Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Crowd control spells are too heavily nerfed

There are three major nerfs to crowd control spells.

1) The durations are reduced from 10 turns to 2 turns.
2) Enemies perform unarmed attacks to wake each other up from CC.
3) Enemies get to make their saving throw at the beginning of their turn, rather than the end, counter to DnD rules.

As a fourth honorable mention, we have enemies targeting casters on tactician mode, breaking their concentration.

This is bad for CC-focused casters in general but especially bad for bards, who don't really have other options until they get magical secrets at level 10.

It makes Confusion especially useless, because enemies must fail two saving throws before having a chance to act confused. Unlike most other spells, it does nothing in the interim between casting it and their first turn (you don't get advantage when attacking them, for example).

I'm not sure why Larian decided these spells needed such heavy rebalancing, but they need to revisit it.

Agree. Larian should change this. For their beloved fighters they added a lot of "special" rules to make them OP so pls. Larian buff the mages.

I’ve never found confusion to do all that much. Enemies still seem to attack and hit me most of the time even when confused.

Hypnotic pattern on the other hand is insanely powerful, with two turns of maybe half the enemies unable to do anything and whoever’s left wasting their turn trying to wake them up. 10 turns of it would overkill, even if that’s the base rules, IMO.

You also have to consider that you don't want CC spells to lock down your team for 10 turns, so separate rules have to apply to CC spells for your characters vs. enemy characters. You'd be having to reload fights pretty often and that's just bad gameplay. You have Freedom of Movement and Dispel, and both of them are melee range cast spells with significant spell slot costs that make aoe dispelling CC pretty challenging unless you break enemy concentration with Sleet Storm, which is a lv4 spell and you have to hope your caster didn't get CC'd for 10 turns to do so.

By the way, it's not just unarmed attacks. Enemies will trivially jump out of entangling vines, spike growth, and Darkness/Fog/Ice Sheet from Ice Storm, completely destroying the utility of those spells.

I think Larian has solved that problem by having enemies never (or almost never) cast these spells. I only ever recall seeing Hold Person. The only time they cast Hypnotic Pattern,