Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Skill proficiency overlap still not resolved

I had hoped with the last patch that cleaned up the proficiency summary, they would have addressed the following:

According to PHB, if you gain a skill from your Origin, and the same skill from your Race, you can freely choose another skill instead.
For instance, if you pick Wood Elf (get stealth proficiency) and Criminal (get stealth proficiency), you should be able to pick something other than stealth when picking Criminal as your Origin.

The way the game handles it right now, this overlap is ignored, and you effectively just lose a skill point when you have overlap. Please fix.

Obvious +1 here.

Where in the PHB does it say that? I never found that rule.

On p125, paragraph "Proficiencies" (that's in the Backgrounds section of chapter 4).

It says : "If a character would gain the same proficiency from two different sources, he or she can choose a different proficiency of the same kind (skill or tool) instead."

So if you're a Wood Elf and your background is Criminal, instead of gaining proficiency with the skill Stealth a second time, you can pick any other skill.

+1 for me as well.

I avoided certain backgrounds due to the penalty of overlap.

OMG 2 years in. No solution still????

+1

Agreed. Curious though about one thing. If you're a warlock and have persuade as a skill and take the beguiling speech invocation at lvl up, which grants proficiency in persuasion and deception, what would/should happen? Would you be able to pick a different related skill, would it stack, or would you just get the proficiency in deception and no benefit for persuade?

The warlock invocation is a little less friendly, unfortunately - you don't get a free reasign with it because you can trade out that same invocation later. It's one of those invocations you should try to decide whether you're taking in advance, so you don't short yourself.

It's quite disappointing that they still haven't rectified this much reported issue with the double up and loss in character creation though. If anyone has reported it recently, I'd be interested to hear what Larian's official word on it is, in their bug report responses.

+1

Big agree too, I totally expected it to let you just shift overlapping points where they occur but as of right now even if you can respec characters, it is very difficult to predict or plan around not accidentally overlapping them and the game also doesn't warn you about it so you could potentially lose a crazy amount of skills just because of that

Has there been any word from the Larian Team on whether this is finally going to get fixed for Patch 8?



Maybe have the game start, after character creation, by granting players a unique one time use Item that allows you to choose a skill proficiency of your choice if there is such an overlap? And have the boon be taken away whenever someone respecs with Withers of course, to try and prevent any abuse.

Or have Withers the ability to grant the missing skill proficiencies?

Whatever solution the Team may arrive at, it does seem odd that something this well known and not insignificant to so many players has gone untouched for years. I do understand that it isn't the absolute biggest thing in the world, but it is still odd that's it's gone on for as long as it has.

I would also be very curious as to what the bug report team's response to the bug is.

For something to get patched it needs to be recognized as a wrong implementation to begin with.

Did Larian ever acknowledge this being an issue? Otherwise, tough luck.

I don't think the purpose of the thread is to place focus on an longstanding unresolved bug per se. I think it's more so of a feedback thing regarding how odd the overlap proficiency implementation was, and that it still working that way to this day despite the years of feedback regarding it's execution is a source of frustration for many people.

Like others have shared in the thread, you can lose a lot to this weird overlap design they went with (Whether this was intentional or not by the Larian Team is unknown). To the point where people aren't able to really make the characters they want due to completely losing proficiencies from the very beginning. It's just something that goes very counter to Larian's game design philosophies, so the Proficiency overlap problem existing as it does juts really stands out as a result. Also given how it impacts players games before they are even out of the character creator.