@Strato: Out of curiosity, what's your pick for the best level 6 spell between Otto's Frozen Sphere, Chain Lightning, and upcasted Cone of Cold? I'm not going anywhere with this and I don't plan on responding to your answer specifically, I'm just genuinely interested in which you like better.
Poison and acid don’t have enough support, and for poison specifically, many enemies are resistant to it.
I could not agree more! Poison damage really feels like it gets shafted in BG3. Early on after getting the game, I decided to go all-in on a poison dragonborn draconic sorcerer. It was so bad XD Cloudkill is pretty decent, yeah, but with so many enemies outright immune to poison damage it really seems kind of not worth it.
Was I just somewhat unlucky perhaps that I tried one of the strongest archetypes on my very first run (even though nowhere near optimised back then)?
Mmm, I would argue that the premise of this thread is flawed.
In terms of just raw power, there a lot of things that can give ice sorcerers a run for their money.
Gloom Stalker Assassin stands out because of guaranteed crits and Arrows of Many Targets. That's already extremely powerful, but there is just a huge variety of compounding bonuses to stack on top of that it's ridiculous. My preference is Titanstting, Cloud Giant Elixir, double Dolor Amarus, Mask of Soul Perception, and Legacy of the Masters. That way you don't just crit, you get higher damage rolls and bonus crit damage on top of it. (I dislike using the GSA build though, it really is too strong to be fun for more than one playthrough, at least for me.)
I prefer looking in another another category for power, though. No sells. "No selling" is a thing in a professional wrestling routine when the protagonist of the match is suddenly just immune to everything. Some of my favorite no sells in BG3 are...
Arcane Ward: If your ward is sufficiently strong, and you have damage reduction effects like Warding Bond and Magical Plate, most things are simply incapable of doing any damage to you at all. You can add in paralysis immunity for even more defense, or abuse Armor of Agathys and enemies' inability to pass on opportunity attacks to turn that defense into offense.
Force Conduit: Very similar to Arcane Ward, but simpler. The tradeoff is it's only effective against physical attacks.
Arcane Acuity: Saving throws? I think not. Combine a high casting stat with 10 stacks of AA and enemies have very poor chances of rolling those 30+ saving throws to beat your SSDC. Particularly brutal with control spells and bards.
Stealth archery: GSA strikes again! It's already overwhelmingly powerful in battle, but it is capable of easily annihilating enemies without entering combat to begin with. It's a lot easier to do with the speed and accuracy of a mouse, but if you abuse stealth archery you can easily kill a dude and move before anyone can spot you. (There are of course other ways to abuse stealth, but archery has the most advantages and no disadvantages I can think of.)
I also never got the impression that the game is so difficult that you are forced to min-max your group.
Ditto. I felt like the learning curve was rather sharp because there's just so many systems interacting, but after getting the hang of it you really do need restrictions(or mods) to find difficulty in the game.
In a way, I wish there was a challenge or arena type mode to put even optimized teams through the wringer, with something neat like permanently unlocking unique camp clothes as a reward. I know I was so dissatisfied when I saw those yellow dice lol.
My main issue with wizards is, that I often don't know what to do with my bonus action.
You must have ESPN, because you just read my mail!
I've never tried multiclassing to specifically solve that problem, but I often ran Gale with Boots of Speed. I'll definitely try your solution though, it sounds more fun than what I've been doing.
Paladins can be rather powerful as well. With one of the best damage output builds being Oathbreaker multiclass with Warlock to access Improved Pact of the Blade to provide a weapon that scales with CHR, an extra attack that stacks with Extra Attack bonuses (For 3 attacks per standard action) along with Oathbreakers Aura of Hate for CHR modifier as damage on attacks (So you get your CHR modifier twice for damage) and Divine Smites to spend all your spell slots on for even more damage.
Cool. I needed an idea to run an oathbreaker and you've just given me a good place to start.
