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Originally Posted by Demoulius
Originally Posted by azarhal
Originally Posted by Nyanko
Just check on the internet. Some players are soloing act 1 with no issue whatsoever.


They are using exploit and meta-knowledge to do that. Everyone can solo Act 1 with barrel cheese and abusing surface in general. Everyone can abuse shove. Everyone can summon the Imp familiar with good attack and bonus action invisibility on demand or the spider familiar with 33 hp too. Or abuse the stealth mechanic which is entirely line of sight based so as long as you aren't in the red cone you don't even need to be good at sneaking.

Nobody can solo the spider Matriarch with 0 prior knowledge. She can one-shot a level 4 character with her range attack and you'll trigger the fight before you see her unless you stealth rolls are good...and you can't one-shot her with stealth attacks with her amount of HP. She's only worth 20 XP, killing level 3 goblins is more rewarding too...

You can also do the entire critical path (i.e. get to the boat in the Underdark) by fighting exactly 0 enemies outside maybe a Bulette encounter where she runs away after a round. Doesn't require stealth, just abusing the tadpole conversation. I've done it yesterday, but took the time to kill the 3 leaders because why not.

People are right in saying the game isn't hard despite the HP bloat, even without all the cheese, but the reasons for that are:
1. the AI taking dumb decisions (focusing on downed party members...lol).
2. Long resting after every after fight, which appears to be a design decision with how camp conversations triggers.
3. The amount of scrolls, magical arrows, magical items you can find and the fact that everyone can cast spells from scrolls. A level 5 character in a high magic setting in 5e should only have 1 uncommon magical item. You get enough to fill all equipment slots in the EA except cloak as there are no cloak.
4. Meta-knowledge, going blindly into a fight is different than doing it for a second time.

1. Can be improve in development.
2. This really need to be reworked. You shouldn't be able to go the camp when there are potential enemies nearby.
3. That one is not going to change, as video gamers need their sparkling equipment and they need it fast otherwise they get bored.
4. Not something the devs can fix really.

1: isent actually that much of a dumb move considering we can otherwise res them in a fight. Making sure they stay down CAN be a good move, although not always.
2: That needs to change. Agreed.
3: The original baldurs gate handled this very well. Unless you had some meta knowledge about 2 rings it would take a decent amount of time before you stumbled upon magical items.
4: Agreed.

Not all gear that you find has to be magical btw. Or only have advantages. A great move would be if you found some non magical items that just behaved a little differently or allowed you to use them in a different manner. Making a sweeping attack with them for example or allowing you to cripple an enemy with a succesfull attack. Im just spitballing ideas but it could work and be implemented nicely.


1. That was just an example and it is sometimes dumb because it can make the enemy vulnerable. I also saw enemy clerics just cast resistance every round after expending their 1st spell level slots. Enemies going up to place themselves in the right spot for a good shove without having to move my characters. Them using items/spells/abilities that kill/hit their allies or themselves instead of my party members...

3. BG still had a lots of scrolls/potions, but the game spaced gaining the other items better. Mostly because vendors didn't sell many of them in the early game areas or they were super expensive for early adventurers. In the EA, you can buy +1 weapon/armor the first time you reach the Grove. You can even craft some. I really think they should leave that for Act 2 based on current level progression. The items left would be the Absolute items (which require the brand to use) and a few items in the Underdark/quest rewards. It doesn't help that the economy is totally broken, things are worth way too much despite vendors giving you around 50% of the price for them. A leather armor is supposed to be worth 10 gp, not 120 gp.

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Originally Posted by Demoulius
Was mostly talking about the gobbo camp but enemies there have ober twice the hp they should have, some have class lvls etc etc.

AND ontop of that theres tons of them.

The fight with gut where everyone in the throne room partipated in particular was a nasty one

And yet in every hard fight there is a way to cheese it.

I just played king of the hill there and no one ever got to attempt a proper attack on me. I was just raining down arrows from the highest elevation.

That wasn't the only place where climbing up made the fight trivial. There are places where they can't even reach you. You have advantage, they have disadvantage and you can move out of sight too. And the AI is dumb enough to keep fighting like that until they die.

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Originally Posted by 1varangian
Originally Posted by Demoulius
Was mostly talking about the gobbo camp but enemies there have ober twice the hp they should have, some have class lvls etc etc.

AND ontop of that theres tons of them.

The fight with gut where everyone in the throne room partipated in particular was a nasty one

And yet in every hard fight there is a way to cheese it.

I just played king of the hill there and no one ever got to attempt a proper attack on me. I was just raining down arrows from the highest elevation.

That wasn't the only place where climbing up made the fight trivial. There are places where they can't even reach you. You have advantage, they have disadvantage and you can move out of sight too. And the AI is dumb enough to keep fighting like that until they die.

Fact that you can cheese the fights doesent mean that buffing hp arbitrarily though. Just that something needs to be done about the cheese. Or the need to cheese.

Persobally high giving you advantagr is in itself fine. It also granting your opponents disadvantage though is overkill

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Originally Posted by denhonator
Originally Posted by Bufotenina
I think we should wait the full release, in OS you have four different difficulty levels, in almost all the games I play there's a choice on how difficult the game should be.


Saying "we should wait" is kinda weird when it's EA it's important to discuss now and affect the development.

We can assume there will be difficulty levels. But since currently there are not, we should assume this is standard, baseline difficulty. With this in mind, you could argue "HP bloat should only exist in a harder difficulty setting", for example


i see your point, and indeed is kinda weird ^^', but (obviously there was a "but" coming :P laugh ) my comment was about those players that feel like the actual combat system is too difficult (I get their point, sometimes it gets frustrating to get involved in fights).

On the actual mechanics I lack knowledge so I trust the players that state how difficult can be raised by other means different than hp bloating and numbers of npc. Still I wonder if it's possible at all to make such changes while mantaining coherence with the D&D 5th edition rules (alas I shiver if I think that your affirmation on the actual system being that standard, that is no different difficulty levels, becomes real. It would make hard the higher levels, making fights more a matter of piling up barrels and searching for altitudes and boringly long, like the Goblin Camp that takes a lot of time to be cleansed).

Larian has a very complicated issue in his hands: to balance the needs of seasoned and skilled (and lucky) players and those of unlucky not so skilled ones or the lazy ones (I fall in the unluck ones, miss miss miss critical miss are something I got used to laugh laugh laugh )

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Originally Posted by Demoulius
Originally Posted by 1varangian
Originally Posted by Demoulius
Was mostly talking about the gobbo camp but enemies there have ober twice the hp they should have, some have class lvls etc etc.

AND ontop of that theres tons of them.

The fight with gut where everyone in the throne room partipated in particular was a nasty one

And yet in every hard fight there is a way to cheese it.

I just played king of the hill there and no one ever got to attempt a proper attack on me. I was just raining down arrows from the highest elevation.

That wasn't the only place where climbing up made the fight trivial. There are places where they can't even reach you. You have advantage, they have disadvantage and you can move out of sight too. And the AI is dumb enough to keep fighting like that until they die.

Fact that you can cheese the fights doesent mean that buffing hp arbitrarily though. Just that something needs to be done about the cheese. Or the need to cheese.

Persobally high giving you advantagr is in itself fine. It also granting your opponents disadvantage though is overkill


That's not really the point, but in another thread someone suggest that higher/lower ground give something like a +/-1 or +/-2 bonus/malus to attack roll instead of an advantage/disadvantage.
I think it would be better to balance the combats.
Advantage/disadvantage is very too OP to be a main component of all fights.

Last edited by Maximuuus; 24/10/20 08:55 PM.

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HP bloat on a few named guys here and there, sub bosses and bosses I think is fine. But the common enemy needs MM health and rules. The minotaur fight only took me 2 tries to win. Even with their bloated abilities. Put them back at MM skills and abilities unless they are Sub bosses. I would be fine if one was a MM Minotaur and the other was a sub-boss with slightly bloated hp OR slightly bloated abilities.

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One good aspect of this game is the AI.

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give us our cake and let us eat it too!!!

maybe its a pain but this is a huge game right? give us lotsa options to play how we want. if we want 5E stats and all the missing then let us have that. people who dont want that can have the HP bloat. Pathfinder Kingmaker has tons of settings you can tinker with to get the game to play the way you want. I'm sure Larian could do similar and tweak balance as time goes... or i guess just let modders do it all smirk

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Well, I don't like the bloated HP either, but if Larian continues ''The Great War Against Missing"', it's better than FUBARing the Advantage/Disadvantage system by handing out advantage at no resource cost. This completely screws the class rewards system.

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Originally Posted by Matey
give us our cake and let us eat it too!!!

maybe its a pain but this is a huge game right? give us lotsa options to play how we want. if we want 5E stats and all the missing then let us have that. people who dont want that can have the HP bloat. Pathfinder Kingmaker has tons of settings you can tinker with to get the game to play the way you want. I'm sure Larian could do similar and tweak balance as time goes... or i guess just let modders do it all smirk


Exactly, you can change almost everything on pfkm difficulty.

If you don't like enemy with high AB, you can change it. If you like enemies dealing ludicrous high damage to your party with 200% damage, you can change it. Why? Because PFKM is one of the few modenr games which puts fun above this balance dogma...

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Originally Posted by Matey
give us our cake and let us eat it too!!!

maybe its a pain but this is a huge game right? give us lotsa options to play how we want. if we want 5E stats and all the missing then let us have that. people who dont want that can have the HP bloat. Pathfinder Kingmaker has tons of settings you can tinker with to get the game to play the way you want. I'm sure Larian could do similar and tweak balance as time goes... or i guess just let modders do it all smirk
Yeah, this is probably the best solution. Personally, I'll be annoyed if a D&D game supposedly based on 5e stays so distantly removed from D&D 5e, but I understand there are others with a range of differing preferences.

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You won’t realize how OP disadvantage/advantage is until you see the dice, I’m playing Solasta and when I see my nature 20 became a nature 1 then I realize it’s a very strong buff/debut. And it shall not be granted so easy.

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Originally Posted by AranSIRE
Only boss characters should Be 'bullet spondges" normal goblins should be quite fragile on dps to feel D&D goblins now it feels fighting Orcs on steroids. dosen't feel godly.


Bosses need lair actions to make them more dangerous, not more hit points. Let the bosses break the action economy, that why they are bosses.

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Originally Posted by Merry Mayhem
Originally Posted by AranSIRE
Only boss characters should Be 'bullet spondges" normal goblins should be quite fragile on dps to feel D&D goblins now it feels fighting Orcs on steroids. dosen't feel godly.


Bosses need lair actions to make them more dangerous, not more hit points. Let the bosses break the action economy, that why they are bosses.


I've been thinking on Legendary actions - maybe give the monster extra places in initiative that can only be used for legendary actions. It will telegraph the actions a bit, but would make something like the phase spider matriarch more interesting.

I really do think we should see goblins reverted to the tabletop standard, but at the same time I appreciate the variance in "types" of goblins. Oddly, it seems like goblins are the only opponents that have had this treatment.

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Originally Posted by azarhal
Originally Posted by Nyanko
Just check on the internet. Some players are soloing act 1 with no issue whatsoever.


They are using exploit and meta-knowledge to do that. Everyone can solo Act 1 with barrel cheese and abusing surface in general. Everyone can abuse shove. Everyone can summon the Imp familiar with good attack and bonus action invisibility on demand or the spider familiar with 33 hp too. Or abuse the stealth mechanic which is entirely line of sight based so as long as you aren't in the red cone you don't even need to be good at sneaking.

Nobody can solo the spider Matriarch with 0 prior knowledge. She can one-shot a level 4 character with her range attack and you'll trigger the fight before you see her unless you stealth rolls are good...and you can't one-shot her with stealth attacks with her amount of HP. She's only worth 20 XP, killing level 3 goblins is more rewarding too...

You can also do the entire critical path (i.e. get to the boat in the Underdark) by fighting exactly 0 enemies outside maybe a Bulette encounter where she runs away after a round. Doesn't require stealth, just abusing the tadpole conversation. I've done it yesterday, but took the time to kill the 3 leaders because why not.

People are right in saying the game isn't hard despite the HP bloat, even without all the cheese, but the reasons for that are:
1. the AI taking dumb decisions (focusing on downed party members...lol).
2. Long resting after every after fight, which appears to be a design decision with how camp conversations triggers.
3. The amount of scrolls, magical arrows, magical items you can find and the fact that everyone can cast spells from scrolls. A level 5 character in a high magic setting in 5e should only have 1 uncommon magical item. You get enough to fill all equipment slots in the EA except cloak as there are no cloak.
4. Meta-knowledge, going blindly into a fight is different than doing it for a second time.

1. Can be improve in development.
2. This really need to be reworked. You shouldn't be able to go the camp when there are potential enemies nearby.
3. That one is not going to change, as video gamers need their sparkling equipment and they need it fast otherwise they get bored.
4. Not something the devs can fix really.


5. abusing the advantage from height / using jump to get behind a mob so can almost always have advantage.
6. using all the bonus actions they added, shove, jump to disengage, etc.
7. Food healing during a fight.

Honestly if there was not all these homebrewed rules in effect, normal by the book goblins would be a challenge.


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Originally Posted by lvl20DM
Originally Posted by Merry Mayhem
Originally Posted by AranSIRE
Only boss characters should Be 'bullet spondges" normal goblins should be quite fragile on dps to feel D&D goblins now it feels fighting Orcs on steroids. dosen't feel godly.


Bosses need lair actions to make them more dangerous, not more hit points. Let the bosses break the action economy, that why they are bosses.


I've been thinking on Legendary actions - maybe give the monster extra places in initiative that can only be used for legendary actions. It will telegraph the actions a bit, but would make something like the phase spider matriarch more interesting.

I really do think we should see goblins reverted to the tabletop standard, but at the same time I appreciate the variance in "types" of goblins. Oddly, it seems like goblins are the only opponents that have had this treatment.


The Githyanki patrol look like they are specialized but I would expect them to be.

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Originally Posted by denhonator
Originally Posted by Bufotenina
I think we should wait the full release, in OS you have four different difficulty levels, in almost all the games I play there's a choice on how difficult the game should be.


Saying "we should wait" is kinda weird when it's EA it's important to discuss now and affect the development.

We can assume there will be difficulty levels. But since currently there are not, we should assume this is standard, baseline difficulty. With this in mind, you could argue "HP bloat should only exist in a harder difficulty setting", for example


Yes, this is the time to be discussing this, not after release. Fixing general balance need to be done as early as possible. Last thing you want to do is leave balancing stuff to the end. A lots of these things have ripple effects and the sooner they can be address, the smoother the rest of your development can go.

Part of the reason I am puzzled about why they are tossing out so much of the tabletop rules that have been tested for 5 plus years?

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Originally Posted by dunehunter
You won’t realize how OP disadvantage/advantage is until you see the dice, I’m playing Solasta and when I see my nature 20 became a nature 1 then I realize it’s a very strong buff/debut. And it shall not be granted so easy.


Hiding the dice is certainly the onlyh way they will ever sneak this shit past the average players head. D&D players already know how ridiculously strong Advantage is. If they showed people what was happening with the dice it would piss them off, and rightfully so, because Advantage was a niche effect that was given out only by certain conditions and class effects. Larian needs to tone back giving out these bonuses so easily.


another thing I noticed and the reason I came to this thread. Shopkeepers are frigin LOADED right from the start. no freaking wonder Larian feels the need to bump HP at the expense of AC.... players have a full set of +1 gear right when they hit the grove if they thieve for it (long rests reset inventory). Larian should reel that in... these are refugees, if their shopkeepers have that much gear, why are they having a problem with the garbage geared gobos? Every tiefling refugee could be decked out, I think the greedy merchants are the source of their problems.

Last edited by pill0ws; 25/10/20 03:33 PM.
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Originally Posted by Merry Mayhem
Originally Posted by AranSIRE
Only boss characters should Be 'bullet spondges" normal goblins should be quite fragile on dps to feel D&D goblins now it feels fighting Orcs on steroids. dosen't feel godly.


Bosses need lair actions to make them more dangerous, not more hit points. Let the bosses break the action economy, that why they are bosses.


And minions, powerful resistances, supernatural defenses, spell like abilities, etc; not HP bloat

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