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Why do you think they introduced Deathfog barrels from the beginning on the tutorial ship?

This is the thing with Larian: what they make meta is what they make OBVIOUS. Instead of it being subtle, it is almost like someone yelling in your ear to do whatever path they want. They want YouTube compilations of shoving high-level bosses and barrel cheese because that is so KEWL~*!!*~*!*! to them.

Tactical advantages DON'T actually require advantage mechanics, y'know? I can only assume you've never played D&D 5e, nor care to think how this affects the game beyond your most shallow immediate concern. Advantage is a strong buff and beyond the imbalance it causes on its own being so strong, it also causes a shit ton of imbalances to classes, feats, and spells that will require an avalanche of more homebrew to re-balance. Or just ignore it as seems to be Larian's modus operandi, and accept that many things will be broken.

Height advantage: Bonus to hit if above, penalty if below. I-Win tactic, but not guaranteed. Range itself is an advantage for ranged specialists, but a slight bonus like a +1 or +2 (perhaps even granting half-cover +2 AC/Dex save) would incentivize plenty without primitivizing the tactical combat you fool yourself thinking you promote. You don't actually promote tactical combat with simple "I-Win" tactics that will be the *only* correct first move in 99% of all scenarios. Add to this the peculiar/gamey implementation: Assuming you're slightly above your target; where you aim at the target might give you an overwhelming bonus or not. Aim at the head, you might not get it, aim at the feet and the height difference might be large enough to trigger the mechanic.

Flanking/backstab advantage: Bonus to hit if behind. I-Win tactic. You are free to move at the back of any opponent w/o them reacting. This is a constant, time-consuming reminder that turn-based combat (that I like) is a really crappy approximation of real combat and thus damaging to immersion. It is virtually guaranteed, so having to jump to the back every round just feel like a formality ritual that waste the player's time.

Larian have fallen into a trap of their own making, despite actually having raised early concerns over just this. They expressively stated they wanted to avoid a situation where there would be only one best tactic, yet have done their utmost to ensure this being the case with their lazy advatage homebrew. I'm frankly astounded over the level of obtuseness.

I agree with the other criticisms you raise however.

This is the same exact thing I said about the "barrelmancy problem" since the EA started, for the record.
Give these barrels proper weight and you already solved half of the problem.
Make the ability to move them around more realistically tied to a character strength and you solved the other half.
And unless we are talking about inhuman levels of strength (more than 20, etc) no one should be able to THROW barrels around. At best akwardly lift them from the ground while slowly moving to a different position, as it happens in games like Shadow Tactics when you use the "big samurai".
Also, no barrels in your backpack, period.

Good reading, thanks for that ...
Just one question: Not being subtle is bad thing? O_o

When everything is constantly wacky, crazy, trying to be funny, pushed to the limit then nothing truly is. You need the contrast of the mundane or subtle to accentuate those very things.

More often than not, yes,

And more specifically the lack of subtlety is often pointed as a downright flaw when it comes to writing, regardless of the genre involved (comedy down to complete parody, horror, drama, romance, socio-political commentary, etc).

A total lack of it would mean that a writer assumes the audience has the memory of a goldfish. It might be fine if you're going for comedy, but I don't think that's what BG3 is supposed to veer towards. The best jokes require some thought to begin with regardless.

Again, I like the idea of barrels and surfaces, but when they are better than spells...

In my Afflicted Fan Fic, as I was writing it, I used a keg of gunpowder to make a battle rather interesting. Marli and Barton and crew were facing the PCs, 3 custom and all origin but Wyll. I played it out with TT rules and stats. Good fight, even with a party of 7. I used Bandit stats for all of the group except Marli and Barton. For them, I used Bandit Captain stats.

Barton went down, so I had Marli lose it. The PCs were within 10 feet of the keg, but so was most of her crew. She launched a fire arrow and hit the keg. BOOM! Dex save throws for half damage. 7d6 damage. Fire burned for 1 round. 29 damage, I rolled. Killed Marli's crew, for the most part, but took out several of the PCs. They weren't dead, but they were dying.

I used oil on the ground during the secret tunnels fight at the grove against Gresh and his goblins. I did pretty much the same thing but said it was 4d6 instead for damage. Several PCs were standing in the oil. Took 15 or 7 if made Dex save. 3 goblins and 1 goblin captain suddenly became much harder to beat, even with 8 party members, 3 custom and the 5 origin with Wyll now included.

The point. Well placed traps using barrels and surfaces is fun. I could see someone rolling a barrel towards an enemy and shooting it, but throwing? No. Sorry. Even if you are strong enough to lift a barrel full of anything, throwing it even more than 5 feet/1-ish meter is ridiculous. It might work in a game where you are becoming a god, but it doesn't work in a game like this.

Isn't there a spell that makes a creature grow huge in 5E? Last I played Pathfinder Kingmaker there was a fight where a mage would turn one of his ally thugs into a freaking giant. Never beat this fight. Would you be able to "throw" barrels then?

Enlarge person? It gives a +2 Strength bonus (while making you easier to hit) as far as I remember, it doesn't triple your strength.

But fair enough, an already strong character with additional buffs could probably throw a heavy full barrel FEW meters away.
Should we really take the fringe cases to justify standard scenarios, though?

Yeah, that is all good and clear ...
But i didnt seen them in that article talking about "everything" ...
I believe it could be fine to have some crazy idea, or epic plot ...

I mean, i realize that this is pure matter of personal taste, but quests in this game didnt seem to "all totaly epic". O_o
So i would believe that if they managed to create on one hand fullscale invasion of goblins under rule of new Cult of the Absolute ... and in other hands two farmer boys, that are simply searching their sister, or a little deep gnome that is going to help his friend ... they would be able to manage some middle ground in the future aswell. O_o

I bet it does in a Larian game.
I guess I'm just too used to playing BG2 where it's pretty easy to raise your strength to above 20, with +STR equipment, Draw Upon Divine Might, and potions. What about the Stone/Fire/Storm Giant Strength potions? How rare are these anyway? In BG2 you can get quite a few of them.

The ogres throwing barrels of goblins up onto the walls of the Grove was somewhat believable and fun. I MIGHT accept that. Otherwise, no. Ogres are strong, and IF magically enhanced it might be plausible. So I thought that worked. All other barrel chucking, no.

You are correct that I have never played 5e nor did I realize the potential imbalance issue with height advantage that you describe. Thanks for the clarification and details. I did not consider how important advantage is.

However, I was originally responding to the idea of home brewing. Adding *some* sort of *advantage* (used here generically) for things like sneak attack, backstab, and height are not egregious to me in theory (even tho they may be implemented poorly at the moment in the game).

In contrast, the other things I mentioned (ie, winning every fight with barrels, jump, shove, and eating food) makes classes, builds, and party setup completely irrelevant. To me this goes beyond the nitty gritty of game balance…these things fundamentally destroy what make DnD based games fun in the first place (as well as replay-ability).

And I just hate surfaces, personally. They are hamfisted and immersion breaking 80 percent of the time. There are so many oil slicks in DOS2 that the entire map needs to be evacuated for environmental cleanup. If the devs want big explosions, give us some grenades and wicked spells and devastating AOEs. Not a map that is basically a beach in Texas after an Exxon disaster.

Right. For example, I like that Larian has height bonus. It just shouldn't be so OP. I don't mind backstab giving advantage, but then you need to add another rule that says you can't move around behind an enemy in a melee without provoking attack of opportunity. That's where the problem comes in. It's too easy to get backstab because every round you can maneuver behind them ESPECIALLY with Disengage as a Bonus action.

I mean, I actually think backstab makes sense as an advantage. It should just be WAY harder to achieve. I mean, any homebrew that offers advantage to a roll should be hard to achieve.

And now, I realize that we've been literally having these exact same discussions since EA was released. Sigh. And people wonder why we're so frustrated with how slow Larian has been and with their lack of communication.

If you actually want an answer, there have been dozens of threads since EA started documenting how many rule changes were poorly thought out.

Examples include:
1) Giving enemies an abundance of Alchemists fire which creates surfaces even on a miss, dealing damage with no saving throw, thus making any spell requiring Concentration worse because it increases the chance of failing at Concentration higher than normal.
2) Increasing the enemy HP and decreasing enemy armor is another poor change because they didn't touch enemy saving throws, therefore making spells and attacks which require saving throws to be effective worse, because those deal the same damage as before, but are relatively harder to hit compared to things which target AC, and when they do hit, they feel worse to use because the enemy HP is so much higher.
3) Free advantage from backstabs and height breaks 50+ class spells and features in just the low levels alone. Such as Rogue's Sneak Attack, which you can no longer do when on the low ground. The Barbarian has the Reckless Attack feature, which gives advantage on attacks in exchange for enemies getting the same.
4) Everyone getting free disengage and jump, and everyone getting bonus action hide make the Rogue's cunning action feature pretty much useless.
5) I could go on and on...


But I don't believe you want an answer. Every single one of your posts that I have seen leads me to conclude that you're deliberately arguing in bad faith. If I come back with a list of rules, even if it's 40%, you'll just say "Aha, that's not half of all the rules in the game".

Even if I do spend a lot of time composing that list, you will dismiss or ignore any answer I give with your ridiculous standard reply of "Larian is the DM and Rule 0 of DnD lets the DM change the rules. Therefore any rules changes they make are by definition rules as written."

You take one premise, that "the DM is allowed to do such a thing," and from that posit the false conclusion of "Anything which is allowed to be done is therefore good." Here's why that's a false conclusion:

Let's play a campaign. I'll DM, you'll be a player. As the DM, I am ruling that all your attacks and ability checks are to be done at disadvantage, because I say so. Just yours, not any of the other players. Because I'm the DM, I can do that because of Rule 0, right? Would that be a fun experience for you, as a player? Of course not. I would be singling you out for unfair treatment. That's absolutely something I CAN do as a DM. It would make me a really shitty DM, though.

"Rule 0" is not a valid excuse for everything the developers do. Your position boils down to "Everyone should stop giving feedback because Larian is the DM and they can do what they want." That's not even Larian's position, otherwise they wouldn't bother with EA at all.

Yup. I've been very consistent as a vocal critic from the day the game was revealed. It *is* nice to see so many posters here who were in the "the game is fine/awesome" camp now coming around to one degree or another and agreeing with the critics that the game is not fine and that it does have some serious problems.

But the problems can be fixed. And the game can be fine, even awesome. If only Larian will listen to us for a change.

There are other approaches such as to listen to the "silent majority" or interpret data in their favor, i.e, if data shows that players are shoving, using high ground, jumping, running around enemies for advantage and exploding barrels this must mean that these features are awesome right? Not that balancing the game around those might've anything to do with people using it.

You know, there is a way to make it ...
And it was allready mentioned on this forum, funny how fast we forget about such posts ...

Im not sure if i remember it corectly, so maybe original suggestion was a little different ... if you want source, you have to find it yourself, im too lazy for that. :P

Anyway ...
The suggestion was that enemies, should turn around to face EVERY meele attack, unless:
A) Target have no idea about attack (wich would mean attacking from hiding, invisibility, maybe in same turn as you misty step, maybe inside Darkness, or maybe when Blinded etc.) ... to put it simply when surprised.
B) Target is allready threatened by another PC in meele range, and therefore turning to one would simply mean expose its back to another ...

In shorten version: They would act just like characters in Heroes of Might and Magic do.

I would like to just say that its not my suggestion and reapeat that maybe i remembered it wrong ... but main structure should be (i hope) intact.
Anyway, personaly i would support it imediatly, since i really like the idea.