Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Redcap Fight unbalanced

So I had a fight with four level 4 Redcaps in the swamp. Apparently Larian took their values pretty much exactly out of the DnD rules without adapting. That said if you look up the rules an encounter with 4 Redcaps with a party of 4 is considered deadly up to a level of 6 starting getting hard at level 7 (EA has a level cap of 4). And it isn't hard to guess why:

- Multi Attack that allows 3 consecutive hits
- Ironbound Pursuit that targets Dex Save and does 3d10+4 damage (honestly at level 3-4 ?!) => could one shot your characters if hit and good damage roll

And since it didn't seem to be challenging enough Larian added the swamp debuffs. I am actually pretty curios why Larian chose to make that encounter that way since it is obviously balanced very badly.

Since it is more or less an optional fight you could also easily miss it so maybe they wanted to see how player get along in a rather difficult/unfair fight.

But honestly I am worried it is something else:
They bloated up the HP of their other enemies and thought "Oh look the redcaps have the same HP as our other enemies in the game at that level (after HP bloat) so why not taking them unmodified!" (completely ignoring that their stats and skills are far too strong for that level). The fact that they label them with level 4 when you examine them points very strongly to that suspicion...

Wait until he finds out the Redcaps have sickles with incorrect d4s assigned to them which doubles all of their damage output 🌚

I think The secret here is to kill as many of them as possible before they engage you in melee

Honestly the real bummer of this area is that Ethel is clearly going to revive herself somehow, but you leave her body lying around like a dummy instead of throwing it in the fireplace.

I had the luck of attacking the hag who just ran off and allowed me to kill them at a time as they trickled in. They seem to have no ranged attack or at the very least none that are as powerfull ad their melee attack.

1 reached my PC cleric with ac17 and downed him in 1 round 😂

If you get more in melee I can this fight beeing very lobsided!

Actually I managed to win this fight in my 5th or 6th attempt with a lvl 3 party because I had 3 or 4 successful Dex saves against Ironbound Pursuit in a row but without that... Not a chance...

Also their sickles do 2d4 damage, which while yes, is what they have in their stats, that's 6d4+12 damage from a single enemy just from multiattack, and when you kill them, you get to loot their sickles, which means your party now has extremely good light weapons for your characters without martial proficiency to now dual wield or have with a shield, with 2d4 being arguably better than the 1d8 a select few one handed martial weapons have, and objectively better than the 1d6 most other weapons have.