Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Larian please add another difficulty. Game is too easy

I'll make it short. Even on Tacticion difficulty the game is too easy. You hardly need any elixiers or potions (besides heal potions here and there), use scrolls or dive into itemization. You can basically kill almost every encounter with spamming sneak attacks with Astarion and Cantrip magic.
I understand that the game should appeal to a wider audience and it did. And I'm very happy that in 2023 a CRPG is that popular.

But please also consider the more hardcore gamers who really love challenging encounters. So please implement at least one more difficulty where enoucnters have higher stats, higher life pool, additional mechanic and spawn at least 50% more mobs.

Thank you.

I agree, Tactician in DOS 2 was god broken, I would like some harder fights with more strategy involved and use of environments. Tactician Hell mode

sure, but as someone who does non-optimal builds/rp builds, tactician is a good challenge.

I'm still pretty early in the game but so far I agree that a higher difficulty setting is needed. I'd much rather see it achieved with mechanics than more mobs and higher numbers (although more HP is clearly needed, especially for boss fights). Mobs need to make more intelligent use of spells and abilities. At least the simple combos players use like hold person into free crit smites, proper focus fire, just generally getting value out of their actions instead of flailing around like fools.

Yeah, this is why it should be a fourth difficulty rather than buffs to tactician. The problem for a lot of people is that half the fun is in optimising builds, but you then find there's nowhere to use them.

Perhaps if encounters were difficult they could fix the CC spells too... Geez it was disappointing when someone finally cast hypnotic pattern on my party and for a moment I thought 'oh no' and then I remembered oh yeah he just wasted his turn no worries.

Many times tactician can pose a real challenge for anyone , but for that to happen you willl have to forgo the games main features wich is quicksaving, autosaving and reloading . I'm reloading when I stumble into an ambush and half my party get wiped + all the spells and daily abilities you lost for huge setback even if you eventually win , so I reload and ...but I also position myself, buff etc and wops all of a sudden a severe encounter becomes mundane when you know a little of what will happen, she will scream for help, that guy will run for a drum etc etc .. The elephant in the room is reloading and having trial and error combat possible , not much to do about it more than creating a iron man mode

So basically meta builds and save scumming being possible means the game is too easy.

You could handicap yourself. Impose rules that could make it harder.

Implementing a whole other difficulty doesn't sound like patch work but rater expansion dlc work.

instead of adding HP or enemy numbers, it would be more interesting to reduce numbers of long rest / time you can do (maybe by limiting food), prohibiting respecs, and limiting save-reloads.

Honor mode would have solved this. Why does Larian leave out stuff that they have done in the past that worked really well?

I think changing the point buy would go a long way. Instead of 27 Point Buy and +1/+2, which is a redundant mechanic, give 44 Point Buy for Story, 36 Point Buy for Balanced (resulting in the same min/max as if you used the +1/+2), and 28 Point Buy (with no +1/+2, resulting in lower attributes than you currently get) for Tactician as a baseline (in all cases, a 16 or 17 would cost 3 Points and an 18 would cost 4 Points). For those who want something harder or easier, you could also allow decreased or increased Point Buy from baseline. Some people were complaining the game was too hard on Story Mode, so allowing them to have a 44 Point Buy would probably go a long way to making that issue go away, with the option a 60 Point Buy to make it really easy (I don't think you need an all-18 option because that is kind of boring, but it isn't much coding work to let the Point Buy slider go all the way to 114, or "all 18s"). While at it, you may as well let players adjust their attributes down to 3 and allow them to start with, say, 0 Point Buy, which I think would be a real challenge on Tactician.

I don't think all of this should be pushed onto DLC because it is so easy to just code in adjustable Point Buy. And if you put it on the "Difficulty" screen, there will be no confusion about whether you are making the game easier or harder than the difficulty the game designers thought was about right.

You could also handle the Point Buy change with a toggle that allows you to either stick to the appropriate points or "break the rules" and just get a warning when you venture forth, such as "Your character has higher/lower point value in attributes than is recommended for your selected Difficulty. Venture Forth anyway?" The advantage of that is you can roll attributes and then just plug them in, ignoring the usual point buy limitation, especially if Larian reduces the floor for attributes to 3 and increases the cap to 18. It would also be easier to understand for new players if you had a toggle on the Difficulty Screen that was essentially "Allow attributes to be higher or lower than recommended?," especially if attributes was hypertext, than a question about Point Buy, which is a more abstract concept.

What you think is easy may not be.

And I think the devs deserve a bit of a break from major work post release. You're asking for a systems revamp because you can't control yourself and need to munchkin.

Read my post again. I dont want Larian to take away from other players, but consider the more hardcore gamers, who like challenges. for those players bg3 is too easy and therefore not really fun ...

if you wanna play on lower difficulty levels, go ahead and do so. enjoy, have fun .. but respect other players who dont have fun due to the game being too easy for their taste.

The game is too easy but it's mostly cause Larian abandoned all type of balance by changing feats, creating ridiculously strong items, environmental effects, and so on. Even changing action economy by giving more bonus actions.

I mean, it's almost like they kind of attempted to be D&D faithful, and then mid-way they like "ahh let's just try to do it our way".

If all the abilities/subclasses/feats/etc worked like a D&D game, tactical would be a great difficulty.

But yes, with all the broken shit there is right now, like tavern brawler, thief bonus action, bugs with throwing and rage stacking/height jumping etc... the game is too easy.

To me it would just be easier to nerf a bunch of stuff - but I don't know if they will do that.

plz add the armor system from DOS2

The game needs to be significantly more stable than it currently is before they do anything with the save system, I largely save all the time because I crash a lot and losing a lot of progress is kindof irritating. I also admittedly do it to drive the story a certain direction, but I will probably not do that next time.

I'm not sure how far we'd want this taken either. Losing progress in a game with a lot of dynamic choice, cutscenes, and dialogues means it's a time suck if you die because of a mistake, that's not difficult, it's just annoying. I think you might be able to eliminate saves during dice rolls and dialogue, that would prevent save scumming for certain gameplay outcomes (e.g. where you can convince NPCs to kill themselves to avoid combat), but nothing is really stopping you from saving before the interaction. You could implement some restrictions on that too, but then you get into a situation where you die and have to go back over stuff you've already done potentially several times. Maybe have a mode where you are limited to a single save, but then if you encounter a bug or issue, the whole run is screwed. IMO this is something better suited for players to restrain themselves.

I think I'd rather see them do it in the game somehow, more than just HP scaling, but IMO it'd be a lot of work and some of the fights already need a lot of balancing as is.

It might also be interesting to offer custom difficulty modes that add/eliminate dice rolls during dialogue, increase skill requirements for lockpicking/disarming traps, change mob HP, change monster level (which would effect abilities they have access to), inspiration cap, etc. Could add randomization to it too, randomly shuffle flags. I think this would allow people more flexibility in what they consider difficult, but also cut down on the amount of saves/reloads for people who want to drive the story a certain way.

^This^ sums it up pretty well.

If Modding difficulty is anything to go by, changing Point Buy to make it more or less is trivially easy. Make it more if you want an easier game and make it less if you want a harder game. Everybody's happy.

Fear of munchkins is a silly reason to object to a change that adds more options to directly address both concerns that Story Mode is too hard (yes, that's a thing) and Tactician is too easy.

I see no reason to complain about changes that Larian made that are kind of baked in at this point. It's a good game, warts and all. Suggestions are for things they can actually change, either with minimal effort or due to widespread requests even if it takes a little (or a lot of) effort.

I disagree. Nerfing stuff is one way to handle it, but allowing you to choose 16 Point Buy would at the very least make the game harder and probably harder than the majority of players would even want on Tactician (and if it's still too easy, try 12 Point Buy). And it would be very easy to implement as an option. Nerfing stuff takes a lot more effort.

I'm not saying your concerns are unmerited. I don't think it is fun to ignore abilities just to make the game harder, like only using Thief Bonus Actions to Hide, Dash, or Disengage when the game allows you to use them for other things but I think you have to make suggestions that are going to be relatively easy for Larian to implement and that other players will not complain about because they can be made optional. (I know people complain about options online, but it's in the vein of badwrongfun, which should always be ignored.) Anyone who already took Tavern Brawler is going to be pretty annoyed if it doesn't deliver what was promised due to a nerf; I just don't see that happening. Plus, mechanical suggestions are not nearly as popular as fluff, but the fluff suggestions take a lot of work, so if there was a groundswell of support for a mechanical suggestion to make the game harder with relatively little work, Larian would probably do it.

Is Tactitian really easy if you still need to reload fights?

Has anyone 'easily' beat the game on tactitian with zero save scumming and winning each fight effortlessly the first time around?

How about if you try and fail the persuasion rolls on Act 2 minibosses then have to fight them? They really are not easy on tactitian.

The Balthazar / Nightsong fight was a lot easier for me than earlier fights because I'm at level 9 so popped out 2 Icestorms on the first fight, then an ice storm and fireball on turn 2 using quicken and wooped everything.

But its much easier when the mobs aren't poison immune with cloudkill, also I would have to waste a turn casting a poison spell for 0 damage to trigger my poison sorcs poison resist ewww.

I thought I read somewhere that draconic sorcs are meant to be able to bypass resistance to their dragons element, but that doesn't seem to be a thing in BG3, otherwise lol poisoners robe and gloves and spam cloudkil / ray of sickness all day.

Balthazar stole my build and used it against me :x

Yeah it's not as hard as dos2, I would like it to be a bit harder on tactician, just don't increase the camp food requirements more. Scrounging food is cancer and I hate it.