So I did a few combat encounter testing. Mostly I was intrested if I can beat the game w/o using any magic item potions scrolls spell abilities. I could kill all the memorable bosses and encounters even Raphael.
But there was 1 boss that maked me say maybe it's not possible. Ansur the dragon. I could bearly beat from him down 100hp(and he have around 600) and my 4 man team was almost dead. Than the genius AI kicked in. The dragon just flyed or jumped into the pit.
And I got even more shocked from this than from that fact that he basically murdered his own myrmidons. This is no joke that dragon could be impossible to beat w/o any magic. If the AI wasn't so impossible stupid.
The design of the boss fight is good and intresting. The defense of that dragon is unique. Even if I could hit him with 90% success because of the low ac. He had good resistance and a huge amount of hp.
I think we need encounters like this in the game. Other bosses encounters are so bad and the have 0 strategy no prepared spells no armor class or hp to be challenging. In my personal opinions the designer of Ansur has my gratitude.
My only problem was the ridiculous stupid AI. I don't understand if I trow the tadpole into a see or a pit it's jumping back magically but the flying dragon will die and do suicide. Makes no sense.
Any player can make the game more difficult by either creating a less powerful character, not equipping the better weapon or armor, ot even reducing the size of the party from four to three or less.
I take your comment because it's the last, but a lot of other people are also suggesting similar things. IMO it's a misunderstanding of how game design works. We are asking for another difficulty mode, because tactician is too easy for veteran players, and some people answer "well, you should just stop using this, and this, and this, and don't play like this"... In summary, saying "the game doesn't need another difficulty mode, you just have to refrain yourself from playing well." Nah, it's not how fun works.
It's not like there was just one exploit we should refrain from using. A lot of abilities, spells, items, etc, are OP. And it's totally ok, because it's good to feel powerful, we just would like a difficulty where enemies are OP too. Now that I'm finishing the game, I think that just buffing enemies HP would be an easy but very welcome tweak. Of course a lot of other things could be done, but just that would be fantastic. Because in my case, fights are too easy because I usually kill half of enemies before they can take any action. And even bosses, I discovered on youtube that Raphael or Ansur have nice reactions when they reach some point in the battle, but I never saw that in the game because I unleash everything on them on turn 1 and they are dead on turn 2. And please don't say "you just have to not kill the bosses fast". Yeah, as a first draft of the "super-tactician" mode, just more HP would be nice
Well i really hope the radio silence is because they are working on this problem +fsr xbox and split screen fix. And not because they are addig Halsin a new Horse form to do some new romance stuff. Or saving Scratch or adding ripper doctor from cyberpunk to change race and gender.Or dye Wylls hair to pink.
it's there any mod to increase the difficulty? I have never installed a mod before but would love to give it a new try on my necromancer since I faceroll all encounters.
I played game on self-made Tactician+ difficulty and it was more interesting in such a way: - No consumables in combat allowed (potions / scrolls / arrows / bombs) etc. - No buffing elixirs and weapon coatings allowed. - Potential sparing of enemies that I did not think deserved to die - for example, I tricked Hag's Masks in Act 1 to pass through them (which led to necessity to fight them alongside the Hag) and knocked all of them out during her battle instead of killing them (since they were just mind controlled pawns) or for example managed to knock out all of Flaming Fists in Wyrm's Rock Fortress instead of killing them (since they just tried to protect their "Archduke"). While that does not sound difficulty increasing, it actually is - you need to manage attacks and especially offensive spells much more effectively to not accidentally kill targeted enemies by them, especially since many of the spells can RNG crit.
As such, if you want to have increased difficulty in pure unmoded game, you can play with such and other restrictions.
As for the topic - I agree, adding 4th difficulty could be nice.
Here is why I think tactician is to easy part 9-10.
Originally Posted by Harry7T
Trying to solo run this game or any cRPG is just miserable. Game is pretty easy especially when you have your 4 man squad set up. Aside from act 1 Anders unloading smites, theres nothing I found threatening. Encounters definitely need a mechanical upgrade.
The real problem is that the attention is here instead of the gameplay and combat. Omg even Elon Musk bothering with this. That's why we have only Journalist difficulty and that is why devs are focused on shaving animals making mirrors dye hair's .
I've tried replaying the game multiple times but the difficulty and how boring the combat is because of it is one of the biggest things that makes me drop the game again. It reaaaaaaally doesn't help that the combat is also set in stone, the fights are all '' solved '' and just become tedious.
Obviously this applies to most games, but when there's no danger involved it kinda just gets ZzZzzzZzz... I really dunno how much worse it must be if you're a min-maxer lol, because I didn't min-max at all in my playthrough and attempts at new playthroughs. I don't think I even used a single speed pot it just simply wasn't ever necessary there was never a point where I looked at my inventory and went '' omg I need to use something now ''.
Put simply, Larian's insane power creep, homerules, magic items and potions laying everywhere is the main issue.
THERE ARE TOO MANY MAGIC ITEMS AND POTIONS TO FIND IN ACT 1 ALONE, let alone the rest of the game.
To put into perspective, going by tabletop rules. A party of characters between levels 1 to 4 is expected to received a grand total of 11 magic items. 9 Minor and 2 Major.
Minors are basically one-use potions, etc. And on that levels you get 6 common, 2 uncommon and 1 rare item.
Major are basically permament buffs like: weapon+1, but not armour +1. And certain other items.
So, a party between levels 1 and 4 can expect to find, for example:
-Bead of nourishment x4, feather token (basically potion of feather fall) and a mystery key (5% to open a door, then it disappears) -Potion of Greater Healing and a Potion of Hill Giant Strength x1 -Scroll of a level 4 or 5 spell slot. -Cloak of Elvenkind and a weapon +1
You get the idea.
In act 1 alone, we find dozens of magic items, laying basically. You can BUY THEM. This alone is pure idiocy. You don't go delving into dungeons, so that you can buy magic items from any merchant alone.
And that's the tip of the iceberg. How is game supposed to be hard, when you can stack the odds in your favour so damn much? Let alone with things such as broken Haste, etc.
Any mods out there that REMOVE items? Ill I can see are mods that add more junk and powerful items.
There is a brilliant BG2 mod that does just that, make magic items RARE and unique; just one copy for everything. And removes unrealistically put magical stuff at various locations.
It just reminded me of the bowl of goat's milk that old Winthrop used to put outside his door every evening for the dust demons. He said the dust demons could never resist goat's milk, and that they would always drink themselves into a stupor and then be too tired to enter his room..
Adding another difficulty wouldn't really alleviate the vast discrepancy between options that already exist in the game and fix the busted action economy. As the game goes up in difficulty those options will just become more and more mandatory so we're left standing with the same issue we're already dealing with which is that most of the difficulty in this game will have to come from how willing the player is to self-restrict. Tactician in itself is also an increase in difficulty that doesn't make much sense given 5e as a system since it screws around with things like bounded accuracy. Yes, enemies are more of a threat if they can hit you more and if you can hit them less but that doesn't make encounters more strategic and interesting. Larian could just replace every enemy in the game with a blob of goo that has 1000HP and one-shots the player and that would certainly make the game more difficult but I really don't see the point in doing this. The game is really held back about using spellcasters and enemies that utilize CC. Most of the encounters in act 1 and act 2 are basically just comprised of creatures running at your party and performing some variation of a melee or ranged attack. This is also one of the reasons why martials built for pure offense come off a lot better in this game than they do in 5e because they don't have to go up against that many hostile spellcasters that will target their weak saves. A couple of additional enemies here and there, a spellcaster in a group of enemies that didn't use to have one, there is so much that can be done to make any encounter vastly more difficult without touching enemy stats at all. Now obviously, stats are still an issue because the power of an optimized party gets exacerbated by some magic items and feats which means that enemy HP just can't keep up with what the player can put out.
My overarching point is that the balancing effort has to come from multiple directions. Broken stuff available to the player has to be put more in line with the rest of their options, encounters need to be redesigned to utilize more than just enemies hitting you with basic melee/ranged attacks and the stats of enemies need to be adjusted to counteract the general baseline the player is going to have in terms of damage and defenses if they put a decent amount of effort into optimizing their party so even if every party member has a really solid build with decent magic items the player is still required to be strategic about how they approach encounters without being able to bruteforce everything.
Adding another difficulty wouldn't really alleviate the vast discrepancy between options that already exist in the game and fix the busted action economy. As the game goes up in difficulty those options will just become more and more mandatory so we're left standing with the same issue we're already dealing with which is that most of the difficulty in this game will have to come from how willing the player is to self-restrict. Tactician in itself is also an increase in difficulty that doesn't make much sense given 5e as a system since it screws around with things like bounded accuracy. Yes, enemies are more of a threat if they can hit you more and if you can hit them less but that doesn't make encounters more strategic and interesting. Larian could just replace every enemy in the game with a blob of goo that has 1000HP and one-shots the player and that would certainly make the game more difficult but I really don't see the point in doing this. The game is really held back about using spellcasters and enemies that utilize CC. Most of the encounters in act 1 and act 2 are basically just comprised of creatures running at your party and performing some variation of a melee or ranged attack. This is also one of the reasons why martials built for pure offense come off a lot better in this game than they do in 5e because they don't have to go up against that many hostile spellcasters that will target their weak saves. A couple of additional enemies here and there, a spellcaster in a group of enemies that didn't use to have one, there is so much that can be done to make any encounter vastly more difficult without touching enemy stats at all. Now obviously, stats are still an issue because the power of an optimized party gets exacerbated by some magic items and feats which means that enemy HP just can't keep up with what the player can put out.
My overarching point is that the balancing effort has to come from multiple directions. Broken stuff available to the player has to be put more in line with the rest of their options, encounters need to be redesigned to utilize more than just enemies hitting you with basic melee/ranged attacks and the stats of enemies need to be adjusted to counteract the general baseline the player is going to have in terms of damage and defenses if they put a decent amount of effort into optimizing their party so even if every party member has a really solid build with decent magic items the player is still required to be strategic about how they approach encounters without being able to bruteforce everything.
I 100 percent agree with this. The laziest way to add "difficulty" is to just pump up the health pools and +rolls of the enemies (they arguably do this already in vanilla game when they need to give you a boss to fight.)
Unfortunately, I think that is exactly what's going to happen.
There's two legit ways of increasing difficulty. The first is adding more mobs to encounters, in particular spellcasters.
Spellcasters utilizing CC would be great...except that Larian has inexplicably nerfed CC even on casters, making the durations shorter, giving more favorable saves (you have to essentially pass two save rolls for confuse to do ANYTHING), making jump an easy way to get around ground-based CC, and making shove an easy way to snap an ally out of a CC effect. So even if they add spellcasters that use CC against you, it's nerfed, and there's tons of ways to get out of it *built in*, to say nothing of all the magical items you can get to help you with it as well. Still, it could help.
But the other thing they'd *need* to do, and which I absolutely don't see them doing, is...simply nerf the items. They give you far too many magic items, that are far too strong, far too early in the campaign. Some include absurdly broken OP mechanics (looking at all the +damage per missile you can stack on MM.) And this, I don't ever see them doing. And if they don't, that's simply it: They will not be able to create a new difficulty that actually *feels more difficult* without severely inflating monster stats.
So that's it, IMO: One way of increasing difficulty is severely nerfed so that it adds far less difficulty than it should, and another way of increasing difficulty I don't believe they're ever going to change. So inflated monster stats it is.
I kind of wonder what would happen if they created a mode where there was literally only enough camp supplies to rest twice per chapter. See what that did?
They'd also have to rebalance partial long rests because those restore half of your spell slots and hitpoints. Getting half of your resources back is already good enough. They'd also have to adjust how camp events trigger so players that play in that mode won't be missing out on story related content.
I personally think the best method to encourage the player to not spam long rests would have been to have an event system that triggers on long rests that progresses the state of the world and the frequency of how often these events trigger gets tightened the higher the game goes up in difficulty.
So for instance, if the player doesn't manage to resolve the grove situation after 2 long rests it will automatically get raided by Minthara. If they don't resolve the Hag questline after 3, then Mayrina gets kidnapped. It would also encourage players to rotate through their party or occasionally set up party compositions that are not dependent on long rests in order to handle a situation that would automatically pan out in an unfavorable way. A party consisting mostly out of martial characters can push further for longer because their extra attacks aren't dependent on a limited resource while preserving the spell slots of spellcasters for the big fights.
That would Be cool but to tell yu all guys the Truth.. i dont beleave they will ever add or improve on anything in this game anymore.. the fact is that has almost a Mounth that they went silence and are only recieving Praise Non Stop from evrybody.. they will just Fix what is broken and Move On like any other company nowadays.. so just Cut in Half the expectations for anything new in this game becouse in my opinion they already moved on and dont give a F. for us anymore..RS and Trust me the deception will be less if yu dont expect anything from then anymore..hauhauha Thats where im at with larian at the Moment.. dont trust nor beleave in anything they say guys.. (and if yu think im been too Harsh they are at the moment Like CD Project Red was when they release Witcher 3 and yu all know how so much praise ended up doing to then.)
I hope this is not the case. But I also have this feeling. And it looks actually bad that all those post are true BG3 is a sex simulator. I still refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that Sven lied about the difficulty. Maybe I am a fool but I hope not.
But I definitely don't believe in them. To do the huge rebalance patch. If someone watches my feedback videos I show multiple ways that the game is to easy and broken. Combat encounters are dumb enemy's have no spells defense strategy. And I actually was amazed that some big bosses like Ansur the dragon just do suicide and jumping into the casm. And the part of that I don't even rest in my run is pointing out that isn't really the biggest issue. I just rested to move with the storyline. And when I was forced to do it.
But there is a chance that we can ask for the lazy way. To just add another tier. That will not hurt the Sims players. And I can respect that some ppl like this aspect of the game.
I need a challenge in the form of actual D&D rules. Outside of the Larian cheese, the worst offenders in making the game too easy are unlimited resting and spamming Help in combat, even against bosses. How can they win if they can't keep anyone down? And it makes for the most anti-climactic combat I've ever seen in a video game.
Late game also feels like a sudden rush of OP magic items that just make all previous progression seem like a joke.
I hate how free respecs make the game feel, too - your choices are meaningless. You don't have to bother getting good or learning the rules, just respec to whatever's good at the moment.
Core rules difficulty, and an effort to make the game play more like D&D, please.
This is why I think tactician is to easy part 11-12.
I beated easily act1 w/o dieing no respec after I changed rouge to paladin. Only sleeped to progress the story and when the game forced me. No prebuffed ambushing or overused divine smite actually I rearly used it. No save scuming. Full solo no save scuming no tadpoles at all. I went with all bad choices bugs.No shoving bosses hard encounters to casm. I showed some broken items like the halberd and the breast plate but after I gived the feedback dumped them.
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