Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback [DESCRIPTIONS] A lot of spell/feat/skill descriptions need severe improvements for beginners

I started playing the game around 1-2 weeks ago and had that feeling during the EA already and it might be one of the only things that is genuinely frustrating/bad.

There is a CRAZY amount of either poorly worded/wrong/misleading or flat-out missing descriptions that can have severely negative impacts on gameplay.
I don't know how often I went out of my way to check the wiki or youtube to see what a spell does before picking it because the description was lacking or not there without casting it.

I overall don't mind being able to chose between simple & detailed descriptions of spells depending on what you prefer, but if you couldn't check online or knew the spells already you had a hard/impossible time not making mistakes just because the info is hidden.


Couple examples:


Warding Bond:

Its main description doesn't tell you that you will receive 100% of the resisted damage and you can only find that info by observing it or inspecting the condition.

They should just add the line that you can read in the condition that tells you that the resisted damage is redirected to you in the main ability
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Spiritual Weapon:

Its main description doesn't tell you that it lasts 10 rounds or what kind of weapon you can summon & what they can do or with what they scale & that you can only summon one at a time.

It should state that its attack scales with your prof and ability & list the weapons in yellow so you can at least inspect them to read their HP/AC/Attacks etc as you can't do that when picking the spell as well as include a warning that you can only summon 1 at a time & when trying to summon a second that it lets you know that you will dismiss the first one.
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Invoke Duplicity:

Doesnt state that the stats of the illusion & that it is immobile + also misses any range/effect indicator which makes it very weird to use as a beginner.
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Concentration in general:


Is something every player has to engage with but isn't explained anywhere properly and missing completely from the tutorials page.
Tracking concentration, especially when you aren't currently in control of that character is very difficult to track and easily overlooked leading to unintentional concentration-breaks.
Casting a spell that requires concentration while already concentrating on a spell should give you a warning that you will end your currently existing one before casting the second spell.
That can also be very annoying during cutscenes when you don't remember what character does & doesn't currently concentrate on something, especially with stuff like guidance during checks when you afterwards realize that you totally forgot that your cleric that just casted guidance on your rogue to make the lockpicking easier now stopped concentrating on Shield of Faith and you lost a spellslot.
Even the tooltip of concentration is incorrect, it says you can cast only 1 spell at a time while it should say "maintain" because you can very well cast 2 spells with concentration in one round & the only thing that mentions concentration being able to be broken is "might be broken when they take damage" and that is the maximum info you can get in the game when going out of your way to inspect the concentration condition without any further explanation like "this is the range of damage can/cant break your concentration based on your ability roll + all important bonuses"
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Shove/Throw:

Completely missing from the tutorials too.
No info on how much weight you can shove/how much would be required to shove & the same for throw range/weight, you just have to guess or trial & error.
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Obscured/Cover:

To this day I couldn't even online find a proper explanation of what does & doesn't provide what amount of coverage or how lightly obscured vs heavily obscured impacts your stealth roll


Max range:

Not covered in the tutorials while also not being explained anywhere that & how ranged attacks further than your viewable normal range works or when it starts/stops.
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In general, all of these issues pose significant challenges for newcomers and are resolved through trial and error or heavy reliance on external sources. It's only reasonable to expect the game itself, especially its descriptions, to adequately state at the very least their basic bits of important information.

Couldn't agree more. For people familiar with 5e, there are a ton of changes that this game just doesn't explain or, like you mentioned, explain poorly.

I didn't even realize ritual spells were properly implemented. When you're choosing new spells for a wizard, none of the spells have the ritual tag. You only see the ritual tag when it's already in your spell book.

I have noticed this as well, and I haven't even made it past character creation. I mentioned this as well in my post about how frustrated I was with character creation. The lack of information is frustrating me to no end.

Came here to report the Warding Bond description, too.
That's info you shouldn't let out. It literally got a certain Cleric incapacitated for me and it took me quite a while to figure out why that happened.

I am inexperienced with dnd rules, as are almost all of my friends playing this. There is a lot unexplained that I wish had better descriptions or options to hover over a key word and get more explanation.

There are many more incorrect or non-existent descriptions and name designations:

I have the same issue, many times when I look at something (potion, spell, ...) there are quite a few unanswered question. Duration of potions (and other effects) is one of those "quicksave and try" kind of things that should really be obvious from the description.

Funnily, just after reading this post I stumbled across a ring with Warding Bond. The missing information you folks mentioned is actually there, just hidden behind another tooltip for reasons unknown

Yupp!

Tons of stuff is "quicksave and try" while it seems like it should & often times would be extremely easy to just include a few lines of text that explain it OR actually are already in the game but hidden in a sub-selection of a spell OR condition that it causes.

You could maybe even make a creative argument that these descriptions could be revealed after using something like a potion that your character has yet no information about which would be cool, but as of right now it just seems that there are a TON of missing but VITAL infos that our character should absolutely have infos about & you have to save&try until you know more OR you will actually just flat out miss a lot of stuff accidentally.

The good thing is that the vast vast vast majority of these issues can easily be fixed and don't require crazy changes besides copy&pasting some text that already exists.

Same here, after more than 100h of gameplay I actually found out about ritual casting by accident and it is VERY weird that it doesn't have the tag "Ritual" so you could unintentionally discard it when choosing a spell to learn etc.

I definitely agree, even as a very experienced played in DnD 5E there are deviations, and Im more than ok for balancing or just a different take but it would be nice to know and not find out the hard way. Especially for making decisions with non-prepared spell casters that the choices are a bit more set in stone. I save before every level up now.

Another good example would be wild magic, I dont think they really give you any sense of how that pans out while picking the subclass. This is likely something that got back burned cause the community can fix it easy enough on their own by making a resource. The game is polished enough elsewhere for me to not mind but lord help me if y wolf companion gets stuck one more time... lol