Baldur’s Gate 3: Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer Build

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Human Made

Penned by Sarah Arnold

Sarah loves RPGs, sandboxes, and sims. She's played every expansion of World of Warcraft and WoW Classic and spent hundreds of hours modding and playing Bethesda games.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Hsu

Sorcerers in Baldur’s Gate 3 are born spellcasters, drawing upon their own innate magic to power their spells. Where wizards get their abilities through dedicated study and clerics gain theirs through the blessings of their deities, a sorcerer’s potential is stored in their very blood. The actual source of that potential is determined by your choice of subclass, so today we’ll be going over the best build for a Draconic Bloodline sorcerer in Baldur’s Gate 3.

As the name suggests, Draconic Bloodline sorcerers inherit the awesome power of dragons to fuel their magic. Fittingly, the Draconic Bloodline subclass works best with fire spells, so this build guide will focus on making your Fire Bolts and Fireballs do as much damage as possible.

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The Draconic Bloodline Subclass

The Draconic Bloodline subclass specializes in a type of elemental damage of your choosing. You’ll also gain some tankiness in the form of additional hit points, armor class, and elemental resistance.

Here are the features you’ll gain through the Draconic Bloodline subclass:

• Draconic Resilience at level 1 grants you extra hit points for each level you gain as a sorcerer, as well as raising your base armor class to 13.
• Dragon Ancestry at level 1 gives an affinity for an elemental damage type of your choosing. This will make your spells of that type stronger and provide you with resistance to that damage type. You’ll also learn an extra level 1 spell according to your chosen ancestry.
• Elemental Affinity at level 6 allows you to add your Charisma modifier to the damage for spells of your chosen type. It also gives you the chance to spend a sorcery point to gain resistance to any damage type you cast.
• Fly at level 11 gives you the ability to fly on demand without using any spell slots.

Here are the spells you’ll learn for each Dragon Ancestry option:

• Black: Grease
• Blue: Witch Bolt
• Brass: Sleep
• Bronze: Fog Cloud
• Copper: Tasha’s Hideous Laughter
• Gold: Disguise Self
• Green: Ray of Sickness
• Red: Burning Hands
• Silver: Feather Fall
• White: Armor of Agathys

For this guide, we’ll be choosing the Red Dragon Ancestry, so we gain affinity for fire damage as well as the Burning Hands spell.

Race and Subrace

For this Draconic Bloodline sorcerer build, we’re going to double down on our dragon ancestry with the Dragonborn race. The Red, Gold, or Brass subrace will give us fire breath and additional fire resistance. Of those three, you can choose the color that suits your preference, as the difference between them is mainly aesthetic.

That being said, we recommend Gold or Red, since the Brass Fire Breath is a column instead of a cone. If it helps you decide, Gold and Brass Dragons in the Forgotten Realms have traditionally been good-aligned, while Red Dragons tend to be evil.

Ability Scores

Charisma is the sorcerer’s key stat, and you’ll want to get it as high as possible in order to increase the effectiveness of all of your spells as well as your crucial social skills. After that, we’ll focus on Constitution and Dexterity to successfully pass all those nasty saves you make in combat – especially Constitution for those Concentration checks to maintain certain spells.

But it’s worth remembering that you don’t really benefit from odd numbered scores. A 17 is effectively the same as a 16, so it may make more sense to put that extra point elsewhere.

For our purposes, we’re going to go ahead and put 17 points into Charisma and 13 into Dexterity. We’ll even them out later through feats.

• Strength: 8
• Dexterity: 13
• Constitution: 16
• Intelligence: 10
• Wisdom: 10
• Charisma: 17

Background and Skills

Your choice of background and skills is largely a roleplay one. You should choose the skills that will be most useful to the way you want to approach the game.

As a sorcerer, you can choose from Arcana, Deception, Insight, Intimidation, Persuasion, and Religion for your two skill proficiencies. It’s a good idea to take at least one conversation skill – Deception, Intimidation, or Persuasion – to use in dialogue checks.

If you want proficiency in any non-sorcerer skills, you’ll have to get them from your background. The Urchin background is a great choice if you want to be able to sneak around as well as pick locks and disarm traps.

Metamagic

As a sorcerer, you’ll choose four Metamagic options over the course of the game, two at level 2 and one more at levels 3 and 10. Here are our suggestions for which Metamagic is the best to learn as a Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer:

• Twinned Spell: This option allows you to double up your single-target spells by spending sorcery points equal to the spell’s level.
• Careful Spell: Sometimes one of your allies will be standing in the middle of a prime Fireball location. This option will let you blast away without hitting them, and it only costs one sorcery point.
• Quickened Spell: When you combine this with Haste, you can cast three Fireballs in a single turn. Your enemies will never know what hit them. It does cost three sorcery points, but that’s a small price to pay for wanton destruction.
• Heightened Spell: When you really want to be sure that your Fireball hits, this option will let you spend three sorcery points to do just that.

Spells

As a Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer, we’ll want to take advantage of our elemental damage affinity with some well-chosen spells of that type. Unfortunately, you will have a very limited selection of spells as a sorcerer, and you won’t be able to change them except when you gain a level or respec. As such, choosing the right spells is paramount.

You’ll want a good spread of spell levels and a few utility spells to ensure that you have all of your bases covered. The spells listed below are the ones that we recommend.

Cantrips

• Fire Bolt: Since we’ve chosen Red for our Dragon Ancestry, we’ll want to take advantage of that extra fire damage, even with our cantrips.
• Light: A very useful cantrip that can help you avoid being at a disadvantage in dark places.
• Mage Hand: Another useful utility cantrip that will make you glad you have so many cantrip slots.
• Bone Chill: An alternative damaging cantrip for foes who are resistant to fire damage, or when you want to stop an enemy from healing.
• Blade Ward: You have so many cantrip slots, you may as well use one for defense.
• Ray of Frost: A third damaging cantrip? Why not. This one does cold damage and reduces the target’s movement speed.

Level 1 Spells

• Burning Hands: (Red Dragon Ancestry) You’ll gain this spell automatically through your Draconic Bloodline. Unfortunately, it requires being in melee range, but it does a good amount of damage for a level 1 spell and can hit multiple targets in a cone.
• Chromatic Orb: Sometimes enemies will be resistant to your fire spells, or they’ll have some other weakness that you want to capitalize on. This is a very flexible damaging spell that fits nicely into your limited spellbook.
• Magic Missile: When you simply must hit your target no matter what, or you want to pummel multiple enemies, Magic Missile gets the job done.
• Shield: With this level 1 reaction spell, you can say “no thanks” when an enemy tries to hit you, temporarily boosting your armor class by 5.

Level 2 Spells

• Scorching Ray: More fire damage for our arsenal. This spell works a bit like Magic Missile in that you can hit a different enemy with each ray.
• Misty Step: This spell can let you make a clean escape when you get cornered or gain the high ground for an attack with just a bonus action.
• Mirror Image: A great defensive spell that can increase your armor class by up to 9.

Level 3 Spells

• Fireball: This is what we’re here for. Take that bonus fire damage and go blow up some monsters.
• Haste: This spell will let you or an ally double your movement speed and actions for as long as it lasts. That’s huge. What’s even bigger is that you can combine this with your Twinned Spell Metamagic to have it up on two targets at once.
• Counterspell: Your enemy thought they were going to cast a spell and wreck your day. But they’re not, because you have Counterspell.

Level 4 Spells

• Wall of Fire: It’s more fire, but this time, it’s a whole wall of it. Great for controlling enemy movement.

Level 5 Spells

• Hold Monster: With this spell you can make a creature of any type totally useless for up to 10 turns. With Twinned Spell Metamagic, you can do that to any two creatures.

Level 6 Spells

• Arcane Gate: Teleport your entire party across the map, as many times as you want until the spell ends. Given the importance of positioning, this is pretty useful.

Feats

As a Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer, you’ll want to max out your Charisma first and foremost, and then look for a feat or feats that will enhance your fire damage. Here are our recommendations:

• Ability Improvement at level 4 to even out those Charisma and Dexterity scores.
• Elemental Adept at level 8 will help with all that pesky fire resistance you come across.
• Ability Improvement again at level 12 gives you two more points in Charisma for a total of 20, which is the maximum.

Equipment

Early game gear options for pure spell casters are somewhat lacking in Baldur’s Gate 3, but there are a few amulets that you can keep a special eye out for in Act I:

• Amulet of Misty Step can be found in the Defiled Temple beneath the Goblin Camp, and can let you cast this very useful bonus action spell without using a spell slot.
• Amulet of Elemental Torment can be purchased from Arron in the Druid Grove, and will let you do additional fire damage by standing in fire (which you are resistant to).
• Silver Pendant can be looted from a skeleton near the Druid Grove, and allows you to cast the very useful Guidance cantrip.

Later in the game you can look for items that increase your fire damage, like a Necklace of Elemental Augmentation or Ring of Fire.

One of the best robes you can get in Act II is the Potent Robe, obtained from Alfira the bard in Baldur’s Gate as a reward for rescuing the tieflings in Act I. This robe increases your cantrip damage, your armor class, and your hit points.

Join the High Ground

We hope our Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer build guide has helped you create the strongest caster in Baldur’s Gate 3! If you have any questions, leave a comment below, and be sure to subscribe to High Ground for more useful guides!

Happy gaming!