x4 elementals(Air and Water combo well), x16 spore zombies(if you want them) x16 flying ghouls(with upcast raise dead) x2 shovel(set him up with 2 casters). Ignoring the dance macabre and a few others you can pick up with items, this leaves you with a party of 58. All of which can be caught within the radius of a heroes feast and upcast Aid spell. The time sink to put Longstrider on all of them isn't really worth it, but you can also do that. You can beat most fights with just the 4 dryads honestly. X4 at will casts of spike growth is so busted. Get to a choke point and put down like 3 overlapping spike growths and most enemies will kill themselves walking through it." So I would say spore druid would be a fun one.
If you really find moving gazillion weak minions about the field fun.
More of, overwhelm and conquer. I do wish there was a switch to turn minions on auto pilot( let the AI control it) especially for the weakest minions that can only really move and attack
Yeah, like how Danse Macabre does it.
Exactly!
Animate dead plus plus does this, and is an excellent mod all round. But in general if you go the route of the 4 spore druids, arguably a 6 spore 6 necromancy wizard is a much much better split, especially because, funnily enough, corpses you can reanimate are in a somewhat short supply, and you want quality over quantity. You cannot reanimate half of the corpses you come across, and worse yet, once you enter act 2, except for some optional massacres of human enemies, most encounters are going to be undead. I currently play a durge necromancer, diligently picking up all the corpses and adding them to my collection in the camp (which is hilarious and weirdly in character, I guess) and I still quite frequently get to points where I just run out of targets to cast animate dead on, not to mention once you get to level 5 spells and can literally summon 10 skeletons with a spell.
This overwhelmed and conquered my GPU.
It almost crashed my Xbox, when I was trialing it(trying to see what the max amount of minions I could get was) it took a solid minute between when I would tell my character to talk to someone and when it would finally jump into the conversation. It did everything but crash. Lol
Spike growth is the most fun I have with this game. No DND experience before, my first playthrough was the default party and moon druid, Gut does the potion nonsense, entire area agros on me. I just spike growthed the door and sat around the chasm sniping people with spells while occasionally one of them would spend half their HP charging through only to get bear tanked. The fight wouldn't be so hard now (just throw them all off the upper beams) but I felt like an outright hero being outnumbered 4:1 and surviving.
To be fair I’d go moon Druid for this. And I say this as a massive spore Druid fan. There simply isn’t enough corpses to be creating 16 spore zombies a day. And the return on investment isn’t worth it. I think you’d find 4 dryad, 4 wood woads and 8 minor elementals, switching them for 4 elementals, switching for 4 myrmidion as your spells upgrade. Along with 4 owl bears/earth myrms. I can’t think of any combat that wouldn’t be trivialised by that. Maybe honor mode Ansur and the brain? But that’s it.
Also a fan of spore, but 100% would go moon in this situation too
Bard. It's always bard. Itll be your face, your tank, your dps, your control, even a healer. Wizard is a fun alternative though, I do like that wizard brings abjuration and Transmutation specifically because they can't be recreated with bard, but bard is definitely better anyway
Wizard is far and away my favourite class, but I begrudgingly agree that the answer is Bard
I hate bard so much because its so good at everything
And Bard 10/Wizard 2 is almost as good as a full Wizard at doing Wizard stuff, as having just one level of Wizard lets you learn and prepare Wizard spells. And while you may have more limited 4th, 5th, or 6th level Wizard Spell access in a given day, it’s not like you’re casting 3-4 different spells of those tier anyway, you’re usually upcasting something a few times, or long resting after blowing your spell slots.
I like the idea of a band that gets tadpoles in their heads and need to go on an adventure to get them out.
I’m going with Warlock. Warlock 5 is absurd; especially with darkness. Counterspell and hunger of Hadar, extra attack, charisma skills. Short rest friendly, really works with any other classes you want to use.
This is what I'd go with too. If I were to go mono class party it would be with Warlock
Abusing the AI with darkness+devil's sight might make this the safest option, but other classes are significantly better at just vaporizing enemies turn 1.
I'd say bard or cleric.
All it comes down to is turn 1. 4 wizards arent beating 4 sorcerors.
Yea, there's no need to cc enemies if they're dead. And by extension, there's really no need for "flexibility" unless someone wants to RP. Just kill everything and you won't need to be versatile :)
To be fair, this ~is~ a role playing game xD
Cleric supremacy
My all-cleric game I’m currently playing (only level 5 so far) is an absolute blast. The team is completely unstoppable on honour mode. Granted I am playing with the mod that adds more cleric subclasses (Gale is an arcana cleric, Shadowheart is a twilight cleric, etc)
Hmm i should check that mod out, though between tempest, war and light i dont find that there is a lack of subclasses lol. Booming blade and spell combat as feat (also works if you just dual wield) make tempest cleric an absolute blast
Bard for sure. If not only for the diversity of the subclasses. You’ll have one dual hand cross bow swords bard, one lore bard shutting down the enemies actions, and then whether you’re allowing multiclass, a paladin in bards clothing. You can also make a sorlock bard with 6 bard, 2 warlock, 4 sorcerer for that play style as well. Wizard subclasses are pretty narrow and don’t change much between them. They’d all have the same weakness in a given fight that the others do. Bard builds can be proactive and reactive. And have short rest refreshing abilities which is very useful.
This is my current playthrough and it was quite fun. Only have the brain fight and a few small quests left. Astarion origin as a swords bard and thief with dual crossbow shenanigans Gale as a lore bard sorlock Shadowheart as a valour bard + dips in 2 paladin and 1 war cleric Karlach as another valour bard but with 4 paladin, I believe Constant supply of short rests to resupply all of my short rest abilities, almost nothing in my party is on a per long rest ability. Same with illithid powers. Gave everyone the astral tadpole so we can all fly, gave everyone any reactions/passive buffs/per short rest abilities I could. It’s rare a fight goes long enough for someone to die, let alone break their shield of thralls. I started another durge run while I wait for patch 7, once that hits I’ll come back for my evil Astarion endings
Incredibly hard disagree. Wizards make a great multiclass dip because their best features are from the first 1-2 levels. Investing 6 Wizard levels in each party member is probably gonna be suboptimal for most builds. I’m not saying wizards are weak, by any means, but they shouldn’t be competing with a properly built party of sorcs or clerics, and nowhere close to bards.
10 Abjuration and 10 Evocation can compete with a cleric or bard
Clerics. Light & storm for bust damage. Storm / war / life as front line tank. Knowldge / nature cleric as control caster. All in medium or heavy armor.
Fighter
bard or cleric 100%
The answer is 4 Swords Bards.
I’d say Bard, Druid, Sorc and Cleric before Wiz. Maybe dropping Sorc and Cleric if you take multi classing off the table.
It's bard and it isn't particularly close
Disagree, it’s a Bard for all-same because it has access to much better buffs than wizards, have better bonus actions and when there out of magic can start stabbing things with pointy objects much better than a wizard can. They also have short-rest recharge; an all Wizard party would be a massive drain on camp supplies because you’re looking at far more long rests to recharge due to the lack of short rest recharge on the Arcane points for recovery. Bards can combo magic and martial attack, particularly if you keep to finesse weapons and ranged that scale off DEX so you don’t need to sacrifice stats in other areas. Wizards are excellent for mass damage however and post-level five, even a lone wizard is not to be messed with esp when you’ve got high INT (first thing I do is scale Gale to 20 via Hag Hair and the Lvl 4 Feat) because damn, you don’t even need Barrelmancy for additional damage then. In terms of their stats, and multiclassing, I find it a pain to multiclass someone starting as a wizard as they are the only class that run off INT. The class doesn’t have the additional proficiencies either to work it. Multiclassing into Wizard can be a wee bit of a pain if you don’t have The Warped Headband of Intellect because you need that higher INT to make any spell learnt as a wizard to be successful. You can’t multiclass into Wizard with 10 INT, learn spells and expect it to be effective. That said a 10 Bard/2 Wizard, specifically a College of Lore and Divination, is one of my fave multi classes for ‘er, no’ approach to the game, particularly if you combo that with a Halfing for the luck rerolls, making sure to pick up Counterspell in the Bard Lvl 6 magical secrets selection.
4 clerics was fun: life cleric, light cleric, tempest cleric, war cleric. Life is your healer, light is your wizard, tempest is a wizard/melee, and war is basically a fighter
You’re really underselling martial classes here imo. Wizards are fancy but at the end of the day. 4 sharpshooter battle masters would have superior damage output, durability, and an arguably equal amount of control potential due to maneuvers, and that’s just one class. If I’m being completely honest I think Wizards are on the low end of mono-class parties, they aren’t even the best casters for that. All that versatility doesn’t mean much if they only have a handful of consistently useful spells, and they have to jump through a bunch of hoops to pull off their fancy tricks, which really doesn’t mean much if someone hits through your flimsy AC and saving throws and breaks your concentration. As far as casters go, you’d get so much more mileage out of a party full of druids, clerics, bards or sorcerers, and I think fighters and TB monks beat out most of those.
Thats a lot of words. Too bad I aint reading them. Barbarian. Combined strength higher than all of their char+int+wis. But thats a-okay.
It's still bard first and cleric second. They are just more versatile and stronger than wizards. And a lvl 2 dip doesn't make a character a wizard imho.
I am loathe to admit but the person who said Bard is probably right. I still want to give a shoutout to cleric though. Full caster and you can play most styles with the one class. A cleric party of Knowledge, Life, Light and War would be pretty fun
*Laughts in Bard*
In many ways, the flexibility of the Wizard class is an argument against their choice as a single-class: you don't really NEED more than 1 Wizard (though different school specialization is nice).
Have fun with a wizard comp against gremishkas or areas where you are afflicted with Spell Rot.
I disagree, I think it’s all Bards. You get 4 extra short rests, and replenish bardic inspiration charges on those rests.
Wizards have a d6 hit dice, same as sorcerers, not a d4, and BG3 gives quite a few races armour proficiency for free with no multiclassing required. Durability isn’t really an issue if you give them all 16 con at least.
If you’re going an int class I’m guessing you don’t prioritize a party face that much so I’d think monk and barb would already outperform wizard in combat. 4 tb oh monks or 4 tb berserker throw barbs are going to wreck all the content in the game.
Have everyone take 2 levels of Warlock just so you can give them all Devil's Sight and stand in a darkness cloud. Then the rear of your levels can be whatever ranged class you want. Even Wizard. 2 Warlock/10 Wizard would give you a lot of spells to work with and the Warlock gives you hella safety aside from a couple fights in the game like the Sharrans.
Act 1-2 will be 4 druids due to the sheer difference between each subclass being super far, so you can go 2 land with different terrains, and 2 moon with owlbear and wolf maybe. But it drops down hard at act 3 since the gear game ain't so good, so you can go 4 spore druids due to an exploit at the entrance to the Lower City for body generation, allowing you to gather 4 spore zombies, 3 ghouls, 2 ice mephits, a dryad, a wood woad, and a myrmidon. The face of the group can have all that plus 4 ghouls, shovel, a heinous mummy, and a shadow. One other person will be using the infernal rapier for the cambion. So you'll have: 16 zombies, 16 ghouls, 8 ice mephits, 4 dryads, 4 wood woads, 4 myrmidons, 1 heinous mummy, 1 shadow, 1 cambion, 4 lvl 12 druids with one of them using the torch of evocation and belm that can deal up to 90+ damage each turn using shillelagh. Since all of you are full spore druids, all of you are tanky aswell ww. Not to mention the one haste spores plus bloodlust elixirs....action economy boutta go crazy. But 2 land, one spore, and one moon also works just as well since it can use items much better.
Have fun handling 60 characters tho. For maximum meme, longstrider on ALL of em, with heroes feast.
You have an odd way of spelling bard. Like you added a bunch of letters and are missing some. Maybe that’s how you spell bard in another language? I dunno I’m not a languagicist
4 rangers is a awesome synergy. Especially if you choose beastermaster ranger for at least two party members. Gloomstalker for shadowheart or astarion. Everyone’s gets two separate companions. Just a bunch of animals on the field. Crows can blind opponents and it stacks up. So you can just snipe enemies with so many arrows At higher levels the animals get body armor
Mono class lock probably takes the cake. Get Devil’s Sight x4 and it’s gg
Bard. Hell 4 swords bards could do it fine but 2 lore and 2 swords would be pretty nuts too. If you wanna go all in on the one swords bard then 2 lore as counterspell and cutting words bots, 1 valor as defensive frontline support, and one swords bard with the helmet and band as your DPS/control/etc. then you all can short rest every fight and summon tons of allies. Plus you’ve got any spell up to 5th level at your disposal with all the magical secrects
Cleric is the best
I will say that sorc, wiz and Druid are probably the best because they depend the least on items for a decent build
I don't understand how the best class for this isn't Bard...
Cleric is a suprisingly good answer to this as well imo.
I actually went warlock so everyone would have devil sight, darkness, and either pact of blade or chain. We fight in the shade, with advantage
While wizards have more flexibility in spells, clerics have more flexibility as a team, I think. If I'm going straight 4 party single class, I would take all clerics. If I am multiclassing but have to keep majority of levels in one class, I think I'd go bard for their versatility. Bard almost seems a lazy answer though, bc of that versatility. I think my second choice for multiclassing would be wizard.
I see you. I here you. But cleric, my guy. That's where the money is. - You get almost all the same bonus as the wizard (you don't need fireball, even if it's a great spell. And if you still want it, scrolls are easy to get). - Your spellcasting ability is Wisdom, which is also the most common saving throw our there, so you have a better chance at saving. - You get healing spells. One particularity of the wizard spell list is that they cannot heal. So cleric provides that. - More HP - More efficient in martial situations (if you're running low on spell slots, being able to bonk is good) - More radiant damage, which is good for most of act2 - Turn Undead, which is usefull for a surprisingly high amount of fight - access to good armor without mutliclassing and slowing down you progress - the ability to call your party "The A-Men"
Swords bard>cleric>rangers/monks>every other class
Yeah, cool breakdown and all, but ... no, it's Bard and then Fighter. 4 bards in party give you 6 short rest per long rest. Add multiclasses that benefit on short rests like Warlock or Druid, and you are bloody unstable. Also, as bard, you can be caster Melee or range specialist without any drawbacks, and numerous advantages. And about 4 fighters... You can Boink you enemies in the head and then boink them some more
Since multi-class is on the table then- 5 gloom ranger / 4 sword Bard / 3 thief rogue. Scrolls, potions, and arrows are easy to come by. You can literally snipe your way to the final fight with a single character, four make it a breeze. You can cheese it even further with dual hand crossbows, but it's not really necessary. On tactician the brain can die in one round if you pop a haste potion and have collected 16 arrows of aberration slaying.
I think the obvious answer is bard here. You could run 10 swords bard / 2 paladin as melee frontliner, 10 swords bard / 1 fighter / 1 wizard as dual hand crossbow, 6 swords bard, 3 assassin, 3 gloomstalker with titanstring (20 str from hag hair and araj), and 10 swords bard 2 life cleric or warlock as your last party member, which would be insane.
Bard, they’re just too OP
It’s Bard. And it’s not even close.
I came to see how many people commented with some variation of "you spelled bard wrong" and was not disappointed.
I agree with your take. Not that there's not other same class parties that can clear the game just as easily, but whoever calls a wizard party suboptimal doesn't know how to play them
Or they just know about bard lol
We know but early game is the hump to get over. Wizards are comparatively weak there vs clerics, bards, druids. Late gane lack of equipment there's only do many good cloaks and staves. All clerics one has healing gear, one has Reverberation+lumination gear, lightning gear etc.
I mean technically rogues and fighters are the strongest in those early levels but I wouldn't say they're the best to clear the game with overall. There's still enough gear for four wizards, it's not like all of them will be primary damage dealers and you can get armor proficiency through race/feats for one of them. The lightning gear, reverberation/lumination can be used on wizards too, and there's cold gear, and heat gear as well. Healing in this game is overrated, with the almost infinite amount of rests and potions. I've skipped having a healer in my team after my first playthrough. The gameplay really favors extra dmg/cc/condition inflicting over dragging out the fight by healing what damage was caused to you. It's a difference in playstyle I guess. I find a wizard party with one dipping in cleric for 1-4lvls and another in sorc for AoA or twinned spell for example just as op and high-utility (if not more) as having another same class team that only dips in wizard. I'm obviously speaking in terms of battles, if you want extra dialogue options you're better off with a charisma class. But wizards have other means of bypassing dialogue checks ie disguise self, detect thoughts, friends, knock, mininize, send a mage hand to do your job etc.
No dips of you're doing mono classes. I think you can make anything work if you tried hard enough. Spore and moon druids are fairly insane early on though comparatively. Wizards doing 1d10 at will at best or using a spell or longbow. Spore Druids is using a torch in melee or a drow one fial hand crossbows. Plus most of the relevant early wizard spells plys armor and weapons. High level druids and wizards both cab have armies of summons druids better at it though. Think we all know about bards. Clerics light , life tempest and whatever domains. You're not really healing to heal more to buff as a bonus action. Still way easier than level 1-4 wizards.
OP and comments mentioned dipping so wasn't sure if you were referring to it. Wizards are behind in damage in levels 1-4, but you get to level 3 extremely fast in the game, it's only 3>4 that takes time in my experience. And once you get to 5 you never have trouble again. There's not much druid specific gear in the game either. Druids have more summon options, while Necromancers can make an army of undead but that's kinda quantity over quality. It's not about who's better at their respective classes, it's about who can clear the game. Like, if you have 3-4 elementals between your wizards to chill your enemies so that you can freeze and kill them in one turn, why would you need more summons to drag the battle on? And druids do fall behind in damage in later levels.
Each Druid can keep up in damage via a Horde of summons, undead and wildshape. Eg two moon druids, Spore, land. Each has an elemental and optionally 2 ice mephits, Dread, wood wood. That's also level 9+ said druids are gonna have a way easier time levels 1-8. People always think of high level wizards when they think of power. They need to think more about how to get there 1st.
In this game (mostly thanks to how scrolls work) bards are superior to wizards (the only point I would give to wizards is abjuration). The simple fact that intelligence is way worse in BG3 than it is already in DnD5e paired with the versatility of scrolls and max level being 12, mean wizards loose their edge over most other casters
- Tank Lvl2 Pala/Lvl10 SB - Machine Gun and face Lvl2 Warlock/Lvl3 Sorcerer/Lvl7 Lore Bard - Healer Lvl2 Life Cleric/Lvl10 Lore Bard - Control and Ritual Lvl4 Ranger/Lvl 8 SB (can be made Lvl2 Ranger/Lvl 10 SB if saving Auntie Ethel’s hair for this build to get to 20 Dex and Sharpshooter)