https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_HTAhqKaZ8&feature=emb_logo

Yes, in EA could probably only do this once (and I expect they add more barrels in later chapters) but the explosive barrel will be used to cheese stuff.

Thanks... I hate it.

"I think... I think that's the last of them." lol

LOL..I'm not gonna lie. As much as I hate all the barrels - that was awesome

lol wtf

What was the fier ball spam in BG1 and 2 is now the barrel spam in BG 3.

It's funny as a joke. But it's actual gameplay.

Not sure turning BG3 into a big meme is good idea.

This is pretty much why I posted this. I did not make the video but it shows you what people will do with an exploit .

BG3 is a computer game so someone will use the cheesy tactics / exploits if you let them. Do we want the reputation of BG3 to become that game with all the exploding barrels?

Yeah this is just insane. Larian games seem to always have these things going now, and I don't like it.

Reminded me DOS2, in EA you could get death fog barrel and kill Dallis at the beginning.

I would love to see Larian reduce the amount of barrels, increase their weight significantly, reduce the AoE of explosions and significantly reduce the amount of turns they leave surface effects.

I'm not sure if anyone at Larian has any experience lifting a barrel full of fluid but I assure you the big strong men working in the warehouses moving wine barrels can't just throw three of them in their pack and go jumping 20 foot crevices =P

It's not competitive so why not. And it's Larian's game, and I don't remember DOS2 as "that game with exploding barrels"

Easy solution could be to make barrels unmovable. That way they could be available for a set encounter but much less exploitable.

But you don't have to do it, if somebody really wants to place 40 barrels and blow up the goblin army why not. If you do not want that in your game, then don't do it. Why would it matter?

Oh the old you don't have to cheat, use exploits so they do no harm argument.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on that one.

It breaks the balance of 5e regardless if someone mass loads them pre-emptively.

I am not saying the game would be better without them, but giving feedback suggesting they tone them down. Unlike DoS2 we don't have phys/mag armor to soak up the extremely high amount of damage coming out of both the explosion and the surfaces they leave in their wake, and this goes for enemies as well.

And if your suggesting that people just ignore them entirely that's all good and well but the enemies don't ignore them, so you either use them against the enemy or the enemy uses them against you.

There are a couple of issues:
1) If you -can- do it, they have to balance the game around the assumption that people might do it. So you might end up with a game that's either way too easy for people that set battlefields up with barrels or way too hard for people who don't.
2) I just find the existence of exploding barrels super annoying, as a small part of why I find all of the elemental surface stuff, grenades, magic arrows, spell scrolls, etc. really annoying. It's a way for anyone to steal the thunder of people who spend their lives training to make big explosions. What's the point of my wizard learning to cast fireball if Joe commoner can chuck a barrel onto a lit candle? And he doesn't even need to use a spell slot to do it! I'm the guy who would sneak onto the battlefield ahead of time just to remove all of the barrels before the fight.

If they want to set up a fight where the barrels play an important role, then fine, have them there. I'm cool with it if it's an intentional choice about how they are telling the story. But to just have hundreds of barrels of (probably very expensive) explosive materials just abandoned all over the world feels lazy and unbalancing and it detracts from what makes our characters special.

Don't worry, they got replaced by a thousand grease/acid/fire bottles and elemental arrows. Also enemies seem to have a fetish for them.

I can't imagine the time invested in doing that. If you really want to dedicate that much time and energy be my guest. If you don't use it on the goblins they just use it on you.

As far as I can see though it's just another level of tactical involvement. It makes you pay more attention to the details around you instead of "there's my target, CHARGE!" instead of having as many traps that you can't see until you're right on top of, most of the hazards are out in the open. I'll take that any day. Especially when I can weaponize them myself.

I've seen several comments about how long these barrels/ground effects last and even if they're a 35gal barrel instead of 55, oil isn't going to burn off very quickly and a full round where everyone has taken a turn in DnD represents 6 seconds realtime. If they're that much of an obstacle carry water jugs or the create water spell to clear them. Ray of frost is great for cutting a path through fire. Combined with fire bolt you can really clear your path through most things. And should all those fail you jump it.

Tactical involvement is great, its just heavy handed right now.

It would be nice to see this toned down to just a sprinkle that makes certain encounters more memorable.



I have yet to see a single enemy throw water or jump over fire. They just run through it saying

I guess I don't really see the issue. You used your advanced knowledge of an encounter to scoop up every barrel in the act to make one big explosion to end said encounter. If someone wants to play their game that way, what's the problem? You aren't forced to use these strategies, but you can to great effect. Providing freedom like this is a great thing, it can lead to pretty awesome memorable moments or memorable fights where you use something out of the ordinary to accomplish a goal. Suggesting they have to balance the game around this is simply untrue, it's a single player game and Larian tends to encourage creative thinking like this. Toning it down seems a little stupid, because again, there is no real issue here. Ultimately DnD rewards creativity, so do Larian games, and this is a great demonstration of just that.

I haven't seen the enemy do this yet, have you? Or do you mean reactive environments, in general? Because if it's the latter, well, that's good that the enemy is smart enough to react to its surroundings and use that against you.

Isn't it dumb ? I mean, a drow priestess quietly going in the middle of a bunch of explosive barrel. Unrealistic to me. But surely the player was creative.

A game that rewards players for planning and preparation? Sounds like fun.

I don't see the harm. You went around collecting every single explosive barrel you could find in the first act and stacked them in one spot. Of course it's going to be a massive explosion capable of wiping out a small goblin army.

The only bad part about this is that you can't hide them and no army would just willingly walk into those barrels for you to blow them up with, but you can just pretend those barrels are buried under the ground.

Yes, on the very first imp fight in the tutorial one of the imps hit one of the purple barrels which succeeded in doing 2/3 of his own hp, 2/3 of both of his imp buddies who had just ran closer to attack my custom character, and a 1/3 of the githyanki companions hp.

Situations like this is why I would like to see it toned down. The AI was not smart to trade 2/3 of his teams hp for 1/3 the hp of one of his enemies.




Toning it down is due to the frequency being to high. It doesn't feel like advanced knowledge and tactics if majority of the encounters are run in shoot barrels, fire everywhere, jump over it and let enemies run through it.

What it does feel like is immersion breaking and unbalanced, and more like DoS2 then BG or DnD.

I do agree and think they could use a bit of an over hull. Making the damage output a bit less extreme would be nice. But even in the EA I am not having that much trouble with it. I used it a few times but the damage to the enemies was not that extreme. There was only one point that really irritated me and that was a particular chest with a load of barrels that killed my entire party. The damage of the barrels is way too much for just casual encounters and for the most part would benefit from not having those barrels in the first place.

My point was that the example in the video is somebody that went out of his way to set the encounter up like that. Somebody is probably going to use an exploit at some point in the game. I also believe that the barrels in DOS where heavier, you could move them but it was an effort (honestly I do not know that one for sure).

That seems like it would be more easily resolved by improving the AI, which is something I expect they'll do. That said, restricting the barrel placement to areas where their presence makes sense would be an improvement, e.g. the trader in the goblin keep and such.

I think initiative rolls can play a big part on how much damage they do. Sometimes when reloading encounters I have witnessed fights play out entirely differently. If the barrel breaks before everyones first turn and then they receive damage at start of turn, and again when they move at all, that is essentially 10-20 damage to every enemy on the battlefield.

It can completely trivialize the encounter, and sometimes its the enemies that do it to themselves. I am not even sure they target the barrels on purpose or if they're AoE effects or path block effects (I have seen ranged enemies shoot into the terrain more then once.)

DoS2 barrels were heavier I think as well, but maybe not heavy enough considering the real life comparison.

Just make the enemies run away from suspicious barrels. Explosives add an interesting tactical element. Giving the player the option to place hidden explosives and do other preparations for the siege would make more sense. Even goblins are too smart to walk into a trap like that.

I was more so referring to the player side of dealing with the effects, my experience when it comes to the enemies has been "welp guess we'll stand and wait for it to burn out... But that's been their response to grease as well.... Cleaver bastards.

That would essentially be one form toning it down. I am not sure it would be enough to make the game feel more like DnD but it is a start.

It feels like the inclusion of so much damage really disrupts the balance of the class system, and as someone stated earlier on this thread can really steal the glory from certain classes who you bring along to cast a fireball or make an explosion.

And you also had to know when and where to use that fireball, not just spam it at the beginning of all battles or every turn. I think it's more than obvious by this point that a lot of ppl wanted to have too much of D:OS in a D&D title.

That's interesting. In my playthrough it seems if they have difficult terrain but are not already standing in it they will avoid it.

However if they're already the effects they just run through it, taking additional damage, falling prone, and even dieing sometimes.

This is also why I suggested toning down the radius of the explosion and surface effects.

Everyone seems to be arguing between improving the AI or toning down the amount of barrels, but really I think both of these needs to happen. The AI needs some updating because I've seen them run through fire and acid in one go just to get a bit closer to the wizard so they can hit him, and I have seen barrels in so many random places. A caravan that was transporting alcohol when it got attacked having a single barrel of firewine sitting around? That's fine, makes sense they would have some and limiting it to only a single barrel keeps people from just nuking the entire encounter in one turn. Now if that same encounter had 3 or 4 firewine barrels, it would suddenly become an extremely short fight as a single firebolt to a barrel would basically end it.

Maybe don't tone down the amount of encounters that have barrels in them, but tone down the amount of barrels in the encounter and make sure it makes sense for them to be there. It makes sense for a merchant caravan to have some alcohol on board, but it wouldn't make sense for an oil barrel to just be sitting on the side of the road for no reason. An encounter should have 1 or maybe 2 barrels max, not 5+ barrels just sitting around.

As for the AI, they need some improvement. I can't think of a single creature that is stupid enough to just go running right into the middle of a giant pool of fire, so why does the AI just straight leroy jenkins their way through every environmental effect in the game just to hit the wizard? They need some tweaking on their targeting as well, maybe have them go after the character who is actually doing to the most damage to them or to the enemies around them rather than just running straight past the warrior who just slaughtered 3 of their friends to go flying ninja kick the wizard in the stomach? I get it, the wizard has low AC and is easier to hit, plus he can be a major threat. But unless he is actually currently posing a major threat by chucking fireballs at the enemies, then every logical thought says to target the person with the giant axe who just killed your friends and not the random dude in the back holding a stick.

Also, are these barrels made of paper? Why do they instantly explode when exposed to the slightest hint of fire? Would a well-sealed barrel even explode without access to plenty of oxygen? What cooper made these that they completely fall apart when, e.g. struck by an arrow? Decent barrels are pretty resilient.

They might feel less ridiculous if they were much more difficult to actually ignite. Maybe give an intact barrel and very slim chance of exploding when exposed to heat? Or maybe the outside of the barrel catches and it smokes and smolders for a minute or two before it has a chance to explode. They would feel like much less of a kick in the shins to wizards if they weren't so reliable.

That's a fair point, making them take a turn or two to actually explode and toss fire all over the place while giving some kind of visual cue that they were going to blow would make it much more manageable.

That's a lot more work even ( Good A.I. ), so unlikely.

Everything in proper moderation.
The mechanic is great to have, just have to be a master designer and know when.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/j9vwjc/astarion_sends_his_regards/

Exploding barrel isn't the problem. The problem is NPCs can't notice the barrels, it's the problem.

This. You have the same kind of issue in Adventure League modules if players decide to meta the encounters. In DND you are essentially engaging in a story as one of the characters, if you know the story already you can preemptively do things to manipulate the outcome. This can be things as simple as avoiding triggering a trap that you know to be there to gearing up entirely to dunk on a module you know the content of (like bring Dragonslayer sword into a kobold adventure because they're draconian and you know theres a lot of em and its the best weapon to bring)

It is painfully obvious that the person who made the video, knew the boundaries of the invading goblin force enough to scale it up the cliff to where the drow was standing. The biggest difference here is in a DND module, you dont get to save scum, so you can't really immediately reload the game and then premptively setup for what you now know is coming because you just played through it 10 minutes ago.

As far as the power of cheesing your premptive setups with an obliterating series of barrels... I'd really like to know how long it took to set that up.

If my char sucks, instead of learning how to play the class properly or build characters i'll just throw a million bottles/barrels from a cliff like Donkey Kong and call it a day. If i get hit or want support instead of bringing a healer i'll just eat all that food ( since it's even better than potions ) or rest a million times after every battle, etc...

This isn't even an exploit.

It's is absolutely intentionally put into the game by Larian. They do it with all their games, they put in a bunch of tools for players to use however they see fit and let players do clever stuff with them.

Heck, I'd allow with in a tabletop game so long as the players took the extra step to have those barrels buried.

So they want us to mod the game already?

No one is saying its an exploit, we're suggesting feedback that they dial it back a few notches and hopefully don't build act 2 and 3 with an additional 300 barrels of deathfog.

If there were three exploding barrels in the game, and you had to pick and choose very carefully where you were going to use them, I wouldn't have such a problem with it. The issue is that they're everywhere, and when you have that big of a weapon readily available all the time, it stops being a creative improvisation and starts being a crutch.

Or just annoying when you're not even trying to set them off but they inevitable get hit by a mere ember from a nearby spell and trivialize the rest of the encounter.

I think you are failing to realize that this is a world in which oil lamps and Torches are used. Large barrels of oil are used to serve the needs of many villagers. Do we need a backstory for every barrel on the playfield? an acid barrel makes less since than an oil barrel.... hell, even a water barrel makes less since with all the water sources in the game.





or maybe your char sucks because they didnt port the game directly from D&D but you are bound and determined to play a class because you think its cool, not because it's features translate well into a video game. Case in point, GOO warlock versus fiend, currently theres absolutely zero reason to choose GOO over Fiend, you get absolutely nothing from GOO whereas you get something in return for picking Fiend (blessing of the dark one). The mage hand that arcane trickster, cant pickpocket or pick locks.... maybe Thief is better because of this. Classes arent meant to be played a specific way, the game is designed for open ended solutions, which is why every character can perform the same abilty checks.... and if you want to build a character around throwing items, you will still want certain stats and class options (theif gets another bonus action, can throw two objects a round


the food is in the game so that you dont require a cleric in every party that you ever play in. I know that by giving an alternative to the cleric, yes, they do make her less mandatory. Thats only a problem if you want to be required to bring a healer in a 4 man composition

I guess that will be the reputation of BG3, A meme for exploding barrels. There will soon be videos of using exploding barrels to trivialize every encounter. Please No.

So lets state that the oil in these barrels is Whale Oil.

Whale Oil has a flash point of 230 °C / 446 °F so to get a barrel to explode, you have to vaporize all the oil, mix it with an oxidizer and have it under pressure. Just how much energy are in those Fire Bolts?

If oil was as explosive as Larian is making out, no one would ever cook with it. Yes, oil fires can happen in a kitchen but they are the exception.

I am on board with them weighing more... but lets be honest, you are making up temperatures now, we can just say Firebolt meets the requirements whatever number they may be (its magical, who are you to say magic cant just do magical things)... its a game of "can we take a real life example and complicate a fantasy world situation?"


the problem is players dont want to see other players do things the easy way and know that they had to struggle... or they feel like if the option is there to trivialize something, that they are wasting their time by not using it. We are still talking about a game, not a chore. Ultimately if they make the barrel tactic a chore, you wont see it very much at all except to make fun meme videos like this

I am the school that just because we have magic, we do not toss out physics just because, you know, I wizard did it.

OK, what about a flaming arrow. That one fire arrow can vaporize all the oil inside the barrel before it breaches the barrel and everything goes boom?

I really don't see the problem with the barrels. If somebody has time to collect barrels and win hard encounters with them - let them have their fun.

You don't have to play it that way and as far as I can tell all encounters are beatable without them.

Like, how many encounters actually feature these barrels? From what I can tell its the Goblin Feast section, and two Zhentarim encounters that are full of them.

Compare that to a long list of other encounters that don't have explosive barrels.

"Exploding Barrels" is the essence of D&D.

The players inevitably figure out a way to completely ruin and trivialize an encounter, that the DM has painstakingly planned for weeks if not months.

Well I mean, if i was playing the pen and paper version of DnD i would probably try to pull something like that off as well if I could

I mean, if we are trying to justify handing out nerfs just for the sake of nerfing the barrels, the weight is my first gripe.... its a barrel full of oil, do you know how hard that is to carry? You want to be able to move them but I do think theres some strangeness in the Wizard carrying a couple barrels of oil (cuz they only weigh 20 im pretty sure)

Most of the problem would be alleviated by increasing the weight of the barrels and making NPCs react to them as potentially dangerous. Just like a lonely bag on an airplane would make people suspicious so should barrels spreading the fine aromas of whale-oil, gunpowder etc.

Here's another viewpoint. They put those barrels around in different encounters and if you save them up, thats your choice. I dont carry those things around, I loot and sell armor and stuff. You really have to plan out that kind of cheese and dedicate time to it and if you do, then why not have a sweet payoff? Who is to say that fight isnt going to be trivial anyways? I killed all those goblins in packs of 3 while in their base rather than a big battle. My method was not as easy as the barrels but still far easier than the yuge battle becuz I took em apart piece by piece rather than all at once (I tried all at once in the goblin temple and it was silly, the computer takes forever to move that many goblins in battle). So ultimately the barrels are not necessarily even easier than my method, because I played through naturally and streamlined and didnt spend all the time setting up that epic explosion.

if people want to spend their time in collecting those barrels and setting them up for a fight they know is coming, that's up to them.
it's cool that they have the choice in this game to do so.

I personally would not spend that much time in preparation but I will also not force another person to play the game in the way I feel it should be played.

So kudos to them for coming up with that idea...but not like i'm going to use this tactic should i come to the same encounter

an empty barrel of that scale should weight 110 pounds so yes, I think the weight is also a bit off, barrels of that scale should hold 60 gallons and average weight of oil is 6.5 pounds per gallons so a full barrel should be around 500 pounds, not 20.

If they want to keep them as 20 pound, scale them down to 2.5 gallon / 10 litter kegs that people use for home brewing, that would be around 20 pounds.

I don't think anyone's complaint about the barrels is that people shouldn't be able to plan carefully and set up the battlefield a little bit. If you want to do cool things, that's great!

One problem is that the barrels are currently the -only- way to do this. It would be so much cooler if, instead of generic exploding barrels that outshine the things the characters can do on their own, if we could actually utilize each class' skillset to create interesting and varied traps that are designed for the situation. Let the ranger dig pit traps and fill them with spikes or snakes or something. Let the rogue set up trip wires and attach them to that spare crossbow to fire at people as they walk through the door. Let the wizard create magic runes that summon in giant boulders to fall on the heads of whoever steps on the rune. Let the fighter weaken the base of a wall and then push it over on some enemies when they pass by. Let the trickster cleric create an illusion to draw enemies into those traps.

There are so many cool things that you could do that can make the classes shine -and- make each battle feel different because you have to customize your traps to the environment. If you can just drop a bunch of exploding barrels into any battle, it makes all characters feel the same and all battles feel the same.

All very true and valid points, but only if you play at a table or a multiplayer game. Yes you can play BG3 with others but I think they would notice if you start collecting barrels and not sure if you can save scum in a multiplayer campaign. A single player game and a table-top with other people are two really different things. If somebody wants to save scum there single player game (or blow up goblins) they are certainly allowed to do that.

The issue is with the damage the fire does in general, also it stays for a long time. But the traps in BG1&2 where not much better to be honest. Some of them (almost) instantly killed you.

*spioler* u have been warned

Also, I did not find any barrels in the underdark. Did find poison clouds tho.

In terms of barrel size and weight - I would treat that as an abstraction just so players notice.

Realistically a barrel would probably make a bigger explosion.

But if they were to put models the size of a health potions all over then that would make the game incredibly frustrating.

As it stands now I can see the barrels from a mile away and know what to expect.

But the NPCs don't. Thats a problem. If they would simply avoid the barrels the problem would be smaller. Just have them find a route around them or set them on fire from a great distance. The explosives within could be used in crafting to build smaller mines that can be hidden on the field of expected battles

So empty wooden barrel weight 20 pounds, full oil barrels weight 20 pounds. What is up with that.

You can stack barrels up to 4 high. I was seeing if you could climb on top of a barrel, idea was to carry 4 barrels to make yourself an instant archer perch but thankfully you can not jump on top of a barrel so that abuse is out.

Definitely, if the NPC's had better pathing when barrels are around that would be nice

As much as I hate this... It was pretty funny.