Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback [Feedback] The Bless spell and Larian's use of player data for the EA development

Larian gave this interview, which explained that data show that people are uninterested in buffs, that "you cannot sell a Bless spell to people, it's boring", and that people want to see fireworks and damage.

Passage copied below for those forum readers who don't want to read the whole interview (though you probably should). Colouring is mine.

I feel that just arguing about Bless would too narrow, like the small tip of a big iceberg, and I would to be a bit more general. I'm not going to go maximum generality and discuss Larian's vision and what they think is fun. I have my own tastes and vision of what a 5E-based combat system should be, you have yours, Larian has theirs. That's just tastes and they can't really be discussed or argued. (Well, actually, I've just come up with things that can be discussed, but I'll keep them for elsewhere and not derail this thread in the very first post). What I want to discuss though is Larian's use of data and their development process.


1) Why are buffs so little used ?

Larian's data shows that players don't use buffs, and that includes Bless in particular. Why is Bless not more used ? Let's try to see what explanatory factors there could be.

• Bless is nerfed by bad implementation. In 5E, Bless allows you to choose up to X targets within a ball centered on the caster. In BG3 you choose an AOE and the creatures closest to its center receive the buff. This includes neutrals (and enemies ?), your allies don't have priority. That means in BG3 you cannot cast Bless on your companions who are already in the thick of the melee or tactically positioned around unsuspecting soon-to-be corpses.
• Bless is made impractical to cast in highly 3D terrains. The AOE is a 2D disc, not a 3D ball, so if you start having your party at multiple levels of altitude, it becomes a lot more difficult to obtain what you want from Bless.
• Bless gives an average bonus of +2.5 to attacks roll (and ST) and costs a spell slot. Advantage typically means a +3 to +5 bonus to attack rolls, and the current Backstab and High-Ground rules pretty much hand out Advantage each turn, without costing a spell slot. This decreases the value of Bless.
• Bless requires Concentration. In BG3's rules (as of Patch 2 at least, but bear in mind that the data mentioned in the interview was probably from October-November), elemental arrows are a double source of damage (the arrow + the extra). Which means that when you're hit, you have two chances of failing a Constitution Saving Throw (effectively having Disadvantage). This is made worse by the fact that the elemental damage is guaranteed, even if the arrow doesn't hit. Also, Joe Goblin is routinely equipped with fire grenades, i.e. mini-fireballs, which are guaranteed to deal damage and force the caster to do a ST. Not to mention the fact that a fire surface will deal damage at the beginning of the caster's next turn. Overall, this means Concentration is harder to maintain and it devalues all Concentration spells, like Bless.

So Larian's current implementation butchers Bless, partly and directly through a bad implementation of the spell, and partly and indirectly through homebrew rules, which significantly affect the balance of value between the various options available on a Cleric's turn, and which go in the sense of making Bless less appealing. This list is not exhaustive though. I could think of adding a couple more.

• The fact that long rest is handed out for free, anywhere, anytime, means that there is less incentive to be efficient in combat. Winning with 50% HP left or 80% HP left is all the same when you are 4 clicks away from full life.
• The under-developed combat log isn't good enough to make new players (of the log-reading type) pick up all the rules and see how powerful Bless can be.
• There are people who nowadays spend a significant part of their time in BG3 purely play-testing. I don't have a normal player's behaviour when I just want to go to location X to try new dialogue options, and will happily abuse Backstab and High-Ground in those fights that I cannot avoid, which I consider "solved" and which present no interest to me.
• There are people who stream their gaming. They want viewers to come back. Moving images (including flashy animation) are probably better at retaining viewers' attention than, well, everything else you can put in a video. I assume that streamer ... stream, which means live shows, which means you can't do jump cuts when editing. So they'll favour fireworks.
• Bless is not flashy and players just want fireworks and damage.

Now, out of all the possible factors above, which ones are likely to have the greater explanatory power ? I certainly wouldn't pick the last one as the obvious one. Very far from it.

I would have no problem if Larian just spelled out their vision and tastes : "we like fireworks and damage, we think that Buffs/Debuffs (and the Fighters and Rogues, and basically the Attack action, etc) are boring, so we'll make sure we have lots of fireworks and damage in BG3". But here they don't do that. They advance the thesis that players want firework and damage, and use the buff data as supporting evidence. The thesis may or may not be true, but the current data are not good enough to support it. This is bad use of data. There's nothing wrong with having an agenda/vision/goal, and there's nothing irredeemably wrong about incorrect reasonings, but I'm always uncomfortable when I feel there's a chance that the incorrect reasoning which supports a goal wasn't incorrect completely by accident.

Before I move to more about the use of data, I just wanted to consider the following question : are buffs/debuffs any popular in 5E ? According to data from DnD Beyond, for Clerics, Shield Of Faith is the 4th most memorised spell and Bless is 9th. For Paladin, these spells are 2nd and 3rd, while Divine Favour is 4th and Heroism is 10th. For Druids, Entangle is 3rd and Faerie Fire is 7th. I'm not too familiar with DnD Beyond, and I don't know the profiles of the players with an account there, but I would assume it's a mixed crowd. The data also doesn't how often the spells are actually cast. But by and large, I would say it doesn't sound as if buffs are under-selected in 5E. And if they are not, there seems to be a marked difference between the balance/meta/ecosystem in 5E and in BG3. Is that because the TT players and video game players are significantly different in their wants ? Or is that because the BG3 makes buffs less attractive ? I think it is a somewhat interesting question.


2) More generally, what can the data say, as of now ?

I am somewhat worried by the way Larian seems to use their data. In good part, this connects with another thing that has been puzzling me, which how primitive a build they have let us play with and how massively-early this access is.

Given how far from a vaguely-complete game system the game is at the moment (I'm just talking about the systems and mechanisms, the story content doesn't matter), most of the feedback that Larian can gather, both from what players explicitly say and the player data, is probably of limited value. But I'll focus on just data.

Player data show how players behave. This behaviour depends on everything they experience in the game : all the dialogues, all the rules, and ultimately all the parameters one could think of. It also depends on things outside the game.

As a consequence :
a) Seeing as many parameters, rules, etc will be significantly changed by the time the game reaches the near-completion, fine-tuning phase, whatever behaviour patterns are observed now are quite susceptible to evolve.
b) Seeing as many elements in the game (notably combat-and-adventuring rules) are inter-related in complex ways, it is not always trivial to find the most contributing cause to an observed behaviour.
c) The fact that this is an Early Access has an effect on both the type of players who are currently playing and how they are playing. This may introduce a bias in the data.

A couple of examples.
- If NPC dialogue lines are skipped at a high rate, it might be because the voice delivery is too slow compared to how fast people can read text. Or it might be that most EA players have already heard some lines half a dozen times already.
- If people are massively casting spells, it may be because they look so flashily good. Or because they are over-powered. Or because the absence of any restriction on long rest makes spells massively available.

I'm certainly not saying that nothing can be learned at the moment, but I'm surely saying that one must be cautious with how the data is analysed and interpreted.

Everyone is collecting copious amounts of data these days. But it's not the size of the data that matter, it's what you do with it. If you have a kitchen filled with all the utensils you could think of and the finest ingredients, and you place someone who has never cooked in that kitchen, you shouldn't expect amazing dishes to come out.

Larian surely uses the data they collect in many ways, but from what they have communicated, what do we know ?

• They told us before EA that they have the tools to create heat maps of where people die, save, re-load, etc. Which is all nice and good ... depending on how that information is used.
• They told us how un-tastefully common our choice of a Human Fighter was. This was done in jest, I found it funny. (As an aside, it's completely consistent with various data from DnD Beyond.) It also implies that they look at how frequently various options are selected. Totally fine.
• They told us that 25% of players sided with Minthara. Which means, again, that they're looking at how often (story) options are selected. Maybe 25% was a bit lower than they expected, I don't know. They're probably very correct in saying that most players will lean toward good more than evil. It's also probably a factor that not all players realised that siding with Minthara was an option, and that those who realised found that path to be little motivated and poorly handled. Also, once you've watched the sex scene with Minthara once, you can spare yourself the Battle In The Grove in subsequent runs, whichever side you're on, as it is painfully slow due to the very slow AI. It's probably hard to predict how that number will be when siding with Minthara gets fuller (... I mean, I've always wanted to assume that this content wasn't really ready and finished).
• They told us that players don't use buffs ... I've commented on that already.

I want to believe that Larian has smart people working for them. And that as a result Larian's development process is well-informed and efficient. But judging by what Larian communicates, I don't stand super impressed.


3) Development process.

It sounds to me as if, should one want to change an observed behaviour, one should have a good understanding of its main causes, and turn the relevant dials, instead of pulling levers at random.

For the sake of example, suppose that players die at an above-desired rate against the 3 Intellect Devourers on the crash site. There could be several causes. Maybe they have too much HP. Maybe players have at most one companion at that point but there'll be a second one available in the full version. Maybe it's because the game currently does a bad job at teaching its mechanisms, like the fact that, unless you Hide, enemies will see you and trigger the fight even if you don't enter their vision cone (which mean that new players may have a harder time starting the fight from the safety of the harder-to-access high ground). Decreasing their HP isn't necessarily the obvious way to go (nor is it necessarily the worse way to go, it depends on many things).

Less theoretically, if the data show that people are re-loading way too often on some conversation skill checks, it allows to spot a behaviour which is undesired by the designers (I guess) and the players (I believe). But is it because the DC are too high ? Is it because there is a contradiction in proposing high-Charisma companions like Wyll but requiring the players to talk using their PC if they want to gain Approval ? Is it because they tied the Approval to the outcome of the roll, instead of the choice of the player ? Is it because they locked some story beats behind skills checks when, perhaps, it shouldn't be so ? Turning down the easiest-to-access dial (the DC) isn't the obvious way to go.

Larian didn't say that they flip switches voluntarily-at-random. But starting to balance things, any thing, at this early stage of the game (personality of the evil companions, DC of conversation skill checks), without a complete system (all companions, rules for resting, improved conversation mechanisms, etc) and a good understanding of what causes an observed behaviour, sounds close enough to flipping switches at random.

Also, I'm a bit puzzled by some of the design goals.

Sometimes, when there are several options, they should probably all be equally appealing. Other times though, you can't expect all options to be equally used. DnD has over 300 spells, including about 50 level 1 spells. They are designed in such a way that many are situational. You might use a given spell once or twice in a campaign, but the times you used it were situation-changing and memorable. There's nothing wrong with that. DnD seems to give players problems and give them (especially Wizards) a box of tools : up to them to figure out what to use when. Larian seems to want every spell to be the popular one who's used all the time.

Besides, suppose Larian manages to make all spells be the most popular, and thus used about as often. If they want to have each spell used 5% of the time ... that means there can be only 20 spells. If they implement 100 level 1-and-2 spells and we want to click them all all the time, that means they're all used 1% of the time.

So this whole goal of wanting to make us click on every spell sounds quite dubious to me.


Anyway, in short, this interview really didn't make Larian sound good at using EA data and developing the game, in my view. Of course, with enough iterations, they can perfectly converge to a great-to-play version of the game.

I share your thoughts, and your fear.

Their analysis looks really strange.
Their implementation of the rules unbalanced a lot of things and it looks like they don't understand this.

Are they going to remove all spells and features that grants advantages or gives a disadvantages because NO ONE use them now ?
Or will they do something to give them back their usefullness ?

That's the same about concentration. As you notice, it's way too easy to break it.

I really hope they'll give us the opportunity to have more AP/round so we can use more strategies. At the moment with only 4 actions/turns we HAVE to deal damages with every characters. The usefullness/cost rate for buffs and debuff is way too bad.

That's the same about advantages... We HAVE to use backstab and highground because it's free and because we don't have enough AP to use spells/features whose utility is only to give advantages.

The game lacks of tactical value and this is definitely because everything is done so that the player can only attack.

I really hope they'll give us a "D&D mode" or something and a solution for an increased party size (because in its current state, I think combats would be even slower with 4 characters and a D&D mode)

Back in the Neverwinter Nights days, there were few people more revered than clerics administering buffs before a party plunged into a crypt full of bodaks and liches. Because without Protection from Evil and Death Ward, everyone would be wiped out in minutes. It made the cleric feel awesome, and it made the party feel awesome, and no cleric would waste a slot on damage spells in that situation.

I don't get that feeling in BG3. Shadowheart can throw a healing spell and beside that she's almost useless. Her attacks always miss, and her buffs aren't necessary. Maybe it's a low level issue, given what's available, but I guess one way to make buffs attractive is to simply make them necessary for survival. I've never played 5e and I understand that some things have changed, but as I recall from older versions of D&D, without buffs and countermeasures, you were dead. It gave the game this aspect of having to know your enemy and plan ahead. Not just knowing their weakness, but knowing yours, against their special powers.

Why don't I use Bless? Because I hate the way it has been designed in 5.0.

BBG1/2 you could pop off layers of buff spells (bless, prayer, protection spells etc.) then pop off more layers of de-buffs on the enemy (bane etc.) as the flow of combat dictated. In BG3, thanks to the newer implementation of concentration, I can use ONE buff or de-buff. Just one. Only one. Concentration requirements limit the number I can use, and thus place limitations on their value. I have a similar dislike for how concentration impacts summoning as well. I can't tag Larian with this, it is purely a Hasbro implementation.

And before you tell me I'm nuts or an idiot, I am not claiming this is "everyone's" view, or even a correct view from a "balance" perspective. I am simply explaining my current distaste for buff/debuff spells in a 5.0 application. My ancient, fossilized brain is simply too slow to crunch numbers that justify using them.

As with most of your posts, I find myself nodding the whole time as I read through it. There is definitely an art to using gathered data along with qualitative sources to understand what is going on, and I think they may be learning a lot of the wrong lessons from what they are seeing.

You touched on this a little bit, but regarding buffs and debuffs in particular, their appeal really relies on understanding what they are doing and how they benefit the player. It might just be that we're early in EA and Larian hasn't added this part yet, but I don't think they're doing a very good job of teaching players how the underlying system works - they obscure bonuses and DCs in dialog skill checks; they don't explain how attack vs AC or save vs DC works; you can see the rolls in the combat log if you go looking, but to someone who isn't familiar with the system it doesn't explain anything. If people don't understand what a buff/debuff is doing to the underlying system, they aren't going to know when it is valuable, and so it's rarely going to be as appealing as something that just does damage (a fairly obvious objective that most players can understand intuitively). If players think that buffs/debuffs are boring, it is because Larian hasn't done a good job of explaining why/when they are powerful.

I do think that saying bless isn't flashy is a strange takeaway.

That said the concentration mechanic in 5E really pushes players to prepare less buffs in general. No point in having half of your prepared spells be concentration if you can have one up at a time.

And in BG3 this is just worse, for reasons you mentioned and because there are few utility spells implemented (and they won't be as needed in BG3 anyway).

That said, I don't like spending a minute buffing before an encounter like you used to do in older games.

From what I understand (without having followed DnD editions much), 5E changed quite a lot the balance between healing, buffing, and other things a Cleric can do. The fact that long rest restores HP means healing spells are only for use in combat, where it is far from always being a good choice. And the Concentration system is precisely there to prevent the arms race and multiple layers of buffs. But the points I wanted to make didn't concern the relative use of buff between older editions and 5E-BG3.

One point was about the relative use of buffs between 5E and BG3. BG3 is using 5E. It's a homebrew, but the difference of player behaviour is stark, and it's not clear it's because the 5E players and BG3 players have different inclinations. It sounds more reasonable to think that the difference comes, in good part, from the vastly different balance that BG3 produces.

Another was on how the interview goes from "our data shows that buffs aren't much used" to "buffs are just plain boring, cRPG players only want fireworks and damage" without any discussion about why, exactly, buffs aren't used much. Which I find really problematic.

Another was on how Larian seems to think that if a spell isn't used as much as expected, it's a problem. And perhaps one that can be solved by over-powering said spell until it sees more use.

@grysqrl : oh if I continue posting (and I have a few more posts planned) you'll surely disagree somewhere, if you haven't already.

I very much agree with your second point though. That's an explanatory factor that I forgot.

In some video I once watched, the speaker suggested that one thing that makes a cRPG a cRPG, beside merely being on a computer, is that it generally involves a (possibly somewhat involved) ruleset. While the JRPGs did away with that, a tabletop RPG like DnD, which was the source of the cRPGs, really is still a game with a ruleset. Despite all the streamlining of 5E, it is still useful to understand the rules. These rules involves randomness at every level. Buffs/debuffs are only about probability management, and their value can only be appreciated if you know the rules. Many other games have actions that are guaranteed to do something and new players have an immediate feedback. In comparison, a spell to tweak probabilities does something invisible and provides no feedback. As you pointed, Larian has not yet provided a tutorial for BG3's rules (and understandably so). So the usage rate of buffs could up with a tutorial explaining what's going on under the bonnet, at least for players who'll read. (Obviously this explanatory factor is not the-one-that-explains-everything-on-its-own.)

Having said that, I now see one point where 5E players and BG3 players are likely to differ. A 5E player is more likely to have some grasp of the rules, if not a decent mastery, and thus be better able to evaluate buffs/debuffs. As they actively throw their dice on their Attack Rolls, they cannot go far without starting to pick up the rules, even if a GM had them jump in and create a character in full-roleplay mode. What a buff does in a lot less invisible in TT 5E.

I will reserve the right to disagree, then. On the whole though, even if there are details where we differ, I appreciate your approach to constructive feedback. It's well thought out and well presented.

Really good points OP, it doesn't reflect well on Larian at all and gives me concern going forward with the development of the game. I touched on similar things in another thread when I first read that quote about players wanting fireworks and damage. My initial issue with it is just how horribly misguided it sounds, it comes across as if Swen speaks for every player purely on the basis of their subjective data analysis. Did the thought seriously not enter their head that players aren't using buffs and debuts because of their horrible implementation?

As a veteran of the original BG/IWD games it took me some time to understand the new 5e spell mechanics; everything had changed so drastically I was initially confused why I could only cast 1 buff at a time and without fail the concentration was always interrupted, thereby making them a totally obsolete choice in battles. If players are trying this game having no experience of DnD then it's no wonder they aren't going to use buffs/debuffs because frankly the benefits are just not apparent. This in turn leads to spam casting the same offensive spells over and over again; combat becomes boring and repetitive...but glossy to look at.

Less style, more substance please Larian.

Thanks for writing this up, Drath. It's been a lot on my mind as well - Larian's use of data and the conclusions they appear to draw from it making very little sense or being dubious to questionable at best. Each interview that gives rise to comments like this has mostly cemented the impression in my mind that they have already decided what they want/are going to do, and have already decided that they know what players want and what is objectively 'fun', and they're just looking to use the data to confirm the decision they've already made... which is absolutely not a good way to use data in an EA (or, really, anywhere).

Regarding buffing, I feel compelled to point out that not all buffing spells are concentration in 5e, though many, are. Choosing what one in-combat buff is the best choice for a particular situation is one of the tactical choices that the concentration system encourages; in older editions "just stack them all up" was more or less the only thing you did, every time. Many of the big or important buffs for various situations are not concentration, or are long-lasting, even possibly 'night before' preparations, which are then bolstered with in-combat buffs later. To someone completely new to the ruleset, it's not necessarily obvious why some spells are concentration and why other ones are not - and some may even find that it looks unbalanced on the surface, but it really is more nuanced than that. The game needs to explain this, or give the players the opportunity to understand it more accurately.

Thank you Drath for writing these issues up so nicely.
This interview was already discussed in this forum, although not in that much depth as you provided.

What I am curious about is what David Walgrave is going to tell us on the Panel From Hell on February, 17th.

I for one am pessimistic for that Panel, as I fear they will explain to us, which ideas they came up with to make the game more flashy and what is their solution for the balance problems.

In the last panel I didn't get the feeling that Chris Perkins from WotC felt too comfortable, and the whole Panel came across a little bit awkward, at least to me. Maybe that's the reason he is not included this time.

Just my two cents.

to be honest i feel the same........ the last patch was realy dissapointing as it ONLY adressed the Ground effects of cantrips. And all other ballance issues wherent even mentioned as if they didnt exist at all. I dont think we get alot of those issues adressed now. Sometimes it seems that they got problems to get their divinity engine running a DND ruleset. (for expample jumping is made as a "throw yourself" routine.) And they would never admit that its a technical problem because that would upset most fans since many are allready critical on their Divinity approach.

Thank you very much Drath for this post !
I really hope that Jeremy Crawford will not be used as a shiny placebo on wednesday, and that his presence is really a sign of better implementation of D&D5 rules.

Them devs @Larian don't understand how they effectively made all concentration spells useless by spamming fire surfaces on every battlefield?

Players want fireworks rather than buffs is the analysis from the data? Lol come on.

I don't use concentration spells because the game makes me roll 2 concentration checks every time I try to move. High AC won't help because every goblin has AoE fire bombs/arrows/whatever or there's a "highly flammable cloud / barrel / mushroom" just waiting to explode in a sea of fire. And it's massively annoying.

Start with cutting down on the AoE surface spam and then take another look at the data, please.

And last I played, being knocked Prone ended Concentration spells too. It shouldn't.

@1varangian : yes. That use of their data didn't sit well with me. And I forgot that prone shouldn't break concentration (according to this post, I haven't checked the rulebook ... but it sounds intuitive : just because you're on the floor doesn't mean you're unconscious).

@Lunar Dante : I don't want to spoil your hopes, but ... you should probably revise them. From what I've read (links to come in a future post), WotC has a tendency to be present at interviews and promotions for BG3. Naturally, given the nature of the exercise, we probably shouldn't take everything said at face value. But the feeling I get is that WotC and Larian are completely on the same wavelength. WotC isn't summoned as a mere legitimising tool. They sound very happy with what Larian is doing and they aren't going to bridle Larian and tell them to stick to the rules. Now, granted, I think it was only/mostly Mike Mearls representing WotC previously, I don't think I heard Jeremy Crawford. But I doubt he's going to sing a massively different tune.

@daMichi : I'm kind curious as well. I don't think I'm optimistic or pessimistic, but I have one main wish : they Larian starts communicating more and better. That they clearly spell out their vision, what they find fun, what they want to do. And also that they indicate what's decided and non-negotiable, what's already on their to-do list (whether from before EA or existing feedback, doesn't matter), and finally what is worth providing feedback on. So as to reduce the noise in the feedback and requests.

@Niara : that's exactly the case. They weren't exactly the plainest and most explicit about it, but they have their vision of fun, of what's boring in 5E, and what they're shooting for. That has never been faithfulness to 5E.

Bless looks weird because a glowing worm is flying around your characters' faces. Other buff spells look annoying too.

It's a niche thing I wanted to bring up after Patch 4, but the effects like Hex, Mage Armor, Bless, etc. all don't look that great.
Hex making my character glow red, Mage Armor making my character glow yellow...

Essentially, Buff/Debuff animations can be improved if they're lacking in oomph factor.

Also they have the option to buff Bless to a 2d2 or 1d6, that'd be healthier for the game than advantage being everywhere.

Cab we at least TRY getting things correct and then evaluating if a spell is worth casting?

I don't know how niche it is, but I complained about not-super-pretty glowing characters, and I remember at least 1-2 people raising it elsewhere.

The way they sound in the interview is, precisely, as if they'd happily tweak the amount of bonus given until the spell becomes popular (2d2 ? 1d6 ? 2d4 ... ?). Instead of, you know, trying to get plenty of other things correct first, indeed, waiting to see how the general balance evolves (ideally without Backstab/High-Ground giving Advantage for free, and with fewer sources of Concentration Saves), and then evaluating whether they want to make Bless more popular and how to proceed for that.

Niche as in, we have higher priorities on the forums. They could be placeholder animations and Larian already has a lot of feedback from Early Access to date. I really want to see what we get in patch 4 what animations/visuals are changed. Larian employees probably have their own opinions about certain animations and changes could be in the roadmap.

Either way, if it's lacking in "oomph" something needs to change. I'm mostly highlighting that if oomph really is lacking for Bless, then there are simple changes that can give it oomph. I'm not disagreeing that it would be good to play through a more raw DnD meta, but some things have already been changed. It would have been cool to be given the opportunity to say as a player, whether Bless lacks oomph in a videogame format. At the end of the day, what's important is that the game is fun.