Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Patch 6 Feedback

After playing through Patch 6 I noticed a couple of things that seemed strange. Some might be bugs, or they might be intentional but I've compiled them all together. Hopefully this is useful feedback.


Item 1: Crafted spear from broken shaft and owlbear head doesn't apply it's bonus damage effect.

This could be my mistake but with the way the tooltip is worded an animal such as a spider that has 8 eyes(4 sets of 2) would take bonus damage? Or is a "set of eyes" for a spider a set of 8 eyes? In which case what creature has multiple sets of eyes?




Item 2: Chromatic Orb, Surfaces and Sorcerer Identity

I'll use a poison orb for example. While yes it does obey the "new subtooltip" it feels disappointing losing the 1d8 especially because the surface it generates also affects allies. Additionally the negative effect from these surfaces is removed immediately when a target leaves the surface which makes the trade of 1d8 for the surface feel even more disappointing. This brings up the question what makes Poison Chromatic Orb different from Ray of Sickness? Sure I can pick the element of the orb but if I want a poison element why would I ever pick Orb over Sickness and risk my allies having the penalty too, especially when Sicknesses poison debuff lasts 2 turns whereas Orb's gets removed immediately upon leaving the puddle(which the enemy NPCs have an AI smart enough to attempt that as the first action of their turn)?




For the record Fire Orb does get the full 3d8 damage like Thunder Orb, but the Orbs that create non-damaging surfaces only have 2d8. This is calculated by: 2d8 spell hit/miss, guaranteed 1d4 fire field applying burning, then on enemy turn 1d4 burning as it expires.




I assumed that using the Metamagic: Careful Spell would ensure that my poison orb example wouldn't affect my allies, however since Chromatic Orbs' interaction with Metamagic seems to be based on the default 3d8 to single target tooltip it isn't affected by Careful spell, but IS affected by Extended Spell? This seems weird that I'm allowed to extend the surfaces but not protect my allies using the Metamagic.





The way I understood it was that a wild magic sorcerer might have some rng that benefits or harms the group they’re with, because that’s supposed to be their fantasy of wielding magic they can barely control. But a draconic blood line: poison (keeping my example) would be assumed to have a “mastery” over their element and/or control over their magic in general to have it only affect the intended target(regardless of whether you hit/miss the attack roll). The easiest solution if the surface effect need to stay is to have Orb be affected by Careful Spell. Harder solutions that I could think of were:
1) Orb/spells cast matching draconic lineage element guarantee ally save success
2) Wild Magic sorcerers generate surfaces with Orb, draconic lineage doesn't and just has 3d8 of element to target(tradeoff is no debuff effect)
3) No-one generates a surface and a much much larger surface of that element gets generated when the a Wild Magic Sorcerer has their Wild Magic proc on an Orb cast

Item 3: Beast Master Ranger Stuff

Why does the dire raven ranger pet have gigantic armour class? Also it’s strength is just a bit higher than the stats I found here: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/B1ksJQUYe
With such a high AC and ability to blind every time it attacks the Raven seems to be way stronger than any other pet currently. "Durable" bear only has 11 AC and 19 HP, current Raven feels much more durable.



Extra things with pets:
- Why can't the pets scale with Ranger level? Even if it's just their hit points.
- Bear feels like it can never hit any attack and is better off as a goad-bot
- Spider web seems too strong, can keep a target permanently stuck inside a cloud of daggers or acid surface. Maybe have it not work on large targets like Ogre, Minotaurs etc.
- Why is every NPC just terrified and grumpy that a bear or spider pet exists, but a wolf is okay? Especially in the druid grove where NPCs transform into a bear when you talk to them with the angry mob of tieflings?




Item 4: The hotbar feels tiny


I mainly play MMOs so I'm used to being able to just add in more hotbars when the one I'm using gets full, but in this game it feels restrictive and VERY cluttered, no scrolls/potions/extra weapon effects etc. Are we supposed to have differing hotbars for different things? E.g. this is my cantrip hotbar, this is my spells hot bar, this is my illithid+weaponskills+items etc. hotbar and use the arrows to swap between them? If the hotbar size is locked to it’s current width for a random reason like “being 17inch laptop screen friendly” then it could even have 3-5 rows instead of just the 2 we have now.


Item 5: Changes with Nettie's dialogue and "evil" play through

So I didn't play much of patch 5 but it wasn't listed in the patch notes for 5 or 6 that Nettie no longer immediately tries to kill you + requiring you to pass certain skill checks to live?
Instead you have the choose to have her attempt to kill you?

Part of the reasonable justification I had for siding with the goblins was that the story basically went as follows:
Abducted and infected by mindflayer, crashed in unknown land, seek out a healer, get told to see Nettie, Nettie taught by Halsin and will do what she can, instantly tries to kill us, why would we try find halsin if he taught you this, do so anyway but discover that goblins and other infected/evil aligned people treat us with extreme respect and that the tadpole is related to their god, now we have a choice stick with halsin,nettie and the tieflings who know nothing about the tadpole and tried to kill us OR stick with the "evil" characters and try learn something from the inside/from the people who at least know more of what's going on.

However with her dialogue changing so dramatically it feels like the story line available to us is forced. There no longer feels like a decent decision/character development moment of choosing a side. It feels like there is no 9 alignments, only good and evil. Maybe it all makes sense in act 2+3 but currently it feels like the story diversity and reasoning options have done a backwards progression from previous patches.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/T7ECtOs.png[/img]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/CQaePHH.png[/img]

Updates:

Item 1
I worked out what the spear deal bonus damage to; Spectators. It feels restrictive to only have it affect that one type of creature, still think having it affect spiders and other animals with more than 1-2 eyes makes sense too.


Item 6: Legendary Staff
The staff you get from combining the 3 icy items in the Underdark seems very underwhelming for being "legendary" maybe it's just because it's an Act 1 legendary.
The way that Frostbite works is it adds 1*duration cold damage to your attack when you inflict cold damage, however because it only lasts one turn you can't gain the benefit of this effect yourself. You need to have another spellcaster in the group to use a cold spell after you apply the debuff.
The duration needs to be increased to allow you to self-proc the extra damage, a 2 turn duration would be fine allowing you to proc the bonus damage on your next turn. As it's possible to have this effect up permanently on one target a duration longer than 2 turns with it's current 1*duration bonus would be way too strong.

+1 for spear working on spiders. I was very disappointed when I switched out my flaming sword for the spear on the spider matriarch and then realized it doesn't proc.

1. +1 to your point about the spear. i didn't realize it didn't work on spiders as I haven't equipped it on anyone.
2. I thought this was a bug at first and made another thread about it: https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=794576#Post794576
The fact that they changed it to implement the stupid surfaces is so annoying.
3. I haven't played with this enough to have an opinion. However, I would caution you in using third party sources for stats just as a rhetorical device.
4. The entire idea of the hotbar is a fundamentally flawed way to handle the UI. The hotbar should be limited to consumable items and maybe class features such as action surge, second wind, arcane recover, blessing of the trickster, etc. They really should design a proper spellcasting interface and more focused attack interface similar to the one found in Solasta.
5. I very much agree about the story change further incentivizing the good path over the evil one. Larian complains that most of the players pick the good path but then makes the story so one sided that only a psychopath would actually chose the evil path if they were roleplaying and not just choosing it to see where it leads. And based on others complaints, it leads to a very stupid place indeed.

Well, that's very Baldur's Gate-like

With DnD clear distinction between good and bad, it will be tricky to make believable Evil path. Good evil path would require sympathy and understanding, and not making good path an obvious, better for everyone choice. THat would lead to a lot of grey, ala. Obsidian, which while I personally prefer, I dont think it would be a good fit for DnD and Baldur's Gate IP.

Perhaps, evil path should be more tempting - unique rewards and benefits. As it is evil path means killing lots of useful NPCs, to side with people who try to kill you.

Wouldn't that actually make it more Neutral than Evil?
Also, I think that an Evil path can be interesting and believable without being grey.