There's a special satisfaction to playing party-based RPGs with a single party member. Many games have special achievements and challenges for defying the intended play experience of a full and balanced party, like running all members of the same class or never using equipment.
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PostsIn Baldur's Gate 3, a solo build offers a lot of unique challenges but also some helpful advantages. You can stack all the best magic items, ignore time-sensitive objectives, and evade the optional boss fights locked behind companion quests that a sole adventurer can safely ignore. Here are some build options for approaching this daunting challenge.
Best Solo Build For Baldur's Gate 3
For Origins, the best solo build is easily the Dark Urge. You gain a lot of bonuses for evil acts like killing would-be companions and plot-relevant NPCs.In Act One, you gain exclusive access to the Deathstalker Mantle, a cloak that grants invisibility every time you land a killing blow. This item is powerful enough to create a solo strategy around, aiming to land one killing blow each turn to retain near-permanent stealth in combat.
When enemies know an invisible character is nearby, they'll attempt perception checks using their bonus actions, ending your invisibility if your stealth is low.
Starting Class
For a solo playthrough, you want a class that excels in stealth. This maximizes the value of the Deathstalker Mantle, the main tool keeping you from being dogpiled by large groups of enemies. The two main options are the rogue and gloomstalker ranger. Both can hide as a bonus action, but the rogue can also dash or disengage. The ranger gets access to a fighting style that rogues notably lack and some spellcasting to round out utility.
Rogue's ends up being the better option for a solo player. They have sneak attacks to increase their damage and expertise to outperform on stealth. Invisibility and stealth provide constant advantage, ensuring sneak attacks always land.
Their cunning actions mean that they can easily run away from any fights they're unlikely to win by double dashing.
Rogue gets two expertise skills at first level. These will go into stealth and athletics. Stealth allows you to choose your fights by sneaking past enemies and evading damage via invisibility. When forced into unavoidable combat, you want to avoid instant-kill attacks like being shoved off cliffs, and athletics is used to resist shoves.
At level four, you'll want to prioritize the alert feat. Negating surprise removes one of the game's ways of instantly defeating a solo player; some ambushes cannot be easily prevented without it.
Equipment
Stealth rogues typically use dexterity whenever possible, and this will be true through the early game. Once you have a good amount of money and access to several stores, you can start using strength weapons with the aid of Potions of Giant Strength. They'll take up your elixir slot but provide you with a much wider range of possible weapons to use. Proficiency for them may require a multiclass level in fighter, at which point you might as well take a second to gain Action Surge.
Gith and Dwarves both gain medium armor from their heritage, so you could choose to skip the multiclassing in favor of a stronger sneak attack and quicker access to the Evasion feature.
Here is an equipment loadout for a solo build, including the gear locked behind multiclassing. Don't multiclass until you have the alert feat, meaning you'll be at level six by the time you can make full use of this equipment.
Equipment
Location
Use
Deathstalker Mantle
Camp Event, Act One
This is the linchpin of your hit-and-run strategy. Make sure to move after landing a killing blow to evade any searches or AoEs targeting your last known location.
Yuan-Ti Scale Mail
Lastlight Inn, Act Two
Armours with the exotic material trait give you your full dexterity bonus to AC on top of their base defense. If you've lost access to Last Light, there's an equivalent armor sold in Moonrise.
Shattered Flail
Risen Road, Act One
A great weapon for fights you cannot avoid or that lack minions to activate your invisibility. It heals you for every blow you land. The rogue doesn't have a typical extra-attack to make the best use of it, but wielding it in the offhand as a thief rogue will allow you to swing it twice per turn. The usual downside of going mad if you don't land attacks every turn is negated because you have no allies to accidentally kill in your mastatic.aayyy.com/topic/dn/ess.
The Blood of Lathander
Githyanki Creche, Act One
When dealing with environmental hazards that threaten an instant kill, this weapon will provide an emergency heal when you fall to 0hp. With no allies to help you up, there's no difference between being downed and killed.
Ring of Shadows
Oliver's House, Act Two
You don't have any support spellcasters in a solo run, so spells stored in items become a lot more valuable. The ring lets you cast pass without a trace for an easy +10 on stealth rolls.
Smuggler's Ring
Risen Road, Act One
This ring gives a nice buff to stealth and a bonus to sleight of hand if you choose to steal from vendors. The ring has a penalty to charisma, which would hurt if this weren't a Dark Urge playthrough.
Ring of Free Action
Moonrise Towers, Act Two
Immunity to paralysis means that you're safe from Hold Person, one of the biggest killers of solo players.
Silver Pendant
Wilderness, Act One
This amulet lets you cast guidance. When out of combat, it'll be a reliable +2 on average when taking skill checks.
Amulet of the Harpers
Lastlight Inn, Act Two
Advantage on Wisdom saves will protect you from crowd control spells that can lock down a solo player. It gives a single cast of Shield daily—a helpful panic button in combat.
Fey Semblance Amulet
Hag Survivors, Act Three
A nice upgrade to your Harper's Amulet. This protects you from Wisdom, Charisma, and Intelligence saves.
Darkfire Bow
Lastlight Inn, Act Two
This weapon gives you passive access to cold and fire resistance, along with a daily cast of the haste spell. Haste is a great buff on a character that doesn't have any concentration spells, but the comedown is easily lethal if you're caught out of position.
Check shops after each long rest to restock on consumable items. Potions are your main source of healing, but more important are arrows of darkness and transposition that you can use to evade fights and solve puzzles.
Narrative Choices For A Solo Playthrough
As a Dark Urge playthrough, you have the choice to either embrace your nature or defy it. You get some good rewards for embracing it, and the usual consequence of an evil playthrough (making the other characters sad) is absent when you're traveling alone. This lets you pick up some nice permanent buffs and rare items:
- Stealing the Runepowder Barrel in the Grymforge gives you a powerful weapon against one boss of your choice.
- Eating Ethel's hair gives a +1 to any attribute if you agree to spare her.
- Volo's Stone Eye will help you avoid ambushes from invisible enemies.
- Killing Isobel in Act Two will grant your Dark Urge access to the Slayer Form.
- Adopting Scratch lets you compensate for not having multiple perception checks by throwing the dog into landmines.
Many of the other permanent bonuses a solo character would benefit from require the sacrifice of a companion, such as killing one for Bhoooal's blessing or pimping out Astarion for a Potion of Everlasting Vigour. Depending on how strict you are with the concept of a 'solo' character, you can still pick up these bonuses.
Illithid Powers
You won't have to share your tadpoles with anyone else, but you'll still want to prioritize a few key powers for this build.
- The most important is favourable beginnings, gaining a sizable bonus to your first roll against every target. In social encounters, this will almost always be active.
- Luck of the Farm Realms is a crit in a bottle. Great for boss fights or any fight where your starting sneak attacks don't quite cut it.
- Psionic Dominance shuts down enemy spellcasters, but choose your moment to use it, as you've only one reaction per round.
- Displacer Beast Shape is nearly a hundred hitpoints of ablative damage you can throw out during boss fights. It doesn't fit into your normal ability routine but absorbs a lot of pain in fights that resist your normal methods.
- Black Hole is a good control tool, slowing a bunch of enemies. If you have the Awakened Passive from the Githyanki Creche, you'll be able to cast it as a bonus action to snare a bunch of enemies before unloading a smokepowder arrow or bomb.
- Cull The Weak fits into the plan of having a single character eat every tadpole in the game.
Other Solo Build Options
Like any well-designed challenge, there are many viable options for completing the game with no companions.
Build
Strategy
Assassin Rogue
An assassin rogue without the Deathstalker Mantle can still kill their way through the game one enemy at a time. If they have a way of splitting groups, such as minor illusion, they can avoid most large-scale combats where a solo character is at risk.
Tempest Cleric/Sorcerer multiclass
A Tempest Cleric/Storm Sorcerer multiclass has good armor, access to sorcerer summoning spells, and the high charisma to avoid many fights using persuasion and intimidation checks. Keeping a flock of summoned minions can make up for a dearth of humanoid companions.
Tavern Brawler Monk
A Heavy Armour monk (best achieved by starting as a githyanki or mountain dwarf and spending one feat to go from medium to heavy armor) has astounding survivability, the evasion feature to negate forced damage, and copious damage via the tavern brawler feat.
A Shadow Monk competes with Rogue on stealth due to their ability to make their own cover.
Gale Percent Speedrun
A solo Gale can adapt speedrunning techniques to evade all non-essential fights and use his unique origin feature at the end of Act Two for an underwhelming but technically legal victory against the absolute.
Modded Classes
Some modded classes also provide interesting options. The bladesinger, ported into the game with minimal modification from the tabletop version, has a good balance of survivability and utility casting (taking a few levels to come online). They're strongest when paired with spells imported from Fifth Edition, like absorb elements.
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