Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Improving the Balance of Casters

Use them sparingly if you don’t want to rest as much then. You’re basically complaining that you can’t use a finite resource because you refuse to use the mechanic that recharges it. Sounds like a you problem to me.

Spell slots are a thing in D&D (it used to be much worse). Replacing them with cooldowns or something would be met by howls of outrage by fans.

I decided to try running without astarion.

DC 15 lock, 6 kits burned with four inspiration on my first lock attempt.

Barf.

Not sure what ring and gloves yall talking about.

The only "you" problem here is you presuming to speak for a hivemind of fans and making crappy false dichotomies.

There is a vast abyss of difference between removing spell slots and just changing warlock to have more warlock spell slots at lv12 and make them lv6 spell slots. Even giving them a total of 4 spells at lv6 and increasing their spell book so they can learn Dethrone and Disintegrate if not Chain Lightning would be a start. In a battle my wizard can cast 2 lv6 spells, 4 level 5 spells, and even a lv3 magic missiles with clown gloves will outdamage anything my warlock can cast at lv5. All while the wizard has spell sculpting and a vastly bigger spellbook. Eldritch Blast does not come even close to closing this gap.

90% of the warlock leveling invocations are absolutely worthless. lv9 invocation to get some crappy minor summons that other classes get at lv7 and don't even use, because the minor elementals are garbage for the spell slot they cost. 55-65% hit chance attacks that don't even do that much damage.

Pact of the Chain imp gets a single extra attack, stays at 10 minuscule HP by lv12. Archfey and Eldritch pact warlocks don't even get thematically appropriate summons.

The gap between sorc/wizard and warlock is humongous, and just because you can create a paladin/warlock hybrid that mostly is a paladin with a few warlock perks in playstyle does not mean that people who want to be a pure warlock without being an undertuned pile of garbage with mostly dead/obsolete leveling perks should be happy with what they got.



Both acquired act 1. Gloves of thievery (grants advantage on sleight of hand checks) and Smuggler's Ring (+2 stealth, +2 sleight of hand, -1 charisma). In act 2 there are also the Gloves of Dexterity which set your dexterity to 18 if you missed the Gloves of Thievery. In Act 3 there are also gloves for gnomes and halflings that give sleight of hand and dexterity bonus. I think I'm also missing some more items in Act 3 that grant sleight of hand bonuses.

Alternatively to the gloves of Thievery, you can equip the 18 dexterity gloves and just have two of your casters, Jaheira/Halsin/your druid MC can cast Enhance Ability: Feline to give advantage on dexterity checks, and Shadowheart can use Guidance on you, since both are concentration spells.

This is very important, a fighter can't have the same intelligence to understand how the spell should be invoked, thus they cannot read and invoke it, only the spellcasting class should be able to cast spells from scrolls.
Also, I would say, Revivify scrolls should be only left for divine casters, otherwise, what is the point?
In Bg1&2 you couldn't just revive everyone left and right, you had to use cleric help most of the time - which adds immersion.

Problem with that is that Shadowheart is already too much of a must-have in a party with the power of Bless and Life Domain Channel Divinity with the arcane tower staff that gives another 1d4 to attacks and saving throw rolls plus an extra 2d4 to spell attack rolls whenever you bless targets. Clerics are already impossible to replace, and the supposed alternatives of bards or druids as a support class alternative don't come even remotely close. Bard College of Lore is closer, but druid is miles behind in utility.

At the very least, resurrection should be available to those three.

Aren't druids divine spellcasters? If so, they can cast spells from scrolls.
Bard College of Lore makes sense, I guess.

It is the same old problem of a healer in the party, that existed in early games - you can either have one or not have one - it's up to you.
if you want to have a divine spellcaster in your party - you can take several available options, or you can make your main a divine spellcaster, or you can make a hireling.
Otherwise - you're on your own, and that is fine, that is how it's supposed to be.

You can choose not to have them, but this isn't a true choice. Choosing not to have this one particular class puts you at an immense disadvantage.

It's not the same as choosing to have Karlach vs. Lazael or Gale vs. Sorcerer hireling. The gap between those is significantly smaller than the gap of not having a cleric. There is just not support class that is on their league. Druids have healing spells, but they're about less than half the efficiency, they don't have Bless in their spellbook for some weird reason, and their offensive spellbook is even worse than the Cleric one. Bards at least have Bardic Inspiration and really powerful CC.

The support and caster acrhetypes have really wildly unbalanced intra-class states, whereas the martials are much more even with slight tradeoffs (barb more durable than fighter for the price of less burst, rogue has more burst than fighter at the price of lower durability, paladin has rogue burst levels but limited resources to manage, so it's burst vs DPS tradeoff). In the support category, it's Cleric by miles over the others, and in the caster category it's Sorc>Wizard>>>>>>Warlock.

And by being forced toward hirelings you give up another essential aspect of the game, the RP and dialogue since hirelings have zero meaningful dialogue or connection to the story.

Larian could have lessened this balancing mess by increasing the party size to 5 and retuning encounters accordingly, so party composition could be much more flexible and accommodating of the suboptimal classes without feeling as much the impact.

I think you're right.

You might want to read the posts I was replying to. We weren’t talking about whether wizards are better than warlocks or multiclassing, but casting spells in general and the fact that you need to rest to recharge slots.

What your wizard can do in battle appears to contradict the thing I was refuting, that “They do not want you to cast spells and this is ridiculous”

This is missing all sorts of information. What were your stat bonuses?

Actually, I mean look. Let's assume you had ZERO bonuses. +0 to sleight of hand. For some reason you were using a REALLY crappy character for this. This means you had a 25% chance of succeeding on any given roll. If you are being honest, and you REALLY burned through 10 attempts on this without opening the lock, do you want to know what the chances of that happening were? Roughly 6 percent. And this is assuming ZERO bonuses. If you used modest bonuses (let's say, 14 dex and proficiency for a modest +4 bonus total; for context Astarion's at level 1 is +7 from expertise and 17 dex, I believe.) If you were using someone even MODERATELY good then the chances of you failing 10 times in a row are a mere .2%, or 1 in 500 chances.

And this is assuming you did NOTHING ELSE to increase your chances. Guidance, which shadowheart has by default and which you can get from a locket. Bardic inspiration. Pretty sure there are spells or abilities you can use to get advantage on the roll. The rings and gloves we're talking about....actually I forget where they came from personally, but I am pretty sure they're both somewhere in act 1. The gloves give advantage on any sleight of hand check when you use them (which is a pretty large bonus), and the ring gives a +2 to sleight of hand checks.

The point is this: Failing 10 times in a row to open a DC 15 lock, if you are using the very easy things you have access to and a character that is even *sort of* good at sleight of hand stuff, is absolutely not normal. It is, in fact, if you used everything, extremely unlikely, statistically.

Minor spoilers concerning all the items that can be used to buff sleight of hand checks.

No sleight of hand, elf warlock. No skill for it because I didn't pick either background with it.

Dex 16.

At level 8, with the gear I have on him, Astarion has +10 in bonuses before guidance iirc(I'd have to check again).

I did not have the gloves nor the ring. I can't get them on that character either as she's in act 3(its my 8 half elf sorcerer) so I'll just see what I can get astarion to with them. I think I have both on my warlock in the chest.

Astarion doesn't even need those items. At 20-22 DEX with feline blessing and guidance he should have more than enough chance to open lockpicks, and these would be overkill.

There's also the Knock spell you can get on Gale or from scrolls which has a 100% unlock rate for any non-magically protected lock for a measly level 2 spell slot use. As far as I'm aware, the only Arcane Lock doors in the game which Knock does not work on is some door in the Shar Gauntlet and the vault doors in the counting house in Act 3, which have a DC 30 but you can get the keys to them through various NPC's and quests, and the Bhaal Temple door which requires specific quest progression. The rest all can be opened with Knock.

It shouldn't be an issue though. I always kill Astarion when I see him and never had an issue on my warlock (no sleight of hand, no items for it either) with any locks just relying on his DEX 16 (+3) and Guidance from Shadowheart or later the necklace.
He was in Act 3 when I stopped playing him, my party usually consisting of Shadowheart, Lae'zel and either Gale or Jaheira. It sounds like you are really unlucky with locks (and traps)...

My current party has no rogue either (monk as a main, the others as above) and again no problems getting locks open. Sure, I may use two or three picks while trying but lockpicks are easy to get.

Knock eats a level 2 slot. I can use that on something offensive. Or Misty Step. Plenty of other important things. I don't long rest every room.

But regardless, it has nothing to do with the scroll thing.

I'm giving you what I believe to be Larian Logic. It's like Bethesda Logic, it just works ™.

They don't want you to feel pressured to bring a caster or cleric or whatever. As it is, not many divine spells are scrolls. Which is fine.

They already have mind read and feather fall, jump and heroism and barkskin and whatnot potions.

Plus what scroll you get tends to be random in loot and vendors.

They've got a reason for what they did.

I am confused by what you're saying here.

The point is this: You absolutely do not need Astarion on your team for lockpicking. Having someone with high dexterity, and who has expertise in lockpicking, is great if you want to
1. Open every lock
2. On the spot
3. Spending no resources
4. And not having to rely on gear
However there area TON of different options for you that makes Astarion's level of skill in lockpicking unnecessary. Yes, you might have to OCCASIONALLY burn a level 2 slot on knock, but if you lockpick what you can and use knock as a last resort, it hardly means you will have to long rest in every room.

Something regarding this I forgot from earlier games.

In 2nd edition, the only way to use scrolls outside of your class was with the rogue HLA use any item.

In 3rd edition and maybe 4th, all classes could use all scrolls but they required investment into the use magic device skill.

I'm not sure how it works in 5e pnp, but is it really huge deal to remove the need for UMD and just allow any class to use scrolls? They still get a DC check and none caster classes arent going to be passing enemy save checks with their scrolls, plus they do a lot less damage without sorcerer specialization or evocation wizard.

One time in DDO, we couldn't find a second healer for a raid, so I grabbed a few stacks of mass cure and heal scrolls on my rogue and respecced my specialization trees to include +75% scroll effectiveness and now we had 2 healers and beat the raid. I was also monk multiclassed although shortsword ninja spy specced (maximum sneak die & invincible saves build), but my punches still kinda worked without handwraps and just scrolls equipped which was lol.

I agree with the old UMD thing. I stuck points in it for wand use specifically, usually.

As for saves, that's in? I can't imagine using an expensive fireball scroll if your enemies will just resist it.