Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Patch 5 combat encounter difficulty discussion

Um, yeah I noticed the AC of lots of enemies were lowered. Backstab was removed, but the AC of stuff was lowered.

I did not have issues hitting enemies. The new combat AI is good, but still buggy. AI does some weird movements and triggers bunches of opportunity attacks for no apparent reason. They do not even move far or anywhere meaningful.

I was shocked at how easy encounters were, but they were not hard even before the changes.

Major bugs with Hunters Mark from AI. They tweak out.

Well, I am not sure if I suppose to compare patch 5 to 4 or just talk about the patch in general. So I'll just share me experience...

First is important to declare my playstyle:
-I usually go for really synergistic builds, although not necessarily "MinMax".
-I am not completionist, so many amazing itens are left behind (xp would be too, but this not apply at current state of the game). I like to roleplay on a way that my character do "what make sense to him".
-I don't do cheese strategy's.
-I don't sneak/start the fight, unless it's clearly a non talk-able situation (Enemies already RED on the map).
-I don't save scam, nor on fight nor to get itens and similar.

My party was my Main(L.Druid), Lae'zel, ShadowH and Wyll.

What I can say is that even with Moonbeam, my most important spell, bugged with DC=5, the run felt to easy. I had a TPK at the Hag once, because I played recklessly and Lae'zel missed her "fear"; I think that anyone with magic missile on the party should have an easy time.
Now talking about the others battles in general, all felt far from challenging.
I saw some videos of people having different point of view (saying that the game are to hard, that they died X times on the Minotaur and so on) and probably that is to be expected since there're a large GAP around learning D&D, and another one on cRPG experience.

I just hope Larian take this into account and brings various difficult level, so people can experience what they are looking for. I mean, on this aspect I had a really great time playing PathfinderKM and PoE1(Both was pretty difficult, I loved it) and even though DoS2 was the best game I ever played, it was kind of easy... I Played o tactician with 3 characters, "banned" the resurrect idol and finish the game with easy even with the party not at the max level.


PS: When I say it's feel easy doesn't mean winning all the fights without a character going to the ground, but between that and a real challenge, considering 5e rules there is a big difference.
What I mean is: I never opened the inventory and: -Dam, I am on trouble! There must be something here that I can use to turn the tides of the battle on my favor.

EDIT: Was reading the comments and just realized that I forgot one fight, the Gith patrol. That one was pretty hard (at level 4), if I am been honest I won because of a combination of Luck and Knowing the fight from before. It was complete possible, if not fair, that I lost that fight.

Invoke duplicity, I never had this much attention before patch 5, but now it's value have rised a lot, same with wolf's pack tactics.


Yeah, I agree. Sometimes the dashing felt excessive and unnecessary.

I did have an interesting bit of "AI" that I had not seen before, or forgotten about: in the initial fight outside the goblin grove, one goblin smacked another goblin (1HP damage) to wake them up after being Sleep-ed.

All I can say about one thing, the Drow and Spectator encounter caught me by complete surprise. I was sneaking around with my Lolth Drow Ranger Bounty Hunter, inspecting the various petrified Drow, leaving the rest of my party back at the Selune Fort and that Spectator literally flew right past me. My sneak check passed the first time so I just stood there letting it move past me, but I failed my second check. So it immediately charmed the Drow back. But, I succeeded on my third sneak attempt and it was out of sight from everything else.

With how the AI works in this game, even if your in combat, you are sneaking, hostile NPCs don't try to actively search for you. So, while still in combat, I sneaked back to the Fort and pressed the "Run Away" button. To my surprise, it took me back to the camp (instead of just stopping combat). So, I went ahead and rested and continued down a different path. Later in the play through, I am now coming up from the bottom of the area to where the Drow are. They are all still charmed but the Spectator is nowhere to be seen. Coming from the bottom, these 8 or 9 Drow are WAY too much, especially with positioning on top (gaining Advantage).

This encounter is quite interesting as I was hoping to use the Basilisk Oil, and being Drow, that they would not be hostile but I found out from doing some research that this encounter is just that, a fight. I had to just leave this fight alone because of how difficult it was with all the Drow awaken, even with the Spectator not to be seen anywhere.

I wish you luck ...
I tryed to throw Basilisk Oil on their leader with by Tiefling, but she just attacked. :-/

Well, at least i destroyed all statues then and had only Spectator to deal with. :3

The discussion in this thread is very interesting to me. Honestly, what you guys are speaking of as "fun" combat challenges I would find to be very aggravating and tedious. For example, some of you have been commenting on what it takes to win against the commander and the gith patrol. Personally for me, the kinds of tactics you guys have used, i.e. tanking with one party member and then plinking away from range with everyone else, would be mind-numbingly tedious, especially in TB combat and especially as I am very much a melee combat fan over ranged combat. So this is where I very strongly support Larian using process-tracing to track how players are playing in the EA and gathering macro data about how things are working out in people's games. Larian should peg combat encounter challenge/difficulty to the typical or average player, and NOT to people in this forum, because you guys are clearly outliers with respect to what you see as combat being "challenging" in a fun way.

Alright, so I've started a playthrough as with a non min/maxed Tav and I'm going to try to recreate a fresh playthrough. (I've also turned off weighted dice).

I had no problem killing commander Zhalk again, but TPK'd against the intellect devourers right after xD. If a player is just exploring blindly after rescuing Shadowheart, you can enter the chamber before the intellect devourers do. They will will start combat right next to your characters in this scenario.

@DragonSnooz, what's your composition. I'm interested in your experience with a non min/maxed run.

@kanisatha, In a lot of way I agree with what you are saying. I would say that the Githyanki fight is absurd now. Far too difficult for a "regular player" as it is. But I also think this shows the game has the capacity for high difficulty levels. It's verging on Pathfinder:Kingmaker highest difficulties as it stands now (reminiscent of the Technic League Ambush at a high difficulty setting and low level), especially being limited to level 4 - it requires significant min/maxing, lots of metaknowledge about items and using many tricks to succeed, and reloads are likely even with that. This sort of range of difficulty is exciting to some people (including me) but is also niche and so yes: "Larian should peg combat encounter challenge/difficulty to the typical or average player, and NOT to people in this forum", but I also support harder difficulties.

For some of the fights, the EA at the moment represents a difficulty that is relatively non-standard in these sorts of games due to it's EA nature: mid game level cap. If anyone is familiar with playing BG2 without ToB and BG2 with ToB they will be familiar with this kind of difficulty. Similarly BG1 without TotSC compared to with TotSC. There is something quite fun (for me) about winning high level encounters at lower levels, but I feel that the frustration players feel with these encounters will be mitigated via max level for an area being dictated by available XP, not fixed level cap as it is in EA. I made a whole tongue in cheak thread at patch 2/3 time about beating every encounter with a single level 1 character without using barrels - sometimes silly things like that can be rewarding too.

@alice_ashpool, yes this was what I was trying to say as well, that the normal or standard or default difficulty setting should reflect and cater to the typical/average player. So then yes there should be higher difficulty settings for players like you, and also lower difficulty settings for someone like me who is going to hate the combat no matter what and wants to get through it as quickly and efficiently as possible. But some people in this forum (not you) seem to be pushing for the default difficulty level to be extremely challenging, and that's what I was reacting to.

I started a "dumb" playthrough. I picked fighter (because damage go brrr), recommended attributes, human and I just run straight into every fight. If i have companions, they do according to what class they are. Fighter will run in with me, Cleric will use cantrip damage spell, etc. I just finished the ID fight on the beach.

First ID fight on the ship: was a joke, i just ran in, killed the first one before it even moved, another one didn't take any action at all and it said "surprised" (at least i think it said that, it was fast but i've never seen that before). Lae'zel the other one. That fight was over in two rounds.

Outside against 2 ID on the ship. They didn't even attack, we killed them in one round.

Got shadowheart, ignored the passive ID running around.

Went to bridge, killed everything up to the Commander, autoattacked him to death but Lae'zel got left behind and the two smaller cambions insta-gibbed her, i escaped with shadowheart.

Beach fight with 3 IDs, they start with 12 hitpoints out of 15, they've DEFINITELY been nerfed ( i had thought so, but now i'm sure of it ). i just autoattacked them with Shadowheat melee attacking as well. Fight was short.

So far, the game is very doable with a fighter if you're running into enemies. Other classes would fare very differently i'm sure.

Well this is actually encouraging to me. I especially like that you are testing this with a melee fighter.

I'm using an Asmodeus Tiefling Wizard with DEX +1, CON +2, INT +2 and CHA +3. I usually go for High Elf ensuring +3 in DEX and INT, so it's been interesting seeing how much more often the character misses and gets hit. (I'm not using Magic Missile or Shatter for the playthrough).

I've been using Shadowheart, Astarion, and Gale (Killed Lae'zel). With a full party I made it to the grove with only the one TPK. I'll be having Wyll replace Gale soon.

Owlbear was almost too easy now. Hmmm. Well, either way, it was fun. I enjoyed the fight. I really like that not every fight is putting me on death's door. That really makes the gameplay more enjoyable.

Don't get me wrong either. The owlbear reduced my Ranger to 7 HP in 1 turn. My party was at level 3. So, if he'd gotten some more hits in, it probably would have been harder. I just managed to get lucky and Menacing Attack worked on my first hit. Then I swarmed around the owlbear so that when she tried to run I got several more hits on her from each party member. So in 3 rounds she was dead.

Fun little thing happened too. I forgot I had passive on, and I knocked out the owlbear mother instead of killing her. Apparently, that didn't stop the fight. The baby was still trying to kill my party. I had to then kill the mother right away to end the fight.

Ah, it's been a while since I've commented on this. Menacing Attack should NOT work this way Larian; please fix it. It should cause enemies to be frightened, meaning they have disadvantage on attack rolls and can't move closer to the source of their fear. Otherwise, and this is very important, the enemy can act normally.

It should not cause the enemy to spend its entire turn running away, provoking AoOs AND losing their standard action. Oh and don't forget the damage taken by the menacing attack itself (plus superiority die damage). This is a blatant example of a status condition (frightened) that Larian copy-pasted from divinity without adjusting to 5e rules or considering balance.

Menacing attack is way overpowered atm, dwarfing all of the other battlemaster maneuvers (and many other class's 3rd level abilities). With a single enemy failed ST, an entire battle against a single strong enemy can be trivialized. Using a resource that fully replenishes on short rests, also deals 10-15 damage, AND can be used multiple times per turn once fighters get extra attack (up to 4 times with Action Surge).

oh man this reminded me of Baldur's gate 1 fear spells. Your entire party would just run around out of control for something like 2 real time minutes. Just awful.

Pathfinder Kingmaker too. You look away for a few seconds against an enemy that can cause fear, and suddenly one (or more likely a few, and usually the tank is one of them) of your party members has run far away, likely initiating combats with other enemies or heedlessly running through traps. Or both. Fear was the cause of many of my reloads. Or in the best case, still having to wait for it to end.

Unlocking the "Immunity to Fear while in the kingdom" benefit was such a relief.

At least fear had a hard pre-buff counter - Confusion at low levels on the other hand

oh God, confusion lol. I think part of the reason the old school games were not as brutal as they could have been was how quickly you could load a saved game. I've had more companions die in icewind dale in the first 2 hours than i ever have in BG3 but because i can just insta-load, it's not an issue.

Insanity too. And idk how BG worked with this, but P:Km has this nice mechanic where casting a targeted spell on an insane party member who has mirror image up can hit one of the images! And you need Heal or better (6th+ level spells) to cure insanity, which my party did not have many uses of.

That was a fun "cast Heal -> hit mirror image -> my insane party member kills another party member -> no more level 6 spell slots so reload -> repeat"