Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Elixirs of Strength are the problem, not haste

Well yeah I mean sure, there are no problems, only lackluster solutions! hehe

Sorry I know, I know, but it's really the same thing as barrels right? I think we need to get at why this stuff is here, like functionally, what is it really meant to do? My first assumption seemed to be that STR elixirs were there for mainly for the gish builds or for players who delight in the min-max power fantasy of convenience. Although honestly, on that front I think it's still more about giving grizzled players a way to ignore encumbrance and blast past any encounter, so we can carry those barrels around with ease lol. In a game where the answer to any dilemma can potentially be high yield kabooms, who are the kabooms really for? I think they're probably for me, just like I assume everything in BG3 is a totally bespoke one-off and catering to my specific whims exclusively, but only in specific contexts. I'll give an example from last night...

The scenario, honorably slain by my own impatience and reckless impulsiveness, as usual lol... Thanks 3 o'clock planning!



Choosing to save Dame Aylin, not because Shadowheart said so, but because I'm too hung up on Jaheira (predictably) went about as well as we deserved. This time around Minthara missed her opening Smite and Lae'zel whiffed her soul-breaker attack against the Mind Flayer on the platform, so instead of 'the gods fighting at our side' like we'd hoped, it was a dominated Dame Aylin proceeding to just TPK the hell out of the entire crew with no mercy whatsoever. Like legit, I misty stepped on over right away, only to get smite'd into the dirt in what felt like one round. Losing a Greater Elemental, 2 Minor Elementals, those 3 primo Zombies who never even got to weigh in, dropping the haste to get completely merc'd by necromites etc. Could it have been prevented? Most assuredly, but just not the way I was rolling that time it seems hehe. It was one of those situations where one bad decision lead to another and another on my part, like a chain. Shadowheart as the last gal standing just jumped off the cliff into a pool of brine, to avoid the ignominy of being taken out by the Moon Maiden's daughter before Myrkul had even showed up to seventh seal the deal lol. So what's going to happen next time? I don't know, but it may involve some runepowder on Ketheric. Like are we gonna go JD and Veronica now, all gently with the chainsaws? This is after like 1400 hours of playing Durge on repeat since launch, so there's no one to blame, but yeah at some point, I know why those barrels are there. It's not for the newbies with the glint still in their eyes, it's for the exhausted like me, probably. STR from 8 to 21 is pretty absurd, but if we need a rationale I'm sure that's it, like aid to monty haul basically as a time saver, since it's probably just as much/often a dozen suits of heavy armor that need to get lugged around immediately after the demo detonation. There are different ways to punish players for creating builds around stuff like the OP elixirs, spells, feats, any particular item combo etc. Larian seems to enjoy the method where the principle downside for any given min-max power fantasy is mostly just the click-click tedium on the backend, or giving up some aesthetic quality and looking kinda goofy as a result, or maybe just a flat cost in Gold (usually pretty modest) so no real malus.

Haste is already very powerful, simply from the AC boost and especially the movement bonus. The extra +9m/30 ft of movement is pretty major. It takes us from Kiting around to like parasailing off the back of the ship lol. 'Provolo' rush there for sure hehe. I mean the combat areas in this game just aren't that large to begin with, so when you add stuff like longstrider or gith gummy berry jumps, flight, you're basically running circles around everything while hasted. Pop another action or attack on top of that, or meta magic to juice it even further, and it's always going to be way more hardcore than whatever the next best spell. I feel like they were able to see that a mile away though and to me it mostly feels natural. I don't feel like I'm flipping the board when my sorcerer casts quickened haste, or twin for the win, cause there's some counterbalance built-in. For the STR Elixir you don't really have that. Not a situation where you wake up the next morning enfeebled, or face an opponent who can break strength as their debuff special periodically. Like could you imagine a scenario where one of the legendary actions at the Goblin camp was just someone casting dispel magic? I mean they said it borked everything trying to implement across the board, but if you suddenly go from 21 back to 8 in the middle of combat, even if that only happens once or twice, might be enough to give players pause about building around that one on the highest challenge modes. At least with Haste it's gated by the lvl 5 power spike, and much harder to come by in the form of scrolls and such early on, where it breaks like every battle in the first act. I think an analogy would be something like acquiring the boots of speed in BG1 for an RTS type scheme like they had in that one. Once you have the boots of speed the game is sorta turned on it's head, cause everything has to start keying off the player's ability to kite at warp speeds. Again though, the can was kicked until pretty far along in that game BG1. You didn't pick up those boots of speed until the very end of the Cloakwood arc, and then they could only be used on 1 character. In this game the click heels equivalent is sorta similar. Shadowheart clicks heels, everyone gets nailed with Spirit Guardians and radiating orb hehe, the power up is probably comparable there if going by just one character becoming ultra.

With Haste you've always got that threat of concentration being broken and losing a turn to lethargy. The concentration requirement alone puts it in direct competition with half the spell list on any caster character. The potion version is much much weaker, not particularly expensive, but 2 rounds compared to 10 before going lethargic is significant. You'd have to drink 5 of those potions, so blowing 5 bonus actions as well, to get the same mileage out of a speed potion and it would probably end up costing more in GP or alchemical ingredients than the regular scroll of Haste did. Compare that to the Elixir of Hill Giant Strength, which lasts all day, competes with ASI, or equipment that commands a valuable slot, and costs less than 100 gp? Ethel replenishes them at 3 per long rest, so you could bank enough to get through the entire game by just visiting her half a dozen times early on, and stocking up to the hilts.

As an example of how it compounds, say you find camp supplies and rest restrictions not to your tastes, you can cast Goodberry with a camp follower and flip the board as soon as Withers is unlocked. The downside there is click-click tedium, because you have to push that Goodberry spell icon 20 times and watch a casting animation that's basically 1 second per berry. Then extra inventory management or party management stuff on top of that, as you have to shift the berries around to the active party before the snooze etc. Is it worth the extra click-click tedium and carpal tunneling? Probably not. Maybe at the beginning of the campaign though, when resources are low and acquiring gold to simply purchase food is similarly click-intensive with trash looting. It probably ends up being a wash after a while, like you can click Goodberry 20 times or click 20 chests in-world to find a similar amount in gold or items to barter. But at the start this undermines most of what's going by increasing the cost of camp supplies to 80 on higher difficulty settings.

If the whole point is to overcome the camp supply sink because you're a caster who replaces spellslots on long rest, then for 200 GP you can buy 80 camp supplies from a merchant in the form of supply packs. If that's too much, you can go to Withers and spend 100 GP to respec your class and restore spellslots that way instead, but again the downside is click-tedium, since that requires going through the re-levelling process from lvl 1 all the way up to whatever the current XP threshold. It ends up not being particularly time saving or cost effective in the final tally, so presumably players eventually just give up the ghost on that stuff and spend the extra gold for convenience.

What's the downside of a Strength elixir, or a Club, over just building ASI? Probably just inventory/camp management tedium again, where the player is fighting against things like encumbrance or loot organization annoyance, being disarmed and then dealing with the fallout, having to shift items around on the fly at inconvenient times. I think an example of a good stat boosting item mentioned already is the Circlet of Intellect. The reason is because they left it at 17 and because Intelligence is already the dump stat for most Classes. If the STR Elixir was set your stat to 17 rather than 21, (or 20 instead of 27 later on for the Clouds) that would feel quite different. Or if it was a potion with limited duration as mentioned above. Or even simpler just make them prohibitively expensive or rare/random. The only real issue is that they're so cheap and so reliable, otherwise we wouldn't be able to build around them to such an extent.

I think the solution for challenge is two-fold. First they need to make it aesthetically appealing to use the more mundane equipment or class abilities, over the easy or cheap enchanted stuff, the tradeoff being a nerf to overall power in exchange for control of the visualization. Then they need to jack up the prices for the consumables. An example might be something like STR when caste as a spell doesn't change anything about how your character's avatar presents visually, compared to some consumable that does the same where it maybe makes the character look funny. If I had to appear like a Hill Giant to have the STR, then I'd be less likely to exploit it if the visual was important to me. In that respect all the glowing VFX buffs that I tend to find annoying would make a certain sense if the idea was to punish us for pursuing the power ups. As we scale up we tend to look goofier and goofier, trading the glam for a +1 to whatever. This is sorta the inverse of what I'd want, where as we progress and increase in power or bonus through normal character progression, that we'd look cooler, more unique, and be rewarded for patiently plotting along instead of taking the quicker or easier path. Here we get the opposite, the visual becomes more locked the more reliant we become are on our equipment or buffs. If an Elixir of Hill Giant Strength forced me to wear clown facepaint at the same time, I would probably use them less, if that was somehow the goal. Anyhow, I agree, Haste is not really the problem. I'm not sure STR elixirs are even in the same ballpark to make a proper comparison though. To satisfy a hard-Core challenge, I think maybe just the magical curse concept where things like Elixirs and Healing Potions are made much more expensive and all the sliders in the difficulty settings are cranked to the max.

Maybe Elixirs or spells even summons etc that typically would go all day instead reset on short rest? Might work without going too ham there. Would still allow for some strategic haul so that's not totally upended, but slightly less potent than +12 to an Attribute that we can acquire from lvl 3 on, that goes all night till sunrise lol. Another option might be get waylaid at night after the elixirs have all worn off, so there's a tradeoff. Planned buff during normal adventuring, becomes unplanned debuff when you least expect it, at camp. But they don't have anything like that in place right now except for a few setpiece things related to companions. Could probably be a mod of some sort I suppose, for the classic callback "You have been waylaid by enemies and must defend yourself" but at 8 STR again, just cause I'm hung over from yesterday? heheh

Another option would be to have the Elixirs of Giant strength work slightly differently for STR based characters compared to other archetypes. This could be done via doubling the base attribute bonus instead of a set stat, similar to the OPs suggestions of +3 or +6. Going from 8 STR to 16/17 STR is still pretty huge, the problem is that you can go higher than what a pure class fighter can achieve via ASI at the same level in their prime, which is 19 (or maybe 20 with the hag's hair in Act I). I think they put it very high so that the STR based warrior types would also have a reason to drink them, even if the bonus there is only like +1 or +2 STR, but to me it seems like a Wizard just shouldn't be hitting as heavy as a Warrior drinking the same juice. I'm sure this was a change that came down from on high at one point, like where they tried to nix the +X bonuses in favor "set Stat to' for all those types of items/consumables in D&D. Probably a situation where it had to be some certain way cause of the wording in the PHB or whatever, but in this case the STR based BG3 characters like typical martials feel like they're losing out and getting eclipsed. There's no Elixir that can set our DEX to 21 or 27, or Wisdom to 21 or 27, but if there was, it'd probably jack up other classes archetypes in a similar sort of way. Also, since it comes in a bottle, just like with a healing potion, you can throw it at your feet to multiply the effect that way. Kinda depressing for the warrior probably, like where the splash down there just has everyone else clowning on them, long as they're bunched up within that 1.5 meter radius. Seems like a bit of a dig.