Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Difficulty settings?

As a previous poster said, there are many oportunities for xp on the Eastern side of the map. The tombs are easy enough to get you through lvl2 and a bit, then do grove fight and quests, harpys and owlbear. Should be lvl3 then head west to Blighted Village most of the goblins are neutral but there are a few encounters which start hostile, clear them and head to north central gnolls, Zhent quest, "paladins" and clear the road of more gnolls. By then I was lvl4. Can pick up more xp if you head to Waukeens Rest, try clear Blighted Village, kill the Ogres there, kill the Gith to the NW or even head down South and explore the bog.

I'm sure there is enough xp in the early access areas to hit lvl5 and be well into 6. Even further if you kill everything you see/accept some of the more genocidal quests.

As for difficulty, spend your gold, there are traders everywhere. That extra +1 attack, damage or AC is huge. merchants have many upgrades for sale andyou can usually buy two upgrades when you meet the first one, I haven't run a high CHA character so maybe you could gear up quicker. Run Gale and learn Magic Missile, prevents so much frustration, it's easy to get Lae'zel a 1d12 or 2d6 weapon ASAP, Astarion is a bit harder to gear, Shadowheart come pretty well kitted at the start and doesn't need much to be effective. There is a stupid reliance on high ground in the game, a carryover from DOS2 I hear though I never played the game, try to start fights from high ground and give everyone a light/heavy crossbow, try get to highground with your weaker characters, move-take action-repeat.

Once you hit the later areas there are stupidly powerful items available which make the game a cakewalk. Look for The Sapphire Spark Amulet and Staff of Arcane Blessing. Those two items themselves make the game easymode. Shadow of Menzoberranzan helmet is great for scouting out fights and setting things up.

I've played this game more or less exactly the way I would play a DnD game and I've had no problems with the difficulty. I think a lot of DnD players are too accustomed to going at problems and fights head-on rather than addressing them tactically. I would suggest easier difficulties for players like that, so they can play their way and still have fun; if I were DMing for a group like that, I would certainly adjust the challenges to their playstyle rather than demand they change how they play to suit my challenges. Right now there are no difficulty settings, but I'm pretty sure there will be. That should prove an adequate fix.

This is unfortunately true. I love D&D 5e and DOS/DOS2. I have put 30 hours into BG3, I love it but it has some serious flaws based around the game systems meshing.

I'm the same as Zer0. I approach the battle like how I would play a pnp DnD 5e game. Using the environment or sleep spells to gain whatever advantage I could gain on action economy.

So far it's been working pretty well for me. I've finished the EA without too much difficulty.

I did this fight solo at level 2 on classic (its the only available difficulty option) with a Wizard. It is definitely a you problem.


Saying "Git Gud" is not very helpful so no, instead I'll try suggesting things which can help.

1. Use line of sight to give you an advantage against ranged enemies. If they cannot see you, they cannot hit you. Hide behind walls, in enclosed rooms, etc and restrict how many enemies you fight at a time. This was how I did the fight you complained about further up, when the casters appeared I just ran into the room, cast grease at the door and then used cantrips like Ray of Frost on them as they walked in.
2. Use height (when its an option) to your advantage. Stand on high ground, shove off any enemies when they come close and then use ranged powers or a bow against them, as you will have advantage.
3. If you see someone hostile to you at a distance and you know moving closer to them will engage combat, enter stealth, position your characters appropriately and then use sneak attacks to initiate combat. This will give you a surprise round which will allow you to alpha strike them.
4. Make use of crowd control effects and appropriate buffs for encounters.

^I agree 100% with this.

I find the combat difficulty just about right personally. After my first playthrough, I only encountered about 4 particularly difficult fights. Larian games are kind of like From Software games. There's a trick to them, and once you learn it and everything clicks, it becomes quite manageable, without usually ever tipping into easy.

Other comments have already offered some good suggestions, but I'll also mention that food is your best friend. Most food will heal you a small amount, and you can eat it as a bonus action; some rare food can heal better than potions. I was absolutely slamming apples and sausages into my character's face every turn that I had a leftover bonus action, which as a fighter was pretty frequently.

Also, something to keep in mind, particularly in that temple fight, is that light affects your chance to hit. Attacking enemies in shadows is disadvantaged, and if you're playing a character with darkvision you might not even notice that they're standing in a shadow until you switch to a human, or pay attention to the hit-change tooltip that will give you a warning. Make sure your cleric or wizard has dancing lights, and pre-cast it before the fight if you can, or just cast light on your fighter. Or, if you do not want to commit concentration to a maintained spell, light some existing light sources in the room, or drop lit candles in the combat area, etc.

You should be able to get to level 2 before ever getting to the temple though just by gathering your party and exploring a bit. I got to 2 on my most recent character just from killing everything in the tutorial and gathering 2 out of the 4 companions.

Honestly I'd be a bit dissapointed if the combat was easy - BG could be notoriously hard sometimes (remember Lord Firkraag?) and I for one find it refreshing from smashing 1 rinse, repeat kind of combats (looking at you Geralt). It's rare nowdays that the game actually requires you to think (I especially loved the spider matriarch fight).

As for the temple I'm sorry to say but it's definitely a you thing - I took Shadowheart's word it's imperative we get there asap so I only stumbled upon Astarion trying to find the entrance and we 3 manned it easily straight from the nautiloid.

I think Sharp gave you a sound advice I'd just emphasize it's imperative to pay attention to positioning and react to the terrain, also you know you can step out of AOE effects like silence right?

Also there are surely going to be other difficulties available but they just want to fine tune classic first.

Hi,

I am the sort of person who likes to play games on the easiest settings possible. I am not totally struggling with the game as it currently is, but I am finding it to be an unsatisfying experience at times, especially since load times are horrible which makes save scumming annoying.

Anyway, this post is about possibilities for difficulty settings. Larian could do worse than looking at Owlcat's Pathfinder series for ideas here - completely customizable difficulty settings for the basic wimp like me to the hardest of hardcore ironman people. There are a couple of things I want to specifically address though - you'll understand the first one if you read my anecdote at the end of this post.

The lowest difficulty setting should completely do away with the concept of character death. Have characters knocked down in the fight get up at the end. If that isn't possible, at the very least on this setting enemies should not be targeting downed individuals, and the save DC for a death save should be 5. (Yes, it's DC 10 in DnD 5e, but we're talking about the easiest setting here! I am not proposing it change for all difficulty levels!)

Another thing I might suggest for the lowest difficulty level is a reduction of all DCs, I (and I'm sure there's others) would really like to avoid save scumming if at all possible. The load times at the moment are too slow for it to be an effective tool for those who want to see the story and yet see continual fails on conversation dice rolls. This could be something that can be adjusted over the difficulty levels, make them harder for higher difficulty levels.

If you have any other ideas for difficulty settings, feel free to post them in this thread. (Please don't attack or belittle people who like an easier game, just because we're soft and squishy doesn't mean we're total carebears... and besides, I might cry *sob*.)

Z.

Anecdote:

I think I hit my limit last night when I was fighting a Boss and lost Shadowheart. At the end of the fight, I realized I didn't have any scrolls of revivify, and as such I was stuck with a dead party member. So in the end, after much faffing about, I decided the easiest solution was just to repeat the fight, but this time without fatalities. Then I ended up losing Wyll (the baddie hit Wyll so hard, he flew into a ravine, and hilariously ended up all the way back to camp, where his corpse landed near the campfire, but I digress...) So I gave up for the night.

That whole situation might have been mitigated if Shadowheart's corpse was able to be picked up. Cause then I could have taken the corpse with me when I went to buy more revivify scrolls, rather than having to buy the scrolls then sneak back into the now thoroughly hostile goblin camp to her corpse. This is not an unrealistic idea - people can be carried.

Is there any additional confirmation from Larian about multiple difficulty levels, and what setting the current early access state will be akin to? To me this is a hard setting, at least a level above what should be default/normal. I really hope this isn't what "easy" is supposed to be. This being even "normal" would be bad. I'm very concerned that easier settings won't make it to full release because then the only way I'll be able to play is to either hope someone mods it in, or cheat. I like the game but I'm here for the story and the character interactions, not to spend hours save-scumming to try and make it through encounters.

After struggling with a particular fight involving I'm frustrated enough with the difficulty that I'm ready to either just find a way to slap on God Mode and cheat my way through this (and I sure hope Larian's analytics notice that this is what it takes), or drop the game until full release. I'm unfortunately too many hours into it for a Steam refund so I'm really hoping that the promised multiple difficulty levels actually make it into the game.

I've already spent 30 hours from all the constant re-loading due to terrible skill check rolls. Highly intelligent wizards, deeply wise clerics, and very charismatic warlocks shouldn't be struggling this much on such basic things. I'm not trying to learn a stranger's deepest secrets during conversation, I just want to continue the story. RNG treats my characters like they're blind, deaf, and dumb.

I don't even know if this particular fight is necessary to progress any quests, but I will want to feel like I've experienced the full game with at some point.

sitting at a table in a physical DND game and rolling a 2 on an insight check with your character's 18 wisdom is no different than failing it in the game. is it frustrating? yeah. but that's what the save scumming is for. it's tedious but if you aren't content with the outcome your rolls get you, you reload and do them over and over again until you get what you want.

as far as game difficulty goes, I've found that combat difficulty was the worst for me when I was playing a fighter, with the cleric, rogue and wizard in my party. but now I'm running with 2 warlocks, the cleric and a fighter and honestly? warlocks wreck face really fast. Hex + Eldritch Blast is no joke, I've done 20 points of damage in one go.

The spider matriarch is pretty easy, you can kill a lot of the little spiders by shoving them off the cliff, and you can also burn the webs. If you burn the webs it means that the spiders can't just walk up to you.

I had no trouble with this fight following the ideas I just wrote down with two different comps. First I was Cleric, Astarion, Gale and Wyll; second was, ranger, Astarion, Gale and Lae'zel.

Astarion is the MVP, he is seriously the best party member you can recruit , put him on thief specialisation and he gets double Bonus Actions, it's the BEST!

Use the Dancing Lights Evocation Cantrip as well, it'll help get better hit on the matriarch too. There is also Alchemist's Fire that you can pick up from the Doctor's Laboratory too.

Messing around on the game files look what I found:



Hints at Casual, Classic and Hardcore difficulties for the game.

My characters at level 4 struggle horribly against enemies that should be easy and quick to deal with (like goblin cannon fodder). And, no it's not the build, or lack of armor etc. The Matriarch Phase Spider is insanely difficult. I've never had an RPG register so many misses when attacking with anything other than Magic Missile. And even then, the damage registered is Pitiful (2, 3, and 4 hits) for a total of a Measly 9 hit points on a spider with 130 HP!

I suppose what I am asking for is: an easier difficulty level. Because right now, playing this game is infuriatingly frustrating for me. I like these games for their story.

Thanks so much!

It will come. Hopefully soon.

I hope you're right!

I've had mixed experiences. First play-through I really struggled with; second has been a lot easier in that I'm probably getting the hang of the rules, though given the amount of stuff I don't use there's obviously a lot I don't know. A combination of separation, high-ground, sneak and not being afraid to play dirty! And having at least one party member with an escape plan should the worst happen, i.e. pay to resurrect the others at camp. Only had to do that once so far, and yeah, it was the spider!

Dice-rolls are the real killer and a number of people have commented on a tendency to roll low (some people vehemently dispute this but the number of times I'll roll a four or less in dialogue checks is remarkable; well, it's more remarkable if I roll a 17 or over as it happens so rarely...) but if you have the patience you can save during combat and reload if you get an unlucky streak.

The game definitely has balancing issues IMO. I have a thread on reddit where I talk about how the game is too easy if people use all these non-D&D strategies that are artifacts of the game engine. Some, like being able to push while invisible without breaking invisibility, are definitely bugs that have not yet been fixed (Makes spider queen real easy). But some like unchaining to skip initiative checks are questionable. Will Larian address them or leave them in? And if they plug some of the holes, will they fix the encounters to be easier?

To me, part of EA and play testing is to see if they made things too easy/too hard. But it is hard to say when there are all these ways to cheese the game. The heat maps mean nothing once users get frustrated and just start cheesing every fight. So until these things are fixed or there is some indication what will and will not be fixed, it is hard to gauge if difficulty is correct or not.

but steal gold, hit m, portal out is the best bit!

Its interesting how I haven't seen anyone mention potions - which are cheap as hell, but you can just steal anyway. Apply oil of sharpness then binge drink potion of fire resistance, potion of fire breathing, potion of hill giant strength, potion of speed, throw a potion of sleep at an enemy then go to town, that is if you bloated stomach doesn't explode first

I think it's pretty safe to assume that they'll give us a difficulty slider in the full release. It's fairly standard in RPGs.

They'll also give a good look at balancing the difficulty of encounters. The levelling-up speed will also be looked at. Basically the balance of the whole game.

But will they do that soon ? I don't think so, and I hope not. Balancing the whole game requires having the whole game ready. It should be the finishing touch.

The game currently feels like it's BG3 : Play-testing Edition. You walk into the Druid Grove and you're level 3, allowing you to quickly check out the archetypes of all the classes, and finding problems. You talk to 5-10 people and you're celebrating at camp, allowing you to test story permutations.

I'd much rather they prioritise the user interface, the writing and the game mechanisms at this stage of development, rather than improving the balance or, say, releasing new races or classes.