Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian please add another difficulty. Game is too easy

I absolutely agree. However, right now, the game lets you teleport when areas are definitely NOT cleared.

How about something like: when you enter certain areas, until that area is secured, you can teleport, but can't long rest or change your party?

I find Tactician difficulty fine. I generally can get through encounters first time, but without savescumming I had major problems with Balthazar, Gortash, parts of the Creche, saving the Gondians and saving Orin's victim. To name a few. Heck even Githyanki patrol needed a retreat, rez and try again.

One thing I don't like is excessive buffing HPs and numbers in general because it starts to get incredulous.

My Tav with 100hp and Str18 is causing all manner of upsets to the Absolute's plans yet there are ranking Banites with 120hp and Str21? Surely such powerful foes could counter my actions. The immersion starts to suffer if numbers balloon.

One idea for taking difficulty to the next level. Have semi-random counterstrikes?

Have a counter measuring faction interaction and ideally another measuring likelihood of finding the camp. So if you hit the Banites too often and they learn you're staying at the Blushing Mermaid, they hit you. Ideally after you've expended resources.

This doesn't affect existing encounters but adds anxiety about expending resources. Unfortunately, it might just result in even more long resting - and camp supplies mean little once Heroes Feast is learnt.

Quick toughts (a bit disappointed that I didn't picked the tactitian mode, so it refers to the "normal" mode).
The "normal" mode is for sure too easy.
But for me it's not exactly linked to rest or whatever (I rested very very very little since the beginning of the game and I have gazillion foods), but it's for me twofold :
- I feel a bit of an issue if you do "all" the quests that you're just always a step ahead of the encounters you have. For example, I'm in Act 2, my party is level 10 and a half (yeah you count the halves), and I'm meeting group with level 8, so of course I wreck them and gain even more XP...
- The combat for me fall into two categories : Either you surprise the others and are prepared, either you don't. And if you do, the advantage is really big, you get advantage for all your party, then if you manage properly they don't even have a first turn.
- I think there's a bit of an issue with the DnD5 ruleset there. When you launch a spell that does 4-40 damage, the variance is so big that it can really change the tide a major way. When I confronted the boss of Act 1, the fight was completely underwhelming, and had to maybe hit 4 to 5 times to extinguish his health...

Have no proposal on my end, but yeah, at that point in Act 3, with the team and the equipement I have I'm not having much fun.

I think you could have a cap in each Act. Level 5 until you get to Act 2, Level 9 until you get to Act 3, Level 13 until endgame. (Yeah, I added another Level.)

I don't know if my take on difficulty is that valuable since I didn't find tactician that easy. But these are the levers I'm thinking of pulling for a more difficult playthrough.

1. Never load anything but the most recent save except in case of a bug, never load if the game can be continued.
1a. Quicksave whenever a fight starts
1b. Quicksave whenever a fight ends
1c. Quicksave at the end of every conversation
1d. No saving in conversations

2. Never move or pick up explosive barrels.
2a. No crate stacking.

3. No pickpocketing merchants.

4. Ban or fix the following
4a. Tavern Brawler
4b. Haste
4c. Lore Bard's Cutting Words
4d. Pact of the Blade's extra attack
4e. Multiclass wizard spell scroll learning
4f. Phalar Aluve
4g. Staff of Spell Sparking
4h. Stat fixing items. (Headband of intellect et al)

5. Don't sleep until a party member complains about being tired
6. Use a mod to add a 25% xp debuff

I might have missed some exploits, the game might be still way too easy for some. But it seems a reasonable base to me.

Exp gain is too big for sure, or thresholds not big enough. It's probably hard to balance between completionists and speedrunners, maybe give major exp only for main quests and bossess? Or bump enrmies to higher levels in tactician?

Yeah, I feel like the difficulty settings in this game are a bit like vanity sizes. People who should probably be playing on Story are doing Normal, and folks who would appreciate Normal are on Tactician, and those who want Tactician are... out of luck.

It's much like vanity sizes in clothes. Have you ever bought a pair of jeans in your size, only to realize they're too big? I'm a size 32 waist, but plenty of brands offer a "32" that's actually a "34-36". These are vanity sizes. They're not accurate, but they tend to make people feel better.

The game doesn't need more difficulty tiers. What it needs is a nerf to speed potions/haste, and the amount of extra attacks and gear power creep martial classes get. Remove autocrit from paralyze.

If fighters, rogues, monks, and barbarians weren't attacking 3-5 times for 50+ damage each hit, and paralysis didn't grant massive crit chains while easily applied with venoms, and spells like Hold Person/Otto had less effectiveness on boss units, Tactician would be actually challenging.

The problem is martial class gear is a massive power creep, they get too much benefit off the extra attack from thief multiclass, and speed potions/Haste are BROKEN. Paladin Smite and Half-Orc racial also needs nerfing.

Seriously, go play a Bard without martials in the team or a Beastmaster Ranger or a Spore/Moon druid without martials in the team and get back to me about how easy Tactician is when you can't 1-2 turn boss mobs and elite units.

What we truly need at this point are granular difficulty options like in the Pathfinder games.

Explorer not easy enough? No problem... increase the buffs you get, Tactician too easy? No problem... disable some features, etc. Everybody would be mostly happy.

This isn't an MMO, it doesn't really impact anyone else if these things are strong and do a lot of damage. You can restrict yourself by not using them or by building your characters around weaker builds. If it were a MMO, I might agree, but since it's not, there is no impact on the other player base for people using builds or features that are powerful. I think given the complexity of some classes esp when multiclassing, they won't be able to nerf enough of the OP things in the game to prevent cheesing or overpowered builds. Balance with this level of character customization and class options is really difficult.

I don't really think nerfing is the answer, I'd rather see balanced difficulty improvements and adjustable settings similar to other D&D titles that let you select various features as part of the difficulty adjustment. Adding new bosses or battle content like an arena would be a nice option also.

Exactly. This MMO mindset needs to go. It is official 5E rules... It's like I'm on a WoW PVP forum suddenly - "power creep", "Haste broken", "Ret Pala OP", "melee too stronk, buff casters QQ"

Just enjoy the game. If it's too easy - kick out one companion and go as three. That's what I always did in Original Sin games.

I already kicked two, didn't help much, finished act 2 and it didn't get harder, and i want to enjoy the game WITH companions. It's not an mmo mindset, people asking for more OPTIONAL difficulties, there is nothing optional in MMO, you enter the server and play by same rules as everyone, in single player game you able to chose any rules you want for your own playthrough, hence we are asking to make more options to chose from.

I agree with this. For D&D games, the solo playthrough is considered an option for a few people, but the party dynamic is what many enjoy. You can't get that if you "make the game easier" by removing party members. It's also not that hard to make the game harder. Ideally, you would give the player lots of options to bump AC, hp, damage, etc. and maybe adjust point buy. That way you can make the game as hard as you want in the way you want. (I personally would do everything I could to avoid making it harder by increasing monster hp; I hate those kinds of fights.)

A quick reminder that all perspectives on the difficulty level of the game are welcome, as long as they're constructively expressed.

Personally, I've been playing on Balanced and am finding that it is ... balanced. I've played hundreds of hours of EA so it was probably a bit too easy for me in Act 1 but I got TPKed a couple of times in Act 2 when I was running low on resources, and more than that in some Act 3 major battles as my lack of 5e knowledge of higher levels and the fact I've not been making any great effort to optimise my party's build, equipment, items or strategies is - quite rightly - starting to bite me more. I also have a number of rules I apply about what I will and won't exploit and when I'll rest. But while I'm prioritising roleplay over optimisation, and also experimenting with builds and tactics as I face encounters for the first time, I am also trying to make decisions that do make some kind of sense at the time.

In short, I'm playing in a way that I personally think should make the Balanced difficulty level achievable but enough of a challenge to be interesting, and it is. I'm expecting that getting better at Balanced will keep me occupied for a couple of runs, and I'll probably start trying some Tactician play as well to see how it feels. But then I have no interest in min-maxing or actively pushing against the (very loose) constraints of the game to make encounters as easy as possible. I can easily imagine that people who enjoy that will find the game too little of a challenge. I'm just not totally convinced that there's a way to address that without completely revisiting the sandbox-type design philosophy of the game that I enjoy.

But certainly, if there is a solution, and it leaves Balanced as it is and gives us step up from that that's not too much of a leap, then that feels like a good thing for Larian to add in a later patch. It'll help people keep playing the game for longer, given it'll inevitably get easier the more we play.

I'd go back and read the posts I was responding to. I was in no way shape or form criticizing the request for more difficulty options, I agree with that completely.

I was disagreeing that the way to do this was to nerf classes, gear, and spells/abilities. That's a slippery slope in a game with so many different class combinations and, if some are overpowered, it really doesn't matter in a single player game as other players are not impacted by it at all. You can make the game harder without nerfing.

If your goal is to make the game more tactically varied and interesting handling overpowered abilities are a part of that. Haste doesn't necessarily need addressing in balanced, but it's an important lever in balancing Tactician+. A typical player may well enjoy discovering an overpowered strategy but if that strategy is degenerate it makes things unsatisfying for someone wanting to explore different strategies. I'd recommend adjusting some of the most egregiously unbalanced things in balanced because it's in the name and FOO strategies can suck the fun out even for casual players, but to only aggressively address balancing in the top level difficulty because that's for people who want a challenge breaking the game and a feat like "double your main stat bonus and get effectively a full ASI to it" warps that too much.

Larian's hiring, new staff needed: "Difficulty guy"

I want to just say one thing. I noticed some people use 'difficulty' as ticked to 'nerf x,y'.

You can complete game on tactician without:
- 'barrelmancy'
- minmaxing
- using speed potions
- using haste
- using fireball
- tavern brawler and any other feat or weirdo playstyle's
- multiclassing

It's possible, you can do this. But i recommend life domain cleric as hard support for this kind of run.

Imo itemization is deffenetly a issue, I'm not talking about removing strong items from the game, but +2 armor around 5lvl(or more so half-plate on Laezel from the start) is not how dnd work. And that just one example.

I don't know what you are writing about.

The BG series has never been balanced and shouldn't be.

The difficulty can be increased by self-imposed limitations. Wait for the "Sword Coast Stratagems" mod, which will similarly increase the difficulty level, as it was in previous versions of the game.