Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Baldur's Gate 3 vs Solasta comparison

I have here a demonstration of one of the harder fights in the new Solasta campaign. Harder as in, doing this cleanly is extremely difficult because the boss (the Archmage) is capable of casting level 5 spells while your party is probably only casting level 3 spells at the time you'd normally run into them. The fighter and archer you're escorting are strong enough that they might be capable of dealing with the encounter by themselves otherwise.


I'm mostly just putting this here as a possible preview of what we could probably expect from higher level spells in BG3.

1) Lightning Bolt has massively long range, almost comically so (it's a 100-foot line). You could probably hit something across the entire screen with it.
2) Counterspell only works at a range of 60 feet. It's why I risked taking an opportunity attack on my Wizard to get close enough to counter whatever was coming next.
3) The spell I countered, Cone of Cold, is a 5th level spell that does 8d8 cold damage with a con save. If I let it go off, it would have likely crippled my party. It has a 60 feet cone range, which is pretty much half the screen. By comparison, Fireball is 8d6 fire damage on a 20 foot radius.
4) Counterspell is a 100% success rate up to level 3 spells. Upcasting it lets you extend that 100% success rate to whatever level spell slot you used, but as my characters were only level 6 at the time, I could only cast it at 3rd level - which meant I had to pass a DC 15 check to counter the 5th level Cone of Cold.

To people unfamiliar with the concept of reactions, you only get 1 reaction per turn, which regenerates at the start of your turn. This means it is possible to do things like having your wizard shoot an arrow to bait an enemy Shield, then counterspelling said shield as your arrow flies towards the enemy (not that this is really a scenario you may see in BG3, but it is somewhat common in Solasta if you run a Greenmage Wizard, which has proficiency with bows and the archery fighting style). In BG3, I'd imagine you can do things like having your melee run up to a wizard and then purposefully leave to bait out an attack of opportunity or attack to bait out a shield, which would free up your caster to use a high level spell without risk of being counterspelled.

There are even higher level spells with even larger range. Assuming we end up going to level 11+ and get 6th level spells implemented, I imagine Freezing Sphere would be one of the first 6th level spells implemented. That has a 60 foot radius. That in Solasta basically translated to almost the entire damn screen. It's worth noting that the spell is specifically worded to say that it has the ability to freeze water too, enough to trap creatures swimming in it (though Larian may homebrew it to trap anyone standing on water surfaces, which I'd consider to be an interesting change and wouldn't really complain about, especially since proper swimming mechanics most likely won't be a thing in BG3 at all for obvious reasons).