Skills and abilities (attributes)
All right, it’s time to discuss the skills and abilities you’ll want for the Druid in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Skills
As mentioned in the previous section, wisdom is the most important attribute. Likewise, the five wisdom-type skills (Animal Handling, Insight, Medicine, Perception, and Survival) should be helpful in your run given the extra proficiency. The only downside here is that certain race/background picks would mean dropping a few options. But, if you did go with the Wood Elf with a Folk Hero background, then you should easily have several locked-in. You’ve got Animal Handling, Perception, and Survival (wisdom) and Stealth (dexterity).
Combined with the Druid class selection, you’ll see a few more that you can select: Arcana (intelligence), Insight (wisdom), Medicine (wisdom), Nature (intelligence), and Religion (intelligence).
Personally, I just used one point for Insight and another for Nature. Even if the latter is governed by intelligence, I feel that it ruins the roleplaying (RP) aspect if a Druid doesn’t have proficiency in Nature skill checks.
Abilities/attributes
Given all the terms that are synonymous with “abilities,” I genuinely feel that we should just start calling these things “attributes” or “stats” (even if the panel says differently). Anyway, here’s an example:
- Strength (10) – You’ll want 10 points if you wish to be able to equip a decent armor, at least for Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Early Access stage.
- Dexterity (16) – This is primarily to boost your attacks with dex-type weapons, provide an increase to your armor class rating, and, of course, enhance your initiative (how soon you’ll have your turn in battle).
- Constitution (15) – This is for your HP in humanoid form. Funnily enough, once you gain the ability to use Wild Shape (level 2), your animal transformation’s health pool is separate from that of your humanoid form.
- Intelligence (8) – You won’t use this often, so this gets dumped.
- Wisdom (16) – This should be maxed out. Later, once you hit level 4, you can choose the “Ability Improvement” feat to add an extra +2 points to wisdom.
- Charisma (8) – Same with intelligence.
Okay, since we’ve talked about all these points, it’s time to discuss the best spells for the Druid in Baldur’s Gate 3.