Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback By the love of Myrkul, STOP with HP bloat!!!

Know what else the spider lacked that Firkraag had? A group of 6 level 15+, well geared characters attacking him. I still argue that facing a group of 4 level 3/4 characters, other more creative methods can be used to make it a quality fight than just bloating its hp.

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Nope. I wanna BG3. I only mentioned ToEE cuz is a TB low level game like BG3. But BG2 is IMO better.
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I do as well, I've actually forgotten most of BG2 do to me not being impressed with it overall.

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Then there is all that with Firkaag. So they pretty much made him near invincible with all that
Did you read my post??? I literally made an strategy capable of soloing him in 2 rounds on LoB difficulty with about 60% success chance.
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Honestly my mind went blank with some of the big words you used. lack of sleep, and lack of technical jargon. It happens and I did read where you did whatever to allow you to do it 60% of the time. If you want shoot me a pm explaining all that in simpler terms. Small words would be appreciated.

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On to hp amount you factor in what it doesn't have compared to Firkaag stoneskin, spells, immunities, invunerabilities, aoe to outright kill one party member instead of slowly weakening them with poison
I prefer to fight enemies which has high AC, high mobility, good AI, a lot of things to consider than just an "bullet sponge"
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Understandable but theres not much you can do with a giant spider. It's a giant spider, so you bump it's hp up. even then she's really a pushover. She does have mobility, her AI needs improving she spent to much time close to me, while the mid levels phased in and out as much as possible. Might be different for others, but my two, three fights she was always to close. Then again as someone said Phases spiders are spose to be melee online.

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Wrong. Stoneskin negate blows on 2e, gives 10/5 on 3/.5e and on 5e is very lackluster "This spell turns the flesh of a willing creature you touch as hard as stone. Until the spell ends, the target has resistance to nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage." https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Stoneskin#content
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Ahh, yeah. Still it may be lacklaster but at such low levels your not really going 'ham' with magic. It's mostly mundane, and spiders can't cast. So it effectively doubles your hp for a time. Anything that hits and is negated means you should count each up as that amount of hp. to figure it all into an equation. though you had a point with dispel to end it. Curious did it with his magic resistance even affect him?

ugg my quote fu is garbage. any help would be appreciated lol

It's a spider. Sure you could go the abomination route if you wanted, grant it stone skin like property dropping it's hp down to 50 which would still be like around a 100. unless your group is continually doing magic damage. Many haven't grabbed much in the way of magical gear when you come across her.

If it was actually an intelligent creature with the ability to cast spells and stuff then it would open the doors far more, then it being a spider. especially a spider thats a side quest that you can do if you want or you can skip it.

The closing tag needs "/quote" instead of "quote"

I'm not sure, honestly. But even the 5e HP levels of gods are pretty insane.

All gods (and their avatars) possess divine ranks (DR). Quasi-deities, which includes all avatars, demigods, titans, and vestiges as well as the likes of True Dragon Ascendants, have a DR of 0. Stronger deities have higher DR, with powerfule greater deities having a DR of upto 20, and supreme deities (like Ao) going even beyond that. Letting aside all additional bonuses and spells gods get in combat, let us look at raw HP numbers.
1. All gods get max HP for all their hit dice. And gods usually have a character level in the range 30-50 split between various classes. So that's already hundreds of HP. Considering a god with only d8 classes, that's 240-400 HP.
2. HP bonus from constitution modifiers is multiplied by (DR+1).
3. All gods have a minimum of 17 and a maximum of 30 to all stats, with higher DR gods getting massive ASIs. For a powerful greater deity with DR 20, we can assume they get 30 CON, giving them an HP bonus of 210.
That means a powerful greater deity with only rogue-like classes probably ends up with around 610 HP.

Of course, gods are also immune to most non-magical damage. Gods with a DR of at least 1 are also resistant to ALL forms of damage.

TLDR: it would be a slug fest, if you could last that long despite all the other feats and advantages deities get (such as a speed bonus of 15-50 ft depending on DR).

+1. That’s all.

Really? One of my biggest complaints for the 5e monster manual is how few hitpoints everything has relative to the amount of damage players do

A level 10 party can kill most CR10 monsters in a single round. A level 9 hexblade sharpshooter can do over 100 damage with a single arrow

The queen spider is not balanced for a fourth level party, by the way, it's closer to a young red dragon in CR than it is to a Giant Spider

but...yeah... don't use 2e hp values to make any judgements, this isn't 2e. A 5th level party has ABSOLUTLEY no problem chewing through 138hp, and you should really be 5th before fighting the Spider Queen Fight (literally nothing compels you to battle it at level 3-4, you can just go past it) Let me lay out ONE good round (assuming the game is finished):

- Laezel uses Great Weapon master to attack four times (Action surge.) Statistically, she'll miss twice, so she uses Precision Attack to hit. She uses Menacing Attack on the two that already hit.
She deals on average 89 points of damage if all four hit (really! do the math yourself, I might be wrong cuz its 3:26am, but it sounds right to me. 2d6+3+2d6+3+2d6+3+2d6+3+1d8+1d8+10+10+10+10)
- Wyll uses hex on the spider and casts Scorching Ray at third level, dealing 12d6 points of damage, averaging out to 42 damage (assuming they leave in 2x casts in one turn)
-Wyll's imp stabs the Spider Queen for 5 points of damage, killing her
- Gael uses Fireball to destroy minions
- Shadowheart casts Spirit Guardians, huddling around the party, to deal 14 damage to anything that comes within 15 feet of the party and slow its movement to a crawl

Yes this is, statistically, a VERY good round, but in just ONE good round, with two party members not doing anything to the spider queen, they've killed it

The reason I say 5th level is that it seems to me like the spider queen fight is a pretty well balanced encounter for a 5th level party

They are still too weak compared to old edition deities. 2e only had rules for avatars, true deities was above game rules and 3.5e have a lot of nasty abilities to deities. Like immunity to any weapon bellow +5 and the possibility to cast antimagical field which doesn't affect the God himself while he can cast disjunction on the party and make all of his epic gear mundane and spells worthless. Not mentioning that due all energy from his followers, they allways roll the best possible result for everything. And even if you somehow managed to make then lose a lot of HP, they can teleport to their divine realm where they are near omnipotent and are protected by ludicrous powerful followers.

This talking about a general deity. Good lucky resisting an single wail of the Banshee from an deity like Myrkul... IDK his stats but believe that the DC to resits... Assuming 30 INT and divine rank = 16 (lowest of an greater deity), his DC would probably be > 10 + 10 ( int ) + 16 (divine rank ) + 3 (he probably has at least epic spell focus necromancy) + 9 (spell level) = 48. The FORT save of an CR 19 ancient red dragon on 3.5e is 22, so if the ancient red dragon rolls 19, he only gets 41 vs the 48 of this ultra low estimate..

But not even Gods, archdevils like Mephistopheles on 3.5e had a lot of nasty DC 30+ spells to resist.

NOTE : Fort save on 3.5e can be translated to CON save on 5e.

Without the help of another God, is near impossible to kill an God, even with a 12 party sized on epic level.

Tiamat on 5e is weaker than most non deity ancient dragons dragons on 2e...



CR are too "inflated" on 5e. Monsters who are CR 10 should probably be CR 6 or 7 in other editions. And you rarely fight a single creature alone. You generally fight at least a squad of 5+.

And you are looking with only to the damage with high rolls and crits.

Did you played BG2? 3 horrid Wilting in a chain contingency can be cast in a instant and the 3 would deal 60d8 damage in a huge area, yes, 3*20d8 ( https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Abi-Dalzim%27s_Horrid_Wilting ). On 5e, it deals only 12d8 necrotic damage. Which means that the AVERAGE 20d8 damage from 2e(90) is almost the same of the max damage of the 5e spell(96)

First off: comparing HP between Editions seems to be a rather pointless exercise.

But it is right that some enemies seem to have more HP/Stats/Abilities than they have in the MM. Which is weird for the usual grunts running around. A boss with more HP and stuff they can do is fine tho.

My point is that 5e already has a big hp bloat. No need to inflate even more. 5e is the second edition with hp bloat, losing only to 4e. And an "boss" should be hard not cuz he is a sponge, but cuz he has interesting abilities, spells, traps, allies, tactics, AI, etc.

While i generally agree, i think the high health pools of some opponents are necessary due to design flaws that took place before.
On the one hand because of surface and status effect DoTs that are way stronger compared to regular DnD. And on the other hand due to the absurd hit rates. In BGIII you rarely have a hit chance under 85% due to high ground and backstab. Your avarage damage is at least 2 times of the damage you could achieve in regular DnD5e, especially if you take into account crazy stuff like shoving in a bonus action.
If we look at generic DnD5e: Just pick the Bandit captain. That is a NPC that gets thrown at you by at least 1 campaign as level1 bossfight. he has 65 HP. Now consider you are 3 levels higher than that facing the spider + you got like a 100% damage boost compared to regular 5e.... The Monsters need such a large health pool.

Unfortunate, but i think the "big health pool" issue is a symptome, not a desease. ´
If it had 80 health i would laugh it away in 1 turn perhaps 2.

Don't know so much about the balance in older editions but the absolute numbers are pretty much irrelevant, as long as the relative numbers are somewhere comparable. Does not matter if the boss has 10hp and I do 1 dmg per round or he has 1000hp and I do 100dmg per round.

Anyway: I agree that Larian should put more trust into the CR balance, that is already there and just builds appropriate encounters with them.

They do indeed matter, because in all RPGs (at least all i ever played and its a lot), output and input do not scale in the same speed. Does not matter weather its DnD, Pathfinder, Skyrim or anything. The higher the performance gets, the shorter and deadlier the fights are. Thats because of stacking synergies. Everyone remembers Level 1-2 fights in TTRPGs that took like 15 rounds and were pretty close. As the PCs are getting stronger, the fights will shorten significantly, since the PCs can more effectivly focus and CC enemies down.
Due to the highly increased performance of both PC and NPC in BG3, the low level fights are already affected by this effect. Fast, short and deadly for either side.
Most people will have beaten EA without any major problems, so i do not think the game is too hard. But it is less exiting in terms of combat. For the most part, after the seeing how the first round of combat goes, you generally already know that you have won or lost, since you either managed to achieve your win condition or you didnt and be doomed.

The thrill of finally hitting that little bastard goblin who kept evading you and dealing enough damage to crush it is one of the most satisfying parts of tabletop. I want it in BG3. Please don't bloat hp.

Maybe you misunderstood me: I am talking relative HP at any given level. Progression balance is another thing, but OP was having problems with the fact that a god in BG1 or 2 had 150 absolute HP and now a spider has 150 absolute HP. That in and off itself has no meaning whatsoever and its pointless to compare 2 editions in that way.

The relative power is important, not what number is representing it.

In an interview with Swen from last year he argued that you'd missed a lot in D&D, which according to him wouldn't be very fun in a video game.

Maybe reducing some of the AC whilst pumping HP to make up for that has been done with that in mind in parts too.

It has been discussed a lot that you can't do that without messing up the balance elsewhere. Not all attacks target AC. Anything that attacks saves or HP directly gets nerfed when you lower AC's.

Actually is the opposite. An warlock with an Eldritch Blast can OHK another warlock with low con at lv 1 with good rolls. But at lv 20, an warlock can sustain multiple critical hits from another lv 20 warlock without any problem.



The best CRPG's are this RPG's where enemies dodge, armor deflect blows, hit enemies are hard but each hit deals a lot of damage. JNobody deserve everything being an bullet sponge.

By the DMG, 138 HP with AC of 15 is squarely in CR 4. Assuming "level" is "CR", if the AC is particularly low, that could be defensive CR 4 in practice. That is supposed to be balanced with the offensive CR, which for CR 4 is 27–32 damage per round -- which as I recall was about right for the phase spider matriarch.

So, eh — it doesn't seem like particular bloat to me.