If the AI doesn't have the sense to avoid targeting its own side then its a serious problem. 90% of the problem with the difficulty is the bad AI.
And yes, the most challenging thing they had was a waves-of-enemies survival encounter, but even then I didn't lose anyone. The actual endgame fight is such a huge letdown.
But hand to God, they should not have released this game with that bad AI. What's the point of faithfully crafting a authentic 5e rule system and not provide a good encounter?
To be fair, that goblin example can be justified as the Shamans considering their foot soldiers to be expendable. I've seen similar behavior with AoE attacks in DOS2 and BG3 too, so it's not far fetched. The double lightning bolts did result in a party wipe. I suspect enemies in BG3 that possess Fireball and Lightning Bolt will
absolutely do the same thing. Considering I've already seen datamined BG3 Lightning Bolt and uh, Larian should think about dialing back its maximum attack range...
Though I've not finished the game yet, I did notice that the AI's intelligence and aggressiveness can be controlled in the difficulty option settings... for those saying that it was very silly, what setting were your enemies on (I'm mostly curious because I'm only a little way into my fresh play through now that the game has released)?
I can't say too much about difficulty options as I haven't fiddled with them personally, but I remember one of the most common complaints about the hardest difficulty of Solasta back in the EA phase was how enemies would hard focus on killing a downed party member, which let people cheese fights by playing ping pong with Healing Word. It's the same problem BG3 has, actually.
It's honestly not too much worse than enemies in BG3 always seemingly hard targeting the lowest AC character if they're within attack range, even if they expose themselves to extreme danger doing it.
Ironically, Pathfinder WotR probably has the most varied AI out of all three games right now. I've observed enemies switching targets if they miss too much, some will prioritize whoever did the most damage to them, some will just bang uselessly against your tank because they're too dumb to know any better, and some will begin fights prioritizing the main character because they recognize them as the party leader and had probably just insulted them in pre-battle dialogue. But you know it's deliberate because it's generally
consistent among the different enemy types.
