Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Suggestions: Class Balance Changes

They could add a lot of the camp cutscenes/dialogue (mainly the party dialogue ones) to short rests, where the party sets up a brief camp wherever they are in the world. This would:
-make short rests feel more significant and realistic, and less a click of a single button to gain mechanical benefits
-allow characters to still get story content without frequent long resting (2 short rests per long rest = 3x the story content per day)

Why will Gale only tell me his secrets when we're at base camp? Why not while on the road?

The real issue is HP bloat and changing the way AC works, it along with the way they've gamed likelihood to hit for attack rolls based on various controllable variables the player can plan for (i.e. high ground), makes fire bolt worse than it should be under normal 5e rules and it makes non-attack roll cantrips like sacred flame significantly worse because they have the same lower 5e hit percentage BUT the same lower damage, despite Larian buffing enemy health to compensate for higher hit percentages. If the enemies had more normal HPs like we would expect to see in DnD5e, then there wouldn't be a problem, fire bolt would be fine, sacred flame would be fine, etc. As it is now, all damage cantrips are underpowered, and you need the more hard hitting stuff as bread and butter and the game basically incentivizes you to take a lot more rests so that when you run into enemies with health bloat you just unleash your most powerful arsenal. What this does is by design drags us further away from core DnD balancing and rest dynamics. It's a fundamental problem that I, and many people (HP bloat primarily) have been complaining about for months and for some reason Larian keeps ignoring it.

And this also wraps right back into to the original argument that lowering AC/encouraging HP bloat also discourages the use of buff spells, because enemy AC being lower to begin with means there's few situations where you'll need that extra boost to overcome it. And again, the only practical tool to fight HP bloat is to increase damage values or stress indirect environmental factors further - but there is a certain point where people start noticing that the latter is emphasized to a level where it is clear that it's to the detriment to the practicality of every other possible tactic, and it puts a stranglehold on the strategic potential of the game as a result.

Reversing course on that would mean saving throw spells and buffs would become more desirable to use, and good strategic use of those means you can take down an enemy faster than the current situation. You can still make use of those environmental factors as you wish, but the game would not be balanced entirely around them. Hence, more tactical options.

It's a cyclical balancing problem.

It's also a balancing problem that needs to be fixed. The way they have it now is unacceptable.

Wow, I'm almost at a loss for words....

Literally all of the changes you're suggesting are either game-breakingly overpowered, fly in the face of balancing systems, completely misunderstand the purpose of the spell/ability, or all of the above.

Larian devs, please, for the love of Selûne, don't make any of these changes.

I really wish this myth would die, because its not (and has never been) true. It was started because someone on reddit looked at one or 2 goblins, noticed that they don't have 15 AC and 7 HP and decided that because a goblin in tabletop has 2d6 hp, of which the average is 7 and has 15 AC, that the reason must be because Larian changed Goblins because "missing is not fun." At a very vague, surface level analysis, this seems like a fair assumption, except it does not hold up to any substantive level of analysis. For reference, here is a goblin.

To begin with, where does that 15 AC come from? 11 from the Leather Armor, 2 from Dexterity and 2 from a Shield. Great. This means that if a Goblin is not wearing Leather Armor, or has lower Dexterity, or does not have a Shield, they will not have 15 AC. If you believe that the world of Faerun is in any way realistic, you will find it possible to believe that not all Goblins are identical and all wearing the exact same gear, ergo, the equipment lineup for Goblins can vary. This is, by the way, exactly where most of the Goblins who are missing AC, are missing AC from. They do not have a shield equipped.

Well, how about HP? Some months ago I got into an argument with someone on these forums about this very topic and I went to the effort of recording the HP of all the Goblins in the EA and averaging their HP. That includes the HP of boss Goblins, which have HP >20. So, including Goblins which were specifically designed to be bosses, the average HP for Goblins turned out to be 11.75. 11.75, happens to be a value within the 2d6 range. There are many Goblins with 3-4 HP, there are also a couple with 15 HP or higher values. 2d6 happens to be a range, not a fixed value, so even if you look at just the smaller pleb tier goblins, you can expect some to be at the lower end of that range and others to be at the higher end, with some deviation.

So, what really happened? What I think happened is Larian decided to try and make the Goblins "believable," and gave them some character, by making them not all identical, although there is some symmetry in how they are set up. There are Goblins which use bows and they have a set of gear and a set value of HP. There are Goblins who fight in close combat and they have a different set of gear and a different value for HP. Larian created a bunch of Goblin archetypes, each of which had a different equipment and HP total, to reflect a believable "character" for that Goblin. Basically, they tried to give the Goblins a bit more depth than just being something that you kill. Some of these Goblins, have 15 AC and above 12 HP, because it fits with the character. Basically, what Larian did was what you could imagine a DM doing if they were trying to create an immersive world, creating backstories for random enemy Goblins.

And as far as encounter design goes, does it really matter if its a goblin with 12 HP and 13 AC, or some other creature that has those stats. What matters is they are trying to tell a story, using a particular monster group and for the purposes of the fight they want an enemy with a particular stat block. Does it make more sense to just modify a Goblin to the stats you need and then justify it in the story by giving the Goblins a bit more character, or should you just scrap the encounter entirely because the enemy type you want doesn't have those stats in the player handbook. I suspect many of the people complaining about this and requiring a strict 7 hp 15 ac goblin, aren't spending much time thinking about this from the mindset of a designer and are putting too much emphasis on a strict adherence to an arbitrary stat block. When designing an encounter, your first focus should be on what it takes to challenge a player from a mechanics pov and from a story pov, the first thing you should think of is what type of enemy matches the type of story you are trying to tell. If the type of enemy you need for your story is a Goblin, but the player happens to be a bit strong when encountering them, you either have the choice of scrapping your story and going with something else, or modifying that goblin's stat block.

That's not how numbers work. You can't just have a range and have the average basically be the maximum and call it good. 2d6 is already a range between 2 and 12 with an average of 7. If the range is 3-15 with an average of 12 then they've buffed HP that's literally how maths works.

Regardless of where it came from, it had a deep observable effect on the game's overall balance. Maybe your narrative purpose reasoning would work out if the goblins were designed around an average referencing the tabletop stats to begin with, but they and every other enemy in the game are near universally following the rule of lower AC/higher HP. And the end result is that people have noticed how the combination of that and the high ground advantage/backstab advantage system have really thrown out most incentive to use buff spells for the purpose of overcoming higher AC and spells that target saving throws. Not to mention the Sleep spell being far less effective than it should be.

I see reading comprehension is hard, let me help you.
If you exclude the bosses (there are quite a few of them, the priestess Gluk and some others), the average drops considerably. Still above 7, but most Goblins are within the 2-12 range. Furthermore, you conveniently ignored most of my points, more specifically, the points about how goblins were modified. How tells a much more important story. Most of the Goblins within the EA are named NPCs, with their own kit and their own dialogue. They are designed to be "characters" rather than to be blank monsters solely there to provide you with loot and XP. Expecting them all to have the same kit, is the same as going outside and expecting every person on the street to share the same identity. This is the kind of thing you could expect a good GM to do and indeed, there are literally quotes from Jeremy Crawford where he endorses modifying these values. Here is an example which came up in the last argument I was involved in over this topic.

Just because the average HP for all Goblins in the entire of Faerun is 7, does not mean that in your specific sample, their HP needs to average to 7. Its a guideline, not a requirement. If the encounter you are trying to design calls for a different stat block for a Goblin, then go for it, because this is the kind of thing that a good designer will know when to change.
Except they aren't, if you actually go to the effort of referencing other enemies instead of just parroting what you read other people say online, you will find monsters are usually on the high end of the HP roll for that monster, but the AC is usually untouched, provided the stat block for a monster does not have it using equipment. If the stat block for the monster has equipment, the AC is either higher (yes, in some cases Larian's monsters have both higher AC and HP than average), lower, or identical, depending on how Larian decided to altar the equipment on that particular specimen of monster.
There are a few encounters (very early on) where sleep is potentially useful. What you are forgetting is, 2 things. At the point in time when sleep and other spells like it are useful, surfaces or other sources of incidental damage will outright instant kill any enemies in the fight, thus rendering sleep a waste because you could just light the (conveniently located surface) on fire. The second thing is, Larian levels the player up quite quickly to 4 and is balancing encounters around a higher level party where sleep has less utility. Thus their goal for these higher level encounters, is probably for sleep to have limited usefulness to begin with.

Hmm... I actually booted up the game to check. Most if not all of the goblins in the goblin camp are rocking way lower than 15 AC and way higher than 7 HP, depending on their combat role. Of course, some of that AC may be based on gear differences, and some of that HP may be based on level difference, but it's near universal among them. That said, I will actually admit that you are correct when it came to the other monsters I found within the goblin camp. The Ogre and Bugbears didn't have much changed in terms of HP, but their AC was increased or lowered by one or two points. However, goblins still make up like 50% of the EA content and no one really knows exactly why Larian decided they had to be altered to such a level, so it's not hard to see where this perception comes from.

Even so, this would sound okay in a vacuum, but it just lends further credence to the idea of exactly how much high ground advantage/low ground disadvantage (and backstab advantage) has such a drastic effect on how people approach combat in this game, if it turns out that the HP/AC changes didn't really change the calculations at all. And that makes the high ground/low ground stuff far, far worse on multiple levels.

The thing is, you can actually fairly easily work out how their AC has been changed for each Goblin if you care to. In most cases, they removed pieces of equipment or replaced them with something else. It seems like something you could believe would happen in a disorganized camp (and that Goblin camp is anything but organized).
The low HP Goblins are there as well in the camp (I have screenshots of all of the Goblins if you are curious), but yes, there are quite a lot on the high end as well. Larian's Goblin bell curve is a bit weird, with lots of Goblins on the 2 extreme ends with hardly any near the middle at 6/7/8.
As I said, I expect most of the changes made were a result of a combination of trying to give the Goblins character and trying to make a Goblin camp a challenge for a level 4 party. Goblins do not exactly have a stellar challenge rating.
I checked quite a few monsters, including the phase spiders and the spider boss. Animals had the exact same AC but higher HP than the average in the PHB, as they do not use armour. Monsters were all over the place depending on what Larian did to their gear.
I know that all we can do is speculate, but we can do much better in speculating than assuming the reason for the changes is because Larian thinks missing is bad. If that was all they cared about, there wouldn't be monsters with higher AC values than the values in the PHB and there would be a much easier way to make those changes, just change all the Goblins in the same way. Going out of the way to give every Goblin a name and give them some role in Goblin society is going to a lot more work to solve the problem of "missing feels bad" and kind of makes that seem to be an implausible reason for doing so.
I think high ground giving advantage contributes far more to the perception that its easy to hit things than Larian's changes to monster equipment does.

Cool. This is actually a well reasoned argument.

Another thing to add (and strike down) from my own thread. Thanks!

EDIT: ...Or not. Apparently this forum has a maximum edit time. Why is this a thing?

(v2) Sorry, but I am pretty much against all the changes suggested here.

* Firebolt is a cantrip you can cast every single round.
SUGGESTION : I would not mind if similar attacks had better damage average like 2d6 (instead of 1d10).
Nb : The tabletop is a whopping 1d10. As a level 5 caster, you do 2d10 (tabletop).
You cannot compare it to Magic Missile which cost a spell slot ; ALWAYS hits (and counts as many hits versus, for example, Mirror Image), etc.

* Rogues do NOT need to be hidden nor invisible at all ... They can do a Sneak Attack as soon as they have Advantage and, I think, also by hitting the back (in BG3-EA only). A rogue can, in one single turn in BG3, hit the back and Jump/Disengage as a Bonus Action. If you chose Thief, you can Sneak Attack, do a second-hand attack [Bonus Action], and then Jump/Disengage away with the extra Bonus Action (Which does not exist in D&D 5e).
Nb : they do NOT even need to hit the back. Sneak Attack can be triggered in many other ways including at ranged!

* Healing Word does a TINY amount of healing because it is ranged ... Cure Wounds is, by definition, touch, but the healing could be improved. If Larian made Cure Wounds ranged, other healing spells would also need to be adjusted, like Healing Word would need to be kept useful or relevant.

* Currently, Wizards cannot even summon their Familiar as a Ritual (it cost them a spell slot for a weak familiar), but Rangers can summon a stronger Familiar at will out-of-combat, BUT you would like Rangers to additionally be able to summon a Familiar at will in combat. Some fairness would be nice. Familiars are usually a Wizard thing. :P

No to the rest also ... Sorry.

I do like those suggestions though.
The "not unsummon on camping" would also help other classes that have the Familiar spell (cost 1 spell slot, but they should exist as long as they are not destroyed).