Stop using story as an excuse for shitty balancing. "oh its the absolute", well doesn't change that every Goblin has bombs and got archers with fancy arrows. That's not how balance works.
I read this as "Stop using the stuff the game tells us to explain the stuff we find in the game". What's that that Castle used to tell Becket? Oh yeah, "Stop ruining my stories with your logic".
You see, the problem with your ultimatum here is that I was responding to how they may have come up with this equipment, and how they may have learned better tactics. I get that we have to be on board with this "but my DnD" narrative, but the entirety of the plotline was approved by WotC. If it hadn't been approved, you can bet it wouldn't be in the game. No matter how much of a purist one wants to be, when the owner of the IP says "This is ok", it's ok. Now, you can rally together a social media mob to attack them if you're unhappy about their decision, but until they reverse course on it, they've approved it, and that means that it is, in fact, DnD.
A lot of people want to crack the whip on Larian for poor writing, but here's the story you're trying to tell, in a nutshell:
So a new power in the Realms is trying to take over and remove all the Gods from their pantheons. What is their army, you ask, and rightly so, for such an ambitious undertaking? Why, it's Goblins of course, armed with pointy sticks.
Do you see the flaw with your narrative here? The Absolute, whomever they may be, is very definitely well connected. How do I know that? Because our tadpole has been altered. I'm afraid that the clout, and ability to do something like that is going to require something more than goblins with pointy sticks. So while people huff and puff about "not DnD" about something that was approved by the people with the final say on what is or isn't, I have to look at the story, and plot, what of it we have at this point, and make a judgement call based on what's been provided to us. That you, or anyone else, want(s) to ignore that because "but my DnD" doesn't mean a whole lot in the current context of how content gets introduced into the game. It's not some homebrewed version of DnD, it's approved by the owners of the source material, and if they say yes, you can slip into denial, and try to ignore the information provided in game all you like, but it doesn't make you right, and, it doesn't give you some sort of "high ground" to say "stop using things in the game to explain things in the game".
