Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Hill Giant Strength Potions

1) The solution is to make the potions far more rare or tone them down to potions of Strength (18). The game is already way too easy.

It's a problem if the best thing you can do as a STR character is start with 8 STR instead of 18 and just give up your elixir slot (really not a big deal) to just be a super-strong character... with all your STR points invested somewhere else. Since the 18 DEX gloves can be obtained really fast too (act 1, can be rushed at low lvl) you can also start with 8 DEX (and give up your gloves slot) to just be a demigod stats-wise

IMO no Spell or Potion should last until Long Rest. Non combat Spells at best until Short Rest, everything else - 100 turns max.

As to Ability Score changing magic items - well, in BG1 one made a beeline for the 18 (IIRC) DEX Gloves :P. But there was no respeccing then (and we went to school uphill BOTH ways too!).

I disagree.

Incorporating Potion of Giant Hill to your build is just not effective, if you're maxing fighting and less camp-ing, you possibly lost content, not sure if anyone would like that.

I mean what could a 21str potion could possibly do that a +27 Str glove can't? (an item you can bee line your way to, as soon as you reach lower city).

And you're telling me you want to restock enough 21str potion enough to hold up for the entire campaign until you can speedrun to get 27str glove?

Also, you're losing the benefits of elixirs.

So why the heck you would want a 21str apart for situational thing like hauling big loot to vendor (in my case).

I think everyone could agree if the stats is your main stat, you don't want to cheese with with potion.

As I said, this is for STR-based characters. You can pickpocket ridiculous amounts of these potions in act 1, you will long rest tons of times (possible more than a regular playthrough if you're pickpocketing these potions + the mats needed for them and cloud giant elixirs). The gloves aren't even good, not to mention they are all the way in act 3. You're missing out on much better gloves by using them instead of elixirs, even if you don't care about boosting your DEX to 18. You don't need any elixir benefits other than juicing your main stat if you're going for this.

I have finished this game solo in Tactictian mode as a fighter using this method. It doens't just work, it's busted.

You know what, I never thought I'd agree with Tuco but here I am.

As for "resting too much" or whatever the argument is.... do you not play with casters? Do you not try to push the story along? Many events only happen at camp when you end the day. I rest all the damned time because of it, and there's nothing more obnoxious than being out of spell slots.

I also rest at the end of every session before I save and quit so that I don't forget to when I start back up the next time.

And then comes Cloud Giant setting Str to 27, grab that proficiency bonus and add it to the broken as hell Balduran greatsword, and nothing short of a sorc with Dribbles clown gloves can even come remotely close in damage output. 2H damage fighting in this game is so ridiculously effective because of how many paladin/fighter favored items and consumables are in the game vs. other classes. And stealing in this game is so easy thanks to Fog and Astarion with gloves of thievery+smuggler ring.

I mean, you HAD to be right about something at some point.

The potion really did not fit into this game's system, instead of tiny to zero improvement, it got 13/19 additional strength, while 8/9 point on creation that would be realocated on other stats, with unlimited supply. The result is it nullify the need of strength investment, makeing the game looks bad no matter player use it or not.

My way to make it fit into bg3 would be make it increase by but not more than (hill giant only) instead of increased to. The reason why not reduce the duration is because it would only encorage player to refresh vendor to accommodate the attrition or skip rests if per short while lootable only would encorage player to resepc and overstretch sections. Removeing it works perfectly too but it would be boring.

They could just keep the potion's benefit for athletics and acrobatics checks and disable its benefits for combat. It'd then be a utility potion for extra carry capacity and athletics/acrobatics overworld checks.

There are too many potions in general, I think.

I tend to agree with this.

My biggest problem with this particular potion is that it undermines so many builds, and it's so abundant that there's no practical reason to not use it every long rest.

Also, just to clear up an issue that was mentioned earlier in this thread, these elixirs are *not* expensive. They go for around 70 gold a piece, assuming you're even buying them in the first place. Someone else mentioned that you'd run out of money because they were in the ballpark of 400 gold. That's just not true, even when you factor in low charisma and not having someone like Wyll purchase them for you.

Yeah. So I generally do like the idea of elixirs - by giving per-long rest bonuses players have incentive not to long rest too often. However, I thought Deadfire did it better: bonuses were tied to food that we were consuming (so while there was plenty of food so you can rest whenever you want, food with good bonuses was more scarse/fiddly to get that would resting less). Also bonuses weren't as OP as they are in BG3.

Perhaps, a flat bonus to strength would be a better solution for the potion? (+3 and +5) Or would that result in it stacking with something else, making it even more OP? One could make it so only the strongest buff applies - but now we would move even closer to Pillars of Eternity system

I don't see how that would make it any "less OP".

Stacking bonuses, even in itemization, are generally considered more powerful (and abusable) than just matching a set value you can also reach by more organic means.

After reading many of the replies, I'm struggling to understand why so many people defend the current duration of this potion. These potions allow the player to invest 17 starting points in a second category and potion their way through the game without risk.

1. It's 1 hour in default rules for a valid reason. The difference between one hour and long rest, as someone else noted, is massive.

2. BG3 version of the potion exceeds what you can achieve by investing feats and base points into strength with no downside. If I could take a cheap drug that would give me all the effects of going to the gym and training hard for several hours every week....wait, no one would do that right? This is the steroids of Baldur's Gate, and it penalizes both the ai and the role playing aspects of the game.

3. As far as I can tell, it cannot be removed by anything but death or a specific potion that replaces all other potions. What happened to dispel or remove magic from Baldur's Gate II?

4. It is cheap: my first trip to the Grove is to visit Auntie Ethel and pick up three of them with my puny funds.

5. They are plentiful. Ethel restocks them after short rests. I have had 10 of them after my first long rest, which was enough to buff my lead character for the duration of the game.

6. Of course, one could not exploit the potions, but should we be forced to limit what we use because it's broken, or should we fix it? If I want to play an all natural character, I will foreswear potions entirely. But, if they are in the game, they should be implemented in a way that allows a player to use them without trivializing the difficulty or character creation process.



A fix could include:

1. Remove magic spells that have a chance to remove potion effects.

2. Shorter duration (1 hour) or until short rest.

3. More expensive.

4. All of the above.


Of course, we could mod this, but as things stand, mods are so unstable with the current patch, that risking one's whole run seems like a poor choice to fix one annoying aspect of the game. The developer should do this. If you want to have high strength that lasts all day, put points in it. As it is, using a base feature of the game feels like cheating against an AI that is already weak.

One of the major problems in 5e as a system is that we get so few feats, and that ability scores and feats share the same progression. In earlier D&D systems, feats and ability scores had separate progressions so you got both. Most 5e characters only get 3 feats by lvl 12, with Figther and Rogue being able to reach 4. Most of the good feats don't have an ability score increase worked into it, which would've made the system a lot more interesting. Increasing your strength, for example, is often effective, but it is often very boring compared to getting access to additional abilities. So much of our character is already determined by what class and subclasses we play with that having a straight stat increase be one of the optimal choices we can make is a reduction in what little freedom we have.

I think that having these items and potions available is overall a good thing, because it means that we have a bit more freedom with the few feats we get. But even then, this freedom isn't free. If I am using a strength elixir, I am not using another type of elixir, because they don't stack. If I'm using the Gloves of Dexterity, I can't use the Legacy of the Masters. And so on.

Another solution could've been to do the same thing OneD&D does and give every feat an ability score increase. This would also have made starting with 17 in your primary stat more interesting, as it would let you reach 20 with 3 feats. This would've required them to fully embrace homebrewing the feats though, as they'd need a serious rebalancing (even more than the feats already do, I mean).

Because it's a fake issue, entirely focused on expressing disproportionate concern for an expensive and inefficient solution.

No one who isn't a complete idiot is going to build a STR character with a primary stat gimped only because he can use extremely expensive consumables after every rest.
They also compete for your unique "elixir slot" with other stuff, which makes questionable at best to build your entire strategy around them when you could get the same result with a permanent stat increase.

And the problem with "fixing the duration" is that it doesn't recognize how the game work. Fuck me sideways if I want to have any expensive consumable lasting "an exact hour" in a game where

- there's no proper clock
- there's no actual pause
- timeflow doesn't stop when you browse the inventory or any other menu
- you can spend tens of minutes at any given time sorting said inventory, because it's a freaking mess.

+1 to that

I could NOT have said it better myself. Thank you

haha, they're not extremely expensive, not at all, why do you keep saying that? :rofl:

you seem to have a lot of skin in keeping these potions despite constantly saying how only idiots would use them...