Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Low AC high HP goblins - Larian's combat redesign

So goblins' AC has gone down from 15 to 7 and their HP has doubled. This simple redesign has long reaching consequences.

The immediate ones are the low level Wizards' forte, crowd control spells. Sleep and Color Spray have been nerfed to half efficiency. Sleep is amazing against multiple high AC, low HP targets. But it's next to worthless against the "Larian goblins". It often drops only 1 goblin instead of 4. Sacred Flame suddenly sucks horribly compared to Fire Bolt because it attacks Dex saves instead of AC. Getting or not getting a +40% hit probability is a huge deal. Magic Missile is also nerfed because always hitting isn't special anymore.

So what if this starts a trend where everyone must hit reliably, and everyone's HP pools get inflated to compensate? Effectively everything that does damage that doesn't attack AC gets nerfed. That's basically 90% of spells. Do we really want to rebalance all the spells? How lame will a Fireball feel against HP buffed enemies? Then there will be a healing economy problem when everyone must heal more. Mundane food already heals so maybe easy healing everywhere is where we are headed? We are not there yet in EA, and I really hope this won't become a thing. But the change with goblins implies this is the desired direction.

All of this just because "missing is not fun"? Is it really somehow more fun to kill a goblin in two hits rather than a miss and a hit? The goblins are supposed to be quick and annoying but squishy, and most of them also look pretty heavily armored. If anything, it's weird that you can damage them so easily.

Let's not forget a "miss" in D&D does not mean a clean miss where the attacker just completely fails. Anything that would hit 10AC+Dex is actually a hit. The rest are armor absorbing the damage, and shield and weapon blocks. But the way BG3 shows a miss to you is that you failed. They even added a little laughter from the opponent when you "fail". That's why it doesn't feel good. Of course it doesn't when your Fighter hits nothing but air even though the target is an ogre the size of a barn. It doesn't make any sense. If we saw the weapon being parried or skin/armor deflecting the damage we wouldn't feel like we failed. The opponent succeeded instead.

This is my request to Larian: Make the misses look exciting. Deflections, parries, heavy armor soaking damage. Opponents reeling under impact even if they don't take damage. Don't fundamentally try to change the 5e system. And offer a hardcore D&D setting without any changes. I haven't even played 5e but I looked it up and the tabletop rules on jumping, shoving, disengage and basically everything that's different seem better than BG3 changes.