Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Spellcaster Need Plus to Hit Equipment (Spoilers)

Spoilers:

As best I could find in chapter one there is only one item that improves spellcasters chance to hit: The warped headband of intellect.

This will add plus one to hit for any wizard with an intelligence below 18.

There are no other items available. This leaves spellcasters at a disadvantage. Physical damage dealers have many plus one weapons at there disposal. Should they chose to up there primary stat to 18 that gives them a plus five to hit as apposed to plus four for casters.

That's a bigger boost than it sounds. Wisdom, charisma, and intelligence based to hit users could really use something to help keep up with the physical damage dealers.

Here's hoping for items such as wand of the war mage or such to give the spell casters a bit of item parity.

I think the headband of intellect is meant for rogue and fights, so they can take the eldritch knight and the arcane trickster and be as good as the wizards.

You are right that to balance things out they should add objects that help all the classes. Not just +1 to hit, but also magical robes (I found just 2), more belts, objects to set other attributes to 18, etc.

But balancing loot is complicated. Right now I think rogue have it best. Even the magical weapon you craft is designed for them.

As for fighters, most rare weapons are two handed. So fighters who want to be duelist, have worse options. And clerics are severly handicaped.

I dislike the idea of items that set a specific stat to a fixed value.
It makes your stat distribution meaningless or players dump stats because they know where to find this item.
Like somebody creates a fighter with dumped int and takes eldritch knight at lv3 because he know where to get this headband.

I prefer the 3 E method were items give a bonus to stats you have.
A "headband of intellect+2" would have the same effect as a weapon+1 for a fighter, but it does not make your stat distribution meaningless.

But spell casters get so many other cool toys.

Not in this EA. Maybe at other time or in parches, but right now, there are no good items. There is one rod sold by the hag that is ok and improves saves. But that's about it.

In d&d there are nice objects for spellcasters, bug they aren't implemente here.

If you dislike them, don't use them. Back in BG 2 these items were added because you had to roll stats. MInmaxing characters is really not how you are supposed to roleplay, but since this is not a DM-led adventure there must be a method of giving an upper hand to severely underpowered characters. Imagine if you could only play characters over 90 points. Some people may be ok with it, but some wouldn't. Now, these items were always completely optional, so if they annoy you just feed them to Gale, but don't ruin someone else's fun.

Well, I think the band is cool. But the OP is right about other classes needing also similar objects to balance things.

For example, the ogre gloves would be nice for clerics. Or the dexterity gloves. But those objects are quite powerful.

Actually, in my case, Lae'zel always misses, my mage is perfectly fine. Btw. magic missile, as far as I know, always hits.

And the spells are quite unbalanced, you just need to find the right ones. For example, in the case of mages, I noticed that grease can take out several enemies at once. Already applying grease makes them fall down and in subsequent turns they may fall down again. You can also light it with fire, dealing additional damage.

And that's just a level 1 spell. There are lots of such little combos.

There is a great post that disects spells. Laezel doesn't fail that much if you understand positioning. You need to look for high position and flanking.

But the way encounters are designed, they favor ranged combate and the use of barrels.

magic missile is the best spell in the game.

100% hit rate and you get a neck in the under dark that literally double the damages. making the wizard the most powerful class in the game.

you don't need any spell check nor 20 intel

Clerics and warlocks doesn't have magic misile. Besides, as explained in the other topic, magic misile fails sometimes. It is a bug, bug it is still there.

On the other hand, an eldritch knight can wear the band+amulet and use magic misile + being good at melee 😉

I was so annoyed by the unreliability of spellcasters hitchances, I used Gale only to lit people or ground up with that non-spell slot using fireball.

So that someone could throw an oil or smokebarrel in.
Now THATS what I had call a highlvl fireball spell.
And it has a nice hitchance too.
As in - always a hit, it seems.

Agree casters should get acces to spell foci items that offer a plus to hit like the martial classes get plus to hit(and damage) weapons... in 5e they seemed to want to make cantrips an available equivalent to a martial class attacking with their weapon... do away with the lame(imo) wizard who ends up mostly using a crossbow in combat to conserve spells... not to mention items like this do already exist in the books...

Don't like some of the, to me, undesired affects they arbitrarily added to some spells as what some kind of imply are a trade-off...

No justification for not currently... there will be str and dex items ingame eventually i have no doubt... one spell or item in EA won't change this either...

..and items that can raise any stat up +8 pts are horrible imho and have no place in the game... thats artifact level magic for total lowbies... horrible precedent, stuff like that is what makes me a little nervous where they are planning on taking the game...

I found spellcasters to be just fine. And wizards are obviously going to get really powerful as the game progresses to higher levels.

Clerics actually have a ton of great equipment
Ring - that adds bless when you heal someone
Gloves - that add resistance to all physical damage when you heal someone

And there are a bunch of cool simple weapons for clerics.
Mace that adds 1d8 necrotic damage
Mace that applies faerie fire
Axe that applies fire/burning
The shattered flail
And a couple of cool spears if you don't want to use shields.

Speaking of spells - due to being brought up many times - my opinion is they need to stop having level 1 spells be used in 2nd levels (or subsequent spell slots) to up their power. Perhaps they changed the rules in 5E, but in previous editions the spells just scaled up as you leveled and didn't take up a higher spell slot unless you added a meta-magic feat to it. Did this change? If so my apologies.

Ummm...there is one item for wizards that is totally OP.

This is 5e rules.

Yes, this changed. Now many spells can be upcasted by using a higher level spell slot -- a sort of inherent meta-magicking if you will -- to have greater effect (and some, like Counterspell, need to be upcasted to counter higher level spells).

Damage cantrips now improve with levels, however, about every four or five I think, and gain more damage dice.

Ah, okay. Thank you, LodurOfTheSquids and Dexai. I can see the reasoning, but can't say I still don't prefer the auto-scaling of the older editions. At least cantrips can make up for the some the loss to versatility. Anyways, thanks again for the explanation. It is appreciated.

I hate this idea, and I guess you don't really know and understand D&D.

The 18 int item is way too powerfull and I can't understand why we should have such abilities at level 3 on more characters/abilities......
18 is nearly the maximum, I would hate that my characters could have so powerfull abilities so early in the game.