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

The high HPs are to make up for barrel damage.

You don't fight 5 goblins in this game, you fight 20 at times and at level 3-4 your casters have what 6-7 spell slots? Let's be real here for a moment.

People just don't understand it - it's not a TT game here, it's a video game. In TT you don't have your level 4 party of 4 squaring off against 20 1/4CR+ enemies - in BG3 though? You have quite a few of these encounters. In TT something like Temple courtyard would be considered a DEADLY encounter and it's a normal difficulty here, to remind you.

The big benefit of a video game is that such encounters are actually manageable, but adjustments need to be made to accommodate, nothing is wrong with that - it's the point of homebrew.

+1

Larian redesign is naive and shows negligence. Missing is not fun (ok, legitimate logic) so let's just change things so the player doesn't miss often. But now you broke the overall combat because stuff like goblins are getting killed way too easily and making a spell like Bless for instance pretty worthless. "Uh, this was dumb" *scratch head* "fuck it, let's just give them more hp". Nice, now you've broken gameplay again by effectively making even more spells worthless and the enemies damage sponges when it makes no sense (silly scrawny enemy getting cleaved by a two handed axe and barely hurts him).
Once more an overall lack of sense for the flow of the game. Turn based gameplay makes combat encounters too slow and boring, so the attempt to correct it results in the mess that currently exists.

Then I guess it is more sensible to adjust the encounter size at least for the first few levels instead of changing the DnD 5e ruleset too much and introduce much greater balancing problems...

I am just going to chime in with a story from a campaign I played in recently:

My character spent 3 turns fencing with a goblin, as both of us repeatedly missed. Me and the DM roleplayed and made it a tense fight with a lot of swearing. It was fun.

Would I want to experience the same thing in a video game - no, because that would just be miss animations. And even if you add more miss animations they are still just miss animations and can't rival what your imagination can come up with.

So I am all for lowering AC of a lot of generic enemies so I don't keep missing all the time.

Or let's just not do that. All in all big encounters are fun, while missing all the time is not fun.

Video games are made for fun, not for frustration and pettiness. Nobody is asking here for 100% hit rate, but 15 AC vs your party of cripples that at best have +7 or +9 attack to their name if they totally deck out their characters and balls to the wall powergame, that's a tad steep for a video game that wants to be enticing to millions of players.

You don't need to lower AC, you already have at level 1 all at your disposal to deal with it. Use the Sleep spell to immobilize 4 or even more (if they wouldn't have too much HP). Sacrad Flame spell of cleric targets dex saves which means an almost safe hit against sleeping enemies. Just as example.

Good points from the OP.

It is however missing one of the largest changes, which it that you get Advantage from High Ground, and Diadvantage from low ground. Advantage/Disadvantage is an effective +/- 4 to dice rolls, which means a +/- 4 to AC.

Remember the Harpy fight, where you're stuck with permanent Low Ground Disadvantage, with difficult terrain and climbing between you and the closest high ground?

Casting spells does not solve the problem for classes that target AC. You are saying that 4 (Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Warlock) out of 6 classes in EA need to rely on the other 2 to be good in combat?

Also Sleep is nice and all, but makes it harder to hit from range (at least in 5e), so putting targets to sleep makes it harder to hit for ranged characters.

Again, you just don't understand the context of the whole thing here.

- It's not a TT game between D&D geeks, this is a game for millions of players world wide with hundreds of thousands of them not doing even 1 TT game ever or even D&D game ever. People are not born with inherent knowledge of all D&D 5e intricacies - all they will see is 40% hit chance and after couple of battles where they will drool on keyboard they are gone with Metacritic and what not going down.
- What we test now is a normal difficulty, not tactician. It's a difficulty players are expected to tackle when they fire up the game.
- This being a video game - it allows much more complex and bigger encounters unmanageable in TT sessions, difficulty and challenge can come here in other ways than just high AC and winging it with dice and RNG - a cheapest thing to boost difficulty in games.
- Burned actions in turn-based video games are frowned upon as a whole. While people understand you can't succeed all the time, they do expect a reasonable return for investment overall. That's why we can do more in action as is, btw. Last thing Larian needs is just to frustrate people by making them fight excessive RNG all the time. There will be enough of that as is.
- Surfaces in BG3 are more available than in TT and more exploitable too. Creatures need a bit higher HP to compensate that too.

This is the context. Realize - this is a video game, not TT run.

There are a few encounters they have to balance better. This is one of them. It is almost unbeatable if you don't know what is coming or have a pretty high level. However in this special case I noticed that the song varied in volume depending on where my camera was so I assumed where it is highest is where the enemies are hiding. So I moved my party to a far better starting position without knowing and initiated the battle by being too close to them rather than talking to that boy (which I did in my second playthrough).

To their defense, modern XCOM games (especially the second) give you plenty of tools to mitigate randomness. Sure hit skills, explosives, psionic powers, elevation, flanking, etc.. all contribute to significantly raise your chances to do guaranteed damage.
In fact among experienced players there's a saying that any time you are "relying on a dice roll" you are making a fundamental mistake. I rarely even attempt anything below 85% in XCOM 2 and often I manage to play entire missions without a single miss.

People who go around bitching that they miss a lot and that the RNG is bullshit can't play for shit.

I am aware:



But all said and done, the point is that people don't like wasted turns and let's be fair - BG3 is no Xcom2, RNG is a more severe here as is even before asking to raise AC to match TT base material.

It all comes down to how much they want to deviate from standard DnD 5e. DnD 5e is balanced. When they deviate they need to adjust other things which in turn also render some other things useless (e.g. more HP means Sleep is weaker). In the end it is not DnD 5e anymore which can be fun as well but it is a whole lot more work to balance and I fear that Larian try on something here that they are not able to handle in the end. DOS2 was fun but its rules are less complex than DnD 5e and far easier to tweak for balancing purposes.

Dude, an AC of 15 is a 50% chance to hit in 5e at low level. With advantage that 75% to hit. Those are frustratingly low numbers - and you have very few ways of improving them above that.

Your argument fails because the PC's have the same armor values and HP formula as the TT rules do, despite the rest of the combat balance being changed - surfaces everywhere, goblins having tons of AoE effects - grease bottles and fire arrows to make explosions everywhere.

As Zorax says, the more they change, the more they have to balance. It's a chain reaction of change, which is only going to make it more difficult.




I knew it was Harpies the first time. I saw the nest and the piles of bones, I wandered up around the cliffs, and didn't trigger any combat. I saw the kid and knew where the encounter trigger was. I just didn't have any good options.

I considered sticking a character or two only the little ledge, but that's still pretty low compared to the rest of the area, so it wouldn't have fixed disadvantage. I considered sending someone all way around to the top of the cliff, but they would be all alone, which means they'd dead if attacked (or the one left on the ground would be). I just didn't see any good solutions so I walked everyone together into the trigger.

Larian gives you enough means to not attack AC, even more than classic DnD e5 (e.g their surface stuff). Why do you have to smash everything with a hammer if there are other ways? For easy or normal difficulty I wouldn't mind if you lower AC. But on higher difficulty levels I expect certain enemies to only be beatable with certain means, preparation and tactics and not with basically everything.

It's almost as if the player were to actually use his brain and try to make a party that complements itself with synergy and utility and use the tools at his disposal to deal with these encounters he would succeed. Instead I guess what people want is just a wack-a-mole simulator where you only auto attack enemies and they fall dead without putting up a fight.

That would probably "entice" a lot of players, let's just ignore the soul and lore of the game because they're completely irrelevant I guess.

I think the miss issue can be solved by giving players different difficulties. Lower AC for a easy mode is fine to me, but they have to make a difficulty level for core TT ppls imo, they don't care about missing alot and just want to play like it was on paper.

Thats exactly the description I would put under the Story Mode Difficulty (the easiest one) .