Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian's gimmicks are like an invasive species to an ecosystem

Good point about Heat Metal dealing damage that has no saving throw. Still, it can be stopped by Counterspell, as you said, and is a Concentration spell, which can be broken, and Magic Missile doing unstoppable damage but can be stopped by Counterspell and Shield.

I'll bet that neither Counterspell nor Shield can stop the mighty medieval molotov cocktails' surface damage, though. Nothing in the game can save you from eating that guaranteed automatic damage.

If the current state of reactions reflects Larian's intentions, it is likely that Counterspell and Shield won't make it into the game, either. So that will effectively make those unstoppable.

Also, I forgot to +1 your original post, so +1.

Shatter deals damage once.
Magic missile and heat metal deal damage multiple times, but they have big drawbacks in that MM is completely blocked by shield and heat metal requires concentration.
Fire arrows, fire flasks, and surface-creating spell can deal damage twice. This makes it so much more likely that concentration will be broken.

If you want a surface created by a thrown flask to deal guaranteed fire damage, then said flask shouldn't also deal damage from hitting a target. You should have to choose between setting the ground or the single enemy target on fire.

See the following example for 5e oil, where you have to make such a choice.

+1

As Droth Malorn says one of the problems with the various versions of the grenades is how they take away from the Medieval / Early Renaissance feeling of the Forgotten Realms.

But the OP is also right and the problem with easily inflicted damage that cannot be defended against will become clear at upper levels when concentration is required for spells. Elemental summoning, for example, requires that the wizard keep concentration or the elemental may attack the party.

Larian just needs to stop making surfaces the center of their thinking -- they managed to do in few instances, the hag fight is perhaps the best example. (also the minotaur fight but I know liking that fight puts me in the minority)

Not including Counterspell and Shield will severely dumb down the game play for casters. I don't remember too many details from BG2, but I do vaguely recall fights against high level casters where I had to plan ahead and prepare spells that would peel off their layers of protective spells such as Shield and Stoneskin before the martials and wizards could commence with the killing.

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You could argue that it would need a seperate action to ignite, but that's not a stretch to change whilst still "basing" the game on 5e. Like I said, the concentration issue is a big deal that needs addressing, but the damage isn't a problem to me. But concentration is also a broader problem in that it makes so many spells in the game useless due to conflict, multiple small damage numbers forcing disproportionately hard DC checks (minimum DC is 10), and going Prone putting you temporarily into an Unconscious state...

Do I really have to explain why this is not even comparable to the medieval molotov cocktails?

Do I really need to refer you to your question "what feature in PnP allows guaranteed fire damage"?

Is it the same? No.

Is it comparable? Yes.

Is the damage annoying? Yes.

Does it break the game? No.

Does it have problematic interactions with concentration? Yes.

But this is DnD, and why DnD's system is a failure. The saving/attack throw crap is garbage, and so is concentration.

Concentration from DnD is disabling you form properly setting up spell combos to mitigate the number of enemies in some fights. Case in point, the Githyanki Patrol fight. 50% or less chance to hit normally on each of them,3 of them use ranged attacks as well. Shadowheart is stuck casting Bless, and thanks to Concentration no other utility spell but Hold can be used (at a 60% success rate). Want to use your druid's faerie fire for betetr hit rates? Assuming it passes the pitiful 50% chance to land wasting a precious spell slot even if it does not land, you are then stuck in concentration with it.

So what happens if your druid lands faerie fire? He cannot use fog or darkness, he cannot use entangling vines, he cannot use barkskin, he cannot use spike growth. And most importantly, he won't be doing any damage because he cannot use moon beam or flame spehere or conjure flame blade, which for some ridiculous reason as a melee weapon that requires you to go in the thick of melee, breaks on concentration.

Ditto for your Wizard/Warlock. Need to cast Hex to do any damage worth a damn unless you spam magic missiles rank 2 with the necklace? Too bad, if you want to use fog, sleep, flame sphere, Tasha's, etc, you cannot use any of your other spells.

This RNG hit/miss system on top of concentration is leading to a lot more exploit and cheese than any of Larian's mechanisms, because the fact is the vast majority of videogame players do not want their battles to have an outcome down to the roll of a dice.

Concentration is not a Larianism, it's pure DnD sewer garbage. And it keeps 95% of the spells from being used, because what concentration does is it forces you to use the most universally applicable and powerful spell, and since spell slots are so limited and fights drag out so long thanks to missing half your hits, you run out of spell slots really quickly and the concentration mechanic makes it so you don't want to swap out concentration spells as needed because spell slot efficiency is so important.

How is it comparable?

Concentration was introduced exactly for the reason that you can't just storm through anything by expending enough spell slots. Earlier editions of D&D were ridiculous with the pre-buffing and it wasn't fun in any way. Just a tedious spellcasting sequence after every rest and a balance nightmare.

It's a great mechanic that makes you think and choose what to do, rather than just empty your whole arsenal with reckless abandon and win.

The Githyanki are level 5, you are level 4 at best in EA. They should be a problem. They can be Larian cheesed of course which makes talking about Concentration rather pointless before the exploits are addressed.

Prebuffing is not tedious at all if you just make buffs expire quickly out of combat. "You can't just storm through anything by just expending enough spell slots", great, so instead you have a roll of the dice fight you just reload to your previous save if the saving throws don't go your way or the enemy rolls first initiative and CC's half your team and half heals the rest. ABSOLUTE GARBAGE DESIGN.

I mean, what's the alternative, you crying about prebuffing, but instead what we have is playing every single class play like a ranger or rogue and scramble for advantage before every fight so they don't miss half the attacks against a force that outnumbers you and will outlast you through sheer numbers of spells? Disregard the Githyanki patrol, just take the goblin camp or the regular Underdark encounters. Playing your way, the fights basically come down to the roll of a dice. To hell with that. To hell with being 2 shot by a minotaur. To hell with eating a 20+ damage attack from the Horrors on 30 HP pool characters with a 50% chance to retaliate if you don't abuse elevation, backstab, or light sources. To hell with a 24 damage Iron Foot.

It doesn't make you think and choose what to do at all, it's a garbage mechanic that means my druid will never use any spell but Moonbeam, or Flame Sphere/Flame Blade if they nerf moonbeam, because there's no point ever where Faerie Fire or Barkskin is ever worth the spell slot and concentration over Moonbream or Flame Sphere's reveal+damage. Actually try to think about this, don't offer some empty platitude. Explain when in hell a cleric will not use bless over Bane, when a druid will use Entangling Vines over Web (which does the same and can be set on fire) or Moonbeam.

Every time I get these same naive retorts about Concentration making for smart choices. Absolute garbage argument. Increasing spell combination permutations makes for SMART choices, not limiting your spell usage to a single spell out of 15+ 95% of the time.

Oil either is a surface or coats a single target. It doesn't directly damage the target AND ALSO create a surface which then automatically damages the target.
Furthermore, oil as a surface "deals 5 fire damage to any creature that enters the area or ends its turn in the area"
Notably, it does NOT deal damage to any creatures that were in the area when it was ignited.

So a fire flask or fire arrow is more powerful than oil in 3 big ways:
1.) can deal direct damage against AC AND creates a surface which deals damage
2.) is a single action instead of the 2 required to ignite oil
3.) Deals the surface damage immediately instead of only after a creature willingly enters or ends its turn in the fire

I actually like the old 2nd edition wizards as demi-gods. You start out hiding behind rocks and rule the game at higher levels. With the right pre buffs you could through anything and planning the right buffs was part of the strategy. In ToB battles were all about the contingency and chain contingency spells.

But while you and I might like that, 2nd ed partisans are few and far between. Many people thought that mages were OP and fighters were bland. 5th edition is the most popular edition ever -- people love it. And 5th is great, I really like that WotC has brought back elements from 1st edition: "if the story is good enough, whatever you were trying to do works"

Concentration is much better check on the mages power than are the 3rd ed debuffs -- AOO on spell casting, every opposing wizard could counterspell with the spell. If you ever played tabletop 3rd ed, the wizard was never able to cast their signature spells -- "fireball -- countered" "couldkill -- AOO, interrupted" . . . 3rd edition transformed the wizard into a gunslinger. Make wand, use wand, fail to level up because wand making has eaten all your experience points. Rinse and repeat.

Pre-buffing can always be exploited in video games when after a playthrough or load you know exactly what's on the other side of the door. It's a bad video game mechanic.

You don't need to cast only concentration spells. There are other powerful combos like Hold Person + Inflict Wounds. 8d10 with a 2nd level slot is rather nice.

Also worth noting that Larian's area and encounter design makes all crowd control spells less useful. Every fight tends to take place in a huge open area with a lot of verticality, even when you are indoors or in a dungeon. When you're being attacked by a tight horde of something spells like Entangle become very powerful, hence concentration. And also so that you can't stack multiple entangles or entangle + web on top of eachother for a super mass hold.

I do think that some spells like Barkskin could lose the concentration requirement, but the mechanic itself is cool and necessary.

I don't believe it's really comparable. The current BG3 does damage twice, and both deals damage to a direct target (one action available for oil bottle), as well as leaving an environmental hazard. You get a save against the initial throw, but the surface is unavoidable.

Simply making the surface not deal damage until the initial throwers next turn would be a good solution, or making the surface it leaves unlit oil that was not ignited upon impact. It would make the consumable useful, possibly deadly, but not so annoying to face as a concentration caster.

With the current ruleset and available items, I think would be a good idea for Larian to go over the spell list and give a little love. Barkskin, as 1varangian mentioned, is a good example candidate, though druids aren't exactly the most needy caster. I expect sorcerers particularly to be hit hard by the current set up of constant streams of small unavoidable damages.

It cannot be exploited because if they do what I said, which is that buffs outside combat expire in a matter of seconds, that Bless or Mirror Images pre-fight would be totally wasted since by the time you cast an ability and engage, the buff is gone.

Powerful combos like Hold Person+IW? Assuming your spell slot of Hold Person even lands at a pitiful 50-60% hit rate, by foregoing Bless with Shadowheart you're just spreading far more misses across your party, which means Lazael's Frightening Strike is less likely to land as well as an action surge for 40+ damage, your human mages with their abysmal hit rates in the Underdark or within an obscured dungeon setting are landing less than half of their spells if they're not cheesing magic missiles or gutting their damage output by foregoing Hex+multistrike spells like Ray of Flame by having to waste concentration on Dancing Lights cantrip requiring concentration. And that's on top of denying your party a sizable saving throws buff on top.

For reference, I just did the Duegar end of EA boat fight on lv4 characters completely kitted out on the available magical items in EA, with all current maximum paerks, and my Gale from the high grund of the back of the boat had at best a 60% hit chance on his Poison Ray cantrip (using staff of crone+poisoner's robe+ring of poison resistance since EA is bugged and staff of crones poison ray cantrip also currently damages you). And that's while I had the Duegar 2H fighter frightened with Lazael. Virtually every single Poison Ray in that fight missed, and all of Gale's damage in that fight came from using Magic Missiles afterwards. I cast 6 Poison Rays, all of them missed on Hexed targets from high ground. That's how awful it feels. Meanwhile my druid's moonbeam did reliable damage, as did Lazael. Shadowheart couldn't hit a single spell from high ground unless it was using her fire-dipped crossbow at 65% hit rate.

I don't know how anyone can pretend this is an enjoyable combat experience, watching 5-10 second turns go by per combatant in a flurry of misses unless the enemy chooses to cheese me with a cheesy 20 damage firebomb.

Area and encounter design would change nothing about CC spells being awful when they use up precious, limited spell slots to only miss half the time and do nothing else, stalling out fights by causing an opportunity cost of damage, which means giving the enemy more action turns to CC/blow your party up. The best defense has always been removing enemies from the board as quickly as possible. And even should these spells land, all you're accomplishing is screwing your fighters over as Vines and Spike Growth also hurt Lazael or your druid's forms to boot.

I am not excited at all about my Druid because virtually all my spell slots require concentration, which leaves me only using Moonbeam over and over again, unless I feel the urge to play conjure flame blade which is a far worse playstyle since it's a melee weapon conjure that places you in the thick of melee but breaks on concentration, wasting one of your three limited 2nd rank spell slots should anything sneeze on you in melee range. And since my druid is not an OP elf race with built in sleep immunity/charm resistance or the higher defenses from +2 DEX, it's been fairly often that I get summarily put to sleep and lose my melee conjure with only getting off a single swing off a 2nd rank spell slot. Never used Entangling Vines. Can't use Faerie Fire. Can't use Barkskin. Can't use Enhance Ability, also requires concentration. What's the point of Heat Metal? When I use it to debuff hit rates on a single target, and hit still goes through, concentration is broken and another spell slot wasted; far better to play a ranged moon beam druid and not expose yourself to all these risks of wasting a spell slot and doing more damage, from range, damage that is aoe (2d10 aoe, illuminates targets vs's heat metals' mediocre 2d8 damage on a single target).

The concentration mechanic only accomplishes completely monotone gameplay as it always boils down to using the optimal concentration spell for damage or the optimal utility concentration spell that will net your party the most damage. And since you get a single action per turn it's not like you can plan around swapping concentration spells in advance for benefiting a teammate and then using a damage/debuff concentration spell of your own.

It's a horrendous mechanic that only accomplishes a stifled combat experience. And it shows in the current superiority of martial classes, which would be fine if martial classes did more focused damage with more baseline survivablity while casters were the masters of utility and aoe damage, but this is total crap where a fighter with Frightening Strike at 4 uses per fight has a supremely better hit rate CC spell that also does their normal high melee damage. Or rogues currently getting to do what they do in early access.

Perhaps my druid's gameplay experience with concentration wouldn't be so horrendous if animal forms were such absolute garbage with fixed instead of scaling stats to your character, equipment, and level, and you could supplement your gameplay with in-form actions and could use moonbeam movement or heat metal reuse while in form, etc, but that is simply not the case, the animal forms are gimped, including the most awful of them all, the supposed tadpole form, and they are more liability than boon. And if you're a Land druid you don't get to use animal forms anyways because they take up a whole action slot to shapeshift instead of a bonus action.

Though it isn't too different on my wizard, cleric, or warlock currently. All their gameplay is the same. Hex+nuke for warlock/wizard, assuming you're not forced into magic missiles due to abysmal hit rates, and Bless+IW on cleric. It's even aggravating that I discovered Shadowheart is supremely more efficient playing with a crossbow+1 and weapon dipping than using her awful 40-50% hit rate Sacred Flame cantrip for a pitiful 1-7 damage or the equally unreliable Radiant Bolt that costs a spell slot to boot if the enemy is not in melee range.

+1 to the OP.

I mean we can only make so many posts over and over pointing out all the unique ways in which these changes break separate components of 5e game design. Feels like we've been saying it for months, and not much evidence that it will be digested by game designers. Of course there are people who do not like D&D and would prefer for Larian to treat this game as if they had decided to make DoS3 with D&D storylines.

I think the best we can hope for at this point is that they will include a D&D version of this game, and I really think that it should be included at launch. For the historic Larian audience that follows them for DoS, and for players who have no knowledge of what 5e would have looked like, Larian will keep their cheese because that's how they like to play their games. But they should at least deliver on their 5e promise by also including an option to toggle on a D&D 5e rule setting for the game, that way everyone can be happy.

+1 to the OP

- Surface effects should only be created if DnD description says so. There are many surface effects in DnD (grease, web, spike groth, and so on)
- Attacks that miss the target should not cause damage for that target

It is fine that oil starts to burn if you use fire on it. But solid ground should not burn because of a fire arrow and a missing fire arrow should not set the target on fire.
Enemies should not bleed fire or poison.
The bite of a spider is toxic. The inside of a spider may be disgusting, but your chars wear shoes and cloth. They do not drink that stuff ( well, Astarion might ;-)

Sure, the effects are exaggerated. However assuming that something shouldn't work as it works because it's not in the rules is not a good option for discussion.
As for the poison, well, the fumes themselves can be very dangerous.





Many enemies are much stronger than they should be, but it is justified.
The basic creatures in D&D don't really have a lot of options to do.
Opponents using only AA are not very interesting enemies in a game focused on tactical combat.
Adding new skills to them is by far the best method. Another would be to increase their base damage or by increasing the number of them (turn-based combat problem).