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

Here's my take as a 5e DM with over 15 years of experience DMing in general:

-this is likely an unpopular opinion, but random encounters are bad game design and shouldn't be present at all. I've never encountered a player that actually enjoys them. Their purpose in D&D is to dwindle a parties' resources and.. marginally annoy people while the players eat them alive? Having a random encounter where some nameless kobold kills your character isn't satisfying in the least, so random encounters are never designed to be actually challenging. They're strictly there for EXP and resource dumps. Almost no modern RPG includes them because they're -bad- and even worse, boring.

-there are too many magic items. I do agree with this sentiment; they're a dime a dozen. Half of them are entirely useless to your party. I've found a ton of items that affect Bardic Inspiration and yet I don't have a single bard. A good amount of the items you find are to simply account for different parts compositions you're using. A very, very good number of them are overturned and could be toned down.

-resting is and should be easy; however, there should be consequences for resting too often. The irony is BG3 has the perfect explanation as to why you shouldn't rest constantly: there's a tadpole eating your brain. Rather than reducing the amount of supplies you find, it would make more sense and be more engaging if resting meant the tadpole inched ever so much closer to changing your character into a mind flayer... and for that to be a bad thing.

-atat boosting items are awful in general and should never be used. Terrible design decision, enough said

-one thing that's more an issue with 5e than BG3 exclusively is the action economy. This works for and against the player at the same time, depending on the encounter. Depending on the size of the enemy party, you're either going to mop the floor with them (eg, Grym where you have four characters focusing one) or you have 20 enemies at once you get overwhelmed with. Encounter balance is an inherent issue with 5e; one mechanism they use to help address this is Legendary actions/resistances for boss encounters that would otherwise be a total cakewalk. Beyond that, I'm not sure what the solution is other than further limiting actions per turn somehow.

Tl;Dr 5e has issues inherent to the system that hold BG3 back, some of the ones I've seen described aren't actually issues, and solutions for others are rather obvious and should have been present to start with.

Game definetely needs much more harder difficulty, though I prefer customisable difficulty settings like in Pathfinder: WotR.

From time to time, I see that some ppl asks for more mob density, like x2 or x3 more mobs. Do you guys realise what you asking for? One fight will be x2 times longer...no...no, thank you.
I prefer another approach, it's, as I said, customisable difficulty settings or one more difficulty level, which will nerf some buffs, poisons, potions, like Potion of Speed grants 1 additional action per 2 turns & ofc higher enemy stats, no respec, disabled saving during combat\dialogue, rest req.more resources, smarter AI & no explosive barrels, at least 1, which should be extremely heavy and carried on the back of our character(obviously with stealth\combat penalty) which can be detonated by enemies.

Completely agree.

Beat on tactician, way too easy.

I could beat most of the game with 1 characters. I virtually never had to used potions or scrolls, exactly as the OP stated. By the start of act 2, I was a god, and that only increased as the game continued.

I want a much harder game--double the mobs, or double the HP, that would be a quick fix.

The problem is that doubling the amount of mobs or doubling the monster's HP isn't going to work when it comes to increasing the challenge. Difficulty doesn't just scale like that.

I mean, who knows, maybe they'll find a way. But I worry that the reality is that they're going to have a hard time making a more difficult game unless they take the painful step of nerfing the items and effects that *they themselves* inserted into the game.

Disagree with most of the messages of the 8 forum pages so far.

What game are you enjoying if any? BG3 or something else?

Because I see posts asking for a stricter resting system, when camps are essential to story flow and party management.

I see posts asking to double the amount of enemies because encounters only last a few minutes, but what could happen to a turn-based game when doing so? No clue?

Not to mention how silly is the request for random encounters, you never experienced how frustrating they can be in a game?

I think Larian was 100% devoted to player experience overall, I’m not doubting any moment that they could have designed nightmare encounters if they wanted to and in much smarter ways. Instead, you have multiple ways to conduct a fight, multiple characters becoming forces to be reckoned with rather than just lousy npcs, powerful and distinctive items you are happy to find and make you think about builds to wield them, an incredible selection of mobility options on the field, that as everybody knows are key.

Of course game is easy to beat, that’s by design.

You have BG2, you are asking for Throne of Bhaal. Beware what you’re asking for… kinda a deja vu.

But I’d rather have 8 forum pages asking for a NEW game answering those difficulty increases requests, with a survival and resource management approach, where that ring mail+2 counts, than seeing posts of people boasting how their flying pala-druid killed a boss in a round. It’s a gamer issue, not a game issue.

I started a request thread before happening upon this one. By far the simplest fix, and one that would really enhance the D&D experience, would be to add a new difficulty setting that removes the metagaming information (hit chance percentages, enemy AC, HP, resistances etc). Then players would have to use their best judgement of which enemy to attack, pay closer attention and learn what an enemy's weaknesses are. Rather than being spoon-fed all this information that no sane DM would ever tell their players. RAW players should only know when an enemy has less than 50% HP, not what their total and current HP are.

If you wanted to take it to another level you could even remove the enemy names unless they've been introduced or revealed somehow. So players would have to assess who the leaders are by their appearance and behaviour – not just casually reading it.

I absolutely agree with this, and in fact I think its really a missed chance that they did not do this. Because this could also be built into the skill check system, and this game REALLY missed the mark when it came to making all the skill checks valuable. For example when fighting an animal, you could start out with no information, but a nature skill check might reveal things like its AC, resistances, vulnerabilities, etc. And you could use different skill checks for different creatures.

But while I agree this would help, it wouldn't solve the problem. Especially later in the game, the items Larian gives you access to are simply wildly imbalanced and really throw off gameplay. I actually bought up the idea that they should have different versions of items for different difficulties of the game - that way they could let them still be unbalanced at lower difficulties but tune them better for higher ones.

Definitely a missed opportunity but I don't think it's too late, at least to do the bare minimum and offer a mode that removes that info (literally just turning pieces of code off). Even folk that have already played in Tactician mode might be keen to give things another run in this fashion. And I think many folk may not even be through the main campaign yet (especially Mac users lol). Integrating with skill checks would be icing on the cake – 100% agree with that. We rarely get to use those skills right now.

When I saw that we can get all this info without any effort, my first thought was - wrong. I completely agree that such feature trivialise game, we're not Witchers, we shouldn't know every weakness of every creature. Some classes should be able to pick skill\feat in order to get knowledge about certain type of foes...also if such limitation to be implemented, imo, it should come along with disabling Save option during combat.

knowing all stats and effects is absolutely amazing; kudos to larian for adding that. how is one supposed to know what something like "unstoppable" does, for instance, let alone plan around it? save in combat can be used for savescumming, sure, but given how long loading takes, it's not very practical. but it's indispensable for correcting misclicks, or doing what you were not intended to do due to ui, or trying to find the place where the dreaded path is not interrupted.

That's also true. Some fights are pretty long and it feels bad to start over, so from such point of view, saving mid combat is a good thing.
As for knowledge about our foes..well, knowing what buffs do is one thing and knowing stats\resistances\feats even hit chance is another thing. I think free knowledge about Buffs is okay, but anything else, well, it feels like cheating.
But anyway, I'm, personaly, fine with Larian approach to difficulty, I just asking for hardcore difficulty which should disable all of this stuff we are talking about.

This is not really how the Tactician mode looks like - or at least not so for some of the players. If you do struggle like that, you are not really playing Tactician mode - you are still learning how to play the game.

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In Tactician mode, my party /main char have not died even once yet. Before my first playthrough, I spent over 20 hours slowly learning how to play this game, which was in the standard mode, until I hit level 3. At that time, I did not even know how to deal damage properly, a group of 6 level 2/3 guys were already able to take down my party of 4 - what a shame - when I realized I should use healing potions, it was already too late. After such learning experiences, I started my first playthrough, which is in the Tactician mode only. Even in the most brutal battle so far, which totally surprised me considering how nice I was to my enemies (trying to avoid killing them, which I realized later was meaningless), my party prevailed. It was my party of 4 vs a group of up to 9 enemies (boss was 1 level higher) - Shortly after the fight started, 3 of my 4 guys took turn to be frightened, poisoned, paralyzed, etc., unable to move, attack, or take actions. And the enemy boss was healed to full health at the start of every round. On my part, it was nearly a hopeless struggle... But, the beauty of a game like BG3 is: there is almost always (thought not always) a way out, as long as you look hard enough to look for it. My party won the battle in the end.

I'm still learning - solely in the Tactician mode of course. I play a highly charismatic char, but I hate to avoid combat and almost always try to talk people into fighting me (unless that's really bad roleplay-wise: for example, always a bad idea to be rude to a merchant, unless you wish to kill and robe them). To avoid getting butchered, just don't pick a fight you can't handle at all. When my main char had < 50HP health (the total heath pool of my entire party was < 200HP), the game presented me with the option to attack a guy with a whopping health pool of 520HP!!! There was absolutely no way to not get slaughtered if I had attacked. So, I just convinced them to leave in peace.

Oh, by the way, I don't reload mid-combat. I make saves only for exploring different options or witnessing different cut scenes at a later time.

The Tactician Mode is not really that difficult. The Standard mode is essentially a tutorial of some sort. Once you have learned enough how to play this game, Tactician naturally becomes the updated standard way how BG3 is supposed to look like. Like as in BG1 and 2, there are numerous ways to handle things in the game. Staying alive all the time in Tactician mode may not be easy, but it's not really that hard either. When struggling, always look around trying to find a way out.

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Once players have graduated from the Tactician mode, they naturally wish to have a new level of challenge. Totally understandable.

I'm one of such players. After I am done with my playthrough (which is on Tactician), I hope there will be a new level of difficulty awaiting to explore further.

Bump for another difficulty.

At least something basic for now, that would deal with the most obvious things without the need for a complete overhaul of classes and game mechanics (as some suggested) I guess rewriting AI is no small feat and the effort to balance all fights to the vast range of builds and playstyles to be all fun and challenging for all seems to be futile.

A new difficulty (even mod) with a few sliders could do the trick... maybe? So we could "tailor" it better to our personal needs? It could deal at least with the problem of consumables and easy-to-kill mobs.

Adding adjustable modifiers for the:

- Mob level scale-up with the party level
- Mob HP, AP, stats.
- Less XP for the party
- The "value" of gold - Sell/buy items with say... 200% greater loss. (I left Act1 with 10K gold - no resources are scarce anymore)
- The amount of resources needed for a potion (or take most of the potions out of vendors)
- The amount of food needed for rest.



edit: going through the mods available, there are some already out!

I think the difficulty is fine until your characters start coming online. The difficulty feels where it should be up until about level 5. Once you hit level 5 it just becomes easier and easier as you level up. Increasing mob hp I feel is just making enemies "bullet sponges." it's artificial. I think a few things could definitely make the game harder. Less gold, more xp needed to level, more resources needed to craft things. Less camp supplies scattered around the world or even more camp supplies needed to long rest. Having oils basically a necessity in order to beat certain encounters could be added too. Even on tactician you never need to use oils. I also agree that having all the information about an enemy is kind of weird and should be removed on tactician or removed on an even higher difficulty if it was added. Not knowing HP, not knowing resistances or % hit chances seems like it would be REALLY fun to try out.

I have one simple question to Larian.

Where are all the gameplay D&D OPTIONS to tweak the difficulty and our experience?
There are NONE.

Were gameplay or D&D options ever on the table? I don't remember Larian mentioning anything like that.

So to me, adding enemies is not a good idea, having turns that last a half hour because there are 30 enemies sucks. The main thing they need to do is adjust action economy. If I can't get six attacks a round the game becomes much harder. You might say let the ai get six attacks, but the ai always out numbers you, I don't think that would be fun.

Bump for a rework of the difficulty.

The game is very good, but I'm playing on tactician and I never feel challenged in battle. It's a bummer, as fights are a big part of the game and they become repetitive and dull because of that. My characters are never in real danger I never need to reload a save or use the countless potions or arrows I stored...
I totally understand that the game can be difficult for some less hardcore players, but experienced players who like to min/max are a part of the public. And it's sad there is not a difficulty mode to challenge them.

Reworking the XP curve could be the easier way to make it. Currently if you do the sidequests, you level up quite fast, you are overpowered mid-game and you are locked on the level cap in all the end-game. I guess the fights I found too easy mid-game could be more difficult if I had a few less levels.
I'm looking for mods to change that, but it would be nice to have it in the vanilla game.

Gold is also an issue. It's a pleasant feeling in RPGs to meet traders with powerful items you can't afford yet, it gives you a motivation to progress and get more gold. Here, you always have waaaay more gold that you need, it feels pointless.

As a casual player (in that I don't really optimize/minmax/strategize/buff/etc) with well over many hundred hours DOS and now BG3 combined, I think the most concerning thing to me is how the difficulty curve plateaus at a certain point. As others have said.
I enjoy normal modes, but the normal mode was not normal. It was too easy and tbh I enjoyed it for my first playthrough. Nothing wrong with Larian basing their modes on a majority audience. The more hardcore subset is almost always the least/last tended to.

But back to what I was saying before -- the difficulty curve.
I think around level 4-5 is when it really starts to flatten out.
Our groups gets more L1 and L2 slots and now L3 is getting into the mix. Martial classes get extra attacks. Action surge only requires Short Rest :o
Alert feat on all characters. I'm sure you guys know how that plays out.
And oh man, the gold/resource/magical item economy in this game. It's a lot for any hard mode.
Hang on to LaeZel's undies, we're still in Act I.

By the end of ACT 1, I say there is no real danger. No real feeling of "Oh god, I need to craft/strategize/optimize gearsets/etc", it's just rest and go.
And the enemies? They don't really have those sort of abilities that scale with the players' newfound ones. There are no devastating abilities. Moments where rolls were just terrible all around and made for a crap encounter regardless of buffs/debuffs? Sure. But is that all we rely on? The enemy needs to scale with the player in not just level, hp, mob density (to me these are just artificial factors and more prone to causing annoyance and unnecessarily prolonged fights by themselves), but in the variety and quality of their abilities that match what's available to the player. Not just whip on a single person 3x in a row and every now and then throw a patch of [insert element here] on the ground. The enemies are simplistic to a point that you start to catch on to the heuristics of the AI. A true iron difficulty should make the player feel as if they must use everything within their power to succeed with degrees of realistic limitations.

Eight pages in and the Team Hardcore real men still can't get their heads around the fact that nobody forces them to use the OP items or to use the broken implementation of haste or any of the other things they complain about.

There are at least 4 mods on Nexus that convert various things to 5e and several that make various classes more like 5e. There are also at least a couple which alter the level curve.