Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General My thoughts based on my Patch 5 playthrough

OK, so I just got finished with another fairly complete playthrough of Act 1, and I just wanted to share my thoughts about the game in its current Patch 5 state.

1. Camping 2.0: I have made no secret that, in principle, I think this is a fantastic step forward in the Long-rest system....but I do feel it could do with some additional tweaks:

(a) I'd love to see more variety in the backgrounds for your Mini-camps, and I want Mini-camps to be more restricted in terms of what you can access there as compared to your Main Camp. Only the characters currently in your party, & those
with an especially critical dialogue, should be available at a Mini-camp....& nor should you have access to the skeleton or your Trunk.

(b) I think there should be more limits placed on a player's access to the Main Camp-either in terms of what locations on the map they can access the Main Camp from, or the cost-in supplies-of using the Main Camp.

(c) I'd like for there to be a chance, based on where your Mini-camp is located & your game's difficulty settings, for random encounters to occur. These chances could be mitigated by Camouflaging your camp (Survival).

(d) I definitely feel that the value of Camp Supplies & the cost of camping needs to be re-balanced, considerably-especially in relation to the level of your character. I would also like to see changes to the Camp Supply system that would make
spells like "Goodberry" & "Create Food and Drink" valuable spells to have, as well as making Cooking a viable proficiency to have in the game (taking several low value supplies & converting them into something much more than the sum of its
parts)

lastly, I think that even a partial rest should require at least some supplies.....even if its something is low as 1-5 points worth.....though maybe this should be tied to the difficulty settings of the game.

2. Active Roll system: Again, in principle I absolutely love this new mechanic, but I do think some re-balancing is needed.

(a) I could be mistaken, but I think the DC values for rolls may be based on the pre-Patch 5 dice-rolling mechanics, as I fail my dice rolls far too rarely IMHO.

(b) In particular, some clearly "Class Specific" skills-like Lockpicking & Trap Disarming-should have a much higher DC for characters outside of the appropriate class.

(c) I might cop flack for this, but if you use an Inspiration to re-roll a dice, I am inclined to say that the DC should increase by 1 for each re-roll.

3. Background Quests: I can't think of anything remotely bad to say about this new feature......the only suggestion I could think to make is I really hope there are even more in Act 2 & Act 3....as well as maybe a few extras in Act 1 as well. As an Outlander, I actually found myself stumbling into my Background Quests.

4. Other thoughts: I could be completely mistaken, and feel free to correct me, but I don't feel like Astarion's Sneak Attacks are as useful as they once were.....and I think they may have been nerfed too much in this Patch.

To be honest, outside of the normal array of minor bugs & glitches, I can't think of anything truly negative to say about the game at the moment. Keep up the great work, Larian, and I cannot wait until Patch 6! Hope we get to go up to Level 5 this time!

I think you make a lot of good points here, but there are some I'd like to voice my dissent/general thoughts on.

1(c) I don't really disagree with this request, I'm mostly highlighting this one to voice my thoughts that I'm not sure if this request is viable alongside the way Larian currently approaches enemy combat design. It feels like they want to make each fight distinctive in a way that would make random encounters not their prefered way of doing things.

2(a) I disagree here mainly because in D&D, DC is meant to represent the difficulty an average person would have to do a particular task. An average lock is always going to be an average difficulty to open for anyone, the deciding factor is how far above or below average the character doing the pickign is. The point of getting bonuses and proficiency for a character is to demonstrate them being good at a thing. Anyone can attempt to break a lock, but rogues have proficiency with that sort of thing because part of being a rogue means being good at it.

It also will make it far harder for a party to do without a rogue or similar class, which given the fact we only get a four character party could lead to players requiring certain characters as necessary on any playthrough. For instance, I play a Ranger who's also good at lock picking and trap springing in part because I like the other characters more than Asterion and want to spend the most time with them. Changing DCs based on class would mean that either I would have to play a rogue (which I am not at all interested in) or I'd have to constantly have Asterion in the party. I think actually changing DCs based on class is a move away from How 5E is meant to work in general. Though I do think that some dice checks probably should be adjusted a bit more.

2(c) I'm curious why you think this should be the case. I personally disagree because, in my opinion, Inspiration is explicitly a tool for when you REALLY want to pass a particular check. It's meant to help you clinch a really important moment or help your character shine doing something you feel like they should be able to do. It feels like it defeats the purpose if using Inspiration just makes a check incrementally harder each time. At the very least it kind of disinsentivises using Inspiration for rolls that are already tough to begin with.

Why?

"Because we already have millions of supplies and we need more excuses to use them" is my standard answer.

i guess i just don't subscribe to the thought that games need to be balanced THAT tightly. players have too much gold, better nerf all gold sources. Majority of players not dying at a certain fight? Better buff that fight. Not everyone plays the game in the same way. Some people will ignore food entirely, relying solely on pack supplies and if they choose to rest more than the hardcore/gitgud crowd, they might find themselves softlocked, having to spend their time worrying about supplies instead of actually playing the game. I just don't see how a player having too many supplies affects your gameplay. If you think you have too many supplies, drop some of them.

I like that gathering supplies is not a challenge in a typical game. What it does do is keep you moving forward. If you blow a couple of days using support spells to explore parts of the world you've already picked over, you won't gather anymore resources and you might feel pressured to go explore somewhere new. I think my party has enough for about a week of camping right now, but I've had plenty of experiences where it made sense to stop for the day because the next bit would be a big push, even though I had only used a couple of spell slots.

In my opinion long rests should not be so punishing that the player feels like they can't use short-rest resources in every encounter, which currently means you should feel comfortable using about a third of your daily rest resources.

Except it's not "tight" at all?

We aren't talking about "having extra food for a couple more days" like the user above me is implying here.

We are talking about having something like 20 times more food that I'll ever need, and that's without even buying any.
According to some quick math I finished my last playthrough with enough food to do give or take 39 Long rests.
I'm not sure I'm going to have that many in my entire playthrough OF THE FULL GAME after release.

Even in a deliberately sub-optimal playthrough I still have 6 extra backpacks of supplies that have been untouched.

Most of the wasted long rests were from the "unweighted dice" streaking low, repeatedly. So If a player doesn't change the dice setting, even if they play poorly, they should have an even larger surplus.

and? i keep saying this but until they separate long-resting with story cutscenes or add a cheap way to rest up (say an inn), they need to make long-resting almost free. The partial rest is silly because the game doesn't really tell you that story is tied to resting, so encouraging as little resting as possible with limited supplies goes against the whole design. Also, why does it affect your game if someone else rests 39 different times? You're not going to rest regardless of how many supplies you have. Just don't pick them up and carry on with your no-rest style of play. This isn't a competitive game.

Balance is important of course, but i dread having a repeat of DOS2 where you were almost forced to do every little quest/activity to be at an appropriate level. I remember hours of running around to different areas trying to find something that I could do that was in my level bracket. that's why i'm concerned about this game being too tightly balanced. (yes, i'm sure you never had that issue, you were destroying everything 5 levels above your level, but i'm a scrub)

AND you sounded worried about the idea that the short rest requiring food as well would put you in a tight spot.
When in reality even then I doubt you could run out of food if you TRIED YOUR BEST.

i think i'm done responding if you're not going to bother actually engaging with my post and focus on a single word (the first one lol). Have a good one.

Tend to agree on Astarion being nerfed into oblivion. Lae'zel with the everburn blade absolutely shreds everything, and Astarion is ... well ... meh (never missed as many attack rolls as in this patch). And that's not even taking into account the changes coming with level 5 where fighters and other melee classes will gain one extra action. It would help if Lae'zel couldn't hide on every single turn and attack with advantage as a consequence, with hiding being a bonus action for everyone. Having hiding be part of cunning action would restore at least some partial value to Astarion, in addition to making his playstyle more attractive and interesting vs other characters. Or otherwise implement a stealth roll when hiding outside of cone of vision for heavy and medium armored characters.

Overall I do think rogues' damage output was busted before patch 5, so it did need a nerf, but now I really don't bother bringing them into combat anymore.

EDIT: I do want to also confirm that I am loving this patch so far. Bugs aside, the quality of life changes + the balance elements are great to see.

I don't really feel like you're obliged to pick up every piece of food you pass, and I would not want the game balanced around that point.

Resting tied to resources will never be a viable balancing mechanic because:

1. The economy will never be balanced. Economies in fantasy games are never balanced. There is always an easy exploit somewhere, because

2. If people have cool spells they want to use their cool spells, not feel trepidation over using their cool spells because they are struggling to afford groceries.

All resting tied to resources is good for is getting you to think about these things a little bit, which I believe the current system does just fine. It could be tightened up a bit, but you don't want to punish people for experimenting with their abilities or getting creative with new approaches to combat that didn't go perfectly as planned. The idea of short rests requiring resources is cool and would be especially nice if it could be tweaked so that you have to save up for a long rest but you could feed yourself for a short rest with what you find around. (So you happen upon the goblin's dining room, that signals a good time for a short rest.) Both of these are really just mechanics-as-flavor, though. You don't want to actually be fretting about when you can take short rests, and you only want to fret in the slightest about long rests.

Not allowing the player to instantly teleport back to where they were would discourage long resting more than any resource cost. Players would opt to keep pressing on in order to avoid running through 10 minutes of cleared forest more readily than they would to avoid using up camp supplies.

We're not playing Oregon Trail. Nobody wants their Baldur's Gate 3 ending to be "starved to death."

I'm going to respond to what's relevant to what I said.
You felt like going on a tangent on an expanded topic, good for you. But it wasn't something I was interested in engaging with.

I absolutely agree with every point except 2c, and after my patch 5 playthrough I basically found the same things. I especially like the idea of mini-camps having a chance of triggering a random encounter if you fail a (group) survival check.

I'll have to admit that I like this idea as well as it would make things more interesting. After all if your camping out somewhere something or someone is bound to come across your campsite. This would be true even in real life

I would agree if there was some option to avoid ambushes. Safe camping when you are in the grove. That would mean that anybody who wants to avoid it can use the waypoint system to get a safe rest. Most of the time I want a chance of attack to make camping more exciting, but if I have just limped back from a huge boss battle I don't want to get interrupted by a pack of wolves every five minutes.

I agree with what you are saying and I'm not saying every 5 minutes that would be extreme. Maybe once a night or twice on a long rest