Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Reducing MISSES in combat

I find frequent misses in combat annoying, and believe many non-DnD people would be alienated from BG3 because of that, as I already explained in my suggestion how to reduce them ( in this post ).

But I just read compilation by Maximuuus, and it have other interesting suggestions regarding misses. Since my main request was "reduce misses", any of those would help - but I still found some issues that made me redefine what my request really is. Issues I found with previous suggestions :

- An option that could add a +”x” bonus to every D20, in every situation whatever the check could be something that keep D&D’s balance safe while at the same time would increase our % to hit.
*** this would outright make combat easier - it would be very hard to keep "DnD balance safe" with that

- An option to reduce the ennemy's AC.
*** again , this would directly make combat easier , and may disbalance DnD concepts - it would reduce significance of proficiency with weapons and impact of STR/DEX for example

- An "auto advantages" after 3 miss.
*** this would make game "slightly" easier, especially since we often have advantages anyway. And reduction of misses would be minimal - they would still be annoying

- Something like "+5% to hit" each time a character miss.
*** this would also make game "slightly" easier, and misses slightly reduced - if current average is 75% to hit, it would take many misses before it helps. Misses would still be frequent.


Basically, those issues I mentioned above made me clarify what I think is wanted : REDUCED MISSES that do NOT MAKE GAME EASIER and KEEP IT BALANCED.
Game is easy as it is, and making it easier would make it less interesting to play - and harder for Larian to balance.


Out of above suggestions, one I like most ( apart from my own suggestion, of course ) would be modified "reduce enemy AC" in a way to prevent making game easier. And that would require "increase enemy HP" proportionally to reducing enemy AC. That way, enemy would remain roughly same challenge but with less misses. Other suggestions are hard to balance to keep challenge and still reduce misses.

But even modified "reduce AC, increase HP" would still leave other issue - DnD is currently balanced around AC. Reducing AC would reduce significance of proficiency with weapons, and even significance of your main attribute like STR/DEX since increasing them help with Ability Modifier used in Attack Roll against AC. In other words, currently increasing STR/DEX helps you twice with your damage: first, increasing chance to hit and, second, increasing weapon damage. If they reduce AC on enemies, increasing your STR/DEX would be less impactful.

To put it differently, lets say that you currently have GWM warrior, Archer hunter and rogue, and that their average damage is comparable: GWM warrior can do largest damage, but is more often missing, rogue is doing less damage than warrior when he hits but more damage than Archer, but Archer miss less than rogue due to +2 archery .... so they are "balanced". Now, if they reduce mob AC and increase mob HP, mob may remain similarly hard, but our character balance is broken : they will all hit most of the time now, and GWM warrior will end up doing more damage than rogue who will be doing more damage than archer.


Regarding my own suggestion, it avoids all those problems - it reduces misses but reduces averages hit damage to compensate, taking into consideration exactly same influence of AC as it is now. Therefore total amount of damage over entire fight remains the same, and it does not require rebalances of individual mobs, nor it break importance of AC ... while reducing misses significantly ( in fact, it leaves only 5% miss chance from critical misses).

One potential issue with it is that some people think that 5% misses is too low ( even if it is higher than average miss chance for DoS ). Which brings another question :

what exactly is "satisfactory reduced misses" ?

It is obviously subjective and may be different for everyone. In one of previous posts I defined my minimum as "turns where I miss with any characters to be in minority". That means chance for any of 4 characters to miss per turn should be under 1/2 ( once every 2 turns) - or average hit chance for single character to be over 85%. Less annoying goal would be one miss every 3 turns, meaning average character hit chance above 90% .. or miss every 4th turn, requiring average character hit chance over 93% etc

In my default proposal, hit chance of characters is 95% - only critical misses in 1/20 cases is left, since my proposal suggest that *critical* damage remains the same, both critical hit ( allowing same max damage as it is now ) and critical misses. But later in thread I mentioned that it would be possible to implement it as a "slider" where certain amount of misses is allowed, even above 5%. It would mean that more misses are allowed, and damage is less reduced, to keep exactly same total damage over time.

That "slider" option now looks to me as best fit for above requirement to reduce misses, not make game easier and keep it balanced.
Probably best name for that would be MINIMAL HIT CHANCE :
1) Allow "slider" option that has 1= default, misses as it is now ; 2= miss once every 2nd turn ; 3= miss once every 3rd turn ... etc ( where "once X turns" means one miss for all 4 characters together ) - this will determine minimal hit chance as mentioned above ( 1= as it is now, 2=85%, 3=90%, 4=93% ...)
2) on each attack, check if crit or miss UP TO THE CAP. If original chance to hit was 60% and option=1(original), we still miss in 40%. But if minimal hit chance is 85%, we do miss only in 15%.
3) compensate ( reduce) hit damage for amount we reduced miss chance ( so that new average hit damage * new hit chance from #2 equals original average hit damage * original hit chance )
4) [OPTION] compensated damage can still be in range ( eg if originally it was 1d12 with 1-12, reduced can be for example 1-8 ) OR reduced can still have all possible values (1-12) but with changed probabilities (see below)


This should be as easy to implement as my initial suggestion with 5% misses, and would not require any further game rebalance or chances to each individual mob AC/HP, while keeping effect of all DnD stats ( keeping importance of proficiencies and STR/DEX as they are now). It would probably require changes only in BG3 procedures that calculate AttackRoll and DamageRoll, and even those should not be large ( I gave example pseudo code in my suggestion post ), but important part is that those changses would be localized only to that part of code, without need to rebalance entire game, concepts like AC/HP or mobs.

Regarding to 4th (optional) part, in my original suggestion it was fixed to average since I assumed that some people are also annoyed by low hits ( eg you hit 1 with 1d12 ), and making compensated damage always average value fix that. But I noticed that other people are averse to "homogenous" damage, and so I pointed out here that it is an option for solving MISSES issue - even if damage remain in range, it is previous 3 points about reducing misses and compensating average damage that counts - damage itself can remain in range. There is, of course, middle ground even here: game can change probability of each value 1..12 in a way to keep desired average ( one we reduced in point #3 to compensate for reduced misses), while still having SOME probability for each value 1-12. So next step would be ( if we want to reduce number of minimal damage values like 1-2 that may annoy some people) for game to change probability of each value 1-12 in a way that both achieve average asked in #3, AND reduce probability of low numbers ( by symmetrically reducing probability of high numbers), while still keeping both of those possible. For DnD veterans, it would be similar to difference between 2d6 and 1d12 - first has less chance for both 1 and 12, with similar average.