Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Subclasses and Races versus Level Increase

You're right. I think the ranger is a good example of a class that is so poor that it is not fun.

Truth is Larian should be going above and beyond in every single thing they can possible.

If they think 6 quests per zone is enough they should do 7 (or more). If they think 12 companions is enough they should do 14. If they think 3 subclasses per class is enough they should do 4. And so on. Like this game just needs to be epic. It needs to bake and honestly everyone is fine waiting. Larian has the money and this game right now could be amazing. The engine is fine. The gameplay is fine. Just make the game good. Don't leave a single person feeling like they had a bad experience and we're good.

Some people want more levels. Give that to them.
Some people want more races. Give that to them.
Some people want more abilities / items. Give that to them.
Some people want more story / story diversions. Give that to them.

Give it all to us because it will repay you 10x back. It's worth it. You genuinely have a chance to make a really epic RPG and go down in history Larian, don't fuck it up.

One problem that i RARELY see anyone talking about 5e high level gameplay is the HP bloat.

What i mean by that? Look to 2e, most spells grow up at d6 damage per caster level while casters levels grow up d4 and the CON bonuses is far more limited. This until lv 9. After lv 10, you get almost no HP. Enemies has so little HP that even Deity's Avatar has about 200 hp. A lv 20 barbarian CAN have 250+ hp easily on 5e, which is enough to survive a small army of 40 crossbowmans with heavy crossbows firing at him at once if we assume average damage.. And most attacks scale way less with level, most weapons +3 aren't deadly as epic martial weapons and spells deals way less damage. That is the same problem of Oblivion. more you level up, more TEDIOUS with less stakes and less ways to challenge the player. On 2e, a lv 1 necromancer can OHK another lv 1 necromancer, a lv 10 necromancer can OHK another lv 10 necromancer and a lv 20 necromancer can OHK another lv 20 necromancer. On 5e, a lv 1 warlock has a small chance of OHKilling another lv 1 warlock, a lv 2 warlock can at best 2HK another lv 2 warlock and a lv 20 warlock can spend dozens of rounds to kill another lv 20 warlock.

Many DM's who started to DM on 5e now believe serious that you can't challenge the player on high level D&D.

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Comparing Strahd on 2e(lv 16 necromancer) with him at 5e(lv 9 caster)

Pick 2E Strahd on 2e , stats bellow. His stats can be found on the book Domains of The Dread. He had only 62 hit points.



And he could cast a lot of nasty spells. Contigency spells, Clone, Maze, Limited Wish(...), he required weapons of +2 to damage him and was a nasty enemy but din't took more than few rounds to fight Strahd. Now look to 5e Strahd stats. He no longer has any of his nasty spells. The unique nasty spell that he has is Cloudkill and cloudkill on 5e is a minor annoyance, while on 3.5e, can kill a high level barbarian in few rounds or severely destroys his CON, lowering his saves and hit points. On 5e, he is just a lv 9 magician capable of casting a single cloudkill per long rest.



However, he has more than twice his hit points. That means that a encounter with Strahd is no longer a deadly encounter that lasts few rounds with high stakes. Quite the contrary, is just a long fight with no lethality. A fireball from a lv 10 arcane caster could deal 6~60 damage on 3.5e, or 33 average damage. Each lv up is more d6 damage. While on 5e, a fireball only deals 8d6 damage or 28 damage.

That said >

• Average Fireball damage on 2e -> Takes 53% of a LV 16 STRAHD hp
• Average Fireball damage on 5e -> Takes 19% of LV 9 STRAHD hp.

My guess is that high level mobs in average takes dozens of more time to kill/die on 5e than on 2e. Considering that I an comparing a high level "boss" with a "mid level". In fact, Fireball caps at 10d6 on 3.5e, Cone of cold, 15d6. On 5e, the difference of fireball to cone of cold is miserable 2d8 damage.

Is similar to Oblivion that at higher levels, the damage numbers grows a little bigger while HP pools grows exponentially higher. A Strahd fight on 2e would be something tense where the party will try to flee, kill or die in few rounds. On 5e, would be a hours long slog.

Yeah I can definitely see this as a problem. But then again, when I look at how many fireballs to kill Strahd I can see why 5e did this. If we use 2e numbers, you could use a wizard/fighter and kill him in a round. Maybe this makes combat a tad too quick and there wasn't much to it? I never played 2e so I'm not sure if this is the feeling you get from it though.

On theory, yes, he can """die""" in one round to a delayed blast fireball. However, he has magical resistance AND good saves that needs to be dealt, is immune to weapons weaker than +2, has a lot of skeletons and a contigency of spells. Contigency of spells allow him to insta cast 3 spells when a condition is met. Eg - When with less than 10% hp, he could summon a horde of skeletons, cast a cloudkill and teleport to his coffin.

On 2e, vampires are also not insta destroyed when they have less than 0 hp.

Did you played BG2? they become in mistform and run towards their coffin to heal. You can fight then on chapter 2 and 6. And they also has a lot of nasty abilities, like inflicting negative levels...

A situation "I dealt massive damage to him, now he is on mistform, and summoned a bunch of buffed skeletons harder to turn before teleporting using a contigency and fight his skeleton army inside a cloudkill would be very hard. We need to deal with his skeletons and find his coffin before he can regenerate and re attune his spells is far more interesting than controlling and attacking every single round for long hours. The first remembers me about a vampire novel. The second of a mmo..

More is not always better.

I was really struck by a recent RPS interview in which level cap wasn't commited to, but the designer mentioned that with less levels covering more content they can better design content without player running into content that is way too high level for them. And that's something which has been bothering me a lot in recent RPGs - be it D:OS1&2 essencially linear progression due to spikes in power, P:K wild swing in level of enemies you can run into within the same zone, or PoE1&2 and how easy it is to outlevel the content.

BG1&2 didn't have that problem. And that's because how slow leveling was. You had a lot of freedom in BG1&2, but you get a direction and you have to go out of your way to run into a content which is really too hard for your characters. If you run into hard encounter it might be 2 or 3 level too high for you - not 8 or 10. Even so such encounters were intentional, special, and were properly set up narratively.

My main dislike for D:OS2 and Kingmaker is lack of brevity. While game size can be a good marketing tool, it matters not if quality of the content is poor. People call Kingmaker a second coming of BG1, and I understand why, but I think they undersell how good BG1 content really was. Pathfinder seems to be picking up some steam now, but I am nearing 70 hours of playtime. Comperatively, BG1 completionist playthough with an expansion took me less then 45 hours. Even if Pathfinder has equal amount of good content as BG1, padding it out with tedious design, unnecessary systems and boring locations doesnt' make it better. Nor does it help that it's companions are talking a lot, while having an equal amount of depth as pretty much silent archetypes of BG1. So rather then slap more companions, spend more time on companions you have. Deeper rather then wider.

Fighters are better as multiclasses up to levels 3~6. They get feats, extra attack and action surge (possibly best feature in the game) very early, but are underpowered in later levels. Also Champion might be the worst subclass by a long margin.

Wizards are not as powerful in 5e as they were in BG. All spells don't scale unless you spend a higher spell slot, and in this case they only get 1 damage dice per slot level.
Also the most powerful spells such as Time Stop and Wish are severely dumbed down and have tons of restrictions to use.
And the damage a Wizard can deal with spells is easily surpassed by a Rogue or Paladin.

They have superb utility and crowd control spells tho.

Oh definitely. A wizard or caster is fundamental for any party.
But he went from a nuker in BG2 to a utility/CC specialist in 5e. And that's how it should be, you have other classes that specialize in killing.

In that case you'll be pleased to hear that WOTC apparently has been working with Larian to address some of the concerns ranger players have with the class.

In this video (18:20) it sounds like they're going to do away with the favoured enemy and natural explorer features, or at least adjust them so they no longer are overly situational and unfit for video game adaptations.
It seems like it's going to be more about your preferred playstyle, but we'll have to wait and see what this actually entails from a gameplay perspective.

With all due respect, they cannot make the class worse than it is(for a videogame). Right now rangers have the (dubious) honour of being the only class voted "worst class" and "unfuniest class" 4 years in a row in D&Dbeyond official pools so I have high hopes to see what they´re going to do with the rangers.

As a environmentalist guy who played rangers and druids in many games from pathfinder to Neverwinter to Pool of Radiance I am crossing my fingers.

Subclasses and Races, please add undead @_@ in DoS2 just awesome

I hope that they make at least archery great. I mean, Baldur's Gate 1 had all types of cool arrows to chose from. Allowing rangers to craft custom poisoned arrows and giving some things from 3.5e like multishot can bring variety to the table.

Solasta created some custom subclasses for their rangers, it seems Tactical adventures` devs were also dissapointed with the class (the other is the official hunter)

Marksmen

Heirs to the high elf archery traditions of the old Empire, these are undisputed masters of their art and the deadliest ranged combatants on Solasta. Their specialized training includes many different techniques:

Fast shooting, to react to opponent moves with a deadly shot.
Close quarters combat, to remain efficient at close range and avoid being cornered by melee combatants.
Arrow recovery, to avoid running out of ammunition.
Poisoning arrows, to defeat even the toughest enemies – although high elf historians deny that this was a routine tactic of the Imperial ranger forces.
Rumors have also been heard of rains of arrows, so far without proof.


Shadow Tamers

Used to wandering the desolated Badlands, these rangers know the lore and languages of darkness, traps, and the underground world. They walk without fear where others would hesitate to tread.

Simply put, a shadow tamer is at ease when others are not. The numberless hazards of the Badlands include darkness, monsters, rough terrain, bad weather, and chaos. Shadow tamers take all of these dangers in stride.

Heights, depths, darkness, monsters: none of these bother them. In fact, they make them deadlier. In the monster’s den, they are the greater monster.

More subclasses and subraces over levels. Two main reasons: Implementing quality content for more levels is likely *much* more resource intensive than adding a variant class/race. I still feel confident there will be an expansion to the game taking the main character to level 20. So yeah, both sugar and honey baby!


That is a half-truth at best. Wizards are IMMENSELY more powerful in many regards. Low-mid level Wizards were previously crap unless you kept resting to memorize spells, and then they were just barely okay. 5e spellcasters have strong scaling damage cantrips, can cast in full plate armor (and shield with proper feat), have more health and better attack etc. You can multiclass a caster magic missile specialist that can cause 700+ damage in a single round for instance (2 fighter, 1 hexblade warlock, 17 evoker wizard). This is immensely much stronger than any BG-original Wizard from level 1 to 20.

In past editions wizs have a lot of "save or suck" spells. You fail the save, you die. No refunds. Some of them were even area spells (wail of the banshee, horrid wilting, circle of death, etc) so wizs and casters in general were (luckily for players) toned down in 5e.
They had more variation on defensive spells, some of them astoundingly effective (Mantle, protection from magic weapons, spell trap, simulacrum, stoneskin, Absolute immunity, plane shift, etc).

Also all mages had access to different types of metamagic, not only sorcerers, and metamagic were not limited by your sorcery points, you can cast them as long as you have spell slots. You also had "spell sequencer" and "contingency" spells you can prepare before the combat.

They are still arcane powerhouses, but a little less than they use to be. I do not say that´s necessarily bad tho.

As far as wizards, or mages in general go, I hope they don't put out crazy damage. I would like crazy damage, under normal circumstances, to be saved for the rogue. It's kind of the whole point to half of the rogue's kit. Also the rogue can't cc well or do a ton of utility stuff unless it's an arcane trickster, which doesn't really count here. So I want the rogue to have the big boy numbers and 0hk if anybody can, not my wizard.

Except that a single finger of death could kill a enemy with 666 666 hp..."he is immune to death magic", then flesh to stone. And could cast 5 wishes per long rest at higher levels, necromancers could on 2e make the enemy save with - 8 penalty or die instantly with Finger of Death ( -2 from FoD + -2 from specialization + -4 from greater malison) and could put 3 FoD in a chain contigency and cast all of then meaning that the enemy needs to do 3 saves with -8 penalty or die. On BG2, 3 skull traps in a sequencer can means 60d6 damage in a single instant.

And enemies has way less hp back on 2, to the point that deity's avatar had about 200 hp... Also, you are comparing a pun pun build with a pure wizard.

Making up excuses why spellcasters aren't OP in 5e by countering how they always could be brokenly OP. Haha predictable as always. Your 2e wizard can kill someone not immune around your level around 50% of the time at the best (much lower chance at higher level with proper gear), whereas my 5e wizard will kill anyone not immune 100% of the time. Either is way, Wizards are brokenly powerful if built right. Something I don't have a problem with as long as they don't step on too many toes.

Nothing wrong using a multiclass build, especially if it doesn't sacrifice even 9th level casting ability to become godlike. The sequencers of BG2 was silly icing on the top, you could use them defensively and/or defensively to be immune a reminder how bad Bioware was at balancing their own game (made for some exciting mage on mage battles though!). Skull Trap and Sequencers were AFAIK pure Bioware inventions, but your combo was fairly useless against the ultra-powered enemies which were immune to just about any damage dealing magic. I think I reserved my sequencers to defeat immunities and for defense - offense was never an issue.