Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Make Sneak Attack Passive

Which is precisely what I addressed in the following lines.

I honestly don't care. I wouldn't find even the situational fringe cases you are describing meaningfully "game breaking", anyway.
If you use a haste potion chances are your extra attack wouldn't come from stealth anyway, and even if that was the case for a peculiar mix of factors I wouldn't really mind.

Why does it always seem like your comments are cranked up to 110%. It's a bit annoying and unneeded, but the most atrocious excuse imaginable, and completely misguided, no.

It's definitely an rare scenario, but it should be common enough (especially if you're playing certain builds) that it should be considered from a design standpoint, especially later in the game as I had mentioned.

Note:

1) Advantage is only 1 of the triggers for sneak attack. Recall it also triggers when you simply have an ally engaged within 5 ft

2) Advantage doesn't always need to come from hiding - highly reliable "advantage" buffs will eventually come into play like Greater Invisibility or Barbarian/Rogue multi-classes (Reckless Attack), which makes EVERY one of a Rogue's attack viable for sneak attack.

Sneak attacks triggering is very common - I'd argue that the need to spread / spread out your attacks is the more occasional element.


I agree 100% this isn't really needed at the lowest levels. However, based on the current pace of leveling (i.e. how fast we hit level 4), I suspect in the full game we'll blowing pass the EA cap of very early, even within the current EA content. This is why I really like the Toggle suggestion as suggested by a few other posters here - as it will scale better with the late game.

Sorry, it was a bit aggressive. By the same token, I'd say that 'Always' is an exaggeration in turn ^.^

I'm a harsh critic at times, but I usually vet myself back to the 'firm but reasonable' side of that line. I didn't get around to doing so that particular time, and to be honest, I simply could not, at the time of writing, think of a worse excuse, so from my perspective both 'completely misguided' and 'most atrocious imaginable' were quite accurate. If you can think of an excuse for doing that that a developer might reasonably make that is, indeed, even worse and of even poorer quality, I'd be intrigued to hear it, though I fear we'd be getting off topic by then ^.^

What about the other super important part of a sneak attack?

from the PHB:
"You don’t need advantage on the attack roll if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it, that enemy isn’t incapacitated, and you don’t have disadvantage on the attack roll."
am I missing something or it's not in the game? because right now I think the only way to reliably use a sneak attack is by standing on a hill and use a bow because of Larian's stupid height advantage.

You're looking for your target to have threatened condition as it says on the tooltip in the game. And in addition to that and standing on a hill you have true strike, guiding bolt, faerie fire, bless...

From what I've experienced and read, threatened doesn't always work, making sneak attack feel glitchy. Also high ground advantage is right now the most reliable form of advantage and is bordering on broken. Other forms have issues. True Strike works best before combat starts. Guiding Bolt requires someone else to hit beforehand. And Faerie Fire is a concentration spell which is problematic with terrain breaking concentration. Also Bless shouldn't be allowing Sneak Attacks to happen since it gives a d4, not advantage. And other sources of advantage such as Familiar Help Actions are missing right now.

Sneak Attack right now needs a lot of ironing out, but it also depends on advantage also getting ironed out.

That's basically the "flanking" we talked about so often.
I would be all for it as a replacement for the stupid "free backstab" we used to have or the silly "hide as a free action without a check" we are left with now, but as far as I remember it was considered an optional rule, so many consider it divisive.

The "you don't need advantage if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet" rule is implemented in the game and has been from day 1. Though most people never noticed because until now backstab was a thing. After the new patch I've read some reddit posts reporting a bug that it doesn't always behave as it should, personally I haven't run into any problems yet. I hope they fix it, it's one of those things that are super important for rogues and also make the game feel like legit D&D.

"Flanking" is a different thing. It's an optional D&D rule (that a minority of players use at their table) where you get an advantage on your melee attack roll if you've got an ally who's also in melee with the same enemy but positioned on the opposite side of them. It's a callback to a similar rule back in 3rd edition D&D that many people enjoyed at the time, but in the context of 5E it's a little overpowered. BG3 doesn't currently use flanking rules.

I'm not sure if it's currently true, but in earlier patches the "threatened" radius (>5 ft) was larger than the "adjacent" radius (<=5 ft). A character who is threatening wouldn't necessarily get an opportunity attack against said enemy if the enemy moved away. I presume that the same holds for sneak attack: a "threatening" ally isn't necessarily close enough to allow sneak attack to function.

Can anyone confirm that the threatened radius is still >5 feet in the current patch?

There are cases where you can indeed be threatened by an enemy without being adjacent to them. You'll see it with monsters that have attacks with 10' or even 15' reach (giants, bigger-sized dragons, etc), or characters wielding melee weapons with the Reach property (such as halberds). According to D&D rules, if you're threatened and you move outside of the threatening enemy's reach, they get an attack of opportunity on you (unless you use Disengage or a similar ability). If the game doesn't behave like that, it's either Larian homebrew or a glitch.

Also keep in mind that doing an opportunity attack cost your reaction, of which you only get one per round. So a creature that already used their reaction doing something else won't be able to do an opportunity attack this round, even if one would normally be triggered.

@agouzov Yup I took that all into account. I'm specifically taking about medium characters, no Reach, and still having your reaction.

I'm claiming that, at least in earlier patches, "threatened" was implemented incorrectly as having a radius larger than 5 feet. My archer, standing close (~7 feet) to a goblin that still has a reaction, could be threatened (attack at disadvantage), but could also freely walk away from the goblin without provoking an opportunity attack. Thus a rogue wouldn't get sneak attack because the archer isn't technically adjacent to the goblin.

That's my theory anyway. That Larian implemented sneak attack depending on true character adjacency (<5 feet), not the "threatened" condition.

Gotcha. I agree, that does sound pretty unfair.

But note that sneak attack requires an enemy of the target to be within 5 feet (1.5 meters) of them regardless of their reach. At least by the rules.

It's buggy at the moment for melee range. The main instance being if the enemy had been hit with a spell.

It also seems Larian interpreted "if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it" as two enemies of the target are threatening it. Which usually means two character within 5 feet with melee weapons out.

lol well you got me on that & ya, I gotcha.

Right is a totally different thing. But regarding the no "you don't need advantage if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet", I tried really hard to do it to no avail

Threatened has definitely been changed (for the better), but I can't tell if it's still greater than 5 feet. It seems like there are more conditions to be threatened than just proximity now.

Have you tried having an ally attack the enemy before the rogue? Sneak attack is definitely buggy right now, and I usually make sure my fighter attacks before the rogue so I can get it.

Well, in S*****a I've regularly found my rogue in a situation when she had to risk AoO from an enemy with several HP remaining because I didn't want to waste 5d6 sneak on it, instead trying to move to a thicker one and put the sneak to a better use. Because there is no such toggle / choice there, and first hit in a round delivers sneak damage, whether I like it or no.

Sure, it's more difficult to see in BG3 with its unconstrained hide, and it's level 4 cap thus sneak being 2d6 at most, but still. Toggle would add to the dreaded hotbar clutter, but it seems the least of all evils, as of now. Maybe if Larian will add some modifier key (Ctrl or Shift maybe) to toggle sneak dynamically, that would be better; barring that, well, yeah toggle it is.

The whole point in dual wielding as a Rogue is that if you miss with your attack you get a second chance to get that Sneak Attack damage in. BG3 doesn't give you that and it's incredibly annoying on top of the already wierd implementation of SA.

The next patch should be a UI overhaul that would also fix issues like this. Get the weird melee/ranged Sneak Attack abilities off the hotbar and just apply the damage when possible! Visual feedback of sneak attack / not sneak attack on mouseover on target. Give us a toggle to disable SA for some super rare case where you need to finish off a 1HP enemy first and then move to SA something else.

Other UI related stuff:

- Off-hand attacks need to be next to main hand attacks, not on the other side of the screen in a hotbar in a random spot between a random potion and an ice arrow
- temporary actions granted by spells or abilities need to be where other actions are, e.g. Activate Witch Bolt needs to appear next to "Attack" and not buried somewhere on page 4 of a hotbar
- ammunition needs to be sorted under a Quiver tab
- potions and consumables need to be sorted under a Potion tab
- special abilities need to be sorted under an Abilities tab
- actions and bonus actions should be sorted clearly
- spellcasting requires it's own UI that shows all prepared spells and has an efficient but unobtrusive way to upcast said spells

NWN for example had many selectable abilities but still kept sneak attack as a passive, same with the original Baldur's Gate games.