Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Horrrible Fly Spell

Where did you idiots dream this up?
This is the worst excuse for a fly spell I've ever seen!!!!!!!
And what's with these teleport spells that only work for like 30 feet?

What exactly is wrong with the fly spell?

They balanced teleport's distance due to it being a turn based game

It's implementation is less "Fly" and more "Enhanced Leap"

One of the main strategies of flight in DnD is to hover in mid air, so your squishy caster doesn't get beat up (With the risk being ranged attacks breaking your concentration and making you fall)

BG3 only lets you fly between ground locations and as such merely emulates high STR + Leap setups as opposed to being true flight.


That's DnD for you.

Misty Step is literally capped to 30ft distances.

Dimension Door is supposed to have a 500ft range but I can see how that one might be a bit broken if you can just DD through stuff and bypass like half the game...

Teleport is a 7th level spell so we don't have access to it in BG3 with the level 12 cap...

There's a variety of reasons they didn't do this. I'll go over them briefly.

#1. The game's engine relies on an AI pathing grid for things like pathfinding. It's the same system that DOS1/2 used.

One of the main benefits of this system is it makes programming AI and handling game logic around movement significantly easier. It's far less likely for npcs to get stuck on things as a result. The negatives of the system are that the logic of the game operates primarily in the X and Y axis. Similar to a Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game.

#2. It would allow for sequence breaking
There's a lot of segments in the game that would be trivial to sequence break if the player could just fly/teleport anywhere. It's extremely rare games give you this ability outside of sandbox games. A good example is the quest to find the Nightsong in Act 1 stops briefly because the bridge that went there collapsed. Which requires the player to approach it from within the crypt in Act 2. The same goes with Act 3 when the player needs to find a way into the city, it would be trivial to sequence break it if you could just use fly to fly into the city.

This is also something the vast majority of players typically don't question as the game doesn't really portray characters flying in the Z axis outside of Dame Aylin. Who also doesn't do it in combat.

#3. It would be really hard to balance if the player could easily move all their characters out of melee range at any time.
You can imagine a lot of encounters would be straight up broken as a result. Like encounters that are clearly meant to be fought in melee primarily like Ketheric's fight. This would quickly go from "cast fly on the spell caster to move him out of range" to "cast fly on the party at the start of every encounter so the AI is forced to use ranged". Which would cause a core component of the combat system to feel pointless and redundant. And it would feel tedious to have to do this every encounter. It would also make the game feel unbalanced since half of the classes would feel useless because the only thing that matters is ranged. Like why would I bother playing a druid and wildshaping if going 4 wizards is always the best strategy.
This is also the logic with flight but it's even worse as I mentioned above.

I'm well aware of the reasons behind how they implemented flight.

It, however, remains that some people might not like such a limited form of flight.


Act 3 would make less sense for things to be sequence broken. As you'd think they'd have precautions around such common things like Flight and Dimension Door spells. I mean, if people are just leaving scrolls for these spells all over the place that any old pleb can use, then surely they'd think "Hmm... Maybe someone will use one of those spells"

Of course... Considering you can pretty much just walk through the front gate anyway, with just a minor distraction, it's not really much of a "Sequence break" to just fly/DD into the city...

Other things are more susceptible to sequence breaking. Of course, unless you use arbitrary reasons to thwart them (Like, why can't I leap across the bridge by the Githyanki patrol in Act 1?)

While, to be honest, flight as it is currently implemented would also be able to fly into the city. Since it's not like flight can't take you over the wall. It's just you can't hover mid-air which is irrelevant for pathing purposes.


It's really not. Since you just have to have enemies have a ranged attack (Which given that players all have the ability to wield melee weapons and ranged weapons and swap between them as a free action, isn't hard) to break concentration.

Also, technically, it is possible to move all characters out of melee range at any time. Storm Sorcerer's get bonus action flight + disengage after using any leveled spell...

For bosses it's even easier to solve this, as you can give them unique abilities to deal with fliers. Like the Avatar of Myrkul has a unique attack that damages everyone and pulls everyone into melee range if no-one currently is on his little platform. Not even as a Legendary action, but part of his regular fight.

Solasta actually does allow for mid-air hovering and it manages to balance the game so it's not all about flying around. Since all enemies have a ranged attack, even goblins throw stones at you (Which is something that the skeletons outside Withers coffin have, if you looted all their weapons before activating them the Skeletal Warrior will start throwing stones at people). Then once concentration is broken... You fall. Which, if you haven't also got Feather Fall active means fall damage and incapacitation for a turn.


I mean... You can say this now. There's certain builds that are just clear and cut better than everything else. But not everyone wants to (Or even needs to) play only the best strategies.

Even if you could hover mid-air with flight... I'd rarely ever use it personally, as I'd want to use my concentration on things like Spirit Guardians, Wall of Fire, Cloud of Daggers, Sleet Storm, Call Lightning, Hex/Hunter's Mark, Moonbeam, Hunger of Hadar, Haste etc... Things that actively help finish combat rather than something that maybe makes melee enemies less capable of hitting my caster (Something basically already covered by Fog Cloud and Darkness... Which also inhibit ranged attackers to boot)

Well, my bitching not withstanding, I just got into Act 3, and I am stunned at the scope of this game!!!!
Just met Orepheus- or whoever he is and my "guardian angel"
Holy Mackerel, Andy!!!!
This was well thought out!!!!

Fly is the single biggest spell disappointment. It highlights that the engine is just a polished DOS engine - and really they should not have included it or at least called it something else (they already have a jump/ability spell which is very similar). I also disagree that it's current form is more than a technical issue - all the "issues" that were raised can be countered with slightly more careful designs and systems. If you *know* people can fly, then you change up encounters - and you use fly against the PC and their party too. Also, you need to *concentrate *to fly - if someone damages you with a ranged attack, you can lose that fall to your death. Tradeoffs. Also...the game that is much maligned - Solasta - dose implement 3d fly, which while slightly wonky at times, is amazingly fun and shows what could have been.

I don't know the technicalities of flying in the game, but I do know that Solasta also had flying, and it worked great.

Well, first of all you have this icon on the right you click on, then it's not flying, but more like jump.
I played Solasta, and you could really just fly around the room for the amount of turns.