BUILD FROM Toyhouze: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV0I0MM-hjA
The Arcane Archer is one of the most underrated builds in Baldur’s Gate 3 but it is actually one of the most powerful subclasses in the entire game, if not the MOST powerful. With Banishing Shot unlocked at level 3, you can have up to 4 targets banished while just level 3 – and that number only goes higher as you level up. And if you’ve played honour difficulty, you know how big of a difference making an enemy skip their turn can be. Not only that but the Arcane Archer has other amazing Arcane Arrows such as Seeking Arrow, which will ALWAYS hit its target like Magic Missile, Piercing Arrow for linear AOE, and Shadow Arrow, to blind all your enemies granting your team advantage on their attack rolls. And if all that wasn’t enough, the Arcane Archer has a secret interaction that changes EVERYTHING, which we’ll go over in the leveling section. To get started, choose Fighter at level 1. You’ll gain Second Wind, and a Fighting Style. Second Wind is a great use of a bonus action, healing us for 1d10+ your fighter level. It’s great because we can use it during our first turn of combat to activate Broodmother’s Revenge, granting us 1d6 poison damage to all our attacks for 3 turns. For our fighting style we’ll want Archery. This grants +2 to attack rolls with our ranged weapons. For your race, High Half Elf is ideal for Fey Ancestry so that we cannot be magically put to sleep, as well as Darkvision, letting us see up to 40ft in the dark. We also gain a cantrip for being High Elf, and I like Minor Illusion to group enemies before combat. This helps a lot with generating Arcane Acuity with an Arrow of Many targets. This is what you’ll want for ability points. We want primarily Dexterity and Intelligence. Dexterity will be important since we’ll be making ranged attacks, and intelligence is our spellcasting ability modifier as an Arcane Archer, so we’ll want that to be high as well. You can completely dump strength if you wanted to since we’ll be using the club of hill giant strength, but I like having some strength until then. At level 2, we’ll unlock Action Surge. This grants us another action and it’s amazing because it refreshes on short rest, just like our arcane arrows. Then at level 3 we gain access to our subclass – arcane archer. For your cantrip choose Guidance. This is a must-have for any party traversing faerun. If you already have it in your party, then choose Light. At level 3 we also gain 3 Arcane Shots. You’ll want Banishing Arrow – you’ll be using this as your primary means to CC enemies – it banishes them for 2 turns. You’ll also want to get Shadow Arrow and Piercing Arrow. Shadow Arrow is another great form of CC, blinding a target, which grants advantage on attack rolls against them, and they have disadvantage on their attack rolls, and the affected creature’s range of attacks and spells reduced to 3 m / 10 ft, which is the perfect CC for a target you’d like to be killing. So Banish a target you’ll kill later, and use Shadow Arrow on the current target. Piercing Arrow is great if there are enemies threatening you, allowing you to get guaranteed damage in a scenario where another ranged character would probably just miss.
