BEST WIZARD SCHOOL? Detailed Subclass Guide for Baldur's Gate 3

Do the spells learnt from scrolls reset if you respec?

The benefit of Abjuration Wizard is turning it into a retaliation tank and so you don't want to spec into fighter. Even without muticlassing you still have fire shield for retaliation, glyph of warding for attack, stone skin to reduce damage and they all boost your arcane ward. BUT a dip into Sorc and you get AoA and if you upcast that to the highest spellslot you get extra life making you the tankiest on the field and you deal unavoidable damage if hit and so you simply walk up to melee enemeies and force opportunity attacks. Add a level of Tempest Cleric and you then get wrath of the storm, AoA and fireshield

You then still have all the defence of shield and counterspell and can still use fireball and anything else if you want. If you had 4 abjuration wizard with 1 level of sorc and 1 level of temp cleric you're absolutely untouchable. No other wizard subclass is as strong as that. Level 8-10 you can solo the game with the build above. It's arguably the strongest build in the game.

1 level temp cleric also makes you tankier for early game with heavy armour but you can then change to lighter armour or use mage armour as your retaliation builds up and you actually want lower AC to force hits and get retaliation damage more.

Wizards
We tank
We damage
We win
🔥

Divination, period.

Great video. Thank you. always stuggled to get a grasp on the different schools of magic, this helped a LOT. :)

The nerdy adhd energy in this video is making me happy. I'm a D&D dungeon master going on six years and I have over a hundred hours in bg3, I don't need this video for the facts. I need this video for the joyful vibes it brings, positive nerd energy

Was the third eye blind reference a mistake or a subtle joke thrown in? lol I can never tell

I'm playing an evo wizard with the feat that ignores resistance to a specific element (fire for me). I'm pretty much a fireball machine that can lob them right in the middle of my party without damaging any of them. I just completed the fight with a certain wizard in BG and treated it as a 1v1 between my character and him. Was a lot of fun.

Sorry, I laughed at the Ice Knife bit lol I also thought it was an evocation spell until I hit a few allies with it 🤣

Your BG3 videos are really the best ones out there! Thanks for explaining, I played Wizard but never 100% understood what I was doing..

I steal/buy all the scrolls I can and feed them to my Gale so that he has a full toolbox.

Abjuration+that draconic bloodline that gives you armor of agithes. Up cast it using a free cast ability and kill all who dare touch you

This quickly became my favorite BG3 channel, great guides, take my sub!

For Abjuration, it isn't purely defensive. Sure, until 5th level abjuration spells are defensive, but once you reach level 5, ans later 7, you gain access to Glyph of Warding and Banishment, two very good offensive abjuration spells

Is there no ‘universal wizard subclass’ in BG3?

SHADOW WIZARD MONEY GANG

Best wizard subclass is sorcerer

What are some good multi-class options for a Conjuration focused wizard???

Abjuration is freaking ridiculous! My Gale is a draconic sorcerer 8 and abjuration wizard 4, has 21 AC with robes on and 8 stacks of Arcane ward up nearly all the time. Tankiest wizard ever lol. I don't even care about the damage I'm missing out on from Evocation as Magic missile + spellmight gloves and lightning staff obliterate everything.

My Evoc builds now tend to do one of two options, either multiclassing into Warlock for 2 levels and making CHA 14 or 16, or still doing the CHA and just taking the Warlock Initiate Feat. Either build combined with the Robe you get in the 2nd Act that lets you add your CHA bonus AGAIN to any Cantrip spell damage dice makes all of your Cantrips better, and can really make EB a great spell slot saver.

one idea I had for Illusionist (that I haven't actually tested yet) is a glass-cannon build that uses Minor Illusion to force all enemies to shift their cone of vision away from you so that you can hide and retreat to a safer location before attacking again, maybe a multiclass Rogue to be able to Minor Illusion AND hide AND dash/attack all in the same turn

The level 10 conjuration perk is kind of nice since you essentially don't need to take Warcaster or Resilient: con to maintain conjuration spells freeing you up to try out some other feats (take your ability enhancements earlier, maybe try Defensive Duellist, Spell Sniper), and looking at the spell lists conjuration spells are usually very critical spells that you're going to want to keep up. Almost all of the AoE area denial or lockdown spells are Conjuration. Web, Stinking Cloud, Cloud of Daggers, Sleet Storm, Evard's Black Tentacles, and Cloudkill, conjuration essentially does lockdown much better than Enchantment. Call Lightning while a conjuration spell, is unfortunately not in the Wizard's arsenal. Along with Insect Plague, and Hadar's Hunger; and they're to high level a spell to multiclass into their respective classes and still have lvl10 wizard, and I've not seen them as scrolls.

The real downside away from "it doesn't make my conjuration better", is that this doesn't come online until level 10; all of your early level lockdown spells will not see use from this ability until you're progressed quite far into the game, meaning you'll get the best out of Conjuration after a respec from something else. Hard sell for a player going into the game for the first time, to be sure. I ran Gale as an Evoker for simplicity, but now that I'm more acclimated to the game I kind of like the risk of and having to plan for friendly fire more than letting a class perk negate that.

In my next playthrough I'll probably run Gale as a Conjurer or Diviner, but multiclass him out of Diviner at 6 because I don't think the lvl10 ability is really that great. Not sure what a great switch would be though. I could drop the levels in Rogue, I'm kind of interested to see how Wizard/Arcane Trickster meshes out. But at that point it might as well be Astarian instead. There are too many sources of See Invisibility and Darkvision to take four more class levels just to get it even more on tap.

It's divination it's always been divination there saved you 45min

If you want content ideas, spell tier lists would be nice. Maybe gear ones too.

A great use case for the followers you can buy is to grab the wizard and make them a transmuter specifically to make all your potions. You always leave them in camp but they do all your crafting for you.

Why does Shadow heart look so funky?

I want to play every class but damn there’s so much versatility with wizard. Abjuration actually sounds op

Shadow Wizard Money Gang.

Evocation and abjuration are my favorites

I literally just started a playthrough with Gale today and at the moment I'm just going Evocation as a learning run.
Have like 150 hours mainly bard with a little multiclassing and I like the rogue.

fun coincidence. will watch/listen in full, here's a comment, and still subbed.

I just went with Evo, so I can just braindead cast Fireball lol

5eSpells mod + Abjuration Wizard + Armor of Agathys + Create Water + heavy armor and as many sources of damage negation as possible is a damn main character, it is so very strong.

Didn't try out all of them, but my own experience is that Evocation is just bonkers. Swarmed by lots of enemies and Gale would just target an ally in the middle of it all with fireball and watch the world burn, but no allies took damage.

Easy answer = Divination wizard. Force fails on saves and critical for party members.

They're practically banned by most dms.

In my opinion the "savant" ability at level 2 should be expanded to also include the ability of learning all spells of your school, even those that are not usually wizard spells. That would go a long way to actually differentiate the wizards schools from each other and avoids stupid things like a conjuration wizard having to take a level of another class simply to conjure water. Hopefully someone will create a mod that'll do something like that :)

What site were you talking about? Fextralife?

Divination is good for a 2-level dip, but getting it to 6 or 10 is not worth it. The dices are strong but they're scarce. The Prophecy system is clunky since most of those have to be done during combat, and many will force you to deal "weird" types of damage (for a wizard). It's a "lose some to gain some" philosophy, which is unfavorable in many cases. I would only go 6 levels into Divination if they change it to 2 dices that instantly recover after a short rest rather than having 3 but being forced to do tedious "mini-quests" to get them back.

Evocation is good if you push for 10 levels in Wiz. However, for Thunder/Lightning spells, a Sorc/Tempest Cleric hybrid is superior. For Fire or Cold spells, a Dragon Sorc (of the corresponding element) is also better. Magic Missile and Artistry of War are the only 2 spells which Evoker truly shines, but after the "nerf" to lightning charges, MM build requires a dedicated support holding the Phalar Aluve.

Transmutation is great - but you don't use it for your active party members.
Abjuration is also great, but for a niche playstyle that fits more to a solo campaign.
Enchantment is decent, but it's pale in comparison with the Sword Bard - Mystic Scoundrel - Helmet of Arcane Acuity combo.
Conjuration and Illusion are bad, they really need buffs/reworks.

I've got the asshole who led the goblins to the druid grove stuffed in my travellers chest at camp just waiting for when my necromancer hits level 6 lol

I subbed for the tl:dw alone. Thanks for appreciating my time and being a homie.

Hey, amazing video as usual. I've been listening in off and on on multiple videos because you do a really good job explaining things to someone who's new to 5E and bg3 and have given me multiple ideas for building out satisfying roleplay appropriate characters.

What follows is a bit of a rant regarding some of the things about the wizard subclass that I feel exasperated trying to build with.

The conjuration school annoys me quite a bit. Mainly because I feel like it's abilities would allow for a very cool gish with an Eldtrich Knight that can do battlefield control very effectively, zipping to places, having cc capabilities, dishing decent damage in melee and being able to swap places with squishier or hurt allies . But unfortunately there's not enough support for the idea I feel.

Like you go eldritch knight 6/conj. wizard 6. You still get 3 feats + all the martial essentials (heavy/medium armor prof., martial weapons, extra attack, a fighting style), but now you can also cast any 3rd level wizard spell. And after casting an abjuration spell, you can teleport or swap places with your cleric or sorcerer who got jumped by an enemy that you didn't see coming.

Here's where the issue mainly lies:

1) The teleportation requires an action and not a bonus action like misty step, or jump, or dash (via the boots of speed or multiclassing into rogue), and so to close the gap effectively, you'd have to cast a conjuration spell on 1 round, teleport on the next, and only then can you start being effective in melee. It's much easier and more convenient to have misty step on hand via items or otherwise, or just use fly since wizards already have access to that.

2) The wizard spelllist for conjuration spells (and conjuration spells in general), are quite lack luster at level 3 or below. Wizards/EKs can only use these conjuration spells at level 3 or lower: fog cloud, grease, ice knife, find familiar, misty step (already better than the teleport that you can get from conj. wiz), flaming sphere, web, cloud of daggers, sleet storm or stinking cloud (currently bugged, but could potentially be really good). Most of these spells are either directly outclassed by others that require a lower level spell slot, or spells that can nuke something from across the battlefield and eliminate threats that way without ever needing to come into melee.

The first one is by far the bigger issue, since the spells can still have some niche uses. But it feels very cumbersome to go, "oh my sorcerer got jumped, let's use grease or ice knife to slow them down so we can teleport/swap places next turn and then fight on the grease/ice knife the turn after that", instead of just going evocation and throwing a fireball or something else to deal significant damage to the threat and then using fly or misty step to close the gap on the same turn normally.

Also (more rant, sorry): why isn't darkness a conjuration spell? Some of these categories don't make sense in my opinion. Especially since hunger of hadar and evard's black tentacles are conjuration spells.

Abjuration - Can make you incredibly tanky. Combine with armor of Agathys and fire shield to make a retaliation tank, great for a fighter/caster hybrid kind of character. Take 0 damage, deal 20 to the guy that tried to hit you. Evocation - Intellect modified added to damage on a per-hit basis for spells. This works incredibly well with magic missile or scorching ray as the subclass ability is per missile or per ray. Transmutation seems to be for some guy who hangs out at camp and just gives you a transmuter stone.

personally i like abjuration, because arcane ward is nice

Subbed because you keep putting the most important part first. Much appreciated

Lmaoo I LOVE the subtle shade thrown @ that Fextralife loser. A+++ ya earned my sub for that alone. Lmaooo

Don't Oathbreaker get aura of hate at lvl 7?

U da man

Thank you. I just started my first play through of BG3. Your videos have been very helpful in getting me caught up with the mechanics, mythology and play styles. I still have a lot to learn. But I starting from a good base.