Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Dragonborn breath attack is still bad

Currently, dragonborn is the only race that one could consider weak. Their only unique feature is dragon breath and its suck. Two d6 dies in a small cone in front of you, targets CON (everyone has a decent con in this game) and only usable once per short rest. Overall you are better off doing a weapon attack or casting a cantrip. To fix this you could implement one or more changes from this:

-Remove cool down on it entirely. Its still kinda bad but you can treat like aoe attack/cantrip if you have nothing better to do.
-Improve its DC, maybe add associated status effects to it if target fails a save. Everytime you cast it - enemy will almost guaranteed to save against it and you do minimal damage.
-Make it a bonus action instead of action. Still not amazing but at least it does not eat your valuable action resource.
-Make it a 3d8 instead of 2d6, gets additional die every odd level. Essentially a burning hands spell of an element of your choosing that you automatically upcast when you should get access to a new spell level.
-Make it so it adds twice your CON score to the damage you deal with it. Dragonborn breath attack build?
-Make it so it gets bonuses from a spell dc or/and gear with elemental damage bonuses. Im not sure it does currently.

Breath attack is pretty bad even in tabletop, but at least there the Dragonborn have other racial attributes to warrant picking them over something else.

What's comical to me is that even with mods that over-tune breath attack, its still not a better choice for your action than a weapon attack or spell just because of how damage scales and how the action economy works. The only situation where using breath attack is the best use of your action, is if your only other option is doing nothing at all.

I used breath attack once. On a group of nasty goblin children at their camp. It did something like 2-3 damage to each - they all saved against it.

Thats why Dragonborn got updated in D&D with additional abilities.
Only Larian did not implement that update.