Having finished the game - its become quite clear that (in contrast to tabletop), martials really overshadow basically all caster classes in this game. The main reasons for this are simple:
- There's a whole stack of extremely strong gear that is heavily tailored to martial classes and very little in comparison for casters
- Anyone can cast a high level combat changing spell from a scroll
- Crowd control has been heavily reduced in efficiency due to a combination of bugs (see below) and changes in duration
I'd appreciate any advice on how to actually get Larian to read this (e.g. if I should submit separate bug reports). I'm sorry if I'm also doing anything wrong here, not really done this much before
MY SUGGESTIONS:- Fix the bug where saves for spell effects happen at the START of the enemy turn rather than the END. (Effectively this means you need the enemy to fail twice for one turn of disable)
- Fix the bug where all ground based crowd control spells (e.g. Evard's Black Tentacles) have a fixed static DC of 12. This makes them useless.
- Restore the duration of many crowd control spells to their tabletop durations. For example Hypnotic Pattern should go from 2 --> 10 turns. Similar for Banishment. Vancian casting is balanced around single spells turning the tide of battle at the end of the day. Plus when Larian want to counter this they can always include enemies with Counterspell/Legendary Resistance
- Only allow arcane/divine casters to cast spells from arcane/divine scrolls. Sadly I really don't see Larian doing this one as it feels quite contrary to their style of gaming - but I do think it immediately helps to make casters feel relevant when suddenly you can't have martials casting L6 spells from scrolls. I'd make an exception for the Revivify scroll (I haven't seen any other divine scrolls).
- To give casters something to compete with martial itemisation, I'd like to see a new legendary item added to the game that allows a caster to maintain concentration on TWO spells at the same time (they have to be different spells so as not to step on the toes of twin spell). This should probably be a ring so as not to clash with the other commonly used caster slots. Yes this is of course mega strong - I'd say too strong for tabletop - but here, I see it as one of the only ways of easily giving casters something that meaningfully competes with the high end martial items.
- Spells that can be recast multiple times per combat (Telekinesis/Eyebite) should be recast as a Bonus Action and not as an Action. This differs from tabletop but I think important here for relative balance. The fact that you can't grapple with Telekinesis in BG3 is a huge power reduction of the spell - being able to use it as a bonus action would somewhat soften that blow and it might actually become worth casting with the above legendary if you have an additional concentration slot for other things.
