Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Difficulty way too high for story and balanced

Can understand your problems. In my opionons the concentration mechaic of D&D 5 makes the games much more challenging because the foes always try to kill my mage and so i am loosing concentration and my spells are useless. So i do not use protection spells anymore (of course i still have counter spell). Instead i am focusing on damage spells. Made a sorcerer who can casts two spells in one round which works great on tactican mode. Protection i get from potions (invisibilty etc.). So in PF:WotR it is much more easy to protect your companions because there is no concentration. On the other hand potions are not that useful than in BG3.

I can see how Balanced would be too hard for some players. I have not played Story. The game has poor tutorial popups, IMO. Anyone that does not have POE/Owlcat, EA or Larian experience is probably going to struggle on Balanced.

More like Tactician was too Easy. The only difficulty comes from how badly implemented and unbalanced some Classes and Spells are in comparison to others.


I call it "Larianization" First Turn One Shot Wins. It's never the Enemy Turn if you have 200 Actions amirite? Of course it's Lazy and can be massively improved but it's what we have atm. I trust modders too. I also don't like relying on pushing for cheesing anything. The CC Spells are also horribly implemented in the Game that makes anyone not want to bother with anything other than Cheese DPS Spellcaster.

One Positive thing i can mention is how the A.I. is vastly improved from D:OS2 Days though.

Wait does everyone just cheese the game and brag about how easy it is? I keep seeing bombs and barrels and tactician is easy.

I am playing the highest difficulty and it was SO MUCH fun, it really felt hard, survivalish. But after I met Kallach and she got medium armor and two strikes (plus 1 from rage) - it all went to bits, because barbarians are WAY too overpowered. Basically lvl 5 is a huge powerspike and the challenge from the game is gone. So I am still playing hard mode but it's not so fun anymore - tooo easy. Plenty of money, plenty of stuff, forge stuff.... Bring down the barbarian please, remove medium armor wearing possibility from the class, bring down barb health boosts. Now it's just walking around killing stuff, especially if she teams up with the Laezel. 2 strikes per turn is too much.

sorry, internet glitched hence 3 identical posts. remove 2 o them plz

I am playing the highest difficulty and it was SO MUCH fun, it really felt hard, survivalish. But after I met Kallach and she got medium armor and two strikes (plus 1 from rage) - it all went to bits, because barbarians are WAY too overpowered. Basically lvl 5 is a huge powerspike and the challenge from the game is gone. So I am still playing hard mode but it's not so fun anymore - tooo easy. Plenty of money, plenty of stuff, forge stuff.... Bring down the barbarian please, remove medium armor wearing possibility from the class, bring down barb health boosts. Now it's just walking around killing stuff, especially if she teams up with the Laezel. 2 strikes per turn is too much.

I'm not complaining about the difficulty as such. I usually need no more than one or two reloads if things go awry.
However, I still think the fights are overtuned. If you are surrounded by a dozen enemies after a cut scene, and your initiative is shite, and they all go *before* you, ending up two members down, and the other two on the brink of being eliminated before you can actually do anything, I'm not happy with it. Especially if you reload, are just much more lucky with your initiative, and, because you are acting earlier, simply waltz through your opponents. And this has happened to me more than once. You can be prepared as much as you like, but if you're just a but unlucky on your first rolls, especially initiative and sometimes boss mechanics, then it often results in a wipe.
It has actually become a bit better in the higher levels, because you can take more punishment, but it still manages to frustrate if I get mowed down because I can't do anything.

Act II introduces fights that can begin and end before your party can take a single action, requiring a reload because your party is now all dead. That should tell Larian everything they need to know about the state of their tuning of the later parts of the game. I just hope they ignore the “I never had a problem bro” Andy’s here.

I'm level 3 now and play without the loaded dice (single player). And I'm 38, so the brains are a bit tired but not dead yet, lol.
For me the story mode is mostly too easy. And the classic mode is mostly just too hard, so I have to switch back and forth basically as I try to have anough challenge but also not to die in every battle 10 times. But the battles are way shorter than in DOS2, so thumbs UP!

Not sure to whom this was targeted on, but 30 hours in Tactician and counting and I don't think I used a single barrel or throwable bomb so far.
The latter admittedly more because I keep forgetting they are an option than anything else, but still, the point stands.

It's too hard for story but definitely not in balanced mode in my opinion. I just managed to beat Balanced should not made easier imo or it will lose the tension. But in story difficulty you should go trhough the game like butter yes.

Thanks I was starting to wonder.

Ill throw in my 2 cents on this...
Ive played the entire game on tactician and the only time ive struggled was trying to obtain Everflame at the very beginning without "cheese" (like command disarm savegame scumming) - and that was mostly because i started as PC sorcerer.

Ever since ive hit level 5 and have access to twinned spell + haste combo the entire game has been a bit of a joke in terms of difficulty (which is not surprising considering how much you break the action economy with 2 hastes of 1 cast in a 4 character party) with the rare exception of hardmode encounters in specific bad spots (like talking to yurgir without evading the ambush and getting the entire party 1 shot on his turn 1 before i could do anything at all).

"Regular" boss fights like the gith creshe or Kethric/Kethrics special form were all a bit disappointing.

I did enjoy some of the rare special mechanics that tactician had to offer like the exploding mephits that summon more exploding mephits during the swamp fight (shadow druid meeting point). Buuut that was before i unlocked double haste to be fair..

I am in the camp of I'd rather it be more difficult than too easy. That said I do have a few issues with the combat AI that I find annoying that if changed would keep the combat challenging but less annoying, such as the f'n Shove nonsense. The Shove distances are way, way too far and just because the player can also do it doesn't make it less annoying to have to deal with. I'm fine with if you happen to place your PC too close to a chasm that you might get pushed off but if I place my guys well away but still get shoved 10m over a cliff it's no longer fun it's just f'n aggravating. /Rant

I've been TPKed more than once by explosion or knockback effects that sent my entire party flying into a chasm. ):

I feel no guilt for save scumming that.

Well this is a point of view from a veteran Tactician is a piece of cake, there is some encounters that made me reload but nothing that would make me reconsider party or anything?

Honestly Story mode if you are feeling its hard then it needs to be fixed because its basically the walk in the park mode where you just want to see the story rolling and not think about combat. Regarding Balanced I wouldn't touch it, in theory is for people that wanna see some combat but don't wanna optimize the character to the max?

Hope they do a RAW 5e difficulty in case they release a directors cut, no spells swapping unless after a long rest, Heavy armor Penalty, no respec and balance the encounters to be more tougher.

I think 3 difficulty settings isn't quite enough for a game with this level of depth. Balanced isn't really balanced, there's some real spikes here and there which can cause big problems if you haven't hoarded consumables. Explorer is nowhere near easy enough for a story focussed difficulty mode. Tactician still doesn't require all that much in the way of tactics. I think we need some smoothing out of the difficulty curve as well as a real story mode (it would be nice to have master tactician but that requires a lot more work and testing than an easy mode.)

That's fine, as long the blunder doesn't repeat itself.

If I may relate my experience:

I'm in Act 2 on balanced mode and I haven't had to reload in a while. However, that has been highly unusual and probably has more to do with the fact that I have been fighting mostly monsters for a while - which I could ambush with one exception - and not engaged in main story events where enemies initiate the fight.

In my experience the fights around story events (with the exception of minibosses) tend to be way more difficult than everything else, and that's for two reasons: first, the encounters are usually set up so that you start the fight at a disadvantage. Second, if the fight starts from a talk you aren't guaranteed initiative. Case in question: at one point during Lae'zel's story you're locked into a room. You can easily pick the lock, but you very much suspect that enemies are waiting outside for you so you position your party carefully, with the tank opening the door. Now if you open the door, if you're unlucky with initiative and the enemy attacks mostly hit, your tank will be killed before they have a chance to do anything.

My conclusion: the enemy's average damage output per attack is too high, compared to the hit points of our party. If it were not so, fights like these would be significantly less dangerous while, if the same logic was applied to the party, those where you are the ambusher would not be as easy. Both I would consider very desirable. I dislike very much how much your success depends on going first.

This also explains why lowering the difficulty does not help if you have problems. The problem is not you hitting the enemy not hard enough, but they hitting you too hard before you have a chance to hit back.

So I would recommend that for story mode, the enemy's damage output is reduced. For balanced mode, some encounters would profit from a rebalance if they are to fit with the rest of the game playing on the same difficulty level.

In DOS2, I was tempted to give everyone the "escapist" talent because of the dominant combat encounter design. Here in BG2, I'm tempted to give everyone the "Alert" feat for the same reason. I do not think it is good that this single element is so important. It works in games like XCOM, where everyone is automatically hostile, but in a roleplaying game it disadvantages the roleplayers who prefer to talk rather than hit, or at least before they hit.