Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion Player Action Points

Yes this is a great game with huge potential ....

My BG3 playtrough is on hold until Larian or modders make the player more empowered.

Played the game on balanced up to the point is chapter 1 when the player meets the hyenas that turn into kobolds ...... up to that point I had no problems with action points and enemies.

At that point I met some Kobold Hunters and they had literally 3-4 times the action points as the player. At first I thought they were using a one time perk but they did it every single turn running 1/2 way across the map and shooting my group 3-4 times from a huge distance.

What gives? Are the more boss like enemies going to have 100 action points?

I have no trust for developers and no patience for this kind of power imbalance. I could just evade the kobolds like the hint suggested but I don't want to waste even one more second with this game if I am constantly dealing with enemies with 5x my action points.

Also ....... I went through all the trouble of sending my rogue down the to underdark to get good gear and back again ..... tried to use the loot , in this case a fireball wand .... only to discover it was intentionally crippled so it wouldn't even work usefully.

Larian could have at least let me use the wand for one shot .... and have the wand break ...... Is Larian going to gaslight me the entire game like this every time I get a little ahead?


There is already a mod to increase player action points but as the game is evolving I don't really want to use it.

If a single modder can give me 2-4 time the action points ...... why can't Larian offer the same option ....... NOBODY is forcing you to use it so don't give the standard balance excuse.

Some fight requires more wits to solve, this is one of such example.

There are several ways to "solve" this fight.

You can ambush them, taking the initiative to attack, introducing your fighters to the fight one by one surprising them and you try to take out as many archer as possible.

Use your consumable. Invisibility potions, Mirror Image Scrolls etc.

Take high ground as fast as possible/sneak your way to the high ground.

You can also kite them and create a choke hold and plant cloud of daggers.

You can also trigger to talk to their Maddened leader and persuade it to attack their own subordinates, making the fight easier (you can kill her alone later).

Archer has penalties if your fighter standing next to them, making them likely to miss even if they shots repeatedly.

I don't want to sound rude, but I get the impression you rush head first into things and blame the game if that doesn't work out. Yes, the gnolls (not kobolds) are a bit of a challenge, but they are hardly unbeatable or even the worst thing you'll encounter in act 1. So you should not expect Larian to "fix" something, that is not broken.

First make sure you have a balanced party and have leveled up a bit. Level 3 is perfectly fine. Only go into this fight after a long rest so have all your resources available. You want to bring at least 1 frontline fighter who can tank a bit. A paladin with Lae'zel, Astarion and Shadowheart works just fine. Astarion is really good at dealing damage from range.

Take it slowly, either go up left first and kill the full grown gnolls, or stay down first. Doesn't really matter, but you don't want to be all over the place. If you do the hyenas first, you can kill the first with a dialogue option, try to rush down the others as fast as possible, as they will alert the others.

If you tackle the big ones, Astarion can sneak in, you can surprise them and get advantage. Once you are in the fight, always gang up on them. An enemy with 1hp left is as dangerous as an enemy at full health. If you bring Gale, grease is a very good early CC spell.

Generally speaking, you also want to use choke points. Letting the enemy come to you instead of rushing in is always a good idea and will make fights a lot easier over the whole game.

If you have problems with the fight at the cave, a dialogue can make this a lot easier. Just make sure you have your tadpole powers available.

I think you might have posted under the wrong forum.

Nevertheless, based on what you've written, it feels to me you've been brute forcing fights, which is a tactic where inevitably you will run into a barrier in any and every game. I would highly urge the usage of consumables and a well-balanced party, or otherwise changing your approach to the fight. With the caravan hyenas especially, you get a dialogue option to straight up kill that one hyena that is about to give birth, which in turn gives you enough time to deal with the rest. For the upcoming two fights, the one as you go up the hill, you can circle around to be on higher ground, and the other one, you can circle around until you can go under the hill and meet the defending force in the cave, where you can get plenty of high ground and LoS, forcing the enemies to stack up so that they can be killed with some form of AoE. Even if you play solo, you can do a lot of hit and run with a powerful damage character, as long as you make use of distance, elevation and line of sight.

Other than that, your itemization, especially for companions that are hit a lot, matters quite a bit. Having someone with especially high armour class, constitution and wisdom will live forever, while more squishy companions can play around that to deal with enemies quickly.

Alternatively, you can turn down the difficulty and figure out the game more before you turn the difficulty back up.

I generally agree with the other posters - this isn't a difficult fight, but brute forcing it and blaming the developers for your own failures isn't the way. You might consider that a lot of players think that this game is too easy on Tactician. It really doesn't need to be easier. If this fight is enough to convince you not to play any more, that's probably a good decision for you.

Some enemies have multi-attack - an ability your characters can gain around level 5-6 depending on class. Using some spells that don't directly do damage will make this fight trivial. Fog Cloud, a simple level 1 spell, blocks LoS against those ranged attacks. You can setup up some Grease or Web to slow down melee attackers.

In BG3 (and D&D 5E, which BG3 is based on), action economy is king. The easiest way to increase your side's action economy is to have more pieces on the board. At this level, Flaming Sphere and Spiritual Weapon are decent options.

Super good answer.... Thank you for taking the time.,.(no sarcasm intended)

Super good answer.... Thank you for taking the time.,.(no sarcasm intended)

Since so many people bother to answer my question earnestly I will clarify my concerns with the game.

I like to play my RPG games in real time which means no save scumming. I have absolutely no doubt that I can beat the Kobolds hunters when I know exactly what they are where they are what they can do and what their weaknesses are.

I would guess very very very few people could go into that encounter cold and not get eaten alive.. those Kobolds will shred your party in one turn.

They are all sorts of great suggestions people made and almost all of them require that you already know what's coming...

For example the suggestion to engage the Kobolds at point blank range .... It would work great if I actually had someone in my party that could hit with a devastating number of hit points.. none of them can.

The kobolds almost always made their saving throws for grease, and barely took any hit points when you blow up the grease with a fire spell.


Pretty much every spell in the game to the point I played are incredibly weak sometimes hitting for only one or two hit points. The ones that have higher pit points are all very difficult to use and often miss.


It was like the issue with the original Baldur's Gate Games 1 and 2 ... You finally progressing level to get the really good spells like finger of death only to find out they don't work on any creature that you ever encountered cuz they're all resistant to it or all can make the saving throws every time.

If I wanted to basically save scum beat each encounter like a game of chess ... I would play on tactician which I may do in the future.

The take-home message is I don't feel empowered playing this game ... And I get more than enough disempowerment in real life why would I pay for that?

But again don't get me wrong ... Baldur's Gate 3 is way better than anything I played in a long time .... That's why my playthrough is on hold until I can either get more action points or perhaps reduce the difficulty to easy.

But to be honest I found the game pretty easy up to the point where I met the Kobolds... They just seem way too overpowered for a mundane character.

Some might say I chose the wrong party and the wrong playing class as It seems being a mage is seriously underpowered.. but I would rather fail at the game then complete it with characters I hate and that eliminated two right off the bat.


Ultimately .... A computer game needs to prove it's worth to me, not me prove my worth to it.

Baldur's Gate 3 navigates this balance very well for the most part especially in the dialogue and it's depth and skill checks.

I deeply deeply distrust game developers with my time ... But I think there's a good chance I can play BG3 through and not regret it. If so it'll be the first game since Deus ex human Revolution and New Vegas.

And a very simple way that I could play through in real time is to have the narrator come in and just say "this seems like a a bad idea" and have that user configurable.

Don't say it couldn't be done because it wouldn't be very hard.

Lots of people go into these fights blind and do them first time, myself included. It is not difficult as long as you use the mechanics the game gives you. But I get the impression you desperately want DnD or BG3 to be like Diablo. Rush in, spam abilities, get loot.


Gnolls, not kobolds. You meet kobolds later on. Level 2 to level 3 is a bit early for absurd nova damage. Still, by this point in the game you already have some magic weapons e.g. the everburn blade. A paladin using holy smite or a fighter using action surge can outright kill a gnoll in a single turn. If you already have Withers you could respec Shadowheart into a tempest cleric giving you several early game very strong aoe options... and so on. Trust me on this, you are not lacking damage options, far from it.


Yeah, the game is based around dice rolls. There will always be an element of randomness to these fights. If you want to hit more reliably use stuff that can not miss, like magic missle, and try to get advantage e.g. by having the higher ground. Later on you say you are playing a mage, cantrips are weak, they are not meant to deal much damage. Did consider bringing some scrolls? There is an absurd amount of scrolls in this game.


The problem is, you have to realize several things. First of all, not every game is made for every player. I love soulslikes, so difficulty is not an issue for me, nor is dying and learning from my mistakes. Every soulslike released gets the nasty discussion that it absolutely must have an easy mode, because people are entitled to play it, no matter their skill. So maybe BG3 with its randomness, dice rolls, uphill battles, skill needed in creating viable builds, managing a multitude of combat options simply is not your style?

The second thing is, I kinda have the feeling you are not willing to invest the time needed, to play this game good. When I started, I haden't played a proper cRPG for ages and my first steps felt frustratingly difficult. Enemies mopped the floor with my character minutes after leaving the Nautilod. Now I'm complaining that the game is way to easy on tactician, as I steamroll every encounter. I still lose from time to time, but I don't mind, repeat and learn. Do I have better gear? Nope. Did I install easy mods? Also nope. But I did get into the mechanics of the game and learned to create powerful characters and get to a point, that even unkown encounters are an easy win 90% of the time.

The best suggestion for you still is, take it slowly, take the time to learn and don't get frustrated. The power curve of this game is in your favor, level 5 is a major growth in power, just keep going. And if you feel everything is to difficult, you could still use story mod and crank up the difficulty once you are more familiar with the game.


Well, mages have a rough start, always had in DnD. But you still have the option to go in with 2 fighters, it is absolutely possible to recruite Karlach and Jae'zel without having to fight a single gnoll.

+ 1 On Jones76 post. We all start out in learning mode and getting our asses handed to us. Then you get good , realize you have a VAST array of tactical options, and figure out where you are going wrong with your builds and equipment and then you just steamroll shit.

The problem is there IS a learning curve, and learning as a form of growth can be painful. So do you get better and grow, or do you walk away?

Yeah, I have to join the others in saying that you are rubbing against natural difficulty curve. Perhaps you are not using enough buff/debuff, crowd control tools. I you are struggling that would be time to take a good look at your items and spells and clean up your hotbars, if so far you were relying on a handful of skills only. I never had an issue with Gnolls (the fight by the cave is a bump in difficulty, but not to the point where I would loose), but I remember having to really re-examine my skills and inventory when fighting the enemies by the map exit near Waukeen’s Rest.

As you are playing Wizard I would suggest looking through your repertoire and seeing if your spells aren’t too one note - if every spell you memorised is resisted by same attribute, if you encounter enemies with this specific high attribute you might find it hard to be effective.

You probably have a pile of potions/scrolls. Drink/throw/cast them if needed.

Again thank you for the very well considered answers.

Yes I am rubbing against the difficulty curve of this game.
No I do not expect Larian to be perfect ... And all things considered they are a very considerate developer.

Even in the encounter I described as problematic they did give some pretty clear warnings to run for your life.

One of the responders said that lots of people can beat these types of encounters in real time first time.

I can guarantee you that at my level and the level of my companion characters with the spells that I have, and the situation. .... None of you could beat that Kobold encounter in real time first run. You would be hard-pressed to even beat it knowing where every single enemy was.

Let's look at the dynamic of that encounter. First you meet some hyenas that are in the process of morphing into Kobolds .... Sane response to this is to run for your life because there's nothing foreseeable to be gained by engaging in this encounter.

But this situation might be related to what's happening in rest the the game world, and I had and I had a powerful magic item so I decided to risk it

Because the player doesn't know what's happening and monsters are appearing right in front of you that you have no clue of their capabilities ... one must use all your strongest abilities first. Chances are most players will defeat the five or six newborn Kobolds without even a character going into bleed out.

But all your good spells and all your good abilities are gone.

Then the Kobold hunters attack and chances are they will shred your entire party in one or two turns. Your mages will die in one or two hits, and your other characters will die the next turn.

This is how this encounter will play out pretty much every time at the level I hit it. If my characters were fully rested after the hyena Kobolds ... They might do a little bit better and last four turns instead of two turns.

I had one powerful magic item at that point that I picked up in the underdark ... When I went to use it I found out that it was broken and doesn't even work. I didn't have a single other magic item.

I am merely pointing out that it is almost impossible to beat this in real time and the only real choice is to run for your life which I'm perfectly okay with. The question is how do I know when to run from my life? .. and am I constantly going to be dealing with enemies that have five times my action points?

I personally dislike dealing with enemies that have much more actions than I do. That's not the type of game I want to play and judging by the popularity of the mod "action points" some people agree.

To that point in the game I pretty much played the game in real time only saves scuming when I made the most stupid mistake. Obviously I didn't beat the phase spider matriarch first time .... But at least she's a boss character and you can easily choose not to engage her.

i think there is more where you can improve, some research on mechanics of the game should be a start, how damage is calculated, missing/landing attacks is calculated, distance, proficiencies and so on

and a short solution, just come back 1 lvl later!

Coming back one level later is probably valid advice but it ruins the flow of the game.. those characters wouldn't be there when I came back and it makes the game into a mechanical tedium ... Something which BG3 manages to avoid.

In my perfect world Larian would hire a talented statistician to model the player encounter with the AI based on all the assets in play. I would guess that the statistician could predict the outcome of any battle 95% of the time, right down to which turn they will either win or die on.

This metric could be calculated at the beginning of every significant event and a situational intuition check could be initiated... You roll the dice and the higher number you get the better you interpret the situation you are in.

A good role will tell a player that they should run for their freaking life because they're going to die if they don't.

This of course would be a completely optional feature that is only available to set at the beginning of the game.

Then no sane person can complain about it.

The message from the original poster...

Sadly I was very mistaken about this game and I was suffering from two issues happening concurrently and that is why I thought the game was in balanced.

The first problem is that I was using mods and they were conflicting and totally messing up the game. This game really isn't ready for mods in my opinion unless you only use one. Basically I wasn't getting all the proper spells and all the proper feats for my level and it made the game impossible to play. When I played the game vanilla and I counted the call Kobolds , I beat them easily because the game was vanilla and also because of the second reason.

The second reason was I didn't understand how tactical this game was because really there's no other game like it. Unless you take a fortified position at the bridge when you're fighting the kobolds they will eat you for lunch, but if you became tactically you can beat them fairly easily.

When you act tactically with the right character you can even almost beat the spider matriarch single-handedly.

So my apologies as the original post was mostly ignorance on my part

I *sincerely* advise against using mods on your first run. There is no point in changing things that you do not know or understand. If you want to feel super empowered, just turn the difficulty down to Story mode. There is no shame in this.

There are *many, many* games like this, the vast majority of them being *waaay* harder. It's just your first.

A level three Astarion in the hands of a careful player will murder that entire spider cave solo without ever taking a hit. Yes.