Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Level up

I don't know much about 5e outside of BG3. I stopped playing when they came out with 4th edition.

Recently, I started a playthrough with a rogue, and it may be the most fun I've had in BG3, sneaking around, doing a ton of damage, finding new ways to approach scenes. It's great. I managed to take out the commander and the two cambions on the nautiloid without using any exploits.

I feel like my rogue is easily as capable as any fighter or wizard I've played in the game.

Which makes me wonder: does this continue to be true as the levels scale up, or is it only because we're in the low levels?

For instance, does the fighter quickly start to outshine everyone else because of extra attacks or does the rogue scale up nicely in 5e beside the fighter?

I looked up a chart on how the classes upgrade with levels. It didn't look like the rogue got much in comparison. Especially considering that the fighter seems to get a bonus stat increase/feat every two levels after 4th instead of every four levels. Did I read that right?

It got me thinking about the other classes also. Does the ranger animal companion get stronger at higher levels? What about the warlock's imp? Right now, the imp is powerful, but I imagine it won't seem so tough in a few levels when the enemies are harder and it's still hovering at ten hit points.

Rogues scale very nicely, and it one of the extremely few classes that don't depend on resources that they have to regain via short or long rest. The skill expertise (which is not in the game for some unspeakably stupid reason) and scaling sneak attack and some lovely features like uncanny dodge and evasion ensure an allrounded class with amazing capacities even as you level =)

The rogue scales well, yes, even though it doesn't get an extra attack, but it relies heavily on being able to get sneak attack. The most effective way to take the teeth out of a Rogue is to deny them sneak attack somehow.
Rogue actually only gets one less ASI/feat than Fighter, which is one more than most other classes, so they are in a good place for bonuses.

As for Ranger, well... erm.
Beast master Ranger and the lack of scaling for companions has actually been a big issue for a while. Ranger itself has gone through the most revisions of all the PHB classes. The Tasha's sourcebook provided the first formally published revisions, and gave them a leveling option for the animal companion. I'll admit, I haven't played around with BG3 Ranger that much, as I don't really like their homebrew subclasses, but this is an issue shared with most of the pet and summoning classes from the PHB, it wasn't until later that we got summons with scaling.

So, yes, unless Larian has implemented scaling summons/familiars/companions, your imp will be much less effective at level 15 than it is at level 4, and that is unfortunately how it works.

For me it depends on dice rolls and how the DM interprets sneak attacks. I had a rogue that I ended up dual classing into sorcerer because sneak attack was pretty much unusable and my dice rolls are quite often terrible. I was basically useless in combat, sorcerer at least gave me some other things to do during my turn. The fighter I played had more chances to hit the enemy per turn which made it a lot easier to help with combat.

I would say for this game that since there are many ways to get sneak attack, rogue will do quite well. It is probably my second favourite class to play. They do need to add Expertise though, it is ridiculous not having it.

Out of curiosity, Zarna (sorry for the derail but I'm curious...), how did you end up in a situation where you could never get your sneak attack? It's generally pretty easy to wrangle, especially if you're part of a party.

Not enough cover a lot of the time, but the main reason is that there wasn't usually a way to safely get behind the enemy, and since they have eyes they would see if I ducked behind something to hide, even if there is an ally attacking them in melee range. Even though this makes it harder for me to play my character I actually agree with it, anyone with any sense of self preservation should have some sort of sense where their attackers are. It was also fair for our party too, opponents didn't get sneak attacks just because there was someone in melee range of us.

Ooohhh, fair enough... So you had some homebrew nerfs that specifically targeted rogue to make it ineffective in most combat situations. That's cool enough if you were happy with it, thhough I feel as though your Dm should probably have just asked you not to play one, if they were doing that. I'd probably not recommend using that as an example to a player asking about how rogue actually works in 5e, though, since using an example of a game where homebrew nerfs gutted their capabilities in combat could be seen as pretty misleading if you don't call that detail out at the time ^.^

To those genuinely asking, remember - the only requirement of the situation to be enough in your favour to score sneak-attack hits is that you either have advantage in any way, or that you have another creature hostile to your target in melee range, that they are also having to worry about (and you yourself don't have disadvantage). The Rogue has specifically tailored skills in order to make the most of even just that level of distraction well enough to make telling strikes... that's their whole deal; that's their skill set.

The topic didn't come up until we got a melee party member and I tried to use sneak attack according to RAW. Neither the DM nor I gave it much thought until then, and our campaign started with only ranged players. It worked out fine though, since I was better at non combat related stuff and in combat used mostly control spells so the others could do the actual damage. I probably should have been a bit clearer about homebrew being what I meant by how the DM interprets sneak attacks.

It is definitely much simpler in this game. Even with my preferred playstyle of ranged only, it is still easy to get advantage for sneak attack. With decent rolls rogue should definitely be comparable to fighter in terms of damage at later levels, and also has plenty of ways to avoid or lessen damage.