Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Some advice for BG3 after finishing Solasta

Yeah, I know that. I'm talking about situations where they survive and they don't roll anyway. I've had a couple situations like that.


To be fair, the frequency of pop-ups did start to get rather annoying later in the game as I unlocked more reaction/conditional abilities, but it's nothing a few toggles can't solve (as in, we should get an option to not ask to counterspell against an identified spell of 2nd level or below, unless the spell will possibly inflict lethal damage against a party member or cause an incapacitating status effect). Or not to shield against any attack that would inflict less than 20% of the character's HP. And I'm pretty sure everyone now is in agreement that they'd rather have working reactions than none at all. Aside from the few people citing immersion when much of the rest of the game's combat design is certainly already lacking in it.

On another note, Shove needs an overhaul too. Or well, one could argue it IS working properly as is, you're not shoving things off a cliff unless they're already at the edge of one to begin with, the only thing goofy about it is the arc at which things fly. But it's missing the second half, the ability to shove enemies prone instead.

When you think in the long term, the current distance shoving only design will just result in making fights longer than they should be later on. Shove and jump/disengage are powerful as bonus actions now precisely because we are stuck at level 4, when the majority of classes do not yet have bonus actions to speak of. Nor do most classes have Extra Attack yet. When certain classes unlock more bonus actions, suddenly trying to shove and jump every turn isn't that attractive (such as Bards using Bardic Inspiration). One could argue that their existence as a bonus action is a slight indirect nerf to the bonus action heavy classes, and a heavy buff to classes that don't possess that many to begin with.

Anyway, sure, you can shove that enemy off of a cliff, but that's also several turns that your melee won't be beating their faces in with 2 attacks per turn instead. Upon further consideration, shove is only simultaneously that strong and silly now because the cost/benefit analysis is currently firmly in the 'shove things off to inflict fall damage and give advantage to ranged party members/disadvantage to the target' camp.

BUT, if you were given the option to shove things prone instead? Suddenly one party member just needs to spend one bonus action to knock something to their knees, and if they succeed, ALL melee party members will get advantage rolls against them until the enemy's next turn. And this also means each melee party member doesn't have to re-enact a bad edgy fanfic by spending their own bonus actions jumping behind them for backstab advantage. Hell, one could use this as justification for removing backstab advantage entirely.

Stuff like this is why it's absolutely critical that EA should go up to level 5 at some point before release, because a lot of things can completely change when certain class features, the next tier of spells, and extra attack comes into play.


There is a slight difference in context between both games that makes the criticism much heavier for one instead of the other.

Solasta's potential cheese is based more on the encounter design and the tools available to your team. Wall of Fire and Spirit Guardians are crazy, but they are legitimate spells that you can't get until you're about halfway through the game.

BG3's issue is that the cheese is solely revolving around the combat mechanics themselves that are already there from the very beginning of the game, they completely overshadow and throw off the entire cost/benefit analysis for many early game spells, and it's obvious that entire encounters are designed around those combat mechanics existing. That's why BG3's cheese is several magnitudes higher in severity.

Solasta's OP feats are a bit forgivable considering they are literally forced to homebrew that stuff. But I don't think there was anything forcing Larian to implement the questionable cheese mechanics in BG3.

Your example of spitting spiders in Solasta is slightly disingenuous. The early level spiders only possess melee attacks, and I didn't run into any spitting spiders in Solasta in the EA content that was stated to run for half of the game (I am personally waiting until I am done with WotR beta phase 2 to restart Solasta from the beginning). I think by the time I'd run into them, I'd have a bunch of fireballs available to burn them with. The BG3 phase spiders have AoE spits, which is more than a bit nuts for an early game encounter where you have very few ranged options and pushes any fight involving them into what I'd call 'trap clairvoyance design'. Granted, I wasn't too miffed because I am already used to DOS2-style encounter design, but it would feel insane to anyone else.

(That said, while I still think height advantage/disadvantage should be shot into the sun, it might be less of a problem once we get more spells that do half damage on saves. Which, again, we're not going to have as long as we're stuck at level 4 for EA, which heavily contributes to the perception that these new advantage mechanics are so much more powerful for the early game.)


There aren't any here on this forum as I assume our admittedly relentless crowing about all of these issues drove such people away from here. But there's a fair amount of these people on the BG3 subreddit.

Though thankfully, even that place is starting to wake up to this sort of thing. What's this now? Another thread asking for reactions to actually act like reactions? The one person fine with the system as is got downvoted to oblivion? You love to see it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/nyg8ou/we_need_reactions_to_be_reactions/