Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Removing Scaling Cantrips

One of the issues I have with DnD in general, is that cantrips get stronger when lorewise they are nothing but weak spells that are used for training initiates. They are supposed to be so weak, that the person learning magic can not hurt themselves or others with them. However this is not the case, as cantrips such as bladeward, controlflames, gust, guidance, Mage Hand, magic stone, mold earth, shillelagph, can all be used to dangerous effects, especially in BG3 where shapefire/ water and mage hand are responsible for 90+% of the cheese in game.

Reminder: mage hand can spawn 4 hands at once, making you able to chain stagger enemies 4x with shove. This allows you to push a creature up to 80ft per caster, if you take 3 char with mage hand, you can push an enemy 250ft every round. Aka its a guaranteed kill by fall damage. Gust can do the same thing to a lesser effect, except that it can be aoe.

Magic stone itself can become almost as strong as magic missiles, while having no cost. 1d6 + [casters bonus]. as bludgeon which is the strongest element in game outside of force. Rules do not limit how many you can have, i can give my malee hitters 99 magic stones, and essentially be throwing bombs every round, as a pseudo pathfinder alchemist. [no rules about dipping magic stones in fire or acid as they are an item].

Guidance, essentially a huge bonus to passing story checks, borderline op.

There are several misunderstandings about DND magic and this game.

1) you cannot have 99 magic stones. You can never have more than three. It says that in the rules.

2) you cannot spawn 4 mage hands per caster.

3) the gust cantrip is not in Baldur’s Gate 3, same with some other spells you mention.

4) bladeward is not overpowered. Because it takes an action it is basically useless. I have never seen anybody cast this spell in combat in all my years of playing.

What are you talking about?
1. Gust doesn't exist in the game at this time.
2. Mold Earth is not in game
3. Control flames is not in game
4. Magic stone is not in game
5. If you want to create 4 Githyanki/Mages/Sorc with mage hand and waste your action on casting that then have fun. Mage hand is not that useful in bg3. It's shove is really weak. 250 feet? what?

You mention Pathfinder, you may be in the wrong place.

Sorry to harp on this but it is so weird that you specifically say that rules do not limit how many magic stones you can have. The Magic Stones rules description is only 7 sentences long, and two of those sentences explicitly limit how many stones you can have.


“You touch one to three pebbles and imbue them with magic.
. . .
If you cast this spell again, the spell ends early on any pebbles still affected by it.”

Based on your post, if you do play table top, I can only imagine that your group is a cluster fuck of rules misapprehensions.

Guidance won't scale, I guess.... But don't forget about casters with less spell slots. They rely more on scaling cantrips, why limit them further?

I imagine cantrips were buffed because, as a whole, spells and spell-casting were heavily nerfed relative to prior editions. Or, at least, prior editions with the exception of 4th edition. Spells and spell-casting were made weaker with the reduction of spell slots with few ways of boosting their number, the addition of the concentration mechanic, and allowing re-saves for almost all controlling effects. Certainly their were were buffs to some spells within the context of the system, but as a whole, spell-casting got the nerf bat relative to 3rd edition.

Why consider 5e's spell system relative to 3rd edition instead of 4th? Largely because of the mass exodus of players upon 4th edition's release, I imagine. I don't believe 4th edition was the base for 5e playtest material, yes there were some terminology carried over, but by and large little of 4th edition was carried over into 5th edition.

Ignoring most of what OP said, there is an argument for making (attack) cantrips less powerful: balance. Leveled spells (and thus Casters) are very powerful, but are ultimately limited by # of spell slots. However, D&D 5e casters can also use resource-less cantrips that approach the power of martial characters' basic attacks. True, firebolt does less damage than a longsword---1d10 (5.5) fire vs 1d8+3 or 4 (~8) slashing---but it also ignores the most common enemy resistance: non-magical BPS damage.

Should casters get the best of both worlds? Very Powerful resource-using spells, plus Normal-Powered & unlimited cantrips?
Or should they have Very Powerful Spells but Underpowered cantrips, so that their average action becomes ~equally as effective as martial characters'?

Warlocks could be an exception since their class revolves around EB and having few spell slots.

Even so, 5e leveled spells are still more powerful than Martial Attacks (even accounting for things like Sneak Attack, Fighting Maneuvers, and Fighting Styles).

The original cantrips appeared in 1E Unearthed Arcana as follows: "Most cantrips are simple little spells of no great effect, so when the in- dividual becomes a 1 st-level magic-user, the knowledge and information pertaining to these small magics are discarded in favor of the more powerful spells then available. However, a magic-user may opt to retain up to four cantrips in place of one 1st-level spell."

Later editions of D&D often re-worked the original content. So now we have "cantrips" that can be cast infinitely, do 4d6 damage, etc. Why did they do this? I guess it is because the fighter-types can stab with their swords all day long, whereas the low-mid level wizards will otherwise quickly run out of spells in perhaps just one encounter, and then they would have nothing but poor skills with a basic weapon, which is not very magical.

I was unaware of the second rule in how it is originally. When we played it, all peebles that where enchanted by the spell would remain enchanted even if you cast it, similar to how you could with goodberry, where they last for up to 24 hours. 3 stone limitation seems strange in the original. We played with a 99 limit as it is an item stack.




It is not in the game yet, but I am assuming it will be on full release, this is EA. I am provide advise in advance to help avoid issues down the line. Regarding mage hand, you can shove people repeatedly, move one hand, shove, move one hand shove, move one hand shove, shove is a bonus action, and shove is guaranteed out of stealth, it has auto stealth when used by some classes, at lvl 17 it summons 4 hands, at lvl 11 it does 3. https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-LYZbrD6UhjrYlC3FY_x

When I say up to 250ft, i am include vertical distance, as you could space out the hands, and drop the enemy from a ledge with hand A, shove them with hand B, albeit such an example is theocratical.

By the time damage cantrips start scaling, not only are martial classes getting extra attacks, but they are also using magical weapons to increase their hit chance and damage.

Furthermore, by the time you are getting to the later levels, most spellcasters have enough slots that they won’t be casting them as often either and can cast much more powerful spells.

The cantrips are fine. They aren’t generally unbalanced expect for specific instances like playing a coffeelock with 8 eldritch blasts per turn, but that’s fine. It’s fun, players like doing that, and not everything needs to be balanced.

That is an optional supplement and not part of the core rules, and certainly won’t be part of BG3. Is that even an official WotC supplement? I can’t find it anywhere.

Controlling your mage hand in table top is an action, so that restricts the tactic you are talking about.

Y’all need to read the rules. 😂

Yeah, GMBinder is a site for home brew content. Those aren’t DND rules, friend. You’re complaining about an issue that doesn’t exist unless you want it to.

And does it even matter, in game where you can rest after each fight and have "strong spells" ready and waiting basicaly "all the time"?

But that’s only an issue when you have so many food supplies that they become irrelevant, and by that point you really don’t need to be using all of your spell slots in every single fight.

I’m not a TT player, but from reading 5e rules, Mage Hand shouldn’t be able to shove at all as it can’t attack and shove is described as a “special melee attack”. I know it can at the moment in BG3, but I’d happily opt to lose that ability to gain more utility for the hand outside of combat, such as being able to carry light objects or pull levers, especially if its concentration requirement (which also doesn’t look like 5e RAW) is dropped.

I’d agree guidance feels a bit too useful, but mainly I don’t think we should have an amulet with unlimited uses per day. If we were reliant on a divine caster who’d selected it in preference to other options I don’t think it would feel quite as overpowered. And some cantrips, such as True Strike and Blade Ward don’t seem hugely useful. Generally, though, cantrips feel appropriately powered in the game so far, making sure casters aren’t useless when their spell slots are exhausted, and the step up at level 5 feels like the right time. (The fact that, as it stands in BG3, we can technically rest at any time to replenish spell slots is neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned as the game should be playable without frequent resting, or long-resting mid-mission, if we elect not to, and unlimited resting should remain a QoL feature only rather than a factor taken into account when balancing the game.)

I must admit i dont see much difference in between picking a usefull cantrip, before other options ...
And picking a neckage, that gives us said cantrip, before other options ...

I for one am certainly glad this neckage is there, since i find party of 4 incredibly restraining, and if 1/4 of them would be allready reserved for either Cleric or Druid (wich we dont have) it would only feel like yet another lame atempt from Larian to force Shadowheart uppon us, rather than anything else. :-/

Oh yeah, I forgot that mage hand can’t shove in table top.

I did one time convince my DM to let my invisible trickster mage hand pick and and drop a dagger directly over an NPC I was trying to surreptitiously assassinate. He only had 1 HP, so it worked splendidly. Good times.

I can't speak to if/how 5E was nerfed in relation to 3E or before. I just know that one of my huge problems with the game pretty much since its creation was the fact that Wizards (and clerics, etc,,,) had spell slots at all. I get that it was made into a resource that was designed to be depleted and refreshed. It still bothers me that a fighter can swing their sword (effectively) all day long whereas the wizard is limited to a very small handful of casts per day. In that, I like that Cantrips can be used to some effect. It gives those casters something to do the other 98% of encounters.

But consider that D&D evolved from tabletop wargaming, I always felt that the spell system was built on that concept and never evolved, as it should have. Maybe it was time to show some development (beyond what we have already seen). Considering it is now a CRPG, something had to give.

As far as Cantrips being exclusively harmless magics used solely for the training of novice casters, I don't necessarily see it that way. Maybe there's support for that line of thinking, I don't know. But with everything in magic, there is always experience, knowledge and the ability to improve something. It seems to me that should go for cantrips in the same way as any other magic. Cap it, sure. But, within guidelines, I see no reason why even basic magics can't be improved with experience.

There's a feat in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything that allows one to shove with Mage Hand, with a bonus action no less. Of course, the shove in only the standard 5ft. I believe it''s called Telekinetic.

Actually, even the Telekinetic feat doesn't let you shove with mage hand - it lets you, the telekinetic person, attempt to telkinetically shove someone as a bonus action; it's based on you, no mage hand required.