Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Shove should be an action

Wouldn't making shove count as an attack, or simply another thing that breaks invisibility, also fix this?

Well, shove originally was an attack action, so if they restored it to consume an action instead it would fix it. As performing any action would break invisibility as it is currently programmed into the game.

It would fix it but it'd also heavily alter the class balance. Ranged shoving attacks are already better than the bonus action shove for the most part. Turning shove into a regular action is just going to make archer builds, battle masters, and warlocks even stronger by comparison to other classes than they already are.

Wrong. In 5e something is ether an action or a bonus action. You cannot use an action to carry out a bonus action, you cannot use a bonus action to carry out an action. Only special class abilities allow a character to do something using either.

From 5e Sage Advice:

WotC Sage Advice compendium.

This is my worry, WotC really thought out the action economy in 5e and turning things that are Actions in 5e into Bonus Actions is really screwing up balance.

Currently, you can do BOTH.

To be able to do Ranged attack shove it requires a significant investment. You either need to be a warlock and select the required invocation, forfeiting, for example, the ability to see in the dark; or you need to be a battlemaster, forfeiting the spells of an EK and other battlemaster manoeuvres (PnP has a lot more than 4!) and use a consumable resource. For that amount of build specialisation it had better be good!

This is great that you are having fun but my inner DM is thinking from you statement "So we have a bonus action that is so good, it replace many other class abilities or actions? That overpowered."

If something becomes the go to option for every fight / encounter, it needs to be looked at.

what is wrong having shove act like the 5e rules?

Shoving a Creature
Using the Attack action, you can make a special melee attack to shove a creature, either to knock it prone or push it away from you. If you're able to make multiple attacks with the Attack action, this attack replaces one of them.
The target must be no more than one size larger than you and must be within your reach. Instead of making an attack roll, you make a Strength (Athletics) check contested by the target's Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check (the target chooses the ability to use). You succeed automatically if the target is incapacitated. If you succeed, you either knock the target prone or push it 5 feet away from you.

Actually they need to fix is so bonus actions will break invisibility to have it behave closer to how a human DM would run invisibility.

I think it should also be strength based, and it may be, but my weak ass wizard should have no chance pushing an enemy trained in combat stances or a larger creature, yet he has done so to great effect. Make it class specific and an action unless again your class allows it i.e. monk.

Exactly right now a bonus action its pretty often doing more damage then a 2nd lvl spell. And it can also be performed by Mage Hands to make it even worse.

There is an additional concern to making shove a action in this game that the Dev's probably considered. It has a 100% chance of success while hiding, so if you just move behind an enemy bonus action hide and then shove as an action there is nothing to stop you from pushing people without resistance on any class. But this is also due to how they made hide a bonus action for everyone. Though that is a whole different issue.

In other words, because they made shove always succeed while hidden it had to consume the same type of action as hide otherwise their game would be broken, but the Theif rogue completely invalidates that concern.

There is virtually no reason right now to pick anything for Warlock besides cha blast and shove blast. Everything else you can gain either via optimizing your background and race or via in-game items. Battle Master is another non-example because of how incredibly strong ranged shoves are and the fact that their ranged shove also gets bonus damage (on an ability that will presumably already be generating lots of bonus damage). EK has some convenient abilities but the only major reason to pick it over battle master is because you're trying to make burst damage team and need more spellcasters. Build specialization is only a sacrifice if that build isn't generally superior to the alternatives. And again, on top of these examples there are arrows any accurate archer can use that also offer ranged shoving. I get your point that you can do both at the same time but if you were already planning to abuse bonus action melee shoves and you aren't a Thief then why are you not just optimizing around purely abusing ranged shoves instead? They're a lot safer and their subclass/subchoice investment is almost never at the cost of anything significant unless you're trying to run very particular team arrangements.

Warlock* and Battlemaster work just the same in PnP, and whist good, the other classes don't need free shoving to keep up.


*Apart from Devil's Sight lets you see in magical darkness (unlike darkvision), which is massively powerful combined with the Darkness spell.

They don't? Maybe that's how it is in tabletop 5e but going by what's effective in BG3 I don't think the same is true here. One shove can execute entire bosses and there's a plethora of "regular" fights where one shove can delete an equal number of enemies. Thief benefits from melee shoving because he gets two tries, everybody else becomes immensely more threatening with a ranged shove in the pocket because suddenly you don't have to try and bait the ai into vulnerable positions nearly as hard.

Devil's Sight is nice for what it is but it's also one of the things I meant when I said that background and race optimization cover anything you couldn't replace with items. Even if you're not optimizing super hard you can still work dancing lights onto most player characters with ease (and also get it from items). With that much access to darkvision and light manipulation already it's hard for me to see why you wouldn't want the infinitely spammable ranged shove instead. I do see your point about magical darkness but you could also simply use that slot to cast misty step and reposition in a way that forces whatever is in the darkness to come out.

Shove and Grapple aren't actions or bonus actions in and of themselves, they are things you can do in place of an attack. There is no Shove action. There is an Attack action and you can replace attacks given to you by the Attack action with shoves on a one-for-one basis. So anybody with Extra Attack could shove twice if they want. Heck, a Monk with Flurry of Blows at 5th level can shove 4 times. A Frenzied Berserker in frenzy can shove twice at 3rd level (bonus attack) and 3 times at 5th.

Switching shove from attack-option to a full Bonus Action sort of limits its use by the martials. It is also limited by the fact that you can't chose to knock someone prone and have them sit there. Shove prone+Grapple (they are now prone at 0 speed and thus unable to stand) is a great way on the TTRPG which you can't pull off here. Nor can you go on a shoving spree quite the way you can in the tabletop. Making the shove in general involve much further distances addresses that loss however. Overall, the impact of shove is different but not particularly any more powerful.

First I don't disagree, but it this is a thing the AI should be smarter than stand near high ledges.

I'll repost in my idea for Shove mechanics as well:



My reasoning for "Shove should be a bonus action for Fighters and Barbarians only, and a full action for every other class" is because it's a compromise between Larian's concern about Fighters feeling like there's not much to do in the early game, and the actual 5e rules.

I am also fine with Shove being a full action for everyone.

I don't think shoving can be resolved as an isolated "fix". The entire combat economy needs to be redone to incorporate everything correctly.

You eat an elephant one bite at a time. This is one bite.

Not in this game, I eat it as a bonus action and it heals me!