Originally Posted by Saito Hikari
Oh look, the Reddit apologists who haven't paused to take anything beyond EA into consideration are here.

Originally Posted by Elebhra
BG3 EA combat is way more varied and interesting than Solasta’s IMO. I understand some complaints about 5e implementation, but Solasta’s enemy behavior is incredibly dull. Being sometimes frustrated by a shove KO is still better than having enemies that just attack the closest for 90% of the time.

I don't think most people here are miffed at the idea of shove KOs in general. The argument has always been that it's too easy to use, since there's hardly anything stopping you from just doing it every turn as a bonus action, along with the other half of Shove not being implemented (the shove prone option). The latter part means that the game's overall balance seems to skew heavily mage/archer-centric on top of that, as melee characters gain very little from distance shoving unless they can score a KO with it or it's to prevent an enemy from reaching your ranged. Whereas they would benefit tons from shoving to prone.

Shifting shove from bonus action to main action, along with implementing the missing shove to prone function, would achieve the following.

1) The risk/reward calculation for utilizing Shove is suddenly going to shift towards there being much more risk to using it. Enemies could no longer freely shove each other awake and still attack in the same turn, for instance. A failed shove attempt means you can't do anything else that turn.

2) Larian's stated goal is to give martials more to do in general. I think they've done enough of that with the additional weapon actions as is. But many martials and some martial-focused mage subclasses gain Extra Attack at level 5 or beyond. This is something that points to how people not familiar with these mechanics should not consider themselves as having equal input in these discussions - Shove is also considered an Attack, and thus as a main action, a character with Extra Attack can have 2 shove attempts in a single turn if they wish, or shove prone for their first attack and use an actual attack with advantage on their second, and still have a bonus action to use. This is not possible with shove as a bonus action.

At this point, I've accepted that reactions may be gimped in BG3 forever due to engine limitations. If we're not going to get proper reactions, shove absolutely shouldn't be a bonus action either, at least not without a feat cost. The long term effects on the encounter balance is going to be really bad, potentially on the same level as the highly lambasted armor system in DOS2 that caused a total endgame rebalancing in the definitive edition. And from what I can see from the DOS2 section of this forum during the EA phase for that game, there were plenty of people that raised the alarm on that, only to get ignored.

This post is spot on.

Unsettling is the truth that Larian likes to bounce of a wall a few times before they see it as a real problem.

"This is something that points to how people not familiar with these mechanics should not consider themselves as having equal input in these discussions"...I wish that the Larian team had at least one D&D purist, whose opinion they trusted.