Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Patch 4 enemy healing out of combat = Bulette being the worst encounter ever devised.

So Larian, your bandaid answer for people cheesing broken stealth and killing enemies without being detecting, is now to make them autoheal all damage outside of combat, has broken your already broken Bulette encounter even further.

Now, if you don't manage to kill it in one instance, it returns, with full health again. I've faced it 3 times during my druid playthrough, the last encounter being with sovereign and a reanimated minotaur, and even getting it down to 40 HP, it burrowed for a 4th time, and I'll have to face it for a 5th at full health.

This encounter is completely broken under the existing (terrible IMHO) rules modifications.

I've had the bullete appear in both the minotaur and hook horror fights. It sure seems to get around.

But what I've found interesting is that it can turn other Underdark denizens hostile, I assume by catching them with its aoe. In the minotaur fight one of the minotaurs went from attacking my party to attacking the bulette (and killed his companion in the process). The same happened in the hook horror fight; they went after the bulette once it appeared. They actually helped my party defeat it.

I've not been "lucky" enough to have it show up in any other fights. In this playthrough, I did have a hook horror jump all the way from the branch of the tree, land on Gale and Wyll killing them by doing 50 damage to each of them, and take zero fall damage itself.

Larian's meddling with creature abilities has utterly broken all semblance of balance. If the final product is anything close to this EA in terms of cramming DOS mechanics into a shell of DnD, then I'll most likely wait till someone mods in some more accurate rules before I attempt to play the full version.

I'd not call it "lucky"; the bulette managed to kill two character in that fight, but it also angered the hook horrors in the process. :P

But I think Larian should add different difficulty options in the EA for people to playtest before the full release. The difficulty doesn't seem consistent.

You know it's not even really about difficulty. The minotaurs are plenty difficult without being able to jump 80 feet. Same with the hook horror battle, 4 hook horrors and a mage, is plenty difficult without letting giving hook horrors jump attacks that can one shot anyone in the party, the bulette is plenty difficult without being able to spit AOE acid. Phase spiders are plenty difficult without giving them the ludicrous ability to spit poison.

The jumping/disengaging from combat is also completely broken, and makes melee combat 2nd class to any form of ranged combat, there's literally no benefit to trying to tie up someone in melee when they can jump out without penalty or risk, and that goes for enemies and party members.

it's almost as if Larian is trying to make the only viable tactic in the games to be using the DOS features they've thrown in with AOE/surface spam, along with mega-jump and 'push FTW'.

I wouldn't say the "DoS" tactics but I understand what you mean... And I agree.

The difficulty of this game is only based on their OP rules.
Players that don't know them find the game very hard... Players that know them find it very easy... That's definitely not what should be a normal difficulty level.

That's something we have said in many threads... I really hope they'll fix this because such a "learning curve" is not interresting at all in a strategy game

P1 : The game is too hard
P2 : Use highground and push ennemies...
P1 : Thx, now the game is very easy, I'll try with a solo character
P2 : So use dipping and backstab
P1 : This game is easy even without companions !

You feel really good after defeating it though, even more so after Glut reanimates it for you.

I think the bulette is fine. Keep in mind, the party will probably be level 5-6 when meeting this creature in the final game.

It auto heals if you rest. Otherwise, it just gets a smaller health boost from it's Burrow ability. It makes sense to me that if you get to heal from a long rest, it does too.

If you have misty step and invisibility, you can force it to fight the minotaurs every time. It wins/loses/burrows about 1/3rd of the time each.

Then it's broken in the patch, because I've faced it 4 times now, done plenty of damage to it, with only short rests, and by the time it comes back it has full health again.. As to your solution, gaming a broken system being the most effective way to beat an enemy, means that the encounter and/or enemy design is broken, and it's the complete antithesis of DnD.

I've been investigating a bug where someone claims that they killed multiple bulettes, because I want to collect them, so I've killed one at least 15 times this patch. Most of those times letting it burrow on purpose. It regains ~20 hp when it burrows in and another ~20 hp when it burrows out, if you don't rest.


That being said, what I will concede, is that, if you are invisible or out of range when it comes up after being burrowed, it will auto heal for full health within a couple seconds.

Edit:Also, in your case, I'm not sure if you can even have 5 shots at it. I believe it only triggers in 4 locations, and they seem to be one time use.

I don't believe that it's limited to 40 HP gain. I didn't do a full rest in the underdark, on the second battle I had it down to 49 HP, when it came back for the third battle it was full health again; similar for the 4th it was down below half before burrowing.

It's the law of unintended consequences played out on screen, coupled with bad modifications to an already 5e balanced foe. There was no need to bump the Bulette's AC from 14 to 17, as it already has 94 HP, or give it an acid AOE attack. If Larain was concerned that it would be too easy with AOE/surface spam and barralmancy, then they should cut those DOS features out rather than butcher 5e to try to make a poorly designed encounter work.

Even if we go with the "you'll be higher level in the release game" you still are going to be hard pressed to survive this fight given that it can push you off a high spot and then belly flop you for near 250 damage; cheesing it shouldn't be the most viable option.

My 5 battles were as follows, 2 x minotaur area, 1x altar area just beyond the hook horror battle, 1x at the small chasm leap near the myconid entrance, 1x at the top of the climbing wall opposite the path to the tower.

It's not bullshit to kill Bulette, killed him without stealth or elevation. If you survive the first turn with enough team members, Lazael has a 80% chance to land Frightening Strike from behind and with Action Surge Lazael alone can do at least 40 of the 105 damage needed to kill him.

I legit walked up, got half my team knocked around by his burrowing out and still killed him with a Moonbeam> Frightening Strike>Action Surge>Melee>Hex+EB>Exposing Bite>Inflict Wounds combo. Notice I haven't even included 2 turns of possible imp damage.

If you have Shadowheart and a druid you have 2 characters that can rez from range with a cantrip spell that you can use on top of your offensive skills to get people up during a turn with Healing Word. If you start the fight with Mirror Images it's even easier.

Can it be difficult? Yes, as it should, not a complete pushover boss outleveling you by 1 level being made into a ragdoll by stealth/range cheese mechanics.

I guess the people whining about out of combat healing are probably the ones trying to cheese from range and stealth.

I certainly hope they do something to fix stealth cheese and fix the elevation games.

If you're not using a 2H fighter in this game, you're doing it wrong. It's the only class that can get some semblance of CC to land because for some reason Charm at max Wisdom still has a pitiful 30-50% hit chance, as does Charm Beast and Hold.

Frightening Attack is the single most reliable CC setup in the game, and 2H fighter is the most powerful class by far, especially if supported by a Bless bot cleric supplementing damage with Inflict Wounds.

There's no betetr class than fighter at the moment, ~40 damage total with a high chance CC for the next turn in a single turn is the most powerful utility you can have in this game, as you can neutralize the biggest threat in any fight and kill it within 2 turns.

Of course, if you try to run gimped ass casters, you'll miss half your crap even from elevation, so you're doing it wrong.

Ditch the casters, bring only Wyll or Gale for a 4th, and use Shadowheart+Lazel+Melee or Moonbeam druid for your other 3 since casters are worthless in EA. Personally I prefer Wyll because of an imp, and between Hex and Poison Ray with poisoner robes and the magic missiles neck you can do some work with Hex and the imp provides a worthwhile distraction.

If you're not building all your team around medium armor+ shield and mirror images outside Lazael, you're also doing it wrong.

With mirror image+ 19 base AC from medium armor+ shield and then bless on top, you end up with like 30 AC at the beginning round so you can survive the initial volley and proceed to CC chain any boss to death.

Don't blame the encounter.

Blame Larian for making this game all about Armor Class to survive and land skills, and making light armor/robes and staves completely worthless.

At least none of this is as bad as save scumming for half an hour to roll the dice for the 5/10/15 rolls of Necronomicon of Thay. The game would be better renamed into Baldur's Dice.

I don't know the exact dice that can be regained, as it doesn't say in the ability description, but I'm guessing 4d6, 3d8 or 2d12. The highest value I've seen is 24 per burrow.


I just ran a similar test as my previous vid where had it down to 8. Except after it burrowed, I slaughtered the Myconid colony, levelled my characters up to 4, short rested twice, and triggered it from the location by the Sussur tree. It only regained 32 HP.

In my playthrough Bulette didn't even burrow out until I reached the Sussur tree loaction.

I'm also not sure why people are even attempting a lv5 boss without having a source of Bless in the party to actually land skills on a mob 1 level over you.

In that party comp 3 out of 4 didn't even have Darkvision.

I'm not really doing normal playthroughs at this point, I'm breaking things, looking for bugs. That being said, with only 40 damage left to do and 2 wizards with magic missile, one wearing sapphire spark, one invisible out of combat, had I cared and not quit after taking that screenshot, it wouldn't have been a problem.

Your playthrough is the exception and not the rule given that the Bulette can and does regularly show up near the minotaur patrol area and can show up during the battle. As to bless or being 5th level, I'm not sure how you can type that with any seriousness considering the bulette can take flying bellyflops off of high ground and do 250 damage to multiple party members.

Bulette legit knocked me down while crossing near minotaurs, but it's pretty obvious she has specific spawn points to trigger out of. The lower ramp near minotaurs and the sussar zone are examples.

And why would Bulette have high ground on you to begin with. She did a Bellyflop on 3 of my teammates and missed 2 thanks to mirror images, bless, and armor of faith granting me 30+ AC.

I don't get the complaint.



Legit 2 shot of Bulette.

Some of you are exaggerating the difficulty of the encounter or running really suboptimal comps.

And the answer to that is to blame Larian for making so many classes and spells and companions sheer, weak traps, and making consumables and martial classes so comparatively strong.

Doesn't help the elven races are vastly superior to the rest thanks to immunity to sleep, darkvision, saving throw against charm, and +2 DEx giving more initiative and one more AC.

Meanwhile Tieflings get trash racials with fire resistance and +2 charisma which is only worth anything to a warlock. And humans even worse.

Elves+ Dwarves>>>>every other race by a long shot.

How does the Bulette get height advantage on you? It all depends on where it lands.


Your AC doesn't matter when it comes to the leap, it can be 3 or 30, if you don't make your strength or dexterity save, then you take full damage, half with a save.


As to that video, I've seen it, it's a prime example of how Larian has broken DnD with their homebrew rules, and ridiculous choices, like allowing anyone to use scrolls. It breaks the game, and the only way the bulette is 2-hit is by exploiting the poor design, and the fact that the player knew exactly where the bulette was coming out of the ground in that encounter. It was cheese just like finding a spot on the map that was inaccessible if he put the flaming sphere in front of him, and blocked out the minotaur.

It's a poorly designed encounter; one of many.

This is by far my biggest complaint about Baldur's Gate 3. It is anti-fun to have martial classes + consumables overshadow classes and spells.

Wish I would have youtubed my kill on Bulette to put this crap to rest. If you get it to spawn on you with Minotaurs, you had crap luck, and you do what you do when you fail dialogue rolls; you reload the save.

The Strength Save on his leap is completely negated by potion of giant strength or being an elf character with a DEX of 18+ by that point.

You pulled the one time you got cheesed by a mob to complain about it being OP. If you spread your team before he burrows out the leap may at best kill two people.

And in that video no scrolls were used. In his other videos he's killed the minotaurs without the flameball trick or push tricks. His battle wizard just hammered down the first minotaur in 1 turn and then the other one died shortly afterwards since they are weak to hammers.

And if he can learn where the mob will spawn, so can you. I learned the mob doesn't spawn unless you walk down the ramp of the minotaurs while it's there. Otherwise it spawns at the Sussar tree. Instead you walk the highroad to the Myconid colony to the right side and Bulette never spawns.

Not that it matters where he spawns if you bothered to kill the Minotaurs beforehand. All you need is a single Lazel Frightening Strike to CC him to death.

The point isn't even his cheese, it's that he killed the mob in two turns with a single character. You have 4 to do the job.

BG1 nor BG2 were not different in this aspect. In BG1 archery was more powerful than other playstyles, with many magical arrows available, including explosive arrows that acted like fireballs. And I'd say archery was even easier there: you could use one character as a lure while the rest of the party were taking shots, because enemies wouldn't switch targets. At the same time, some melee enemies (including the final boss) hit like trucks, making it difficult to keep melee characters alive. Same in BG2, only this time it was mages that were far more powerful than other classes.

Balance between classes was never part of the BG series. It's just that enemies were much dumber (for lack of better word) in the originals making combat easier.

Baldur's Gate 1/2 melee classes weren't always fun because they had nothing to do in the previous versions.
The fighter of D&D5 has features and things to do.

But if you remove melee classes their zone of control they're not really usefull anymore.
AOO are a joke because of easy disengage and ennemies can often cross a part of your body so you can't really block any path/door/ladder - whatever, the battle arena aren't designed for such purpose.

Melee in the old games were usefull to control the battlefield. In BG3 they're just running everywhere because the majority of ennemies aren't melee and/or can teleport/jump/ranged attack with potions/...

He took that cap from the first vid I posted in this thread. It's not luck, it's repeatable. I do it to get an easy bulette in my spore army at lvl 3. Bulette has 4 spawn locations. If you skip the battle at the bottom of the ramp, or it burrows, and you go up towards the minotaurs you'll find the one from the vid cap, and there's another one, up a stone ladder, across from the stairs to the Arcane Tower.

I agree that fighters were boring in BG1 & 2, but I don't think they were all that useful in controlling the battlefield. Summons and aoe spells were far better at this job. Summons, because they were disposable and BG1 had no limit on how many you could have. Sleep in BG1 would let you win many of the early game fights (and is also why that mage at the Friendly Arm Inn was probably the most successful assassin in the BG saga ). Web was even more powerful in BG1 & 2 then it is in BG3, because anything caught in it would be "held", and "held" characters would be auto-hit.

If you wanted to powergame BG1, there wasn't any reason to take on melee characters. A party of archers with a thief for traps & locks, and a bard for wands & scrolls is all you need.

Yeah, about that. Larian overpowered Menacing Attack, too. Or rather the Frightened condition that it inflicts.

The Frightened condition does not make enemies flee and trigger AoO's. It gives disadvantage to attacks and stops you from moving closer to the source of fear. So a Frightened Bulette or Minotaur would still keep fighting, just with a disadvantage for one turn. And they would not give you free attacks on them.

So, another house rule that breaks balance. Not much incentive to pick Eldritch Knight when Menacing Strike from Battlemaster just single handedly destroys all the toughest enemies. Boss fights are generally why you have a Wizard in the party who can CC and peak perform, but funnily enough they don't have anything as powerful as Menacing Strike in its current form. Best they can do is DPS with the OP magic missile amulet, which is also rather backwards for their intended low level role.

Maybe Larian just hates 5e and would rather make a DOS 3.

It doesn't matter if Eldritch Knight had a more powerful version.

The problem here is that getting spells to land at all reliably is HORRENDOUS. As I said in the previous page, started Githyanki patrol fight at lv4 with Gale stealthed and joining the fight with an opening Poison Ray after prebuffing him with Mystra's Blessing from the unique staff, up in the garrison wall with elevation advantage.

Care to guess the hit chance of Poison Ray with bless and elevation advantage on an 18 intelligence wizard? 60%. 60 fucking percent. Lucky for me, it hit and did decent damage. But it's AGGRAVATING getting a single action per turn and having that single action after waiting for 4 enemy actions to miss half your single actions.

What makes Battlemaster and dual wield builds so much better than casters is that they actually get to land their skills reliably. That's the real issue. As a caster you do less damage, have limited resources, have no viable CC because their hit rates are abysmal, and you have no equivalent of backstab or action surge to give you two attacks in a row, one of them a CC attack that also does damage.

The casino style Dice-A-Rama RNG fest of this game is what's completely ruining the combat experience for so many classes.

Hell, I could write a novel on how often Sacred Flame does nothing and when it does it's for 1 damage.

Or the trash can Concentration system. Nothing more wonderful than wasting a spell slot on bless or the single cast per day Cleric Divine skill or the Druid's entangle only for a single ranged strike to break concentration, and just like that POOF wasted spell slot.

No interesting combos like Entangle+Moonbeam or Entangle+ Spike Growth.

The Supposed Thorn Whip cantrip which is meant to deal with elevated enemies, too bad it fails more than 60% of the time when aimed at elevated enemies due to vertical disadvantage.

These combat rules SUCK.

When am I going to pick a Land druid with anything but Coast? NEVER, Misty Step is too valuable for that vertical advantage to land spells and dodge attacks. It's such a ridiculously restrictive combat system eliminating combat style and choice.

RNG based combat and totally binary outcomes of Miss or Hit down to dice rolls are fine for a tabletop game with friends laughing around at the ridiculousness of it, but UNACCEPTABLE for a proper single player RPG experience.

Well, all I can say is that my impressions from the game are quite different. My drow druid had land circle underdark for roleplaying reasons, as I generally don't powergame my characters or companions.

I think it depends on how you approach playing spellcasters. If you are faced with larger eneny groups, then the simple economy of having limited actions gives the advantage to aoe spells. If you have a druid & a wizard, then you can quickly have two overlaying difficult terrain spells, for example. And you can use thunderwave or the void bulbs (I've noticed you can buy them in Underdark) to push & pull enemies into aoes.

My druid wasn't a very powerful character, but I've found very useful to have in a party. I haven't run into a single combat situation that was not doable, even though I don't bother with things like poisons or dipping.

...which is because of Larian's "backstab" and "high ground" house rules.

All spells that target saves are nerfed hard because they can't benefit from backstab or high ground which have now become the default attacks. Larian was afraid players would hate missing so much they mutilated the system and failed to account for many of it's aspects.

When encounters are being balanced around the fact that Lae'zel can "backstab" every turn and Menacing Attack is many times more powerful than in actual 5e, of course everything else will suck.

This whole problem starts and ends with Larian changing the rules where the rules didn't have to be changed. They change one thing and create two problems. Then they fix one of the problems with something that isn't a real fix and create more issues. Solasta proves this. It's more faithful to 5e and proves the actual rules are much more fun and balanced in a video game than Larian's "fun changes". And it feels the tactics are real in Solasta rather than "move behind" and "go high" in BG3.

To return to the original topic, enemies definitely heal outside of combat now. I recently tried to weaponise Gale's necrotic death aura against the tomb raiders in the ruined temple of Jergal (by smashing in the roof to gather them all in the corridor and then letting Gale go down there and die in the middle of them) and to my disappointment, as soon as Gale was dead, combat was over, and his aura started damaging them... They started healing themselves up. And kept healing themselves. Unendingly.

There's a chance the bulette has similar ability to just heal itself right back up to full health outside of combat.

I
It has that ability, but it only uses it while above ground, not in combat, and not leaving combat. So, if you were in combat with it, and you manage to flee, or turn invisible, it won't use that ability. It will just burrow and regain some health that way(like it always has.) If it was previously damaged, and emerges from the ground a second time, and you manage to get out of range or turn invisible before it enters combat with you, then it will use that ability, and heal fully, before burrowing back into the ground. It also heals during a long rest.

While it does bother me that frightening attack is OP. Thorn Whip is currently coded as melee weapon and gets backstab, rather than having to deal with low/high ground silliness.

It's still weird that Thorn Whip gets backstab, and highlights how ridiculous backstab is at the moment. There does need to be a premium for backstab (like requiring a dex weapon).

Something else is triggering the full heal if the numbers posted are correct. In this last playthrough, the bulette showed up 4 times and escaped with less than 50 HP in all but one of those instances, and in the 5th battle where I finally cheesed it and did enough damage in a single round to keep it from burrowing, it was back to full health at the start of the fight. That's with zero camps, and only the short rests. The only thing I can think of is that I did transition areas and go to the Kua-toa shrine.

The answer to everything in a Larian Game:

Now I know what I'm going to do with all of the farts that I barreled up in 2020.

The reason why you can't beat it normallly or in a D&D legit way is because balance is nonexistent and they want you to use their homebrew gimmicks in almost every encounter. Encounters are designed around the gimmicks instead of the class system and ruleset. This has been clear to the majority since day 1. Which is why they don't delete the infinite stealth cheese either.

Lazael's tadpole power tends to kill her and her teammates as well since if you pull a target off a wall to you, the target basically lands on you and does 20+ damage to you and your party assuming it doesn't also make them Prone. This environmental cheese needs to be dealt with.

First of all, the damage from falling off elevation needs to be removed so boss encounters aren't utterly trivialized, and damage to targets the mob lands on needs to go as well, or Lazael's tadpole power be fixed so the target always lands in front but not on top of party members.

The only benefit that should come from tossing a target off elevation should be to make them Prone.

I don't know if you have to go that far to actually fix push. If you make it an action instead of a bonus action, and give it more true-to-rules results in that you are pushing them 5 feet with a success, not 15. If they are at the edge or if it was a scenario where you stealthed up behind them, then sure, add some bonus feet since they are unprepared, but in combat it should be a 5-foot shove out of threatening range. Then if they want to get more fancy, put trip in that drops a character prone instead of pushing it 5 feet away. https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Combat#toc_43

You should load to a save before you fought the Bulette and try to repro it. It's not transition. I just did the Kua-Toa fight and back and it had normal burrow hp recovery. I also fast travelled to Overgrown Ruins, ran to Ethel's killed her, and went through the portal to Underdark and it had normal burrow hp recovery.

edit:Loading from an autosave while I was above ground and fast travelling back to underdark, It had a recovery of 52.

edit2: Yep, that's the bug. It's not using its full recovery ability. If you load a save you made outside of the main area of underdark, it gets an extra burrow.(I saw 8 to 60 and 8 to 67)

If you load that game, go to underdark, leave underdark, create a new save, load it, go back to underdark, it gets two extra burrows. (8 to 85 and 8 to 84)

I dunno, Bulette pisses me off with that burrowing from the begining, so now i just trigger him, and then hide ... and wait for him to dissapear.

I've just entered the Underdark at level 3 via the Zentharim hideout elevator, and am facing two minotaurs that I have to get past. I try to shoot one from above the cliff out of hiding with chill touch, because the spell SPECIFICALLY STATES THAT ANY CREATURE HIT WITH IT CAN! NOT! REGAIN!!! HITPOINTS!!!!

Minotaur instantly heals back to full.

Larian. Fix your shit. This is not D&D. This is a farce!

The issues with combats is a bit more complex that "they heal out of combats". They should probably heal out of combats and we should certainly not be able to kill them while everyone is "out of combats".

If minotaurs and bulette are extremely hard, it's not because you can't exploit mechanics anymore... It's because they are way too powerfull.

If they are OP it's because they would be too easy for players that use the OP mechanics...

These combats are extremely frustrating but you know... Choices have consequence so something else has to change, leading to other consequences...

Yeah, I noticed this when I got the doom axe from the Zentarim and gave it to Mirkon to slay with(Much better to just give him the minotaur greatclub, he can kill a good portion of the NPCs in this game faster than they can heal) Though technically chill touch is only restricted to the current combat turn, so as long as they wait 6 seconds or so before healing(which they don't always, whacking away with the doom axe they sometimes heal twice in two seconds), it would makes sense. But even worse, I can place a sussur blossom next to an NPC, or even plant a sussur blossum on it via pickpocketing, and it can still magically heal itself outside of combat.

PLANNING for cheese and gimmicks is how you win battles in BG3. ITS FUN. The perfect scapegoat for a broken unbalanced class/battle system.
To be fair, the same could be said for BG2...unless you use SCS , Revised battles, and Atweaks mod and get pulverized in a matter of seconds without proper thought and planning.
The Modding community will be BG3's savior.

Larian is treating fear the same way it works in DOS1 and DOS2, where the enemy loses its turn by running away and disregarding an attacks or damage. Again, this is Larian re-using mechanics from their previous games.

I put wyvern poison on my level 1 rogue's daggers and 1shot the baulette in one turn. You have to use the tools at your disposal mate

Maybe he already use it VS minotaurs or queen spider.

Larian should probably give us more 7D6 poison ! (please don't, this was an unfunny joke)

Larian has created this issue with their own design:

DOS combat mechanics, caused them to try to increase monster abilities and such to compensate for DOS not being compatible with 5E rules.

Then to try and compensate for everyone abusing broken stealth, they introduced healing out of combat.

If they'd started with 5E, and only modified what needed to be modified to work better in a videogame, instead of starting with DOS, then they wouldn't have this plethora of issues that they are now playing whack-a-mole trying to compensate for.

Ok this new mechanic just doesn't work.

Every time you deal damage from stealth or something that doesn't trigger combat, enemies heal to full. And it looks like a spectacular magic heal with huge visuals of course. I just wasted some alchemist's fire trying to soften up a group of enemies. They just healed to full. And then again after taking another tick of damage.

I'm starting to hate the whole arcade game feel I'm getting. This is supposed to be an RPG. They fix something that wasn't broken (5e), then create a couple of new problems, then fix the new problems with some new awful mechanics that take the game further from the actual ruleset.