Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Low AC high HP goblins - Larian's combat redesign

So goblins' AC has gone down from 15 to 7 and their HP has doubled. This simple redesign has long reaching consequences.

The immediate ones are the low level Wizards' forte, crowd control spells. Sleep and Color Spray have been nerfed to half efficiency. Sleep is amazing against multiple high AC, low HP targets. But it's next to worthless against the "Larian goblins". It often drops only 1 goblin instead of 4. Sacred Flame suddenly sucks horribly compared to Fire Bolt because it attacks Dex saves instead of AC. Getting or not getting a +40% hit probability is a huge deal. Magic Missile is also nerfed because always hitting isn't special anymore.

So what if this starts a trend where everyone must hit reliably, and everyone's HP pools get inflated to compensate? Effectively everything that does damage that doesn't attack AC gets nerfed. That's basically 90% of spells. Do we really want to rebalance all the spells? How lame will a Fireball feel against HP buffed enemies? Then there will be a healing economy problem when everyone must heal more. Mundane food already heals so maybe easy healing everywhere is where we are headed? We are not there yet in EA, and I really hope this won't become a thing. But the change with goblins implies this is the desired direction.

All of this just because "missing is not fun"? Is it really somehow more fun to kill a goblin in two hits rather than a miss and a hit? The goblins are supposed to be quick and annoying but squishy, and most of them also look pretty heavily armored. If anything, it's weird that you can damage them so easily.

Let's not forget a "miss" in D&D does not mean a clean miss where the attacker just completely fails. Anything that would hit 10AC+Dex is actually a hit. The rest are armor absorbing the damage, and shield and weapon blocks. But the way BG3 shows a miss to you is that you failed. They even added a little laughter from the opponent when you "fail". That's why it doesn't feel good. Of course it doesn't when your Fighter hits nothing but air even though the target is an ogre the size of a barn. It doesn't make any sense. If we saw the weapon being parried or skin/armor deflecting the damage we wouldn't feel like we failed. The opponent succeeded instead.

This is my request to Larian: Make the misses look exciting. Deflections, parries, heavy armor soaking damage. Opponents reeling under impact even if they don't take damage. Don't fundamentally try to change the 5e system. And offer a hardcore D&D setting without any changes. I haven't even played 5e but I looked it up and the tabletop rules on jumping, shoving, disengage and basically everything that's different seem better than BG3 changes.

I think part of the reason missing isn't fun is because that 75% chance can mean missing three or four times in a row, and then when you do finally hit, it rolls 1-2HP damage. Er... yay.

But to your original point, that does sound like a much more interesting way of playing against goblins. It's similar to games I've modded previously where I've substantially decreased enemy HP to stop them being bullet-sponges and significantly increased weapon damage and chance-to-hit, making fights much more dynamic (and also way more dangerous for me as well as whoever I'm fighting). My main not-fun things are the combination of a complete miss, even with a high chance to hit, frequently low damage and long, drawn-out fights. But some of that irritation may be due generally not being a fan of chance-based games which is what D&D is about AFAIK, so I feel my objections may be a little... well, off-target, which seems to be very much my current thing. D:

I agree on making the misses seem more exciting, I wouldn't hate missing near as much if it came with some varied and cool animations like a shield block, weapon parry, or my attack bouncing off of a thick monster hide. But after watching the enemy just side step an attack every time, it's both boring and annoying, plus it makes firebolt feel even dumber somehow, at least in my opinion. Watching an enemy sidestep a spell like firebolt would be awesome if the spell/cantrip actually went past them an hit a wall or something, but instead it just randomly explodes in their face.

Yeah high variance can mean missing streaks. That's why they need to make misses look exciting rather than just fumbling. Teach the player to get that Advantage since it's so easy and use spells like Bless.

High variance also exists in Skill Checks. I like it less with skills, but it's everywhere in D&D. You can't really fight against it without messing things up.

The Ogre was a bad example since they have only 11AC lol.

I think this is a great example of what BG 3 can be if it more closely follows the rules of 5e.

Let's say you have a plain Fighter, that just swings a sword. Against some enemies, ones with low AC like Zombies, they are going to do great! They'll hit, and do quite a bit of damage, and most importantly, will use up almost no resources because it doesn't eat up a spell slot to cast "Sword to face". You'll also never being doing 1-2 damage because of your attack ability modifier presumably being +2/+3, then another +1 or +2 minimum from the weapon damage die.

But what happens when you come up against a high AC target and your Fighter starts missing a lot? You get frustrated right? This is where the beauty of D&D (and 5e) come to help. Maybe instead of just swinging your sword, your Fighter wants to knock the target to the ground? They make a Shove check with one of their attacks, and now suddenly you have a prone target (if the Fighter wins). Huzzah, now you have Advantage!

Even better, it makes the player realize that they have an entire party at their disposal (6 party size please)! So yeah, maybe this fight your Fighter doesn't do much besides soak damage and be a 'sticky' target. Maybe the big armored enemy is bombarded by spells that target their weak stat, like Dex saves or Wisdom saves? Perhaps this is when you throw down that Sleep spell to knock out all the small enemies to everyone can gang up on the BBEG? Or the Cleric tosses everyone a Bless, and the Monk stuns the target, etc.

There are so many solutions to "I keep missing the target when I swing my sword" in D&D you couldn't possibly list them all. Please, use those solutions. Make players realize how much is out there. Force them to grow beyond just swinging their sword.

Or, just have them turn the difficulty down. Make enemy AC and Player stats change with difficulty level. But have that 'true' difficulty setting when players want to realize that the solution to problems in 5e is to use the tools made available to you in the rules.

Generally speaking I'm way more in favor of combat that is quick and lethal (on both sides). I don't like having to hit the same target several times as an attacker (especially when it's supposed to be a "weak one") and I don't like sponging damage as target.
This just to confirm that I'm not a big fan of this choice, on paper.

Yeah, quick and brutal combat is one of the great feelings just about any game that does it right. My first ever D&D 5e adventure our first combat was against, of course, some goblins. Pretty weak creatures, and nothing felt better than hearing the description of how our barbarian just decapitated a goblin with his great axe in a single swing or the warlock just eldritch blasted a goblin straight to the shadow realm lol. Goblins are supposed to be weak, easy to beat creatures that can spell trouble in large numbers or if they ambush you. It's not supposed to take my fighter 3 or 4 hits to kill a goblin. I should be hacking, slashing, and burning my way through goblins with very few problems.

Plus it would make larger combats go by faster and feel more satisfying if the horde of goblins coming at me was easier to kill. If my party of 4 could kill 1 or 2 goblins each every round of combat, tossing 20 goblins at me wouldn't feel like a slog. Especially when the wizard pulls out a more powerful spell and takes out 3 or 4 in a single go.

I do feel like lowering the AC of goblins is an overall good idea.

With an AC of 15 your entire party can miss all of their attacks in an entire round, which can be very boring in single player.

However a flat double of HP is a bit weird - I'd say scale it down to 10-ish, which should allow a fighter to kill them on high rolls with one hit, as well as allow Rogues Sneak attack to shine.

The point the OP makes about "HP based spells" being severely limited in their effectiveness is also worth stressing.

True, but HP based spells have been buffed - the static number is much better than rolling dice in my opinion.

However, I would like them to tweak the numbers of these spells, currently they are just slightly above the average roll (for example sleep first level 24 HP > 22.5 HP average 5d8 roll). An extra 1-2 HP would make them much more worth a prepared slot.

Goblins aren't that hard to hit with a 15 AC, and when you do hit you usually kill them in a single blow which is the way it should feel. Goblins are weak monsters, my fighter shouldn't have to hit one 3 times to kill it, they should be chopping them to pieces on just about every hit, not just on crits or max damage rolls.

Yes the random rolls tend to miss multiple times in a row, wich is statistically improbable and very frustrating (especially when you got a big "critical miss !" when you need a 2+ to hit... ).

As the OP said, sense of "avoidances" by enemie may slightly alleviate the feeling of the game basically spitting "you suck" to you constantly.
Like missing the enemy by 1-2 margin being either "blocked" or "parried" feedbacks instead of miss/critical miss should help getting a better feel of what's going on, instead of the binary system we got here.

But the way of deviating the ruleset by lowering AC/buffing HP is no good IMO ; as you said goblins being bulletsponges will not alleviate the fact combat will be twice as long.
Better introduce "brushing hits" when target is damaged for a fraction of the regular roll, like missing by 1-2 will deal half damage or something like that. Far less frustrating when you miss with you 2-handed fighter than now, but it could lead to player issues as well (enemy will damage players more as well, where any lost HP can make a big difference in combat outcomes).


Also when AI got improved I expect to see different behaviors happening in combat, like goblins starting to flee after being severly injured, with maybe a "willpower" check for nearby allies, wich may trigger fear and other reactions to being hit/burned/slaughtered to bits, as well as the opposite (ennemy pushing their advantage over you when they feel they are winning).

I suspect part of the reason they made the change to monster HP is because they wanted to implement surfaces. If you have a lower HP enemy, surfaces are much more effective as they are not mitigated by AC.

I agree, if they make a shift to lower hitrate they'd definitely have to make a bunch of parry, dodge, block animations(right now we only have the melee dodge right?) Then it would actually feel pretty amazing. Sitting on the edge of your chair watching what happens, then again that would already be a great additions as is, without the need for lowering the hit chance. Besides, in terms of game design i understand it perfectly well why they opt for a bigger health pool rather than lower hit rate, it just makes the game more intuitevely understandable. We have to keep in mind that in most games you don't wiff spells, period. Larian is trying to keep the core DnD 5e feel alive while porting it to a video game. To draw on both player pools, PC gamers and table top players. Personally i think they're doing that very well.
To get back to the AC vs HP discussion, I mostly tune my enemies when I DM to be more beefy aswell rather than dodging everything. Missing sometimes adds tension, drama and excitement, missing a lot is just plain frustrating, this is further exasperated in a video game setting.
As far as HP based spells are concerned, they always have fairly limited use and drop out of favour very fast in 5e too, besides we know exactly how much health the enemies have which is a buff to these spells. I've gotten plenty of good use out of sleep, Now i would ask you, when's the last time you used sleep in 5e after lvl 3 in a combat ?

Fair enough, I personally prefer more consistent damage in my combat though. I'd rather hit twice than hit/miss.

Fair enough, I get where your coming from. I'd like more consistent damage against, say, a dragon or something like that. But against goblins and weaker/low level monsters, I want to be able to slaughter them without much issue, which adds to the things you can do with them. Tossing a horde of 20 or 30 goblins at someone isn't as big of a problem if you can wipe out a huge chunk of them with a well placed fireball and a couple good hits from your fighter, whereas tossing a horde of dragons at a party isn't something that should ever even happen, but a big 4v1 dragon boss fight where you get pretty consistent hits is much more satisfying than missing most of the time.

Thast what you get for enemys that level with your character instead having them at a fixed low level.

have huge mobs at level 1 or level 2 and only leaders at level 3, bosses at player level or one above.
This should also increase survival and hit chances.

Yeah, that's how it should work. I really hope they don't level scale monsters to our party, because hitting level 10 and still fighting goblins on equal terms would be stupid. I would immediately launch an investigation into who is providing goblins with super soldier serum and turning them all into freaking Captain America or some shit. Goblins should always be low level trash mobs that rely on numbers to overwhelm you while any real bosses and higher level threats should be stronger monsters like dragons, liches, trolls, etc.

Isn't it MORE satisfying to whack the goblin in one hit than always needing two? Even if you sometimes miss first? And the "miss" should mean dodge / block / armor soak.

Imagine a cleave where you kill 3 goblins vs. a cleave only wounding 3 goblins to half health. Which makes a greatsword fighter feel more badass? And speaking of that cleave, goblins should remain weak but come in greater numbers. That's the whole point of 5e that weaker monsters can still hit you and be threatening in great numbers for even high level characters. I want a horde of goblins to AoE.

Agree with OP and others here, make misses look more exciting with animations, and stop messing up the 5e balance so much.