Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Reactions like Solasta!

Party members in range to see the enemy spellcasting automatically roll an Arcana check to identify an enemy spell. You do it with advantage if you already know how to cast the spell they're attempting to cast. You can still counterspell even if you fail the check, but the game will tell you that the enemy is attempting to cast an unknown spell instead.

I believe this is actually one of Solasta's homebrew rules done out of convenience, because I remember reading about how the normal rules for that mentioned something about how identifying an enemy spell counted as a reaction itself, or it was something that would prevent the person doing the identifying being unable to cast counterspell afterwards.

Counterspell:
https://images.app.goo.gl/ZJ6ATpqWAQrqApUd9

This is too much wording, though. A simple:

Counterspell Slow? Yes/No

That would suffice.

And this:

https://images.app.goo.gl/83XMiGAaB3DZMadP8

No. This I don't want. This every time the paladin hits? No thank you.

And I also don't want this:

https://images.app.goo.gl/j2g3fB9XqmyiPjs5A

I prefer Larian's approach for AOOs.

I think I've always casted counterspell without the information. A waste of ressource, definitely. But not so much of an issue in the end.

This is what I have in mind to select multiple targets (30sec video - sorry but I don't know how to resize and I dont know why it doesnt always work here...)


It would obviously help with spells like spells like bless, bane, sleep,... Currently it's tedious to choose who we want to target.

But it could already give us a lot of control over many reactions Hellish Rebuke in the video, but also with AOO, Riposte, Shield, eventually ready, why not as a part of smite for AOO,...

Here's an idea for Smite coupled with Reactions:

Button like Passive mode enables Smite for Reactions. Enemy triggers AOO. If enemy has 1-15 HP, no Smite used on AOO. If 16-30, Smite level 1 is used automatically because button is enabled. If 31-45, Smite 2 auto used. 46-60 is Smite 3, and so on.

Now, no popups for Smite. Normal Smite attacks are like Battlemaster maneuvers, and Reaction Smites are like the above. Maybe they could even make it so players control the HP intervals. Instead of every 15 points, every 10, or something like that.

Yey, even more automatic everything ... just click a button (preffered name: Play) and watch! Dont do anything ever again!

Lol. Not exactly. More like set it up ahead of time as opposed to the game pausing, popping up a window and asking you.

But hey. That's more for the folks who hate popups. I, personally, don't mind the Solasta popups as much. Even the paladin Smite, though probably the most frequent, isn't that bad to me. I'd rather have it than no Reactions at all. The popups give full control, and I like that.

But I could live with the ability to preset my Reactions:

Smite Reaction on - Set spell level HP increments - default every 15 HP

Shield spell on - Set to Any Attack or Magic Missile Only

Featherfall on - No preset needed. If you fall, and it's on, it triggers

Gift of Gab - Dialogue reaction spell, so... No need to preset

Absorb Elements on - Set to Any Element or pick which elements you want to trigger the spell. You may already have resistance to fire, for example, so you don't want it to trigger if fire hits you

Hellish Rebuke on - Select specific target(s) using shift key and clicking on target avatar or picture. If you are hit by one of the selected targets, and it's on, it activates.

Silvery Barbs on - Select enemies that trigger it, and select ally to benefit from it. If attacked by one of those enemies, it triggers.

Counterspell - This is the only one that absolutely should have a pop-up. I'm sorry, but it's too varied. I don't even know how you'd properly preset this one. The last thing you want is to waste it on a baby spell on accident when you are saving it for the potential of something more powerful. Multiple mage's... One casts Slow, another Fireball. Ah... But what if the last one casts something like Dimension Door in order to escape and you really don't want that? Too bad, you auto-triggered with one of the other two spells.

Pre-sets bridge part of the distance, but only half-way - The problem with having pre-sets like that is that it only allows one form of flexibility for situations, when there are multiple scales at play. The keenest example is that you may have all of your varied pre-sets on, but you'll have to stop the game and change those settings regularly *anyway* as situations evolve - You only get one reaction per round, and that's a resource that needs to be book-kept as well as what resources you're spending when you use it.

You, as a caster, may often find yourself in situations where, yes, you 'generally' want to use featherfall if someone falls - and you'll generally want to shield magic missile if it's targeted at you, and you might have set to hellishly rebuke only the target with the highest max hp in any given encounter.... but now you're in an encounter with a powerful enemy caster, and what matters is that you *have* your reaction ready to counterspell them if they use one of their nasty spells - so you don't want to shield that magic missile from a minion, and you won't featherfall your ally falling 15 feet off the ledge to the lower level, because it's not as important as stopping that disintegrate if and when it comes out, and you don't want to be without your reaction if it does... but of course, you do want to do all of those other things if the enemy caster takes his turn and doesn't pull out a big spell this round, and his minions magic missile and shove allies after him... unless they have legendary actions, in which case you'll still want to hang onto it...

Even with a fairly flexible set of pre-set options to utilise, it's still going to end up being frustrating to the player who will find their reaction spent on things they don't want to spend it on in particular or important circumstances, or not being used when it's okay to use it in others.

That is so true. Plus, with presets, you have to, as you touched on, spend probably MORE time managing Reactions to make sure they're set right. And God forbid you forget to mess with them before ending your turn. "Oh crap! I forgot to turn off Shield Reaction. Now my Counterspell won't work!"

Fireball. Everyone's half dead. I could see myself doing that constantly, But at least you shielded that magic missile. Yay you!

Yeah. For the most part, popups. Like I said earlier, they really aren't that annoying in Solasta, and they really don't slow combat down that much. Very miniscule.

Yeah, this is something I wrote about even when I made my thread about trying the Grymforge final boss for the first time in patch 7:

at some point you find yourself having to juggle between toggles for your reactions so frequently (which is STILL far from ideal control over them) that it makes the "annoyance" of dealing with Solasta pop-ups trivial and smooth to deal with, in comparison.

For how "crude" having a text pop-up may be in terms of presentation, it surely beats having to fight with the multiple tabs of your UI for multiple characters at once, going back and forth between switching things on and off.

I still think that Saito's videos from Solasta are an excellent case study in the fact that having the game check with you absolutely does not slow the gameplay down at all, and in facts speeds overall combat up and makes it feel snappier and more engaging as a whole. They're a direct, demonstrated and tangible disproof to the claim that being asked for each action would slow down the game... it doesn't, not any more than you, the player, want it to...

I agree that it doesnt slow down combats. It has always been a non sense argument for those against a proper reaction system.
I.E being able to counter a fireball is less turn/ressources consuming than healing your entire party...

But it's also true that it break the flow of ennemies turns with pauses. I truly love Solasta but it is not known for his dynamic turn based combats. The animations trigger with a delay, the movements are very rigid... and then there are more or less popup depending your characters classes.


I could totally hear that Larian wants to create more dynamic combats. In my opinion it would be a good thing for the whole turn based genre if Larian succed at creating "dynamic" turn based combats. IMO they've already done a good job.


But on top of that, what would happen with popup with the new Swarm AI ? 5 popups at the same time for an AOO ? A huge popup with 5 targets ? Not the biggest issue I guess...

But what would happen in a game that is totally unable to manage a real pause ? (and that dont want at all to deal with pause for multiplayer purpose).

What in multiplayer when someone has to click yes/no ?
Will the second player see every ennemies moving in place until the first player click the popup ? (Like in solasta)
Will the second be able to "break" the game and engage the ennemies frozen by popup with a hidden character or an arrow ?

I may be wrong but the popup solution raise many questions that could not be (easily) solved with how the game currently works. At least some things could feel even wierder than now imho.

Exactly the point i was trying to make with auto/ask/off and seting some reactions on auto. :-/

Sooner or later every player would get to the point where they would understand that everything ask is basicaly the only way.

//Edit:
Souds good to me ...
I mean this was allways the idea in my mind ... after all, if you can make multiple reactions at the same time ... why separate them to multiple pop-ups? O_o

Puting aside fact that bug, where timed-spells expire prematurely if your turn took too long ...
The game actualy is in pause any and every time you are on your turn ... isnt it? O_o

What about it? O_o
Its the exactly same situation as when there is their turn.

That sounds like reasonable expectation.

Unless Larian implement area of combat ...
Most likely, but you dont need reactions for this exploit, so ... if that doesnt bother Larian in regular turns, why it should bother them in enemy turns?

.
Wierder is exactly what I wrote.

This is mostly what it would look like with popup until someone answer "Yes/No" in BG3.
(ok, the animation would probably be a bit slower and wouldnt look exactly the same, except eventually if someone is on a ladder)

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/w3swki/wtf_is_he_doing_sorry_for_the_quality_i_just/

I've been playing The Quarry on PS5 which is basically a game of quick time events and it got me thinking about reactions. I think others have suggested this before, but what if reactions played out more like a QTE? Zoom in on the character as the attack comes hurdling towards them in slow motion. Then all available reaction options show up on screen to choose from with a clock/timer winding down. It would make reactions a little flashier than a simple popup and maybe add a little gamification of trying to decide what to do before the timer runs out. I don't know if that would get annoying if it happened constantly but... just a thought.

I'd be fine with this, if there was a setting to make the timer last an infinite amount of time :P

In seriousness, I don't think there should be any (real) time-dependent things in a TB game. If I leave to go to the bathroom after my character's turn, when I return I should have missed no opportunities to take actions. Either all the enemies/other players should have gotten through their turns (with my character possibly taking automatic reactions), or I should have a prompt waiting for me.

If I had to choose between BG3's current reaction system and a QTE pop up system, I'd choose the current system (unless Larian also implemented a full-game pause).

IIRC this is what happens in Solasta in multiplayer. When another player is eligible to use a reaction, all the animations sort of lock in place and the message at the bottom of the screen changes from 'ENEMY TURN' to '[Player] IS CONSIDERING A REACTION' until the eligible player chooses what to do.

I did a full multiplayer playthrough of the Lost Valley campaign with my tabletop friends. It was loads of fun, even if the writing towards the end of the campaign kinda drove off a cliff, but I guess that's the trouble of designing a campaign with multiple possible endings.

Sure... I mean almost anything is better than what they have now. But I have, for the longest time, proposed that they leave us with OPTIONS in the end. Either you can have it as it is now, or we can have something akin to what you mentioned, or we can have it like in Solasta.

This has been suggested as the aesthetic in a few other threads that talk about it - basically, to smooth the feeling of actions stopping and starting, the action slides into an exponential slow-down while the player chooses, slowing more, until it reaches a full stopping point if the player still hasn't chosen by then - but if they choose quickly, there's no stop at all, and just a brief deceleration of events - even active time combat video games do this within their combat engine, with tactical slowdowns for dodge frames and critical opportunities. In a game like BG3 this would be primarily an aesthetic smoothing quality of life detail, for a proper reaction system that does ask the player each time... again, with options for a time out pass-over if that's what the player wants (and which would probably be a necessity in multiplayer, I'll happily admit).

I have proposed the “zoom in/slow down” option myself in the past, but as Niara is pointing that’s basically an aesthetic thing.

At its core the system would remain no different from the Solasta pop-up system if not in terms of presentation.

Which is EXACTLY the goal, by the way: getting full and granular control over reactions, but selling it to Larian in a way that wouldn’t compromise their “cinematic presentation”/triple A production value.

I’ll say this again about the current solution: any system where a REACTION needs to be planned in advance to work is intrinsically a failure.