Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Large battles are nothing but a chore

Totally agree. what are the best fights in the EA? the minotaurs and the spider queen. not million of enemies just a couple of interesting ones.

Another way to make larger combats less of a slog and more snappy and fun, would be to make things like Goblins easier to kill. I don't know if the game has level scaling (though I imagine it probably does), but goblins shouldn't level with me to be on par or just barely weaker than me when I'm level 8 or whatever. They should already be decently weak enemies that my PC's can take out without too many issues, and as I level up and get more powerful they should become trivial monsters based on the fact that they're goblins, not based on the area I find them in. If a bunch of goblins try to jump 4 level 8 adventurers, they should get absolutely slaughtered, not put up a decent fight.

Anyway, got a bit sidetracked but the point I'm going for is to make weaker monsters like goblins actually feel weak. It shouldn't take my fighter 3 or 4 hits to kill a goblin when in PnP 5e my fighter or barbarian should be decapitating goblins left and right with no problem. Flinging a horde of 20 goblins at my party wouldn't be a slog if my characters could easily kill 1 or 2 each per round, or even 4 to 5 goblins with a decent AoE spell from the wizard. Just make combat faster and more lethal against weak monsters like goblins, and you can fling a whole army of the buggers at us in later levels.

Eeeee. I think "fights against swarms of weak enemies" have their own merits and can be an excellent diversion. But you need to be sure to tune them properly, giving them a quick pace and giving to the player the tools to reduce the numbers in a swift and effective manner.


To be fair, some of the biggest fights in this EA build are challenges you aren't even supposed to to take ahead on, but work your way around.

I don't usually mind slow paced tactical combat...but seems to me Larian for now is more focused on making this a slogfest D&D simulator rather than a fun game.

One notable example on waste of time is the Warlock's Hex spell which is pretty much cast every round. Why oh why include the useless ability check debuff that more than doubles the time it takes to cast the spell? Either REMOVE this component or make it so that the spell debuffs ALL ability checks AUTOMATICALLY.

I would like to comment and say personally myself I know its not everyones cup of tea. But personally I enjoy some of those long drawn out larger encounters. Some times those heavier numbers encounters are better and more challenging than smaller numbers. There are times both are enjoyable. Also pre-planning for those encounters can be very impactful more so than a single enemy encounter. While there are alot of really large scale encounters in the goblin camp there are a lot of ways you can take 5 -10 minutes setup for the fight before it starts and make the encounter a 10 minute large scale encounter instead of a 1 hour large scale encounter. 1-2 of those fights you can horde barrels of explosives and alcohol/oil and just clear it in 1 maybe 2 rounds of combat. It just requires thought and it makes the game more enjoyable especially if the sheer numbers prove to be challenging. They are trying to have those options for people who like it and I really do enjoy those large scale battle fights even if they do drag out sometimes. Some of us find them fun.

Using oil barrels and the like to get through a big fight is plain cheese and should not be the game's expectation for how a player would deal with that encounter. Fighting anything more than 8 enemies in a battle is a tedious and boring chore.

That would make it impossible to follow enemy movements and attacks, which are important for your own plans.

+1

I hope so, because I plainly refuse to use that type of strategy.
Not just because it's immersion-breaking crap, but because I find exceedingly tedious to use that kind of meticulous accumulation of stuff to "set up the battle".

Entire different argument for proper environmental elements that can be exploited to turn the tide of a battle (i.e. the hanging marble block above these bandit's heads at the beginning).
I love that shit and I'd like to see more of it later in the game.
I love even more than using it is not without consequences (i.e. If you make it fall you'll alert all the henchmen roaming on the lower floor), which makes for an interesting trade-off of benefits and compromises.

AI just needs to be optimized so they aren't standing there computing their move. I am certain it can and will be fixed. Never found it to be boring or a chore (except when a friend aggroed everyone in Arx is DOS2 and it took forever for them all to go).

my post was supposed to be sarcastic. i hope that came through.
i was so hoping for all that 5e tactic fun, because there a lot of possibilities with tactics and the right builds.
but the route that larian decided to go is really concerning...

To me, this is a real issue with the combat system right now when facing high number of ennemies.
The higher the number, the longer you wait. It can reach an absurd amount of time.
Time that you don't do anything, you don't play anymore.
And i think that should not happen.

Yep, that's the saving grace, as it were. I was surprised to see it, since not many games allow saves within the combat rounds. If it gets to be too much of a slog, I can come back later and finish it.

The AI delay might be better optimized by the time the game is released. I don't remember it being an issue with DOS2.

Big battles are awful. Even if they get rid of "plotting next move" and enemies that don't do anything, waiting for all those turns sucks.

I cant remember any fight in DOS2 having the same amount of combatants as the druid grove fights. Thats one thing from DOS they should keep.

Exactly my thought. The game should do the calculation on the background at the start of the enemy turn and then do all the animations at once. I mean, surely it's not the computational power to manage 5 goblins at one the problem.

This shouldn't always happen, but we should have the option to skip consecutive enemy turns by pressing space or something. I just fought the whole goblin camp where I positioned my characters on the upper levels so almost none of the goblins could actually attack me. Yet I still had to watch each of the 20+ goblins run in some random direction and then do nothing, sometimes even using their Action Surges to do an additional nothing. Then I'd attack. Then repeat. It took over an hour...

But, consecutive enemy turns should not be automatically skipped. This would make it way too confusing for the majority of the (smaller, with more important enemies) fights.

I have had no problem with the battles as they are. Aside from the irritating bug where you have characters in a block and ending one character's turn skips the remaining character in that block's turn.

Big battles are rough and I hope they aren't the norm. 4 v 4 should be the norm. 4 PCs vs 8 makes it WAY too easy for your squishy wizard to get taken down in the first round of combat since the jerk AI seems to target low AC opponents rather than using line of effect or something). The number of ranged attackers and the frequency of everyone having special ammo and alchemical weapons is a pain.

How would a gnoll get hold of an acid arrow anyway? Using a bow and arrow is probably at the limits of their intelligence already. This annoyed me to no end on my playthrough.