Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Need a bit of advice

I believe so.

First of all it seems to be a nerf to high ground which I appreciate (I still think it maybe too powerful, but it's definitely better) - so if you attack from highground, but enemy is far far away, or concealed in darkness it will just be normal roll - no advantage, and no ranged sneak attack.

I didn't have too many problems with using my sneak attack (aside from the issue mentioned above when attacking enemy engaged by another party member), but it requires slightly more preperation and stricter positioning. I found it rather impractical to try to get sneak attack out of advantage in melee combat, "flanking" is far easier to achieve, but they need to make it more reliable.

If you have at least one factor that would apply disadvantage to your attack roll, and at least one factor that would apply advantage to your attack roll, then you Do Not Have Disadvantage On Your Attack Roll. Your attack roll is a normal roll, made with neither advantage nor disadvantage.

You can apply your sneak attack under two different conditions. These conditions are separate and you only need to satisfy One of them, not both. The conditions are:

1) You can apply sneak attack if you have advantage on your attack roll.

2) You do not need to have advantage on your attack roll, and can still apply your sneak attack, if there is a creature hostile to your target within five feet of it (usually your ally), as long as you do not have disadvantage on your attack roll.

This means that:

If you have a factor that would impose disadvantage on your attack roll (such as being at long range), AND a factor that would grant advantage on your attack roll (Such as having your target lit up by faerie fire), AND your target has one of your allies threatening them... then You CAN apply your sneak attack, because you Do Not Have Disadvantage On The Attack Roll, and thus satisfy the second option for applying sneak attack.

(Once again, I suspect there might be a language issue between us here, Rag - let me know if this is still not making sense to you, no offence is implied)

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As for the teleporting goblins... Larian wanted us to use their high ground mechanic a lot. Then a lot of players did. Then it turned out that doing so made the AI fail to pose any kind of threat, because it couldn't deal with it. So then Larian added in special "enemy Only" tunnels that the AI could use to negate, at will, the mechanic that they encouraged you to abuse in the first place. It's apparently "Working As Intended".

sigh
Wow. It turns out that Advantage from high ground is powerful. Combine it with the fact that some high ground areas can only (easily) be reached via jump (largely a player ability) or other teleporting spells, and high ground becomes even more powerful. Who would have thought?

This is incorrect if you have an ally adjacent to that enemy. If you have Advantage from high ground, and Disadvantage from a far away enemy, then you're attacking at normal (single d20 roll). If you have an ally adjacent to that enemy, you should be able to get sneak attack because you're not attacking at disadvantage.

For sneak attack purposes, you should interepret "cannot have disadvantage" as "cannot have disadvantage on your final d20 roll" instead of "cannot have any sources of disadvantage."

This was source of my confusion ...
I believe i understand now, thank you for surely exhausting explanation it was most welcomed.

Ah! If course. Didn't think that the same rule would apply to ranged sneak attack. Meh, so nothing really changed.

That was exactly my suspicion. Distance calculated from center of the hit-boxes for both ally and enemy, instead of edge-to-edge. I haven't tested it enough though, but I definitely got the impression that I had those issues with larger enemies in the game.

It's deliberate - there are now 'goblin holes' that allow goblins to change levels without going the long way around. I guess Larian was tired of the party seizing the high ground and cheesing the fight.