Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Defending against the raid on the Emerald Grove

I went to try for a 'perfect' Grove defence a couple of days ago, aiming to finish it with no friendly deaths and with the goblins never breaching the gate. While it took some finagling to not have Arka die to the Eastern spider immediately, it is possible to escape the fight with 0 casualties. It's also pretty straightforward to make sure that the goblin sappers never manage to reach the front gate to destroy it, provided you make good use of the oil barrels. Coming from this, I have a couple issues with how this played out:

First, even though no one died, Zevlor still gave his victory speech as though multiple people had been killed while defending and Ikaron has similar dialogue at the celebration. My suggestion for this would be to have a slight dialogue change for this scenario to remove the reference to people dying or make it clear that they aren't just referring to the defence, if they're meant to be talking about everyone who died since they went on the road.

Second is that Minthara sticks around even when her sappers failed to bring down the gate and all her forces are dead. I would suggest that she flee the fight when either it becomes impossible for her forces to breach the gate or when a certain proportion of her forces are killed. This would make a less contrived way to have her show up later in the game, as I've heard she now shows up again if she's defeated with non-lethal damage. I can see why she might stick around if she actually makes it through the gate before her forces are massacred, but it was weird to have her stood atop her hill yelling at her entirely dead goblin army to charge the undamaged gate.

Third, It's way too easy to stop the goblins from breaching the gate at all. A few well-thrown oil barrels make it dead easy to kill all three sappers in one shot on the second round and while it is satisfying, the rest can feels a bit like mopping up, afterward.

Fourth, (and this one may be the most nitpicky, but it still bothered me) it's annoying that Arka's default position is *outside* the defences, past the concealed oil barrels and extremely exposed. It feels like her placement was contrived just to have the raid defence open with a friendly casualty. The presence of the concealed barrels tells me that they clearly expect some goblins to get onto the cliff and the fact that she starts the fight on the wrong side of them makes her look either stupid or suicidal.

I really liked having this as an option and I actually did quite enjoy it, overall. I've run through it a few times, now, and the whole thing can change a decent bit depending on who you have with you and where they're placed, but I feel like addressing some of these issues could really enhance the experience of it. The fact that allowing the raid to happen makes clearing out the shattered sanctum easier due to the reduced number of enemies was a great idea and was what originally led me to try it. I might also suggest making that effect more apparent ahead of time so more people might try it; a friend of mine has done several runs through act 1 and never knew you could incite the raid and then play defence.

Edit: Fifth point: once Halsin finds out in the prison that Minthara has left for the raid, he rushes away to prepare for it, but doesn't show up at the Grove until *after* the battle is done. Not really sure what this is about since he leaves urgently to do nothing all night. It isn't elaborated on what he was doing and no one calls attention to the fact that he missed the whole thing, as far as I could tell. Also I get that the Druids mostly aren't fighters, but even the ones who can fight sit the whole thing out. I was at least expecting a line about how the ones that can fight, like Kagha, are off keeping other Goblins busy to cut down on the number you're facing or some such.