Okay, I have got just one question. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to make all throwing weapons and all ranged weapons have the exact same bloody range???
Because let me tell you, it was a horrible idea. First of all, for those that do not know, all ranged weapons and thrown weapons have got a maximum range of 18 meters. This includes: Longbow, Hand Crossbow, Shortbow, both Crossbows, etc.
So, no matter which one you use, the only one that matters is the one that gives you the most damage, as the range is identical for some unknown reason.
This causes some serious problems, let's list them shall we:
-Tavern Brawler is stricly superior than Sharpshooter when it comes to dealing damage. As you basically double your hit chance and damage, while Sharpshooter requires -5 attack roll.
-Sharpshooter does not let you ignore maximum range penalty. Normally a longbow can shoot 150 feet/600 feet with disadvantage. This translates to roughy 45 meters and 180 meters give-or-take. So, this perk is worse that's it's melee equivalent, Great Weapon Master. Why was it nerfed? NO BLOODY CLUE.
-All ranged weapons are functionally the same, meaning Hand Crossbow reigns supreme. You can shoot with bonus action, making it strictly superior to other ranged weapons.
-Unless you are doing some archery build, the only thing that matters is damage, so hand crossbow wins due to bonus attack actions, while Heavy Crossbow wins due to lack of loading property and having highest damage overall, leaving magic items aside.
As it is right now, there is scarcely any reason to pick shortbow or any other weapon over the two I wrote about earlier. Same builds everywhere, because there is no reason to ever pick light crossbow over hand crossbow, etc.
If they followed the D&D 5e rules to the letter, Longbows would be the best weapon in the game, unless you are an artificer and make repeating crossbows.
Because longbows can fire with every action. While crossbows require a free hand to reload, and in the case of the heavy crossbow a bonus action to reload.
Yes, I complained about this in EA several times in the last three years... it essentially fell on deaf ears. I got reply's like "it's a game, and too hard to code longer ranges". This 18 meter maximum applies to all spells as well, so its a total ranged character Nerf if you think about it. On hand crossbows though you are incorrect as the max range of hand crossbows is 15 meters not 18.
Yes, I complained about this in EA several times in the last three years... it essentially fell on deaf ears. I got reply's like "it's a game, and too hard to code longer ranges". This 18 meter maximum applies to all spells as well, so its a total ranged character Nerf if you think about it. On hand crossbows though you are incorrect as the max range of hand crossbows is 15 meters not 18.
Fair enough, still more than in tabletop and 3 meters of difference is barely noticable. The fact that you can dual wield those things like some kind of akimbo guns is way worse than that. Thief is superior due to that.
Yeah this has been brought up many times going back to early 2020.
Frustration with the cursor targeting, sightlines vs environmental obstructions or verticality, the overall range of bows relative to thrown weapons or ranged spells, the arcs of the projectiles etc.
When you can throw an axe the same distance as you can shoot an arrow from a bow that's a bit of a problem. When you can cover the same distance jumping in full armor or using misty step, archers become pretty lackluster. Sure they're probably too overpowered in the tabletop but I think they overcompensated here. I know it's working on some level, because there are instances when Lae'zel will sometimes have to break out her ranged weapon, but half the time that's from a pathing issue or a body block from a friendly character or a failed jump that got hung on a doorway or something.
They could probably have addressed some of these issues by just having fewer enemies with longbows and ranged weapons or something similar, so it wouldn't always be a battle of edge pans like it probably would otherwise. They certainly managed to still make Githyanki crossbows annoying as hell when the bolts are being aimed at the party by enemies, but mostly that's coming from stuff like poisons or the reduce potion hehe.
Another issue is that the literal first character we meet in this game is a Gith fighter who has all these crazy astral jump and teleportation maneuvers. These allow her to operate at a range, but with a Greatsword hehe. Not that I'd take anything away from Lae'zel, since she's a top fav, but if our first brawler was a somewhat more regular fighter who couldn't jump quite so far, there'd be more reason to have a fighter who uses a bow. If Lae'zel was a character we met in the second act, with those sorts of powerups, but instead we kind of build around her baseline right? Again, I wouldn't trade Lae'zel for a longbow here, but still you can sorta see why we ended up where we did on that one.
In BG1 the longbow had a range of 100 ft (thanks Canada! hehe) so right around twice the distance 18m distance we get in BG3. The distant spell meta magic range basically. If that's too OP then maybe just make it really hard to find a longbow in this game? I mean right? I don't know, seems like something they could have figured out by now, cause this issue has definitely been raised.
I think they probably need to comb over their feedback from the EA in a more thorough way.
They really should have archived the EA feedback a month or two before launching the Full game, so they'd actually have had time to read and process it against their gathered telemetry. Telemetry sans feedback to help qualify it is not all that useful probably. From telemetry they'd be able to tell what people where doing (or not doing), but wouldn't have the context for the "Why" on that. I honestly wonder if anyone ever read our feedback or if anyone has the legit job of summarizing it for actual use by the devs? It would be fairly miserable job I imagine, so that person should probably have a whole team under them, who then also have the job of engaging with the EA players in a more regular way. Or maybe even trying to guide the discourse on some of this stuff here, so it wouldn't sprawl quite so hard, which it obviously has lol.
Even though they didn't do this when they probably should have, they could still do it now. Archive this entire section and call it EA feedback and suggestions. Then come back a month later with a punch of polls and guided discussion prompts for the after action review to try and build some sort of consensus around the sticking points. It'd be very hard for them to apply or integrate or dismiss the feedback already received, while still gathering new feedback. It's also just confusing to read. Each patch that changes something, but then we can necro an older thread that's like 20 pages long, and it becomes hard to tell where the conversation is now based on the Full release vs EA, or the EA expectations measured against what we actually got. To see what changed and when, what didn't, all that stuff.
This community on the home boards is quite large, but still 90,000 registered users, maybe 1/3rd of those users are actually active, that's a lot more manageable than like a million users on steam or whatever. They could probably work with this resource more. The party that's actually gathered here I mean, so they can focus group it. The impression I had of the BG3 EA is that we were invited to do one of those market testing focus groups like they used to do at the Mall, but then once we got there it was like "yeah do whatever you want" and nobody showed up to guide the process or keep the focus group focused. Or similarly to prevent it from devolving into design by committee, which never really works. Still BG3 probably needed an open beta with like a full year on that alone, for a way to compare the telemetry to the feedback. It would be near impossible to go back now and read everything that's been posted here. Just re-reading my own feedback would probably take a week. If I printed out all my posts, it'd be like a 500 page tome by now. Nobody's ever going to read all that now right? But still, they could do things in the window dressing and lip service to make the EA player feel more like it's all being mulled over by somebody somewhere. They should do that for the Expansion or the Sequel.
I think the summary there is that ranged weapons are too nerfed. And nerf is probably the right word, because the arcs and ranges recall this to mind.
Especially that last thread, though I think it might not be that extreme anymore. It's kinda hard to tell honestly hehe.
I think the game does excel at slapstick comedy, and that's a real strength in BG3, but still, people probably want just a bit more realism for this one.
ps. Here sorry I'm going to double up, to man the ramparts cause we've got in coming bolts and arrows from the Dubai call girls again lol. Gotta keep our eyes on the target right! This thread, and my digression from longbows into a general critique of the EA, is an example of what happens. These are discussion boards, so people come to discuss, and absent direction we can find ways to talk about whatever is interesting to us at the moment. Right now it's longbows, but it could be any subject. What happened here during EA is a bit like what happens when you gather a bunch of volunteers together to do anything at all, but without management to direct the tasks at hand.
So say we have 20,000 people all together in a room, some massive Comic Con convention hall say, and everyone who showed up is already an enthusiast and they've all agreed to sacrifice their weekend to make BG3 even better. The legit first thing you'd want (after Security for entrance and egress and an EMT in case someone passes out) is a couple hundred people to start organizing the volunteers into small groups and focus them on the things that they're most passionate about. Maybe you got a handfull of EA players who live and breathe archery and crossbows and missile weapons, cause that's their favorite thing in D&D and they're all super pumped to go chat it up at the archery table. Break em off into that group and give em something to work on, keep em busy and check in periodically to see where things are at. Split the big group into smaller groups, and then teach them how to be useful. That's a job in itself. If you don't have that then the entire convention hall either turns into a big massive party with jokes or a big massive fight, cause people when idle they do just that.
I think the same sort of lesson might apply to the Early Access experience. They went totally hands off in the approach here, which was a method of a sort, it does allow for things to sort of shake down however they're going to shake down I guess. But I just keep imagining what it might have looked like, if they'd considered the EA itself more like a game. Like as the real campaign. Sorta like they did with little cartoons that released after launch, but I mean having that be sort of baked-in, the full EA experience. I think they could get a lot of mileage out of that, (and make it fun like a worthwhile experience by itself), if they treated their home boards in a similar way. Maybe they don't let every user create new threads in every section here, but save that just for the main hall ya know, and in the subs it's a dev playing substitute teacher for an hour. For the rest, they could break it down, in the literal structure of the forum tree, to make it easier for players to contribute feedback for the subjects they're most interested in. Keep the broader conversation and the overall workflow on schedule that way. Basically putting their EA players onto the big white board as it were, and treating it us sort of a laborers (albeit love-laborers who sorta asked for it hehe) but still with an eye towards getting the actual work done. I just think that would have been a cool approach to try and hit the bullseye there, on a lot of this stuff.
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