Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Get over the differences from 5E

I did not say that. I was talking about balance between all classes and the game as a whole. I already laid out that because of the surfaces they HAD to implement healing opportunities in abundance, which atm favors the non-casters heavily. Which in turn is a balance issue. Imagine playing co-op and I play as a Warlock and my buddy is a Champion fighter. So yeah, I am not forced to long rest necessarily, but atm we have only short rest. So after between long rests I have 1 SR to get 4 spells in total. While the fighter has no real need to rest soo often at all. Because his restriction lies in HP, which in turn were heavily buffed by food/potions. So he goes all day no problem, while the warlock is not too great at that point. Without the rebalancing of AC/HP and surface effects the fighter and WL would both maybe do 2 short rests but at some point the fighter is out of hit dice and needs to get a good sleep. And this inner party friction is not only present in Coop, but also in singleplayer. What if I want to use Wyll, because I like him? It is kind of immersion breaking to choose between long resting in the middle of a dungeon or having a PC being useless.

I see that your perspective is that you want a tactical arena game, but you fail to recognize that this is marketed as an RPG. Its not the main aspect to beat the a game in "some possible way" but also to immerse people in it and having a good roleplaying experience. And the latter thing gets kind of screwed if the balance is butchered in favor of some flashy features that really dont offer very much in decision making. I'd argue that the real ruleset of 5e is giving you much harder tradeoffs and decisions than the current "yolo jump and disengage"-balance. It is much thougher to use your action to save your ass, instead of disengaging, moving and attacking either way.



See point above. You have so many things to do, there is almost no tradeoff. In ONE round, you maybe have to choose between a potion or a shove, but who cares? I still can use a potion and my Battlemaster shove attack. Trade-off quality beats Trade-off quantity.

The best argument that we’ve seen in 2020 to justify whether a game is balanced or not is “I’ve beaten the game with a single character” or “you’re not good in video gaming”. The game mechanics as is are completely unbalanced, arguments have been made around the subject but the argumentation is always “I think surfaces add another layer to the strategy”.

Oh I am well aware of that.

Here is the thing though, if you were familar with 5e you would have tactical combat. Spamming surfaces isn't tactics and if spamming surfaces is the core mechanic the game is build around of course those of us who wanted a 5e experience are gonna be upset, not because they deviated from the rules, thats expected, but because they are delivering an experience that is not what we wanted.

We didn't want to essentially play the DOS combat system with some 5e tweaks. We wanted 5e combat adjusted for use in a video game.

Overall I like it as it is. I played through it 4 times already.

Coming from older DnD Games the surfaces were totally new and I ignored them on my first play through - which felt balanced. I often stumbled into enemy encounters and set-ups and tried to gain the upper hand in mid fight. I didnt have to rest very often, but I had to nevertheless. On the first playthrough I never felt too weak or too powerful!

In the later playthroughs I already knew the encounters and the positions. I understood the mechanics, from there on it was very easy. I cleared the complete world over and underdark without having hard trouble.

I understand all the criticism pro and contra surfaces etc.

From my point of view the game felt balanced in the 1st run through - which it should be. (In the final game they can add harder difficulties for additional playthroughs).

After reading good posts in this thread I have to agree though that high ground advantage and surface effects play a big role and should be toned down a bit. Because only from understanding high ground, surfaces and stealth alone I could play through very easy compared to balanced on my first play through.

But we should have in mind that the game should feel balanced on normal difficulties for 1st playthroughs and "newcomers". make other difficulties for other cases.
For example make access to a hardcore 5e ruleset with permadeath after having finished the game once! I would love that.

+1 to the OP's statement. If you want 100% accuracy then make your own D&D campaign instead of having unrealistic expectations to a video game.

+1 to the OP. I gave been on both sides of the screen and think of some of the changes in BG3 are a nice, welcome, tactical option. And I am glad enemies use it. I haven't seen the spamming of bottles people are complaining about, so I dunno how rough it is. I think I haven't mainlined a cleric class yet, so there is chance for one playthrough to be rough with grenades.

Except they didn't? I am certainly not relying on the abundant healing in my playthrough. I suspect that the healing was implemented more by accident (due to them wanting to add some utility to food) than as a deliberate design decision in order to balance surfaces. The best defense against anything is not getting hit and this game emphasizes that heavily, with many areas having narrow corridors to bottleneck enemies in, or ladders leading to high up areas where its easy to break line of sight. The arenas are designed in a way where there is a very clear, convenient, easy to reach location which would give the player a significant combat advantage and at the same time severely dampen the damage output of enemies, to the point where they land maybe 1 or 2 hits during the entire fight. You don't even need metagame knowledge to see this either. The fight starts, if before you act you take say a minute to pan the camera and inspect the arena, you will notice the area is constructed with sections that provide you with advantages.

In addition to that, I am not really seeing the argument for how these changes favor fighter classes. Its the casters which can easily create surfaces. Its the casters which have lots of long ranged abilities, who need to spend the least amount of time positioning relative to surfaces. As it currently stands, the most effective way to play is to not engage enemies in melee at all, but to snipe them at range with either a bow or cantrips for the most part.

Even if this was the case however, lets be realistic here. Larian is not going to implement penalties for resting, or time restrictions, because it would go down poorly with the majority of people who play the game. Even if we both dislike rest spamming and enjoy playing against the clock, its just not going to happen. The fact of the matter is, the people who want to start every fight on a wizard with a full list of memorized spells are going to be able to do that, so its a moot point regardless.



I mainly play CRPGs, Turn Based Strategy and Real Time Strategy for the same thing, I enjoy tactical combat. All 3 of them offer it, usually in slightly different flavors. Whilst it is the combat is my main interest, I will humor you for a moment and discuss the role playing aspect of it (which I usually ignore, because if I was to judge it I would judge it really harshly). When it comes to stories/narrative, I am somewhat of a simulationist, its important to me that the world is believable, it needs to have verisimilitude. That does not necessarily mean that it needs to follow the laws of physics, but the "rules" of the world need to be internally consistent. The moment I cannot think of a good reason for something to function that way, I am no longer immersed in the world.

In a high magic world where some people can warp reality, it makes no sense for combat to be "balanced," its like asking for a gun to be balanced against a sword. In fact, if you are trying to make a world like Faerun believable, there would be a very big lack of balance. I personally consider D&D to be a particularly weak system in the verisimilitude department, if you start asking the question, "why does this work this way," you very quickly hit against the wall of, "because someone arbitrarily decided it does," where as in a more believable fantasy universe, you could probably think of more than a dozen good reasons for that feature to function in that way. An easy example of this is, in the thousands of years that the world has existed, why hasn't gunpowder become something known and used across the entirety of the realms.

From a narrative perspective, I personally consider balance to be one of the least important factors to a rule system, in some cases downright adversarial to immersion. You just need to take 5 seconds to look at the real world to realize that "balance" is a myth, balance is not something included in a set of rules to make the setting more believable, or to make it better facilitate role playing, balance is included to make the combat more interesting because combat is not interesting when the solution is, "so he pulled the trigger and shot him and the encounter is over," for every single fight. Its sacrificing realism in an effort to create a tactical experience. So if all you care about is the "role playing experience" so to speak, then from my pov balance should be the least of your concerns, because a believable world is not a balanced world.

From a tactics (not roleplaying) perspective however, notice, I didn't disagree that it would be better if combat was balanced, I didn't complain at all about shove being moved from a bonus action to an action or any of those other things that were talked about. In none of those cases are actions being removed, just rebalanced. All I objected to was removing surfaces entirely, because it doesn't matter how you try to spin it, by removing surfaces, you are removing an element from gameplay. I would prefer it if combat had surfaces and was balanced, rather than lacked surfaces and of course, that would mean taking liberties with additional rules in order to achieve that. No ruleset is perfect however, you can bet that in 10 years time there will be a D&D 6th or even 7th edition with updated rules and without trying to modify rules to begin with, you will never end up with a "better system."



In almost no cases do you want to use a health potion during combat, because if that action can be used in any way to shorten the fight, then the act of using the health potion is simply prolonging combat.

Yeah im going to go out on a limb here and say you are familiar with 5E rules.

For people who have experience with 5e they know certain things are op if given away to easy in 5e. Let me give you an example. In 5e very rare weapons will give you +3 to hit, and that is really powerful. While advantage is considered to be a +5 to the skill. So giving out a +5 to everyone above you, or behind you is really powerful in 5e rules. It's actually game breaking.

Now think of what that means. In 5e someone having advantage on an attack against you is the same as you having -5 to your armor. Lets say you have 17 armor class a good AC for a low level fighter. You now have effectively 12 ac considered low for even a casting in 5e. With 5e you always hit on a 20, and always miss on a 1 no matter the AC, and tie goes to the attacker. So with 17 ac for every 20 attack you will be hit 4 times. With the person attacking you having advantage you will take 9 attacks every twenty.

As you can see it might not seem like a big deal, but it makes being tanky much harder when you give away advantage.

In short you have to be careful what changes you make to the 5e system as it's easy to break, and in turn break your game balance.

The fact that many of us beaten the game mostly by using refurbished DnD rules made by Larian ( like high ground Advantage, stealth spam, OP cantrips, shove every turn, unlimited rest, disengage as a bonus action, etc) Isn’t enough of an argument to say that the game is unbalanced?

Sometimes I just want to be in a mood of hack n slash party with 4 barbarians that aren’t so smart to use tactical combat and use brute force to overwhelm a goblin army. Currently that’s not a viable option. Isn’t that the very essence of DnD? Everything being viable (some options more effective and others less) is a feature of what I define as a tactical game.

For those who played Pilars of eternity II, there was those ship battles where the player wouldn't have the advantage of adjust the battleground in their flavor. Pure RAW battle. I miss that so much in BG3

Attempts to fix what is not broken already create them balance problems and will require a lot of effort in future to make it just work.

That might be true, although I can't recall anyone complaining about Speak with Animals lasting until the next long rest or concentration break. For the most part though, people are complaining about changes because of the effect the changes have on balance. Efforts to further balance the changes with more changes is only creating the need for further changes. This can go on indefinitely, eating up development time and resources.




I'm not long resting much either. That is however, because of additional changes, such as food which can be as good or better as healing potions and spells.

However, at the moment, there is nothing seemingly limiting the amount of long rests you can take. That skews the balance towards casters, who can blow all their spells in every combat. Warlocks only have a single short rest possible, so they're less attractive to use in comparison - particularly because of Fire Bolt's added strength.




Options and difficulty levels still need to be tested and somewhat balanced even if you slap the words "Unfair" onto a difficulty level.




Player hit points and player AC have not been increased to compensate for all the surfaces enemies can throw around. Instead, they made food items you can pick up in bunches better than clerical healing, and have no limits on long rests, which make Warlocks pretty crappy with a 4-character limit in a party.




"If you're standing in a surface, it's a result of your own poor play." This is an overly general statement. The maximum range on the longest range spells has been cut in half, many combat arenas are designed so that you cannot get line of sight onto enemies without being in range of enemies, and enemies have many additional surface creating effects and bombs.




All we need to do is just change this one little thing, and that'll fix the problem, right? Until that change makes more problems apparent. What happens when we get access to the old classic Fireball, and it's a wet fart of a spell thanks to inflated monster HP? Then you need to change more things.

The domino effect of changes means that they'll need to add "other correcting factors", and then even more "other correcting factors" to correct for those changes, and later, even more "other correcting factors".




I agree that+1 or +2 would be better. Or maybe a range increase like what D:OS 2 has. I had a combat where I was up in the rafters, attempting to get sneak attack from above, but despite enemies being in the circle, I had disadvantage for being "outside my normal attack range".




Surfaces don't need to be removed entirely, they can add things, but they need significant adjustments. For starters, they are far too abundant, they require saving throws, applying them from cantrips is far too powerful (especially when a direct hit deals damage and creates a surface), and there are too many ways to create them - largely because most enemies carry tons of grenades and magic arrows for the express purpose of creating surfaces.




I don't know your exact strategy, so I am going to presume that you are abusing stealth and range to pick off enemies and run away. Especially for your solo character.

Your argument is "if you play in these exact specific ways, surfaces aren't a problem". That's a silly argument. If someone abuses mechanics and reloading enough and most fights can be beaten easily. That doesn't make it balanced for "normal" play. King Tiki explained way better than I can.

Every game is unbalanced. Get over it.

And yeah, you can just hack and slash away with a party of four fighters (if they had barbarians then sure), that's pretty much viable.

You don't really have a good argument at all.

I am absolutely here and spending my money for a 5E D&D game. I get that a video game needs some adjustment, but those adjustments should feel intentional, not "we don't really get the ruleset so we changed some stuff" — which is a lot of the alterations now. It's like a newbie DM with strong ideas making changes which actually make the game less fun.

I've got no problem winning fights in this game without abusing the camp, and usually go way beyond when the characters are whining that it's a long day. I do wish they'd introduce proper short rests and hit dice. But my objection isn't that these things are making the game too hard. They're making it not feel like D&D, and, thread title to the contrary, that's a completely sufficient and valid reason.

Throwing barrels should definitely go — or require a ridiculous strength. (An ogre throwing them at me? Fine!) Likewise, not every eenemy sshould have surface creating throwables, and they shouldn't be so easy for me to come by. And cantrips having a splash effect definitely makes me sad each time.

When the Ultimate challenge was added to Deadfire, the developer expectation was, that the challenge could not be beaten at all. Obviously, optional difficulty settings do require testing in some ways, but whether or not they can be completed, or whether or not gameplay is balanced, is not one of them. If someone is deliberately making their experience harder, they should be aware that they can make it harder than they are capable of completing.


On most occasions, if you cannot see an enemy, they also cannot see you. If you know an enemy cannot see you, waiting until they move somewhere that is convenient to you, rather than the reverse, becomes an option. In the example above of the Goblin camp, what I did was this. I had just finished the "evil" quest line where you kill the druid grove and so the goblin camp was now hostile to me. I entered via the waypoint, immediately being placed in combat upon arrival and then I misty step above onto the encroachments above it. Following this I used the ladder as a choke point and kill enemies 1 by 1.

In most fights in the EA, there are spots you can move into to break line of sight, thus forcing enemies to move into a disadvantageous position. In my experience, almost every fight in the early access can be beaten in a similar manner barring the bulette (spelling?). There are places you can position yourself that force enemies to move into unfavorable territory and its very easy to deny enemies the opportunity to dump a surface on top of you.

There are a lot of points before this which I will skip addressing because we are more or less in agreement. I have no issues with toning down surfaces to better fit the system, I have a very strong sentiment against removing them entirely. Since it seems we agree on that, I will skip unnecessary walls of text on the subject.

I suspect there is already something like this implemented, although I am not sure to what extent. If you stand on very high outcrops relative to an enemy and target outside of the "maximum range" threshold, you will find that up to a point, you can still hit enemies without disadvantage. This suggests to me that a system like this is already implemented and just not communicated to the player.

I don't rely much on stealth, I rely much more on movement and line of sight. Melee enemies can't catch you when you are using expeditious retreat and ranged enemies suffer against line of sight. Choke points are the tool for dealing with crowds, narrow corridors and doorways are all over the place in the arenas provided to us. The question really is, what constitutes "normal" play. Obviously, you do not balance the game around optimal gameplay or mechanics abuse in the case of reload cheese, but you should not balance the game around someone who is hitting the end turn button without doing anything every single turn either.

You know what guys? We don't need to fight like this over this issue. All we need is to ask Larian to sell us a good "DM mod" modding tool for BG3. I wrote in another post:
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=705609#Post705609

DOS2 modding tool was very good too, but it definitely has a steep learning curve, and it does not have the features to achieve true "DM mod" modding I wrote in my post. With such tools, a lot of things can be achieved, including "D&D 5e rule" BG3. If you guys agree with this, please give some positive reflection to my post, so that Larian can feel & agree with the needs of such a modding tool.



As a person who has a 2 years of D&D 5e TRPG experience, I think some part of the D&D 5e rules will resolve some balance issue of the current EA version, especially regarding the bonus action issue. But it is only EA now, so I guess Larian will try to test and fix these issues in general, and I guess Larian will also try to accept more of D&D 5e rules to fix several parts.

However, any 5e TRPG players would know this, there are some balance issues among classes and feats in the current D&D 5e rule. So, if there is an "authentic D&D 5e rule" mod for this game, there will be an additional "balance patch" for the "authentic D&D 5e rule" mod. Plus, typically, while we play TRPG, we don't 100% absolutely adhere to the 5e rule like CRPG. Sometimes, players discuss with DM to simplify the interpretation of the rule to save game time (like, "Look, guys, I wish to finish today's session but I really need to go after 20 min, so can we play this part in this way to save some time?"), and DM prepares in-house rules to fix balance or to give more challenge or to make the story more interesting. While Larian modified a good amount of 5e rules, I'm still understanding this as an attempt to make Larian's own in-house rules to develop BG3 in a better way and to blend the DOS2 style into BG3. I'm OK with that. But again, this is the EA stage, and it's only 2 weeks passed so far. I'm 100% sure full-release version will be changed a lot, as Larian would feel the necessity to fix some balance issues in the current BG3.

Honestly speaking, there can't be "absolutely 100% perfect balance" in any games. Whatever designers make, it is impossible to escape from loopholes and exploits. So, again, if there is a "DM mod" modding tool, a lot of people can be satisfied, and players and modders will try to fix these loopholes and exploits by themselves. But of course, before users make such mods, of course, I agree that the quality of the original game (BG3) should be fully satisfied, and I wish Larian finds the best spot balance to satisfy all players based on their in-house rules and 5e rules.

Then you found the best tactical way to way, congrats!
You don't like it because it's OP? Then roleplay something else instead of being tactical, literally no one is forcing you to min-max.

I know what you mean, but its still kinda funny.



You always come back to "you can beat it by just following these steps". But it still isnt the point that you can beat it. The point is, that is not balanced in a way that makes all play styles equally viable. This is something that 5e is good at. Not perfect, but really good. There are ups and downs, and the later levels get a little whacky, but the balance between levels 5 to ~12-15 is good. And that class balance is held alive by things like bounded accuracy, saves, AC and concentration.

And those things get positively broken by unavoidable damage through surfaces. Look at the mighty firaball. 20 foot radius of pure fire carnage. Even here you get a save to avoid at least the full force of it, while some classes even can avoid it completely. Not even the mighty magic missile spell, a spell that is by design always hitting is unavoidable (hello shield spell).

Why would anyone learn the Create Bonfire spell? It is just a strictly worse option, when I just can buy some firebombs, that cant be avoided and dont require my concentration (not that concentration would be up for longer than 1 round anyway). These things actively invalidate spells and effects that 5e already brings zu the table. But 5e does it better.

While I agree with your sentiment and find your reasoning to be sound the last part caught my eye. Homogenization should not be a goal and it is a problem in 5e and generally there should be clear cut reasons as to why one source is superior to another in certain regards. While I don't think perfect balance is ideal I would prefer that the best choices are tied to classes and character while consumables can offer you alternatives not otherwise available to your selected party or have niche benefits.

I dont really feel that classes are not distinct enough. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. But they are balanced in a way which is not over all favoring one playstyle or class over all the others. Perfect balance is pretty much not possible, but good balance with some specialties and fun party interactions is a great thing. What are the problems you see with 5e? I only have 5e and some Pathfinder experience.

one wizard using his concentration to haste an archer with sharpshooter is better than two wizards in 5e, unless you're fighting crowds all the time