Baldur's Gate 3: 5 Tips For Playing As A Half-Orc (2024)

A staple in the fantasy genre and iconic for being mean and green, half-orcs in Baldur's Gate 3 will allow you to role-play as a brutal martial expert. Although there is no wrong way to play a half-orc, some class and feat combinations are ideal within BG3's mechanics, especially on harder difficulties.

Half-orcs have some advantages and disadvantages during dialogue and story moments but are built for dealing damage and staying alive during combat. If you want to make sure you are getting the most out of the half-orc's unique features, then there are a lot of factors to consider.

Updated January 17, 2024 by Matthew Cochran: Baldur's Gate 3 ended 2023 with a bang, winning Game of the Year in both the Steam Awards and The Game Awards while also wining awards in numerous other categories. As more and more players pick up the game after the holiday season, there is much more knowledge about which starting choices will affect the final act of the game and where your hero can fit into the greater story with confidence. Although there aren't magic items built specifically for half-orcs, like there are githyanki and dwarves, they are no less menacing or reliable.

5 Exploit Your Relentless Endurance

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One of the most useful features of any race or subrace is the half-orc's Relentless Endurance. The first time you would reach zero hit points each long rest, you instead fall to just one. While this doesn't work with massive amounts of damage, it will save you during close fights and allow you to use extra actions.

You will want to make sure that if your half-orc is very low on health and their Relentless Endurance is available, you don't run away to heal or take cover. Instead, wait until after you are dropped to one hit point and then use your extra turn to drink potions, take the Dodge action, or even make an attack that could end the combat outright.

4 Don't Overlap Your Unique Skill Proficiency

The half-orc's additional proficiency in Intimidation is a useful trait for evil characters or for avoiding combat in enemy territory. Because you gain a free proficiency, this will free you up for picking an additional skill of your choice if you were already planning on taking Intimidation.

To ensure you don't waste the Menacing feature, make sure that your Charisma stat doesn't have a negative modifier. Otherwise, the proficiency bonus alone will make the feature almost worthless. Unless it is for role-play reasons, you will want to avoid the Soldier background, as that also comes with proficiency in intimidation, and you will start with less overall proficient skills than if you chose any other background.

3 Optimize Your Savage Attacks

As a rampaging half-orc, your critical strikes are especially deadly, allowing you triple the damage die rather than double it when you crit on the attack roll. While the odds to roll a crit means it will only happen maybe once every other combat encounter, it's enough to help whittle down the health of tougher enemies and outright kill smaller ones.

At certain levels, you can choose the Great Weapon Master feat, which allows you to make an additional attack as a bonus action after you roll a critical hit. Magic items like the Intransigent Hammer will knock nearby enemies prone after a critical hit, both making your Savage Attacks especially deadly.

2 Recommended Class Options

Because of the Relentless Endurance and Savage Attacks features, half-orcs are designed to be melee fighters. If you want to build a half-orc character that makes the most use of these features, avoid choosing classes that focus on spellcasting or fighting styles that rely on ranged attacks.

Barbarian

• Berserker

With the half-orc's Relentless Endurance feature combined with the Barbarian's average health, your half-orc character will be incredibly hard to knock unconscious. With the additional damage from Savage Attacks and the Barbarian's Rage damage bonus, you will be one-shotting most enemies that are near your level.

Fighter

• Battle Master
• Champion

While lacking the Barbarian's high health pool, Fighters get a healing ability called Second Wind, which will also make your half-orc harder to kill at the cost of a bonus action. When choosing a fighting style, avoid choosing Archery and choose either Defense or Protection for a tank role or Great Weapon Fighting or Two-Weapon Fighting for a combat role.

Paladin

• Oath of Vengeance
• Oathbreaker

Like Fighters, Paladins also have a healing ability that can also be used on your party members. They also have access to Smite spells that increase the damage of your attacks. When you score a critical hit, the damage of these spells is also doubled while your melee weapon attack is tripled with Savage Attacks.

1 Recommended Feat Options

Feats are additional abilities available to all classes when you reach levels 4, 8, and 12. Some feats will have prerequisites that make them non-viable for a martial half-orc, but most can be used to strengthen your combat effectiveness.

Savage Attacker

Similar to the half-orc's Savage Attacks feature, Savage Attacker allows you to reroll the damage dice of one of your weapon attacks per turn. While this will increase your average damage overall, you can combine it with the Savage Attacks to reroll the tripled damage dice on a crit, taking the better option.

Tough

Out of all the defensive feat options, Tough is the most efficient by directly increasing your health for each level. This feat is best taken as soon as possible so that you can make use of the additional health early on. At level 12, you will have an additional 24 hit points, which is enough to survive multiple extra weapon attacks.

Great Weapon Master

If you want to focus on maximizing the damage potential of your critical hits, Great Weapon Master will give you a bonus action to make additional attacks on crits while increasing the damage by ten. If you choose this feat, make sure it's not for a martial class that relies on having an unused bonus action, like Monks and Rogues.