Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian's communication, faithfulness to 5E rules, and the players who feel betrayed.

So you never had an actual argument to make. Cool, nice to know.


Honestly, I'm fine with the wild shape stuff within the context of everything else that exists in BG3 as is. The action economy in BG3 more or less completely revolves around a lot of things suddenly being considered bonus actions, so one should realize that wild shape being one too is probably a necessary change to allow them to keep up with the curve. Though even if all the other things like jump/disengage and bonus action shove didn't exist, bonus action wild shape is probably still an okay change regardless.

It's also an indirect confirmation that the devs are probably going to double down on this bonus action focus (or maybe their engine simply doesn't support a way to implement proper reactions and ready actions, the same way it doesn't appear to support true flight at this point, so the action economy's hyper focus on bonus actions may actually be compensating for the lack of such features). Giving feedback to rein this in may ultimately be a futile effort, and our time might be better spent giving more productive feedback elsewhere. I accept that I don't have to like this and that there are people who do enjoy this kind of thing, though I also already paid for the game and might as well see this through to the end to understand the thought process behind the underlying mechanics. Maybe the mid/endgame won't end up being a total balancing disaster as I predict, like how the last third of DOS2 ultimately turned out.

That said, this isn’t to say that DOS2 was a bad game. If anything, most things worked out in that game well enough. But the major problem was the armor system, which contributed to insane number bloat in the end that choked out unoptimized characters by endgame, funneling tactical variety into major cheese strategies. Late game boss fights devolved into nuking the boss in your first two turns or face a total party kill, because they often had one-shot level offense and some on tactician mode appear to start battles with more AP than player characters did.

To see signs of something similar this early in BG3 already is quite worrying. It’s almost like they took DOS2’s design philosophy in regards to action economy and encounter balance, and expected it to work in a DND setting. Larian is quickly discovering that it’s not that simple, as DND is a system that purposely splits up your resources and limits your actions, inherently revolving around trying to come up with creative solutions within your limits.