Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Sneak attack should be a passive

I played deep gnome rogue with a crossbow in my patch 8 playthrough. And i have to say that sneak attack as a separate skill is dumb. Reasons:

1. UI. You can missclick and do a usual attack without additional damage. It happened to me several times
2. The most frustrating reason. You can't use magical arrows(thunder, fire, lightning etc.) with sneak attack! So, for example you want to use thunder arrow from stealth to shove a goblin to somewhere. And now what you do is math - either you want to use sneak attack for damage, so he dies from hit damage or you use thunder arrow to assume that he dies from fall damage. That's not how it should work
3. Combat flow/UI. The separation between melee/range sneak attacks is also bad. Instead of just making an attack, you need to pick a right skill according to your weapon or it will be swapped. That's where missclicks come from and it slows combat for no particular reason

In dnd sneak attack is passive that activates when conditions met - you have advantage on attack. It's not a skill. It will get more ridiculous if we'll get cantrips like greenflame blade or booming blade. So then arcane trickster rogue would choose between sneak attack and a cantrip which is also a melee attack

Larian's home-brew strikes again!

Yes, SA should be a passive or toggle ability. And it should be possible to trigger on bonus action attack.

anti-solo

isn't it good?

your player character can not do without companions.
this is good to understand earlier, before you meet a boss that is powerful enough to limit your rogue's battle field.

What? No one is saying we should remove the requirements for SA, but that it should be treated like it is in 5e; something that can happen on any weapon attack as long as you have advantage or an ally is threatening the target.

As SA works now, we can't get a SA on an offhand attack nor can we combine it with special arrows. If we get Blade cantrips, we won't be able to combine thoae either, despite the fact that the actual dnd rules lets us combine these things.

i see

+1

According to PHB
- You can only do a sneak attack with a finesse or ranged weapon.
- You have advantage OR there is an enemy of your target near the target and you do not have disadvantage.
- You have one SA per turn

That means you have only one SA even if you have several attacks per round (dual wielding, haste, multi classing).
You can do a SA again if the enemy provokes an AoO on the enemies turn.

All of this is assuming BG3 follows the PHB rules, I am not sure if they do.

I am OK with passive SA if it means: "You deal extra damage the first time you hit something with an attack during this turn if the requirements are met."

-1000 for another toggle !
+1 for a "offhand sneak attack" icon.

Rogue could have a ressource called "sneak attack" similar to the bardic inspiration or superiority dices. 1 use / turn.
Both the main and off hand sneak atttack consume the ressource.

I guess it would be easier to teach the mechanic on top of visually showing the rogue's particularities.

But with an icon you can't combine sneak attack with any other ability/weapon attack/special arrow/etc. Also I don't want yet another sneak attack icon; the hotbar is already too full.

A resource would be okay since you can always decide to action-attack or off-hand-attack first, so you'd still be able to choose where your sneak attack attempts go.

+ 1000 to toggle (and Sneak Attack AOO) ...
+ 1 to Off-Hand Sneak Attack button (and Sneak Attack AOO) ...

- 10.000.000 for pasive. :-/
Sory, but i just want to decide when i want to use my resources, i dont want this game to take ANY decision from me. :-/

Why is sneak attack so broken in this game?

Sheesh, it's a core feature of the class!

*shakes head*

A toggle is the better way I guess, because you want to be able to choose on which attack you do it (you can only do one sneak attack per round)

Thats easy ...
Rogue is one of first classes ... and back in Patch 1, two years ago, Larian vision for this game was obviously quite different from what we have now, wich is still quite different from what some people want.

Agreed OP. I find it weird on how it works. Common sense would imply it’s a passive

I disagree with passive. It is not passive in D&D. The player can choose which attack they want to use Sneak Attack if doing 2 weapons. It can either be used in primary or off hand.

A toggle is really the only way to make it work properly. Default toggle is primary hand. Then yes. Every hit is with Sneak Attack with primary hand. If using 2 weapons, you can toggle to Secondary and when you hit your off hand gets Sneak Attack.

Right now, though, it is a skill, and I agree it doesn't work well. You can't use it as off hand, you can easily forget to use it, and you can't combine it with other things.

Geez. Imagine dual classing Fighter/Rogue. Sneak Attack + Combat Maneuvers. Nope. You can't select both at once. One or the other.

I'm just trying the "Expansion" mod (that among other things raises the level cap for your characters) and it makes Sneak attack a toggle that is applied every time it's... well, appliable.
It works.

It does the same for the barbarian's Reckless attack, by the way.

+1 passive
+0.5 toggle
Please make it work if the conditions apply or default to a normal attack if the conditions no longer apply. Atm in patch 8, I selected a ranged sneak attack, my character moved ~1m to do it, the condition no longer applied and my action was wasted.
(I couldn't do another action and the SA didn't happen).
(sidenote: It only happened twice, so I don't know if this was a bug or a feature.)

There are a few things that I assume should work with off-hand that aren't at the moment, though mechanically they are passives, unlike Sneak Attack.

Second that. All are valid points, especially that icons are forgettable, non-combinable and, if Larian goes down this rabbit hole to the end, there will never be enough space on the hotbar(s).