Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Lack of difficulty nearly ruined it for me

Even on Tactician... the game is just too easy outside of maybe a few specific situations. This was without cheese and without using the most overpowered builds (I didn't use Paladin at all).

There are two main reasons this hurt my enjoyment of the game. The first is the obvious one: Not enough strategic depth to the combat. I felt like I had to kind of "gimp" myself by often just charging into fights without any setup. I also really tried not to use things like Speed Potions, Haste, and other powerful consumables unless I felt like I might be in trouble. Just using Speed pots can trivialize tons of fights. Same goes for sneaking and starting off by surprising the enemies. Long Resting is ridiculously overpowered and you could rest after every fight if you wanted to.

The second reason is what really bummed me out. Using a full party allows you to steamroll the game, so to make it feel more balanced I had to go through the game with my custom character and only one or two other companions, one being Karlach, who I was in a relationship with. So I missed out on tons of potential interactions and dialogue with my other companions. It's a shame, because I love the characters and the writing.. I want to travel with a full party so I can experience as much of it as possible. From a story perspective, I would like to replay the game making different choices and using other companions, but the lack of difficulty makes it too boring. I guess I could really gimp myself by being underleveled, using low-quality gear, etc, but I don't find that appealing at all.

The problem I see is that the player deals too much damage and even bosses die before they can "get going". A lot of them also use their first turn to do some kind of buff or action that doesn't really amount to much. Raphael will sometimes summon a minion, which basically gives the player another free round of attacks on him. Most of the bosses would die before even getting a chance to use their signature moves. For example, I have no idea what Gortash is even capable of outside of casting Dazzling Ray. He used some kind of ability which allowed Bane to power him up, but died right after that. Even without pure damage builds, a lot of them can be CC'd/disabled too easily.

Finally, I don't think I am that amazing at this game. From what I've seen of others using some of the most powerful builds and tactics, the strongest enemies can be defeated in 1 or 2 rounds.

I would beg Larian to add another difficulty level in/rebalance things, but I can't imagine that is a priority for them when there are still bugs to be fixed and potential money to be made with additional content in some form.

I wouldn’t say tactician is too easy if it’s your first time playing .

For me my first playthrough on “balanced “ was way harder than my last as a lone wolf on tactician as at that point I know every item that I need for whatever build I am going for, know exactly which encounters are easier to do them first for the exp and which strategy I need for any of them.

All in all the game wouldn’t be so easy if Withers got deleted and we couldn’t respec any day any time based on OP items.

Like once I get gloves of dexterity form crèche I can just respec and dump my dex to 8 then use the 6-8 points I get from that to put anywhere and make myself even more OP.

And then when I get Legacy of the Matsers I can put dexterity points back and rebalance .

If they remove Withers the game will become alot more challenging

Hi, we already have a long thread on the difficulty (or lack thereof) of tactician difficulty.

I would suggest joining in over at https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=922878.

Wait... you're beating the game on Tactician and claiming it's too easy, while I'm still getting TPKs on Balanced.

Same. I started to get really bored with the mechanical side of the game when I noticed how little care there was put in encounter design and overall balance. I got the perception that I was playing a badly homebrewed version of the system by a DM that gave the ruleset a cursory glance, decided that they were more interested in story telling and worldbuilding and came to the conclusion that the combat side of the game didn't really matter and challenging his players would be detrimental to the experience. I went out of my way to not touch anything I considered overtly broken and it was still ridiculously easy up to a point where I would have had to intentionally misplay encounters in order to come close to losing.

Self-sabotage should never be a requirement to make a game feel challenging on its highest difficulty assuming a reasonably competent player.

And before anyone mentions it, the difficulty mods don't fix what I consider fundamental design issues. For instance, core balancing mods that adjust spells or feats so they work more like they do in 5e, such as Haste only providing a limited action, wouldn't affect me at all because, as I said, I don't touch mechanics I consider broken. So installing any of these mods would make the game feel about the same, with the only difference being that I can now use those options without breaking the game even further. And bloating their health and increasing their damage doesn't make the game more strategic and give enemies access to abilities that they should have based on their 5e statblocks.

I'm not going to spend my time playing Minecraft with the difficulty of the game. That's the job of the game designers and they failed. It would be equally ridiculous to expect a person that takes issue with the game's story to just keep installing mods that fix shoddy writing. This isn't DIY game development. I'm not some battered Bethesda fan that factors community patches and a mod list that is larger than the combined length of all Wikipedia articles into their assessment of the game.

The game is too easy once you reach level 5. From there it just gets easier and easier because you gain so much power each level compared to the enemies. You also quickly over level areas just by playing the game which is kinda lame. I never found myself below an enemy in level besides outliers like a boss that's supposed to be much higher than you. I'm playing with a group of friends and yeah it's just really easy. We are trying to decide if we should play with an difficulty mod or what. Long resting is too op so we try not to prepare too much before battles now. We just hit level 8 and haven't had to restart once on tactician despite sometimes running into fights totally unprepared.

Divinity seemed much harder for some reason despite the combat system being more forgiving.

D&D 5e is designed around resource management (Long Rest) and Bounded Accuracy that limits how powerful PC's grow.

BG3 ignores both design principles. It allows you to rest whenever, showers the player with powerful new abilities, magic items and consumables, in addition to overpowering individual common features like Shove and Stealth.

For the game to play better and be more challenging, Larian should figure out a way to get closer to the ruleset they are using.