Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Min-maxing good? Bad?

"playing as a male, playing as a female? good or bad?"

Only you can answer this question young one.

I agree about difficulty settings needing to be considerate of standard builds. The 'normal' setting should be based on building single class characters using the default builds that Larian provides. BUT NOT BLADE WARD for crying out loud. Seriously Larian, stop screwing over new players by auto selecting that shit spell. Or make it a Bonus Action.

Its a roleplay game, not a numbers game. I mean, if people want to calculate the shit out of everything, to the point where all of the story ambience lost in the pure math, I don't care, but it shouldn't be priority in the development

@Wormerine, as I said in the Obsidian forum, I completely agree with JES on what he has to say. Unfortunately, DnD has, over the editions, evolved away from being a roleplaying game system to a combat game system, and it is now pretty much all about combat. And contemporary video games using DnD systems echo this evolutuon. My #1 critique of BG3 from Day 1 has been that it is combat and not roleplaying that is central to the game. And in such a game, it is very natural that players will gravitate towards min-maxing, which I fully expect 90% of people playing BG3 to do, because it is the DnD thing to do.

If I were to ever play BG3, a big 'if,' I'd only play it once, and I'd use a mod to increase my party size to six (a non-min-max custom PC and five NPC companions) and also play it exclusively in story mode. I'd do all these things entirely for the purpose of desperately trying to maximize roleplaying while minimizing combat. And I fully expect that such a playthrough of BG3 will be very disappointing and unsatisfying, hence my intense dismay about the game.

It should be noted here that "roleplaying" for me is meaningful and deep roleplaying. So, for me, throwing my shoes at someone or talking to animals or shoving someone off a roof does not count.

This was indeed my major concern regarding BG3, after playing both DOS and DOS:2. Both games were combat focused and unfortunately the world and story didn't click on me the way I hoped (it wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either). Now, I can't tell anything about BG3 in this regard, because I avoided to play EA, to not spoil the full experience, but there is an interesting interview with Swen on Polish site, gry-online.pl, where he said there is relatively low amount of combat, and you can deal with most situations using persuasion. Now, I obviously can't judge if it's true or not, but that gives me hope, there will be a lot of space for roleplayers, like you and me.

Here's English translation of this part of the interview:

Did the pc gammer article really say you could play a archer wizard with no bow proficiency? Lol.

I dont need a hateful games media writer who hates gamers to tell me how I should damn well play my game.

I'm not a min maxer at least the first few times through a game, but I'm not gonna listen to a scummy game media writer to try to order me on how to play MY game. What a punk that scum is.

Who are you talking about?

I don't get it? BG3 uses 5E ruleset, character creator gives you good default ability scores, and level up steers you towards single-classing. Your average Tav naturally develops into a powerhouse in the gameworld.

Sure, you you can powergame around the edges, but what more power can you really eek out?

Personally, I'll fiddle with ability scores a bit. I'll pick to learn more useful spells first. I'll use a couple of weapons to use more weapon benefits per short rest. Big whoopdedoo.

For all that effort, I'll be slightly ahead of the curve compared to Joe Bloggs' Tav, who in turn is probably an hour ahead of me in game play - and already found the Vorpal sword+3.

Seems to me it's more a case of how quickly you want to have that steak, savour the flavour or wolf it down?

It's frustrating and not fun to just run into encounters you can't complete after a few tries. To me, min/max means pure optimization. That should not be needed to get through content. But wanting to have sensical builds is probably a good idea. A Great Axe using Barbarian with a STR of 10 is probably not a great idea and if you build a whole team with similar decisions that and you could very much struggle.

So it's nice to tell someone it's your game, play how you want. And then they quit after 15 hours because they are stuck and have awful builds, I am not sure that was the best advice.

So you shouldn't need to truly min max and worry about being absolutely perfect, but I'd recommend everyone understand mechanics enough so that they make decent decisions on stats and builds so they can make it though the game.

Okay, Volourn, I’m not sure what’s going on here as I’m just briefly checking in on my phone and the forums are crawling again, but insulting personal language isn’t generally okay, even when it’s directed at someone not here. I’d suggest taking it down a notch!

Simple example: gloomstalker + assassin can do 4-6x the damage that either could do as a single class.

Care to briefly run me through their power combo?

It's clearly something that adds to assassinate ability where Assassins critical hit foes who haven't acted in the first round.

Bearing in mind assassin gets +d6 sneak attack every second level, Gloomstalker must get something more.

****

[Edit] Looked it up myself.

Dread ambusher: level 3 ability, +Wis to initiative, extra attack with +d8 damage.

So level 6 Assassin has +4 initiative, +7 attack, weapon damage +4 dex, and +3d6 sneak attack
Level 3/3 Assassin-Gloomstalker has +5 initiative, +6 attack, 2x weapon damage +3 Dex, +d8 dread ambusher, and +2d6 sneak attack.

Considering the multiclass gains on average an extra doubled die on round 1, but falls behind rounds 2+, I think it's pretty balanced. Actually, it's kind of weak once you realise they're missing out on Expertise and Uncanny dodge.

That's always my main concern as well. I see combat as a means to add some tension to a story, not an end in itself. Reasonable people of all kind should *always* avoid a lethal fight where that's possible without compromising their goals too much, because that's how everyone but a madman actually behaves. There are three situations where you fight (not counting a brawl): if it's unavoidable, if your goal appears to be worth risking your life, or if you're so powerful compared to the enemy that the outcome appears to not be in question. Real prolonged fights, most of the time, actually are the result of people underestimating the strength of the enemy. I guess we have a rather prominent RL example at the moment.

With that in mind, I prefer games where combat is a highlight and not the rule. There are quite a few persuasion situations in the EA version of BG3, and that includes main story events, so I think you actually *can* play BG3 that way. However, the question is whether you'll get enough xp that way that you can resolve combat situations where they are unavoidable or where it would be appropriate for our characters to start a fight. And because I don't know that, I'll do some min-maxing.

I've never really understood the people who disapprove of "min/maxing." It's a single player game, what does it matter to you? Also, are power fantasies not an acceptable form of roleplay? It's always especially funny to me when things get nerfed/buffed and those types get happy about it because it screws over the "min/maxers" since they're supposed to be the ones that don't care about stats, so why celebrate something you don't care about getting changed? It's a videogame, play it how you want.

5e is too broken system even with casual character building. Min-maxing will just make it boringly easy.

PoE mostly is single-player (to the point where you can choose not even to be able to trade with other players). Min-maxing is very much 99% of a game.

Thanks for the quote. I'm happy to hear it, but ultimately I will judge by what is actually in the game. "Few" is a relative term. How few is few? Also, I am very concerned that avoiding fights will punish players with less XP and less/no loot, not to mention unfavorable/unsatisfying quest/story outcomes. But the good thing now is that we don't need to get into an argument about it, because we all can just wait one more month or so to have definitive answers to all these questions.

Listening to JES I did kinda' have an epiphany. Maybe my disappointment and anger are not really about BG3 and what Larian has/has not done with it. Maybe it is about what WotC has done to DnD in the past 15 or so years. There used to be a time, some 20+ years ago, when I absolutely LOVED all things DnD, not just TT DnD but all their video games and their source books and their novels, and I bought and avidly read through everything. But then inexplicably WotC chose to drive a dagger through the heart of that DnD, and what passes for DnD now is something I cannot stand. So maybe I would've disliked BG3 no matter who would've made it, simply because it is a contemporary DnD game blessed by WotC. And therefore, maybe, if Larian had made their new game anything but DnD, I too could've been here as a fan and not a critic.

Nobody's trying to make people play the game a certain way. Yes of course, everyone is free to play the game as they wish. This is simply a philosophical discussion about whether and why someone may choose to min-max, and whether DnD-style games *push* players into creating min-max powergaming characters rather than non-optimal roleplaying-oriented characters.