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

Because there are classes that are built around hitting things - Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Warlock. Hitting things and hitting them hard is what they are all about.

I am not saying you shouldn't use other things like surface effects/shoves, etc. I am all for using them. But if your core class abilities are about hitting things then they should be around hitting things.

And my arguments is that in 5e, the high miss chance is acceptable because it is an excellent chance for RP. Which is completely gone in BG3 because it is a video game. Instead you are stuck with messages saying: miss, miss, hit, miss, which is not fun.

It's a normal difficulty meant for hordes of people who never touched D&D ever or since 2e at best and want just to gather a party of characters they like, roll a main character they like and quest with them without having to optimize every bloody ounce of their game.

People here totally enjoy smelling their farts it seems. "Just optimize everything lol, how do you not know these things sheesh it's a common knowledge - they teach it in schools. Just use ur brain and figure out whole 5e D&D system with your brain power!"

Keep this nonsense to Tactician difficulty. Normal difficulty should be accessible without mandating optimization at cost of story.

It is not meant to be played as Lone Wolf although you still can. One of the best things of the DnD Classes is that all are viable in some way but none excells at everything. High AC enemies are a weakness of the classes you describe. You have to build around them by having a good party to complement you and make up for weaknesses or use sub classes like eldritch knight or feats that give you certain spells that might come in handy if you want to trade off specialization for versatility. DnD 5e gives you all the means.

This is something I can agree with. But it would be enough in that case to simply reduce AC without overhauling the entire DnD 5e ruleset.

this.

D&D 5e already has the chance to hit be far higher than similar RPGs, D&D 5e design is already high hp and comparatively low AC. whats been done is to break the carefully designed bounded accuracy. On top of that, they also made popular low level spells like sleep worse too.

animations for misses would be nice to be fair. But seriously, please stop "tweaking" everything, it really isn't improvements that are being made.

I don't see the problem with shuffling the stats around, this table (it's copied from DMG, p274 if anyone wanna check it out, it's a great balancing tool) exists for a reason.
From my experience, so long you are keeping it as a guideline, you will end up with the same CR/XP value as the MM

I'm fully expecting a hardcore d&d setting to be different from default difficulty where ACs might be lowered. But I agree the HP shouldn't be raised. Increase the number of goblins, not HP. Have they said anything about difficulty settings?

It would be nice to hear confirmation that there will be a hardcore setting with actual rules.

Nobody is saying "optimize everything, min-max everything, powergame using guides etc.".
People aren't that stupid. Anyone should be able to understand that some encounters require you to adapt and figure out a way to defeat the opposition. If someone wants to play a game where they can just ignore every single mechanic of the game and still plow through everything I don't believe they should be playing a game based on D&D. And please note that I'm not being dismissive of people who want an easier time at the game. That's why different difficulties exist and they should tune them to whichever experience they prefer. What you're saying however is something along the lines of the player finding an enemy which is immune to physical damage let's say, attempt to bash it with a hammer 20 times (having a little *IMMUNE* text popup everytime they do it), start foaming at the mouth because he can't possibly understand what he must be doing wrong, so well I guess Larian is just going to have to make that enemy vulnerable to physical damage now. It doesn't make sense.

Not only does it not make sense to start changing monster attributes and characteristics as it also effectively breaks other functionalities. Some examples were already given here such as the sleep or bless spell. Then for each thing you break, you need to find a workaround to balance it. But then the workaround will break something else... You get the idea.

And since you're touching the difficulty aspect, I still believe that even the lowest difficulties should keep the lore and monster characteristics so that the experience of playing a D&D game and exploring a forgotten realms setting remains. Have it be easier to hit enemies, make your characters take less damage, etc... Things that can smooth the difficulty of the game but without breaking its core mechanics.

I get how party composition works. You are missing my point.

In 5e misses are ok, they do not feel like a slog because you often don't spend that much time in combat any way.

In BG3 I'd say 80%+ of your time is devoted to combat. So having even a single member of your party miss that 50% of the time, at least at early levels, is very frustrating. Sure, once you up your Str/Dex it will get better, but for the first 3 levels your fighter is just a machine for shoving off cliffs?

I think I get what you want but in that case Larian should rather change the enemies they throw at you by having some higher HP lower AC enemies as well for the early game rather than tweaking DnD 5e with all the balancing issues that follow. And yes in the goblin camp your warrior would be rather the one who is just there for carrying stuff. But there might be other enemies as well with high HP where your typical cantrips do practically no damage and spells like sleeping are not working. That would be the encounter where your fighter is shining.

100% Agree! This is how you do it in tabletop, so why not do it here?

Also, the balance from these issues is all out of whack. Sleep is almost worthless, and certainly has no long-term value as a pick now. This minor AC/HP change to goblins will require most spells in the whole game to be rebalanced (and then all classes) until it's barely even 5e at all.

Instead of making this a different game from 5e, find a way to make the 5e results cooler and more interesting.

Spells targets DC is still frustrating tho, look at Sacred Flame which only has 50% hit chance. They only reduce enemy AC but not saves, and constant advantage makes the gap larger. Spells are not affected by advantage/disadvantage. Now your hit chances with adv is like 90+, while spells misses half of them, then they need to change more to make spells feel better. But if they make saves too hard to pass dc, then it will finally result into the dilemma they had before in DOS1, the team who win initiative will hard CC the opposite side and win the combat. RNG in dnd comes for a reason.

All Larian is doing is adjusting stat blocks to fit the story/encounter so it is enjoyable for all classes. Mostly because unlike a 5e game there is no DM who can adjust the encounter to fit the party composition.

There is nothing wrong with tweaking enemies to fit the story/encounter. If they want you to fight an Intellect Devourer at level 1 - they scale it.

+1

Veteran 5E DM here, and veteran homebrewer and home designer. 5E is balanced around a 65% hit chance for "typical" equal CR foes. Most fights, though, are going to be against more numerous, lower CR foes, so that hit rate will be a little higher. So the base game is already keyed to a 2/3rds or so hit rate. Some monsters (like the 15 AC Goblin, who has a shield and won't get that AC when using a bow mind you) have higher AC than normal. Many monsters (animals, ogres, zombies) have lower AC than the baseline.

But, like many have pointed out, adjusting the hit rates to be "more fun" and "more reliable" will require them to go through and redial other aspects of the game, and I hope the designers are paying attention to that. If you "double" enemy HP, you'll need to "double" the amount of HP the sleep spell does. If you're dialing down AC, you may need to dial down saving throws too (I was noticing Sacred Flame getting saved against A LOT).

I'm just glad they didn't redial things so attacks always hit, like they had talked about. That would have been rough.

And just in case someone wants to check my math when I'm saying there's a 65% hit chance:

Typical "white room" PC has a 16 in their attacking stat, and starts with a +2 proficiency bonus, so they have a +5 to hit. Baseline AC for a CR 1 creature is 13. +5 vs 13 means you hit on a 3 or higher. That's a 65% hit chance.

+1 Dont mess with the Tabletop rules. Make a story mode for people that dont want to deal with combat at all.
I'm buying this game for the 5E rules and Larian terrain combat design.

An easy solve is to not allow characters to carry barrels around. This shouldn't be allowed anyways, as it's highly unrealistic. Plus it's clearly breaking the 5e game.

To fix up a DRASTIC misconception that have been spouted as truth in this thread:

Larian has stated that the difficulty for this EA is the intended "Hard" difficulty. Not story mode, not normal difficulty. Hard. They are intentionally doing this to gather data on which fights may be harder or easier than intended.

No, you're wrong. It's pretty clear you don't have extensive experience with 5e if you think that the 'martial' classes should be able to hit everything to their own satisfaction.

D&D, 5e, and the Baldur's Gate series of games has always been about the party, not the person. In some fights, the big guy with the big stick will get to excel. In other fights, they have to take a backseat and have someone else excel. Or maybe the fight is such that one character has to *help* the other character, so their combined firepower is greater than each individually.

I totally agree, those classes shouldn't rely on shove or Surfaces because I absolutely despise the importing of DoS surfaces into a game system where they don't belong. The Rogue has the ability to BA hide, providing Advantage which is a huge boost in hit-chance. The Ranger has some spellcasting support like Entangle to try and Restrain the enemy, granting *all* of their allies Advantage. The Ranger also potentially has a pet or two, further adding utility to help the battle by increasing the number of attacks they get to make.

The Warlock is literally a spellcaster. Yes EB + Hex is their bread and butter, but it's not the only thing they have. Maybe you sacrifice that Hex and instead cast Hold Person, so your big fighter that was missing suddenly has Advantage *and* automatically crits, devastating the enemy.

And what about the Fighter? Well, ideally Larian will implement the rules of 5e correctly when they can. That means the Battle Master will get the Precision maneuver (add d8 to a hit to possibly turn a miss into a hit) and things like Grapple, to pin the enemy down so the ranged characters aren't getting attacked as often.

Ultimately, it's pretty clear that D&D just isn't for you. It's not an Action RPG, it's not meant to make every character feel supremely powerful in every encounter. Some enemies have Low AC, and your Fighter will wreck them. Some enemies have high AC, so your Fighter will either need help, or its your spellcasters time to shine.

Party synergy and teamwork beats everything else in D&D, and it should here too.