Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Wish for Echo Knight and Variant Human

I really wish Larian adds fighter subclass Echo Knight and Variant Human race for the full release.

Variant human's starting feat gives a lot of option for any class.

Echo knight, well, it is the only fighter subclass that gives the amazing options not only to combat but also to non-combat play.

Variant human is overpowered as a race though. In my mind also breaks with the all-rounder philosophy and takes them into master of all territory. Battlemaster is a very strong Fighter subclass, I think you'll find that most players solidly place it in the S tier. So basically this seems to be a bid for power gaming.

I would have liked the revised Ranger and Gloom Stalker. They are overpowered too, whereas BG3 Rangers seems...very strong but somewhat balanced

No one shouldn't mind having over powered races or subclasses for a non-competitive game. This is not an mmo afterall. Plus, both variant human and echo knight exist in 5e compatible rulesets.

I'd like to see the Variant Human, as well. I know that it is seen as unbalanced/overpowered, but the basic human is substantially underpowered. The concern is really about feats at level 1, which skews things for the first "tier" of play. If this is really a balance concern on Larian's part, then they could consider limiting the selection of feats at level 1 to avoid some problematic selections.

The Echo Knight is a weird one - it's from the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and Critical Role. Much of that book is not as thoroughly playtested as a typical D&D product, and it shows. I'm not sure it that it really fits the Forgotten Realms and is pretty campaign specific.

TBH I'd rather they just give everyone a feat at level 1 because variant human is so good that it ends up skewing what people pick

I do miss variant human ...



Agreed to disagree. The issue with Human is, you either have the variant human slightly on overpowered side (they are strong, but compared to the likes of aarakocra or simic hybrid it's not close to impressive at all), or you have the base human which frankly speaking is probably the worst race in the game.

Wait, you saw EA and thought bringing in Wildemount source and introducing Dunamis as an arcane force was a reasonable item on the to-do list?

Echo Knight is neither PHB nor even from the same campaign setting, so perhaps set that one aside for now.





The problem is that standard human is underpowered as a race. Classes are not balanced around needing +1 in all abilities, so at least 3 of those will be essentially going to waste, and there's no other compensation.

If Larian wants, they can disable certain of the more powerful Feats until a character reaches level 4, which is when anyone could have potentially one of those anyway.

Would Variant human be more balanced if you only got one +1 ability score bonus with a feat? That way, you can still get 16 in your main stat, but now you're sacrificing much more for the feat, similar to normal choose-ASI-or-feat level ups...

It hardly changes anything tbh. Variant humans are not overpowered, but incredibly useful should you run a build that requires a handful of feats, such as Polearm Master + Sentinel. Granted, some of the feats such as Sharpshooter are incredibly powerful, but it's very likely the only feat you are going to get, which makes your variant human boil down to +4 stats total (because instead of taking this feat as say an elf, you will just put points into stats) It's really comparable to other races, you are trading the darkvision for a tiny bit more power early on. Now the elephant in the room, the Lucky feat is different. The balance issue lies with the Lucky feat itself, rather than Human grabbing it.

Sharpshooter tends to level off, its just insanely strong level 1-10. Anyone can get it at 4, the human variant just comes out of the gate like a monster. Nice thing about the human variant is that it allows you to get some of the feat combos (sentinel/polearm master) on most the classes that dont get an extra ASI before level 8. Having the mechanics of your character functioning is important for a lot of builds... it also lets you start focusing on stats sooner.






They are already sacrificing things for the feat. They dont get darkvision, they dont get any neat racial feature or spells at certain levels like the elves or tieflings do. They get 2 stat points and they get a feat

They are already sacrificing things for the feat, true. But a lot of people still think Variant humans are overpowered; thus there's an argument that they're not sacrificing enough.

In a lot of games I play in/run, we let all players get a free feat at 1st level (variant humans get 2). This helps players who want to build a feat-heavy build but don't want to be a human, and adds some flavor to characters who would choose ASIs over feats at every 4th level. I highly doubt Larian is going to add this, but it would match their philosophy of "allow characters to have more options/abilities than 5e rules allow"... If they're concerned about balance, they can do as Stabbey suggested and restrict the "more powerful" feats to level 4.