Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Why 5e rules matter aka why the warlock is a broken shell

Those of you who made it this far, great. Please give this as fair a read as you can. I'm of the opinion that the 5e tabletop(tt) rules matter in the balance of BG3 because they informed the design of all the classes and class actions. I'm going to hone in on the warlock class to highlight this, but it applies across a number of classes in a variety of ways.

First, I want to establish that the warlock class design balance is 100% centered around the short/long rest rules of the tt game. Warlock have 2 spell slots until level 11 when they get 3. Those spell slots scale at the same rate that all primary casters do, at 9th level they all have 5th level spell slots. Warlocks have 2 5th level slots at 9th level, whereas other primary casters only have 1 until 10th level. Warlock spell slots are capped at 5th level, so any spell they use with those slots will be cast as a 5th level spell but they will never be able to use those slots to cast 6th level or higher spells. Sorcerers, wizards, bards, druids, and clerics also have 2 5th level spell slots at 10th level, but they also have 13 other spell slots of lower levels. How is this balanced? Why on earth would someone play a warlock character knowing you only get 2 spell slots compared to everyone else having 15 at a similar level? Well because those other classes have to manage their spell slots per long rest, so in a 24 hour period they have 15 spells. Warlocks on the other hand renew spell slots on a short rest, so in general play a Warlock gets to renew 3 times for every 1 time that other spell casters do.

Now you might point out, and rightly so, that warlocks still have fewer spell slots per long rest, which is true (at 10th level warlocks would have access to 8 spell slots if they used 3 short rests per long rest, vs 15 for other primary spell casters) but those spells are cast as 5th level spells. You might think half the spell slots cast at higher level sounds a little overpowered, but this is limited because warlocks have a maximum number of spells they can ever know, just like sorcerers and at 10th level they can know 10 spells and 4 cantrips. So they might know 2 spells from every spell level 1-5 or some other combination. And warlocks have a very limited number of spells they can chose to learn from each level. For example, a wizard can choose from 23 5th level spells using the PHB alone and all of the other primary spell casters have more than 10 5th level spells to choose from. Warlock have 4 5th level spells to choose from. They also have 4 4th level spells to choose from. And generally at any given spell level their choices are far fewer than other primary casters.

Ok, so warlocks know fewer total spells, have 2 or 3 spell slots that scale in power and are recovered on a short rest, and have significantly fewer spells to choose from. Why play a warlock? Well they have the best offensive cantrip in the game by a wide margin, eldritch blast, and the invocations to make it great. Why is eldritch blast the best? First it has the force damage type, and that is the least resisted damage type in the game. Second it can target multiple targets starting at level 5. Third it does great damage with long range. But finally when you add agonizing blast you get your charisma bonus to damage on EACH BEAM (and you can repel on each beam too if you take the repelling blast invocation). Compared to a firebolt cantrip which uses the same damage dice (d10) and has the same range, the firebolt uses the second most resisted and immune damage type in the game, and is an all or nothing spell, you hit or you don't and you can only ever manage to get your charisma bonus to damage 1x per firebolt. Eldritch blast suffers from RNG, because you have 3 dice rolls to make (at level 11), but each successful die add the charisma bonus to damage so if you hit 3 times with an 18 charisma you are doing 3d10+12 as a opposed to 3d10+4 on a firebolt. And if you are using repelling blast you can move a single target 30' (no save) or upwards of 3 targets 10' each.

Why do I say they are broken? Because by giving free long rests at any time you destroy the reason why warlocks have 2 spell slots. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to take a warlock over a different spell caster, and in fact you are gimping yourself if you do. By making that change they have fundamentally broken the balance of warlock and monk, as these two classes mechanics are based on short rest renewable resources, so that while every use of their abilities is more costly per usage, the resources renew more quickly to make up for it balancing out these classes. Without redesigning these class structures to be rebalanced under the endless long rest system, they are inherently weaker than the other classes because they pay more to do similar things as other classes. And this is just one area where the implemented rules have disrupted class balance in a foundational way; people have been railing on the breaking of the action economy and how it negatively impacts some classes while buffing other classes.

Edit: changed the eldritch blast section to reflect an 11th level caster rather than a 17th level caster as we should have access to 11th level characters in BG3 but likely not 17th level.