Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Difficulty way too high for story and balanced

If I may relate my experience:

I'm in Act 2 on balanced mode and I haven't had to reload in a while. However, that has been highly unusual and probably has more to do with the fact that I have been fighting mostly monsters for a while - which I could ambush with one exception - and not engaged in main story events where enemies initiate the fight.

In my experience the fights around story events (with the exception of minibosses) tend to be way more difficult than everything else, and that's for two reasons: first, the encounters are usually set up so that you start the fight at a disadvantage. Second, if the fight starts from a talk you aren't guaranteed initiative. Case in question: at one point during Lae'zel's story you're locked into a room. You can easily pick the lock, but you very much suspect that enemies are waiting outside for you so you position your party carefully, with the tank opening the door. Now if you open the door, if you're unlucky with initiative and the enemy attacks mostly hit, your tank will be killed before they have a chance to do anything.

My conclusion: the enemy's average damage output per attack is too high, compared to the hit points of our party. If it were not so, fights like these would be significantly less dangerous while, if the same logic was applied to the party, those where you are the ambusher would not be as easy. Both I would consider very desirable. I dislike very much how much your success depends on going first.

This also explains why lowering the difficulty does not help if you have problems. The problem is not you hitting the enemy not hard enough, but they hitting you too hard before you have a chance to hit back.

So I would recommend that for story mode, the enemy's damage output is reduced. For balanced mode, some encounters would profit from a rebalance if they are to fit with the rest of the game playing on the same difficulty level.

In DOS2, I was tempted to give everyone the "escapist" talent because of the dominant combat encounter design. Here in BG2, I'm tempted to give everyone the "Alert" feat for the same reason. I do not think it is good that this single element is so important. It works in games like XCOM, where everyone is automatically hostile, but in a roleplaying game it disadvantages the roleplayers who prefer to talk rather than hit, or at least before they hit.