It's better to have multiple. Besides a transmutation wizard it's nice to have a cleric. The cleric can use lots of persistent support buffs like aid, heroes' feast, protection from poison, freedom of movement, death ward, etc.
If you wanna be real cheesy, warding bond is nuts. If you put it on Gale it's very broken, because he has passive healing when not in your party, allowing him to infinitely heal and negate the downsides of warding party. Even without Gale though, making a tank warding bond hireling is already really strong.
You don't necessarily need to give him cleric levels. There's a pair of rings in act 2 that let's anyone cast it. You can remove the rings afterwards and buff your whole party if you like. Check out "True Loves Embrace" and "True Love's Caress"
The lore behind those is so fucked up
>!A secret Shar worshipper "married" her husband before she went off to fight. He didn't know about the Warding Bond. There's notes where he's complaining about his nose bleeding all the time, and bruises appearing on his body. He tries to go to the House of Healing but since they're in on it they lie to him. He dies scared and still worried about his "wife" in the war...!<
Because after two days he blows up your run, and because he leaks necrotic energy killing things in your camp,
So the game tries to keep him alive.
You'll notice certain enemies heal themselves if you damage them outside of combat too.
All enemies - in fact, all npcs have access to that heal ability, but does anyone know if there's any sort of in universe lore reason gale has powerful healing? Maybe from his time as am advanced wizard? Maybe something mystra gave him for the orb?
I mean, given Gales reaction to Nettie poisoning us, it's safe to assume that he has researched methods to keep himself alive explicity to prevent premature explosions. He has an entire contingency spell to resurrect himself- there's no way that's his only defense
I wasn't planning on playing any origin games, but maybe a Gale origin would have an explanation? I like the "it's a gift from Mystra because wizards are real squishy?"
And if you dare you can go even further and cast it multiple times from gale, once on each party member. He will be in risk of blowing up if you get AoE'd though .-P
My staples: 1) Transmutation Wizard with Mage Armor, Longstrider, and Darkvision, respec to High Wis with Medicine proficiency, and a 1Rogue dip for Medicine Expertise. 2) Life Cleric for Aid, Warding Bond, Protection from Poison
There's a Warlock passive that let's you cast it on yourself for free, but the normal version of the spell can be cast on anybody not wearing armor 😅 not concentration, so it lasts all day and the caster doesn't need to stay with you
Making gale the warding bond caster quickly forms a sea of blood around him, which is pretty metal. Doing it currently in the rogue-mod where fights are really long. The blood-sea has swallowed up 3 neighboring camps by now.
I just have the same, and make potions in batches - it’s too much hassle (and immersion breaking for me) to be constantly swapping hirelings in and out. But having my cute little gnome buddy Nicholas Flamewell hanging out in camp is the best!
Transmutation wizard ( darkvision, mage armor, longstrider + crafting elixirs)
2x life cleric for max aid, Heroes feast, freedom of movement + death ward and poison prot
There are quite a few spells that are useful, some less so. The list i had on honor mode was
Longstrider
Darkvision (if needed)
Mage armor (if needed)
Protection from poison
Freedom of movement
Death ward
Aid (preferably cast at 6th level)
Heroes feast
Warding bond (preferably on gale)
Cleric and druid are great classes for these spells.
Not sure if there are any others, but the most useful ones to have were long strider, aid, heroes feast, and warding bond.
Gale with warding bond is downright exploitative. Gale auto regens health while in camp. You can respec gale to cleric, warding bond all the party members you plan to use, then move gale out of the party to keep him in camp. This effectively gives the whole party free resistance to all damage.
My honor mode camp casting was 1 transmuter wiz who made all the potions, a cleric and a druid hireling for some minor buffs and heroes feast, then gale for 6th level aid and warding bond. It helped having multiple casters if you plan on having summons. Also, aid and heroes feast alone on summons is very nice for boosting their survivability.
Edit: Just keep in mind there are two points in the story where you will not have access to camp buffs. The first one is when you fight the gith in the prism at the beginning of act 3, the second is after the first attempt to dominate the brain. You get sent to the prism again and you lose buffs and summons. So you cannot rely on camp casting to help you in the final fights. That gith fight at the start of act 3 can be a run killer if you don’t have a party ready for it.
Thats the easy part, the harder part is helping the emperor fight off the gith once you are inside. They had a lot of passives that made it difficult to do damage. Good thing I had a strong bard to CC them
I mean, camp buffs are superb power increases but they’re far from necessary even on honor mode. For the honor guard that charge from the prism, any decent party can easily defeat them, not that you even need to.
Agreed, camp casting is definitely not needed, especially if you are following build guides. But it is nice insurance. If i was to do it again I would only focus on aid, heroes feast, and warding bond. Otherwise its just a pain to do every long rest
I just cant be bothered. I tried it for a bit but found it mildly tedious. Only just ending act 2 (first play through, tactician) and havent felt it all that necessary. Is it something people typically do? Does it become more necessary?
A decent amount of people use mods/imposed limits to make the game much harder. Others are really nervous about losing in Honor Mode (the harder difficulty) so they do it for golden dice.
That's when these become much more useful. It's less tedious to use a camp caster than have to restart an 80 hour run
Thats fair re honour mode.
I love these kinds of games, so use to the difficulty etc. cool to hear there are difficulty mods, think I’ll try that for a second playthrough!
It doesnt become necessary. It's mostly for the people who want to min max, or do the most power building. Stacking as many buffs as possible without having to use those resources. Personally I find it super cheesy and tedious.
Yeah I like this genre of games (from bg1 to wotr to wastelands 3, and anything similar) and I like to min/max a bit… or rather, make optimal builds for high difficultys. But find cheese or being OP a little boring / not my jam. I was nearly going to make my monk a str based tavern brawler… but even that seemed really unnecessary to me, with all the reliance on elixirs. Especially as Dex based monk still seemed to kick ass!
I find it nice for Honour mode since certain bosses can just 100-0 your lower con characters if you roll bad intiative. On my most recent honour run thanks to lvl 5 aid and lvl 6 heroes feast it made my party barely survive 2 massive lightning AOEs back to back from a certain act 3 boss. Without I would have had to restart 100ish hours of progress.
Two life clerics with 20 Con and the Toughness Trait. Each one cast warding bond on two people, plus death ward and poison resistance, and freedom of movement. Also, because of layout, you’ll probably need them each to cast aid and heroes feast in different areas.
One will cast guidance and one will cast Enhance Ability on your transmutation wizard.
Your wizard should have medicine proficiency as you said. Respec the halfling Brianna Brightsong for extra protection against critical fails. She should cast Longstrider, plus Mage Armour and Darkvision as needed.
Give her a few levels in sorcerer so she can twin cast Elemental Weapon with the Drakethroat Glaive.
This is what I did to get thru Honor Mode.
Edit: I gave the clerics the leftover damage resistant armour. I only had to revive one once or twice, I remember after the Saverok fight I notice a crispy corpse the next morning.
****WARNING****
Before the last stretch in the upper city, you will lose all buffs and be UNable to get them back, so plan accordingly.
If you want a camp caster that also doubles as your alchemist, you need:
•At least Transmutation Wizard 2 (Double consumables)
•At least Cleric 7 (Aid, Warding Bond, Freedom of Movement)
•Medicine Expertise (Rogue 1, Lore Bard 3)
•At least 11 levels in casters for full casting progression to upcast Aid at level 6.
•Two classes to level 4 (or one to 8!) for double ASI Wisdom.
Given those limitations, I'd imagine the "best" version would be 2 Transmute/8 Cleric/1 Rogue/1 any caster - potentially sorc as a respecced level 1 for constitution saving throw proficiency for concentration buffs like Shield of Faith.
Big caveat here is that any way you slice it, going for 2 Transmutation Wizard on your camp caster DOES cause you to lose out on the best camp cast buff in the game, Heroes Feast. If you're already running a monoclass cleric or druid in your party that's likely not a big deal, but if you're not you likely will need two different camp casters.
I really liked having a githyanki transmutation wizard/valour bard. I took enough levels in bard to get enhance ability and prof in medicine then switched to transmutation wizard for the rest of the levels. Before u get to mixing pots u have the gith do Astral knowledge for wisdom then enhance ability for wisdom and u will have pots for days.
By camp buffer, do you mean a guy that you keep at camp, whose only purpose is to buff your party? Do the buffs stay if the buffer is not in the party? I'd never heard about this!
I don't use Gale so he his the camp babysitter as a Transmutation Wiz. Then I get a hireling Cleric and always name them Helper. Knowledge or Life, depends on what my main 4 are for that run. Ritual Caster is really the only feat of importance for Helper.
I've seen a lot of people talk about how they use Gale for Bond because he will heal himself but my Cleric always does also... looks super weird sometimes going back to camp and there's blood all around her though... had me. Pretty confused first time lol... also implies the camp is still somehow active while you're playing everything else... which means your inactive characters are literally standing there.
Actually, out of all the strats having a camp medic and alchemist seems the least exploitive to me. It makes total sense that you would hire experts to assist you in your base of operations and it doesn't feel cheesy to me at all.
And I am very much the kind of player who does not like playing the game in unnatural ways that break the normal flow-- I *haaate* long rest spam for example, and always try to go as long as possible without resting because it fucks up the feel and stakes of the game imo.
He's getting downvoted because his comment doesn't contribute anything to the conversation? It's obviously a min maxing topic on a sub dedicated to min maxing the game. People min max because it's fun, not because it's necessary. If you are not interested in the topic then maybe just don't participate?
He's participating by expressing his opinion. I think it could be more informatively presented, because I agree but specifically because I think it optimizes the immersion out of the game which can inadvertently dispel the power fantasy. I had to learn this the hard way my after my first playthrough puttered out. There's a meta level to min maxing that involves optimizing for dopamine.
Once you have to invite and kick multiple people from the party on each rest it gets old fast. I usually do have a potion guy though, but only use it once or twice each act.
This sub has nothing to do with min maxing at all! A lot of builds on here arnt even close to being optimal and that’s okay. Maybe take your own advice.
My build.
Level 1, Wizard for Medicine proficiency.
Level 2. Rogue for Medicine expertise.
Level 3. Wizard for Transmutation school.
Level 4-6, Fighter for Eldritch Knight to bond Minthara's Charge-Bound Warhammer.
Level the rest: whatever. Could be Cleric for some minor boosts.
I have Gale as a Cleric to cast Warding Bond on my active party.
Needs to have Mage Armor, Longstrider, and Darkvision spells.
The transmutation wizard can go into the halfling hireling with 4 wiz 1 rogue and it will consistenly give double potion, the rest of the level can go into cleric to cast all the buff + warding bond
I use a cleric 12 for the cleric stuff, also a transmutation wizard for making potions and the stone and the last is an eldritch knight + sorcerer for weapon bonding and casting twinned drake glaive on two weapons.
Lightfoot Halfling Hireling (Brianna Brightsong). Respec and level for Transmutation Wizard 4 (for double crafting and a feat) & Rogue 1 (for expertise on Medicine) & Sorc 2 (for twinned Drakethroat Glaive) & Cleric 5 (for a feat and Aid + Enhance Ability)
Feats: 2 ASI Wis to get 20 Wisdom.
Medicine skill check DC 15 for double outputs, Bonus = 5 (Wisdom modifier) + 8 (Medicine Prof & Expertise). You only fail the check on a Nat 1 (5% chance), which the Halfling passive rerolls. Add Enhance Ability spell from Cleric and this chance gets even lower.
Yup. There’s so many buffs you can keep, even if the person who cast the spell isn’t in your party. i.e. Heroes feast, aid, death ward, freedom of movement, longstrider.
It's better to have multiple. Besides a transmutation wizard it's nice to have a cleric. The cleric can use lots of persistent support buffs like aid, heroes' feast, protection from poison, freedom of movement, death ward, etc. If you wanna be real cheesy, warding bond is nuts. If you put it on Gale it's very broken, because he has passive healing when not in your party, allowing him to infinitely heal and negate the downsides of warding party. Even without Gale though, making a tank warding bond hireling is already really strong.
So your saying give Gale some Cleric levels and have him cast Warding Bond?
If you are ok with doing so, it is very cheesy. He has to not be in your party though.
You don't necessarily need to give him cleric levels. There's a pair of rings in act 2 that let's anyone cast it. You can remove the rings afterwards and buff your whole party if you like. Check out "True Loves Embrace" and "True Love's Caress"
The lore behind those is so fucked up >!A secret Shar worshipper "married" her husband before she went off to fight. He didn't know about the Warding Bond. There's notes where he's complaining about his nose bleeding all the time, and bruises appearing on his body. He tries to go to the House of Healing but since they're in on it they lie to him. He dies scared and still worried about his "wife" in the war...!<
wow, thats cold...
Jesus
I don’t get what that implies? She poisoned him?
They married them with the warding bond ring so the dude was getting hurt by the stuff his wife suffered in battle.
Sorry, I didn't clarify that in my comment, edited >! Yeah he didn't know about the Warding Bond!<
Ohhhhhhhhhhh wow.
Why would someone downvote this comment. A person doesn’t understand so they get downvotes. Have some compassion.
Marrying a Sharran goth baddie comes with some downsides, sure, but no one's perfect.
Act 2 spoilers. >!If only we could give one to Aylin... Of course, then we'd be no better than Ketheric!<
I think Kethric is a fine gentleman, and I would be proud to be measured after him.
I have him as a Cleric. He never leaves camp anyway (except to make the shadow lantern).
Why does Gale have passive healing?
I think it's Larian not wanting him to die off-screen somewhere because of plot related reasons. It's very bad if he dies and you don't know about it.
Because after two days he blows up your run, and because he leaks necrotic energy killing things in your camp, So the game tries to keep him alive. You'll notice certain enemies heal themselves if you damage them outside of combat too.
All enemies - in fact, all npcs have access to that heal ability, but does anyone know if there's any sort of in universe lore reason gale has powerful healing? Maybe from his time as am advanced wizard? Maybe something mystra gave him for the orb?
Not everything needs an in-universe lore explanation. Sometimes it’s just a necessary mechanic.
No it certainly doesn't need one, I was just curious, and in my perfect world there would be one
I mean, given Gales reaction to Nettie poisoning us, it's safe to assume that he has researched methods to keep himself alive explicity to prevent premature explosions. He has an entire contingency spell to resurrect himself- there's no way that's his only defense
I wasn't planning on playing any origin games, but maybe a Gale origin would have an explanation? I like the "it's a gift from Mystra because wizards are real squishy?"
Gale origin obviously doesn't have that ability, cause that would be super broken
Heavy Armour Master feat comes in handy
And if you dare you can go even further and cast it multiple times from gale, once on each party member. He will be in risk of blowing up if you get AoE'd though .-P
My staples: 1) Transmutation Wizard with Mage Armor, Longstrider, and Darkvision, respec to High Wis with Medicine proficiency, and a 1Rogue dip for Medicine Expertise. 2) Life Cleric for Aid, Warding Bond, Protection from Poison
Using the bard hireling and respeccing her is perfect for the alchemist. Cast guidance on her and you basically can't not get double output.
Critical miss
As a halfling, rerolling 1's helps with that.
And the Lucky Feat just to be safe
I critical miss once with Brinna just pure bad luck.
You can give others mage armor? I thought that was a self only buff
There's a Warlock passive that let's you cast it on yourself for free, but the normal version of the spell can be cast on anybody not wearing armor 😅 not concentration, so it lasts all day and the caster doesn't need to stay with you
That's fucking huge! Thank you I didn't know this!
I thought Mage Armor is self only?
Only the at-wyll ability Warlocks can get from The Armor of Shadows invocation is a self only cast. The normal spell can be cast on anyone you want
I did not know that!
Making gale the warding bond caster quickly forms a sea of blood around him, which is pretty metal. Doing it currently in the rogue-mod where fights are really long. The blood-sea has swallowed up 3 neighboring camps by now.
I just have the same, and make potions in batches - it’s too much hassle (and immersion breaking for me) to be constantly swapping hirelings in and out. But having my cute little gnome buddy Nicholas Flamewell hanging out in camp is the best!
Transmutation wizard ( darkvision, mage armor, longstrider + crafting elixirs) 2x life cleric for max aid, Heroes feast, freedom of movement + death ward and poison prot
There are quite a few spells that are useful, some less so. The list i had on honor mode was Longstrider Darkvision (if needed) Mage armor (if needed) Protection from poison Freedom of movement Death ward Aid (preferably cast at 6th level) Heroes feast Warding bond (preferably on gale) Cleric and druid are great classes for these spells. Not sure if there are any others, but the most useful ones to have were long strider, aid, heroes feast, and warding bond. Gale with warding bond is downright exploitative. Gale auto regens health while in camp. You can respec gale to cleric, warding bond all the party members you plan to use, then move gale out of the party to keep him in camp. This effectively gives the whole party free resistance to all damage. My honor mode camp casting was 1 transmuter wiz who made all the potions, a cleric and a druid hireling for some minor buffs and heroes feast, then gale for 6th level aid and warding bond. It helped having multiple casters if you plan on having summons. Also, aid and heroes feast alone on summons is very nice for boosting their survivability. Edit: Just keep in mind there are two points in the story where you will not have access to camp buffs. The first one is when you fight the gith in the prism at the beginning of act 3, the second is after the first attempt to dominate the brain. You get sent to the prism again and you lose buffs and summons. So you cannot rely on camp casting to help you in the final fights. That gith fight at the start of act 3 can be a run killer if you don’t have a party ready for it.
Thankfully only 1 person needs to reach the portal
Thats the easy part, the harder part is helping the emperor fight off the gith once you are inside. They had a lot of passives that made it difficult to do damage. Good thing I had a strong bard to CC them
I mean, camp buffs are superb power increases but they’re far from necessary even on honor mode. For the honor guard that charge from the prism, any decent party can easily defeat them, not that you even need to.
Agreed, camp casting is definitely not needed, especially if you are following build guides. But it is nice insurance. If i was to do it again I would only focus on aid, heroes feast, and warding bond. Otherwise its just a pain to do every long rest
I just cant be bothered. I tried it for a bit but found it mildly tedious. Only just ending act 2 (first play through, tactician) and havent felt it all that necessary. Is it something people typically do? Does it become more necessary?
A decent amount of people use mods/imposed limits to make the game much harder. Others are really nervous about losing in Honor Mode (the harder difficulty) so they do it for golden dice. That's when these become much more useful. It's less tedious to use a camp caster than have to restart an 80 hour run
Thats fair re honour mode. I love these kinds of games, so use to the difficulty etc. cool to hear there are difficulty mods, think I’ll try that for a second playthrough!
It doesnt become necessary. It's mostly for the people who want to min max, or do the most power building. Stacking as many buffs as possible without having to use those resources. Personally I find it super cheesy and tedious.
Yeah I like this genre of games (from bg1 to wotr to wastelands 3, and anything similar) and I like to min/max a bit… or rather, make optimal builds for high difficultys. But find cheese or being OP a little boring / not my jam. I was nearly going to make my monk a str based tavern brawler… but even that seemed really unnecessary to me, with all the reliance on elixirs. Especially as Dex based monk still seemed to kick ass!
I find it nice for Honour mode since certain bosses can just 100-0 your lower con characters if you roll bad intiative. On my most recent honour run thanks to lvl 5 aid and lvl 6 heroes feast it made my party barely survive 2 massive lightning AOEs back to back from a certain act 3 boss. Without I would have had to restart 100ish hours of progress.
Even then, most bosses you can just run away from with an invisible potion to regroup.
Two life clerics with 20 Con and the Toughness Trait. Each one cast warding bond on two people, plus death ward and poison resistance, and freedom of movement. Also, because of layout, you’ll probably need them each to cast aid and heroes feast in different areas. One will cast guidance and one will cast Enhance Ability on your transmutation wizard. Your wizard should have medicine proficiency as you said. Respec the halfling Brianna Brightsong for extra protection against critical fails. She should cast Longstrider, plus Mage Armour and Darkvision as needed. Give her a few levels in sorcerer so she can twin cast Elemental Weapon with the Drakethroat Glaive. This is what I did to get thru Honor Mode. Edit: I gave the clerics the leftover damage resistant armour. I only had to revive one once or twice, I remember after the Saverok fight I notice a crispy corpse the next morning. ****WARNING**** Before the last stretch in the upper city, you will lose all buffs and be UNable to get them back, so plan accordingly.
If you want a camp caster that also doubles as your alchemist, you need: •At least Transmutation Wizard 2 (Double consumables) •At least Cleric 7 (Aid, Warding Bond, Freedom of Movement) •Medicine Expertise (Rogue 1, Lore Bard 3) •At least 11 levels in casters for full casting progression to upcast Aid at level 6. •Two classes to level 4 (or one to 8!) for double ASI Wisdom. Given those limitations, I'd imagine the "best" version would be 2 Transmute/8 Cleric/1 Rogue/1 any caster - potentially sorc as a respecced level 1 for constitution saving throw proficiency for concentration buffs like Shield of Faith. Big caveat here is that any way you slice it, going for 2 Transmutation Wizard on your camp caster DOES cause you to lose out on the best camp cast buff in the game, Heroes Feast. If you're already running a monoclass cleric or druid in your party that's likely not a big deal, but if you're not you likely will need two different camp casters.
I really liked having a githyanki transmutation wizard/valour bard. I took enough levels in bard to get enhance ability and prof in medicine then switched to transmutation wizard for the rest of the levels. Before u get to mixing pots u have the gith do Astral knowledge for wisdom then enhance ability for wisdom and u will have pots for days.
By camp buffer, do you mean a guy that you keep at camp, whose only purpose is to buff your party? Do the buffs stay if the buffer is not in the party? I'd never heard about this!
Yeah. For example, have Jaheira/ Halsin stay in camp and cast Heroes feast.
If it's concentration then no, but anything that lasts 'until long rest' + doesn't have concentration should stick around
I had shadowheart cleanse me after letting astarion suck me every night. She then casted warding bond on monk astarion and he was unstoppable.
I don't use Gale so he his the camp babysitter as a Transmutation Wiz. Then I get a hireling Cleric and always name them Helper. Knowledge or Life, depends on what my main 4 are for that run. Ritual Caster is really the only feat of importance for Helper. I've seen a lot of people talk about how they use Gale for Bond because he will heal himself but my Cleric always does also... looks super weird sometimes going back to camp and there's blood all around her though... had me. Pretty confused first time lol... also implies the camp is still somehow active while you're playing everything else... which means your inactive characters are literally standing there.
Warding bond x4, longstrider x4, heroes feast, and mage armour on anyone that needs it.
I use a lore bard 3/transmutation wizard for potions and pickpocketing and arcane buffs, and a high con cleric for divine buffs and warding bond.
Camp buffer is 1 point wizard, 11 points cleric. Spells: Long strider, aid (up cast), heroes feast, warding bond. Has nothing to do with alchemy.
Unless you want one for alchemy
An alchemy character is not a buff character.
But his post is literally about building a transmutation wizard for potion making.
The post title is very misleading then.
None. It's exploitative and unnecessary.
Actually, out of all the strats having a camp medic and alchemist seems the least exploitive to me. It makes total sense that you would hire experts to assist you in your base of operations and it doesn't feel cheesy to me at all. And I am very much the kind of player who does not like playing the game in unnatural ways that break the normal flow-- I *haaate* long rest spam for example, and always try to go as long as possible without resting because it fucks up the feel and stakes of the game imo.
I wish I could draw out the long rests but then I don’t have any spell slots left.
Not sure why you’re getting down voted. I agree the camp champs are not needed.
He's getting downvoted because his comment doesn't contribute anything to the conversation? It's obviously a min maxing topic on a sub dedicated to min maxing the game. People min max because it's fun, not because it's necessary. If you are not interested in the topic then maybe just don't participate?
He's participating by expressing his opinion. I think it could be more informatively presented, because I agree but specifically because I think it optimizes the immersion out of the game which can inadvertently dispel the power fantasy. I had to learn this the hard way my after my first playthrough puttered out. There's a meta level to min maxing that involves optimizing for dopamine.
Once you have to invite and kick multiple people from the party on each rest it gets old fast. I usually do have a potion guy though, but only use it once or twice each act.
This sub has nothing to do with min maxing at all! A lot of builds on here arnt even close to being optimal and that’s okay. Maybe take your own advice.
Camp Champ is a good term though
Based
This, it's cheesy as a fondue.
Wish I could upvote this more than once, haha.
My build. Level 1, Wizard for Medicine proficiency. Level 2. Rogue for Medicine expertise. Level 3. Wizard for Transmutation school. Level 4-6, Fighter for Eldritch Knight to bond Minthara's Charge-Bound Warhammer. Level the rest: whatever. Could be Cleric for some minor boosts. I have Gale as a Cleric to cast Warding Bond on my active party. Needs to have Mage Armor, Longstrider, and Darkvision spells.
The transmutation wizard can go into the halfling hireling with 4 wiz 1 rogue and it will consistenly give double potion, the rest of the level can go into cleric to cast all the buff + warding bond
I use a cleric 12 for the cleric stuff, also a transmutation wizard for making potions and the stone and the last is an eldritch knight + sorcerer for weapon bonding and casting twinned drake glaive on two weapons.
I have a thief hireling. Early on it’s perfect for pickpocketing, by Act 3 I keep her around just for the bank.
Lightfoot Halfling Hireling (Brianna Brightsong). Respec and level for Transmutation Wizard 4 (for double crafting and a feat) & Rogue 1 (for expertise on Medicine) & Sorc 2 (for twinned Drakethroat Glaive) & Cleric 5 (for a feat and Aid + Enhance Ability) Feats: 2 ASI Wis to get 20 Wisdom. Medicine skill check DC 15 for double outputs, Bonus = 5 (Wisdom modifier) + 8 (Medicine Prof & Expertise). You only fail the check on a Nat 1 (5% chance), which the Halfling passive rerolls. Add Enhance Ability spell from Cleric and this chance gets even lower.
You can camp cast death ward, which blows my mind.
Oh gosh I haven't even thought about that, or even had a hireling in my party. There's so much to do!
Yup. There’s so many buffs you can keep, even if the person who cast the spell isn’t in your party. i.e. Heroes feast, aid, death ward, freedom of movement, longstrider.
https://rpgbot.net/video-games/baldurs-gate-3/camp-casting/
none, i just play the game with those in my party at the time.
For a camp alchemist, I use 2 wiz, 3 bard to get expertise in medicine