War Cleric - Death Knight Build

[Fluffykeith]

Hey.
So I'm very clumsily theorycrafting a Death Knight type build. The basis is going to be a War Cleric to at least lvl 5, so I can get Animate Dead as soon as possible.

I'd like to multi-class it with something good and martial to give it some extra frontline punch.
Would Fighter or Ranger be best? I like both because they grant Fighting Style, and Ranger also uses Wisdom for casting so I wouldn't be doing weird things with my casting stat ( I think its determined by the class you most recently leveled).
But how far to dip into those classes?

Also, should I Two-Hander or Sword&Board? Shields are a bit weird atm since Shield Bash is borked.

Any advice?

[seeker1]

The good news is the kind of borked D & D Death Knight class at Nexus has been updated to actually work properly. It is based on 5E source material. So you can avoid the Death Knight class somebody literally imported from WoW which is more "foreign" to this setting.

https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/6280

For a long time, the D & D based Death Knight class there was abandonware. This guy updated it and made it compatible with recent patches. Appears to contain some Italian localization but is primarily English language based.

You might not want to use mods, but when people ask questions like this, and there's a mod that does EXACTLY what they want ... well .....

[Fluffykeith]

Originally posted by seeker1:

The good news is the kind of borked D & D Death Knight class at Nexus has been updated to actually work properly. It is based on 5E source material. So you can avoid the Death Knight class somebody literally imported from WoW which is more "foreign" to this setting.

https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/6280

For a long time, the D & D based Death Knight class there was abandonware. This guy updated it and made it compatible with recent patches. Appears to contain some Italian localization but is primarily English language based.

You might not want to use mods, but when people ask questions like this, and there's a mod that does EXACTLY what they want ... well .....

I don’t use mods, period. I don’t like messing with how the game works. I don’t like having to fix my game every time there’s a patch because some mod broke. I don’t like using third party content that I don’t trust.
And yeah, that’s just me.

I get what you’re saying, but when I’m asking for advice on how to do it…essentially an armoured caster knight type that uses necromancy and raises undead…I’m asking how to do it within the game as it is. I’m not asking “is there a mod”. I totally understand that I should have made that clear in my op, so sorry about that

[seeker1]

I respect people not using them. Their choice.

I use dozens, have I had issues or problems, sure, it goes with the territory, sometimes me being an idiot and not properly reading the requirements or conflicts with other mods. And me being the Mac using fool who can't use Script Extender which would make so many of my remaining problems go away.

For the most part, 90% work fine and never break after any updates.

Not trying to convince you of anything, ... hope somebody else gives you the kind of advice you prefer. I would say another way to do this is to combine a Death Domain Cleric with a warrior class, maybe the Oathbreaker. But ... that requires a .... OK, I'll shut up. Sorry.

[Chroniver]

If you're looking for a multiclass build I'd probably go with Oathbreaker Pally 7 / Warlock (best would be great old one) 5 because of aura of hate, warlock spellslots and frightened thing from great old one.

You can dump strength once the build completes as you can use charisma for everything with pact of the blade.

Oathbreaker paladin also seems thematically the closest to a Death knight.

Only issue is that you won't get a ton of summons I think. Although aura of hate buffs them. Edit: you do get animate dead

So you could potentially combine it with a "necromancer" wizard in the party or somesuch.
You can also get some way to summon undead late in the game.

Definitely go two hander in my opinion with great weapon master.

[insta†.Nefer]

you could also multi class a lvl 5 wiz with a eldrich knight (lvl 3)
this way you can get access tgo many more awesome neco spells and the eldrich knight also cast's using intelligence + he get a pact weapon so you can throw stuff for big dmg numbers