Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback {Feedback] Githyanki patrol too strong at the early level

In order to win this match you have to really cheese it as best you can. Normally you have almost no chance. I had 3 of my 4 characters wiped in the first turn when I fought this battle. I was eventually able to win but the cheese was quite strong with this one.

On a side note god I hope they change the story for this encounter. The fact that the red dragon knight sees the great weapon right in front of him and says ..... hmmm know what I should do leave. Frankly my brain started hurting. I really hope that this is just a test ground for now and it will not play out like this going forward. If not the writers need to go back to High School English class to learn the basics of writing.

It's dangerous to go alone! Take this.

The Dark Sniper
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=784086#Post784086

You can beat them with a single flaming sphere. They spend all their special attacks and invisibility potions for fighting the sphere because AI in this game is dumb af.

Larian thinks they can make the game harder by throwing more ac and hp at enemies but in actuality they make their own game more boring and unpleasant to play.

In multiple playthroughs, I've never had them focus on the sphere and not just break the caster's concentration and move on.

Watch and learn then. He didn't even have to get chars in combat, I guess he was just bored.

They drink invisibility potion while on flames, attack their allies, put hunter's mark on themselves etc. etc. BG3 AI is dumber than a rock.

Not if the caster remains hidden and out of their sight. Once (on patch 4) I had a druid team up with Gale and just kept sending spheres over to the giths, while they kept to the shadows. Because enemies viewed the sphere like a normal summon, they'd get close and attack it, even though they could not destroy it. I have not checked if this was improved in patch 5 and if enemies now know to avoid the sphere. Imo Larian should just implement a way to get rid of summons in battle, perhaps a spell.

I really dont think “tuning” them down is the proper path. If the level cap is updated this fight will make much more sense. We should not define the difficulty solely on current limitations.

And we should not have to wait level 5 before doing this fight. This would mean that a lot of people won't ever be able to progress into Lae'zel's quest because you have to clean A LOT of act 1 to reach level 5.

Tuning them down (and some other combats) or increase the party size is the only solution to have a proper difficulty level.
The game has a few difficulty pike that a lot of players won't like.

A difficulty increased for level 4 in the underdark is fine, especially because no one will reach the underdark before level 4.
A few bosses a bit harder but not impossible with a good strategy is fine.
Creatures that can OS companions/the party because they have too OP features is just a terrible idea.
So is a companion quest that you can only do when you have done everything else.

All these poisons, surfaces, dipping, consummables, ranged attacks, this OP verticality and some OP monsters features make the difficulty of the game very incoherent and not fluent at all.

From my experience you can reach level 4 by experiencing only half the content of EA. Pre patch 5 I reached level 4 without experiencing any major content of EA. Plenty of fights can be done even some without needing you to fight. Post patch 5 I can reach level cap with a little more than a quarter of EA thanks to the hefty exp boost from the tutorial. Try yourself at some boss and you will find yourself very close to level 5 already.

You definitely do not need to be level 5 to beat the githyanki, but since I am trying to encourage you to see further than this fight, what about the content past this part of act 1, what of moonrise tower? The game might give you a quest with laezel, but it is in no way encouraging you to do that path first. In fact you are heavilly directed toward halsin. Anyone can reach the githyanki patrol fairly fast. In fact you could be level 2-3 if you really chose to focus this path. You will meet a wall yes, but obviously if you can’t do this yet you simply shouldn’t. Would you try to defeat Ethel at level 2? Doubtfully. Would you rush to defeat the spiderqueen? Of course not. I don’t see anyone trying to “tune” them down either. We don’t know what lies past the mountain pass. What I can tell you though, is that so far many quests had variant paths you could take to reach the next content. Why would Laezel’s storyline be any different? So no, I do not qualify “rushing her content” justification enough to nerf the fight.

Obviously there is no wrong way to play the game. Like any adventure though, there are consequences to the choices you make. I can’t tell you how to play your game, just make sure you think before you act.

The game definitely encourage you to meet the patrol fast because that's the only thing Lae'zel is asking again and again. That's a problem, but it's not the only one.

Nothing let you think that this fight will be such a hard time. It's just a githyanki patrol....Not a spiderqueen you meet after having cleaned a cave, which may not be so easy. It's also not creatures you meet in the bowels of the earth, a giant owlbear or some kind of witch that has wierd things in his cave...

It's just a patrol you meet on the surface to help a companion asking you to go there as soon as you end the tutorial.

This combat is design as the harder fight of the EA but nothing let you think it will be harder than the gnolls, the minotaurs or the bulette. And TBH I really don't think it should.

That said, according to me the main problem is still the way combats are designed. Nuke them or being nuked is just boring and absolutely not newcomer friendly, especially for a game with such complicated rules (tons of classes, features and so on).

A hard combat is fun when you can understand what you have done wrong and what could be done better, how the environnement can help you, how you characters could be positionned and could work together.

In BG3 most hard combats just require to use OP consummables, dipping, shoving/thunderwave and OP highground whatever your party composition. Metagaming is also often necessary, which is very bad.

Uh...Dragon?

Still I'm not sure we need to be so precious about how tooled the encounter is, either Larian wants it to be a no-prize (like killing what's her name in DO2) or a real encounter.

Actually there are a lot of things that hint that the Gith fight isn't just an encounter on the road where you fight gith instead of gnolles or goblins.
- Shadowheart tells you multiple times, that you shouldn't trust Lae'zel. Additionally at some point you have a dialog option with Lae'zel, where you can do a wisdom check to figure out that something is suspicious (I don't remember the exact dialoge).
- Zorru tells you that the Gith he saw are cold blooded murderers that instantly killed his friend.
- When you get close to the patrol you see the dragon fly above you. Your party has to save against fear and makes comments that the dragon is probably looking for them.
- Before you go down to the gith there is a sneaking ranger who tells you to keep silent and find another route to stay save.
- The cinematic when the dragon destroys the bridge should get on high alert even if you ignored everything else.

In my opinion that fight is well balanced, considering that it seems to be the fastest and storywise easiest way out of act 1 and rewards you with a ton of powerful items. You can certainly win this fight without metagaming or cheese.

Yes, but you can't expect anyone to pay attention to all those warnings /s

That's like some sort of situational awareness thing.

Personally, I just roll my entire face across the keyboard during fights and if I die I blame the developers.

When you use the tadpole on her after interrogating Zorru, you learn she views you as already a monster. Purification at the creche is a subject she dodges when questioned on, but later on when she mentions needing to be cured to the Kithrak, he basically looks at her stupidly, so I'm not sure what's going on. For me that only makes finding out what'll happen at the creche more interesting.

I think because Lae'zel is the first companion people get, she sets your expectation about what the Gith are like. We don't personally see the Gith contradict it before the fight.

Hmm basically what I'm saying is Lae'zel is the Imoen of BG:3

The first time I went to the githyanki patrol was on patch 2 or 3. The bridge used to be under the wooden structure, if interacted with the githyankis during the soldier part and failed your roll, the dragon popped on the side of the bridge and killed everyone on the bridge. Needless say it did not end well. I agree laezel is very insistant though in her crèche request. She does not have a lot of dialog content yet, and I have not tried warming up to her yet. I remember when I started playing bg3, laezel was not a companion I felt compelled to trust. From what I had learned up to now from the “teeth-lings”, this race is not a peaceful kind. Hearing from Zoru how they cut his friends open without warning certainty did not inspire my faith in her either. I did not make her a priority choice as a party member as I still had no idea to which limits the allies would go if they were in disagreement with our choices. Also starting as a fighter she wasn’t necessary to the composition of my team. Adding supplementary dialogs avoiding Only talking about the Crèche might be a good change of pace and would perhaps make it less inducing to ply to her singular demand.

Although she does not have much subject to go by so far and also from playing with a few of my friends during their first time I don’t think this “drive” to follow her will be unanimous at release. Even less if they add more content to her EA dialogs like for shadowheart. We’ll see though! Any change happening, I’ll accept it.

Lae'zel is a zealot ...
She would not recognize a lie, even if you will slap with it over her face. Whatever her teachers said, is the truth in her eyes ... no matter the reality.

I actualy do believe Kithrak in this one, that there is in fact no cure, and whole story about purification is only fairytail for foolish younglings, to rush back to their créche, and being killed before they spawn another forsworn enemy of their kind.
How did he say it?
"Only in death are infected cleansed."

After all, Gith are Evil race ...
Ruthless, cruel, and effective. :P

I can only say they are not too strong.
They are too strong if you have too many, what I had call: "misfortune points"

° bad placing of characters
° not being fresh & recovered
° not having the EA's maxlevel
° not being empowered by the well in front of the Hag's house in the swamp
° not having cast HP extension by a cleric beforehand

Do all that and maybe throw a few black powder kegs in an open fire surrounded by enemys and the Githyanki can go and eat sh°°.

Honestly, while I'm not against the idea Lae'zel having been lied to at all, it just doesn't feel right to me that this is something the gith would lie to their soldiers about. Like you said, Lae'zel is a zealot, raised in a culture of zealots. I'm open to hearing arguments otherwise but to me it would make more sense if all githyanki were drilled from birth to believe that death is better than being infected and that any gith who's infected should just kill themselves right away. The gith don't strike me as the type to come up with lies like that for their soldiers. Lae'zel already demonstrated that she was prepared to die when she thought she was changing, and she strikes me as a typical gith enough that I would believe that is the standard attitude. I wouldn't exactly be mad if this turned out not to be the case, I'm just saying the impresion I have at this point. Plus it is true that Lae'zel's reactions around the topic of purification are weird. She acts cagey about it in dialogue, then gives a description of it in ambient dialogue later.

As for the difficulty issue, in my opinion it's too difficult for a fight in a companion quest. It's a major difficulty spike to me an average player even before they raised the hp on the gith. This is effectively the second step of Lae'zel's companion questline (the first being meeting Zorru) and I don't think having it gated behind one of the most difficult fights of the zone makes sense.

I dunno ...
For one Kithrak (as far as i know, one of higher ranks) is certainly someone who will know their society much better than a youngling, who didnt even finished her mature ritual.
For two, if you create a Githyanki, you dont even know about the Purification (or at least last time i tryed, my Gith had only one option and that was "i never heared about this") ... also i wonder if our PC Gith is also concidered child or allready Mature ... that would be funny as hells, concidering how Lae'zel is talking to us, who would be in fact allready superior for her.

But, it might be that Kithrak simply decided to go the path of less resistance ... and kill her right now, than spend resources (mostly time) for her healing. :-/
After all, if there is something that all "low rank soldiers" have in common, its the fact that they are often seen as expendable by their superiors.

Here's what bothers me: this fight was already difficult but beatable, and not necessarily by cheesing, but it's definitely not going to be your first playthrough, because if you play like the story would lead you to, you all walk in together like lambs to (literal) slaughter. Only way I have won (not trying crazy shit like sending in two invisible imps, etc.) is to put my spellcasters up top, and make liberal use of potions of speed and strength. But now, when I see BS like an alleged 5th level NPC with 91 HP, I have to throw the BS flag. There is no way any 5th level character can amass 91 hp; therefore, any NPC with 91 hp is not 5th level. If Larian is going to insist on putting adversaries that are that strong (and hostile) on the battlefield, they need to assign them the appropriate level, and reward EPs accordingly. If I roll up a Gith fighter, best I can hope for at 5th level is either +2 Con bonus and the Tough feat (+4 HP per level for a total of +20 hp for a 5th level character) or +3 Con if I take a Con score bump for my ASI. They could give a 5th level fighter max HP for every level (which ain't kosher), AND the tough feat, and still be 21 HP short. BS.
I will say, since the latest update which puts all the gith in gith half-plate, I am now inspired to create a run-through where all four characters can wear half-plate by the time they hit the Underdark. (Tav, Lae'zel, Shadowheart, and either Wyll or Astarion with Moderately Armored Feat from 4th level ASI. Not going to Stealth anywhere, but don't need to!