Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Shouldn't be able to hide in combat

Its cheese constantly going behind the enemy, hide and get advantage.

Hide should be full action, and larians vision cones greatly mess things up. One one hand they added expensed rather simple D&D stealth, on the other hand they broke the system and didn't show an intention of addressing it so far.

It's been suggested to add circular hearing range, mmso at the very least it requires stealth check to sneak up to enemies.

I personally think they could make the feature dynamic. It becomes HIDE during exploration, but turns into COVER once in combat.

That way it would make more sense and make Rogues more enjoyable and free to play. Because right now you cannot do anything to HIDE as a feature without butchering Rogues as a class, as they depend on hiding in combat.


Apparently that is already being implemented in some shape or form. When I reported a bug with NPCs detecting me by stealing things behind them despite not being in their vision, this is what I was told by support;

"This is working as intended, at least for the detection. If a crime is audible, any NPCs within a certain distance will investigate, which will cause them to turn towards the noise and continue with the usual crime reactions."


So they might be implementing actual hearing system that doesn't leave people confused and actually uses stealth checks, but I am not sure because nowhere in Patch 8 was there any mention of NPCs getting any audio detection system. Right now it's just terrible and looks like a detection bug.

Interesting - so certain actions seem to "ping" NPCs around.

I guess if Hide were made an action, you could also give it to rogues as a cunning action like Dash and Disengage so they, but not other classes, could hide as a bonus action.

The problem is not hiding in combat, but Larian not understanding that their 'small' homebrew changes break any kind of balance in the game. Sight cones are not supported by D&D 5e, thus the whole perception and stealth system got broken by their introduction and made worse by having sneaking characters not being locked in turnbase and on top of that the whole shift in game balance by turning jump/shove/hide into bonus actions for every class.

Implementing the actual rules from D&D 5e would 'surprisingly' solve the problem. You can hide in combat, but not in plain sight. Perception is 360 and you actually roll for stealth not trusting on you noisy heavy armour to sneak up on someone who is just looking the other way.

I confess I don’t know the detail of how 5e handles stealth, but in general I’m in favour of BG3 implementing 5e rules as written unless there’s a compelling reason why not. So from that perspective I have no argument with what you say.

Speaking purely from the perspective of playing BG3, though, I do think the sight cones can be a useful representation of what is in plain sight and it makes sense that hiding there is harder (and might even be impossible in certain situations). But it doesn’t make sense that it’s only in their sight cones that NPCs can detect us, so I do hope that Larian will also introduce a 360 degree perception check that’s influenced by things like whether the sneaker is wearing heavier armour, that would bring the mechanic closer to 5e.

Yeah, the thing that doesn't make sense to many of us is that 5e doesn't have a line of sight in the sense of characters looking in a specific direction. Its a stylized approach to speed up things by combining all your senses in 'Perception'.

Now one could say that vision should be limited, but when we realistically look at it our field of vision is 180° and not 45-60° as is the game. Also if we hear things, we can just turn our heads and eyes quite quickly.

I think Larian here has gamified the perception too much by taking a highly stylized/simplified perception system and further limited the NPCs by sight cones and mechanics that push things to absurd levels - as mentioned no sound or other senses + the option to lock enemies in place while 'stealthing' with no stealth skill while wearing heavy noisy armour.


Am I a fan of 5e's perception rules? Not really and as a DM even less. But changing an existing ruleset demands taking more into account as the rule itself. Larian doesn't pay enough attention to the collaterals of their homebrews.

I don't know if they changed something in patch 9, but I accidentally clicked Hide on my Paladin while beating someone's face in melee.

And without skill proficiency and having disadvantage from Scale Mail, he succeeded. Seems more ridiculous than ever.

Well said.

A mix of 360 perception and sight cones is my preferred solution. 60-90 degree sight cones of automatic detection combined with a hearing radius of stealth check vs perception detection. Has a little bit of both 5e RAW and Larian implementation, and doesn't completely ignore the relatively-core 5e rule that there is No Facing.

Agreed, I think I’d opt for a mix-and-match option something like this too.

Though I do appreciate @biomag’s point that tweaking one element can have unintended and unbalancing knock-on impacts so needs to be done with care, if at all.

Yeah cone + radius seems like an amazing solution!! Because it is really unrealistic to get advantage by simply moving behind someone and sitting while wearing medium/heavy armor!

I could see hearing someone behind you, but sight cones are fine. You don't have eyeson the back of your head.

Yes, but my rogue has...NM I never made a Rogue.

Agreed, but at the same time you don't need 6 seconds (a D&D turn length) to look behind you when you hear something. Its part of the simplification/stylization for ease of use, like your reach with an average sword wouldn't be just 5 feet.

I just soloed the entire Phase Spider lair with Gale without ever being attacked.

Spell > hide every turn. Spiders go "Skitter!" and do nothing because you're not in a vision cone. Flashy spells like Shatter or Magic Missile don't make them at all interested in trying to find me.

Kind of ruins the entire game when you think about it. It has been like this for 2 years so maybe they like their mechanics and clever stealth play.

I’ve certainly felt that NPCs have been worse in patch 9 at spotting you and starting combat if you attack them from outside normal combat range, even without being in stealth. Not sure if that’s true or just dumb luck, but I definitely want them to get better at searching out the sources of threats, or even for turn-based combat to just start even if the enemy doesn’t spot you.

I like the idea of using both vision cones and hearing radius. Normal field of vision would be double or treble what you suggests though. We see around 180 degrees with 100 degrees of that being peripheral vision. Ideally subjects/movement caught within the peripheral vision (but not the main field of vision) should trigger a second perception check (first being for making noise that can be detected) and even if successful lead to the enemy focusing attention in that direction after a short pause.

Right now hide is a broken exploit tactic every bit as bad or worse than the now defunct flanking/backstab system. It desperately needs to go. Attempting to hide after an initial attack/detection should be done at stealth disadvantage (double disadvantage for those wearing non-stealthy armor). The AI needs to be tweaked too.

This has been noticeable in this patch for sure. Often, given enough distance, I can get two or three shots off before combat begins. It's very strange.

The fight where the NPC's can look for you in stealth (tested this twice this week on different characters) was the fight down at the tree with the Ancient Mud Mephits, and Wood Woads. There AI seems to sometimes trigger a search on stealth attack (not always though).