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Originally Posted by Starlights
Originally Posted by Maximuuus
Don't forget to take back your 1H+shield after you used your bonus action. +2AC during your ennemie's turns is not that bad.... smile

..... and send that greatsword to the next companion so he/she can use it at her/his turn. Like a round-robin kind of thing.
I'm a bit worried this kind of stuff makes it to a public release, and survives many patches for months and months. There's so much of it it makes you wonder if this is a Larian design principle more than an oversight. Maybe they like players being able to break the game for "player agency" or whatnot?

- cheating the game by switching items freely as described above (including switching armor freely for whatever magical properties you might need atm)
- Wizards learning Cleric spells and every class being able to use spell scrolls (breaks class balance and identity but probably "fun" for Wizards to cast heals and for Fighters to use spell scrolls?)
- trivializing combat encounters with high ground, stealth, barrels, shoving... so many options to cheese the fights
- the memes: eating pigs' heads for massive heals during combat, or building instant archery towers from crates in your inventory to get advantage, free "backstab" advantages

It doesn't feel like an accomplishment when using any of these exploits. It's all just a big meme, really.

Last edited by 1varangian; 24/03/21 10:13 AM.
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Originally Posted by mr_planescapist
On a side note...during DOS2 EA did people complain about this? (free weapons switching during combat, food...?). Or was it already implemented like now (takes action to use).?

This wasn't really an issue in DOS2 as weapon type was linked to your "class"/specialization. You would specialize or be horribly sub-optimal. Swapping weapons was prohibitively expensive in terms of action points unless you were playing "lone-wolf"/solo who were overcompensated with more action points (to the point of making solo-play easier than playing a full team).

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Originally Posted by 1varangian
It doesn't feel like an accomplishment when using any of these exploits. It's all just a big meme, really.

Most would agree. But Larian seem to strongly believe in maxims like "more is better", and "if you don't like something, ignore it". Even when the "legal exploits" are obtrusively universal core mechanics that you can't help feel like you're engaging in self-nerfing (which is counter to the essence of RPGs) unless you engage in. All Larian gameplay implementations are exploitable, unimmersive and strongly unbalancing. Even those most people don't necessarily think of as cheese, such as pickpocketing - which in reality is giving the middle finger to risk vs reward mechanics (for all intents and purposes near endless source of free stuff for near zero risk and zero effort) for perceived fun.

At this point, all I feel is realistic to hope for is a DOS game-mode for the "lolz-crowd", and a D&D game-mode that limits the cheese.

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Originally Posted by 1varangian
[...] if this is a Larian design principle more than an oversight. Maybe they like players being able to break the game for "player agency" or whatnot?
Yes.

Larian loves letting players find ways to break the game (see 57:35 to 59:11). It's part of their philosophy in general, and probably part of their vision for BG3. People are free to ask Larian to change their vision, but I doubt Larian will heed those calls (of course, it would have been more efficient if they had communicated more clearly on this, but ... they haven't).

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Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
Yes.

Larian loves letting players find ways to break the game (see 57:35 to 59:11). It's part of their philosophy in general, and probably part of their vision for BG3. People are free to ask Larian to change their vision, but I doubt Larian will heed those calls (of course, it would have been more efficient if they had communicated more clearly on this, but ... they haven't).

It's regrettable. I'd like to beat the game through a keen understanding of DnD's class abilities and spells, not through a keen understanding of Larian cheese.

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I missunderstood what I read/heard. This message was useless.

Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
Originally Posted by 1varangian
[...] if this is a Larian design principle more than an oversight. Maybe they like players being able to break the game for "player agency" or whatnot?
Yes.

Larian loves letting players find ways to break the game (see 57:35 to 59:11). It's part of their philosophy in general, and probably part of their vision for BG3. People are free to ask Larian to change their vision, but I doubt Larian will heed those calls (of course, it would have been more efficient if they had communicated more clearly on this, but ... they haven't).

Their philosophy is very strange.

Last edited by Maximuuus; 24/03/21 03:40 PM.

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Originally Posted by Passerby
Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
Yes.

Larian loves letting players find ways to break the game (see 57:35 to 59:11). It's part of their philosophy in general, and probably part of their vision for BG3. People are free to ask Larian to change their vision, but I doubt Larian will heed those calls (of course, it would have been more efficient if they had communicated more clearly on this, but ... they haven't).

It's regrettable. I'd like to beat the game through a keen understanding of DnD's class abilities and spells, not through a keen understanding of Larian cheese.
I don't think it's too much to ask for a D&D Hardcore difficulty without the cheesy exploits for a D&D game.

Some things like the resting system is not up to difficulty settings though and needs to be designed for that from the ground up. So I really, really hope Larian respect that many people actually do want to play BG3 like it's D&D 5e. They are making changes to 5e in the name of "video game" that have nothing to do with video games, but everything to do with someone's personal preference. I love the tactical combat in D&D. The dumbed down combat in BG3, not so much.

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Originally Posted by 1varangian
Originally Posted by Starlights
Originally Posted by Maximuuus
Don't forget to take back your 1H+shield after you used your bonus action. +2AC during your ennemie's turns is not that bad.... smile

..... and send that greatsword to the next companion so he/she can use it at her/his turn. Like a round-robin kind of thing.
I'm a bit worried this kind of stuff makes it to a public release, and survives many patches for months and months. There's so much of it it makes you wonder if this is a Larian design principle more than an oversight. Maybe they like players being able to break the game for "player agency" or whatnot?

- cheating the game by switching items freely as described above (including switching armor freely for whatever magical properties you might need atm)
- Wizards learning Cleric spells and every class being able to use spell scrolls (breaks class balance and identity but probably "fun" for Wizards to cast heals and for Fighters to use spell scrolls?)
- trivializing combat encounters with high ground, stealth, barrels, shoving... so many options to cheese the fights
- the memes: eating pigs' heads for massive heals during combat, or building instant archery towers from crates in your inventory to get advantage, free "backstab" advantages

It doesn't feel like an accomplishment when using any of these exploits. It's all just a big meme, really.

Agreed. I do understand and accept the "if you don't like it, don't use it concept", DND PnP is relies very heavily on this type of thinking, but the combat turn in PnP tends to be very specific in many ways. You have an Action which allows you to do many things, attack, push, disengage, jump, etc, then a Bonus Action (if you have something that gives you a bonus action), which is very limited in what you are capable of doing. A fighter might attack, then say, "well, I'm going to go over here and engage this enemy." The DM would say, "well, the one you just attacked gets an attack of opportunity." Why? Because the fighter's Action was to attack, a disengage is an Action, not a Bonus Action. Stabilizing a downed character is an Action, not a Bonus Action.

Bonus Actions are actually not very common in PnP. Certain classes are granted Bonus Actions, like the rogue ability to use a Bonus Action to dash, disengage, or hide.

When mentioning "micro-managing" equipment, this is all part of the DnD experience. This is why Bags of Holding exist. :P (which essentially we have at the very start of the game smile )

What it boils down to, is what makes sense. You have 6 seconds in a round of combat. What can be done in that 6 seconds. Attacking takes 3-4 seconds, so then you are down to 2-3 seconds. Swapping armor, trading items with friends, or even swapping another weapon from your backpack, doesn't make sense.

Some DM's will stick to the rules and require an action to drink a potion. Other's will say it's a bonus action to drink one, but an action to pour one down a friends throat if they are down.(Me, personally, I don't allow this without a medicine check to make sure you don't drown the person)

I would love Larian to make a lot of different toggles to turn on and off certain aspects like stated above. Again, everyone plays the game for their own reasons. I prefer a more realistic style of play in this case.

In the whole arena of scrolls and wizards learning every spell in the game? I sure do hope that gets changed. As you stated, certain classes are geared toward magic, others are not. If a fighter wants to use a wizard scroll? Make an Arcana check. If failed, the spell fails and the scroll is destroyed. And, of course, wizards learn wizard spells! If it is on their spell list, they can learn it, if it isn't, then no.

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Originally Posted by Passerby
Originally Posted by Drath Malorn
Yes.

Larian loves letting players find ways to break the game (see 57:35 to 59:11). It's part of their philosophy in general, and probably part of their vision for BG3. People are free to ask Larian to change their vision, but I doubt Larian will heed those calls (of course, it would have been more efficient if they had communicated more clearly on this, but ... they haven't).

It's regrettable. I'd like to beat the game through a keen understanding of DnD's class abilities and spells, not through a keen understanding of Larian cheese.
Showing my age here; Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 had it's fair shair of tom-f**kery with mechanics. One of the more infamous ones was with an enemy just out of the party's line of sight and casting cloudkill (aoe damage over time spell, I forget if it's made it to 5e). There was also stuff like the cloak that reflected magic back at the casters, allowing you to walk into a room of beholders and let them do the work for you. Then there was the more fundementally baked in problems, like higher level spells actually being fairly limited; even towards the end of the series when you were fighting some of the most canonically powerful beings in the setting, Dispel Magic, Fireball and Lightning Bolt (all level 3) would usually sort you for most encounters in terms of offensive magic, while more powerful spells were functionally useless (especially the ones that required the enemy to have a certain HD; by the time you got those spells, most things beat the threshold).

That is Bioware and Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 however, not Larian and Baldur's Gate 3. Players are always going to find ways to break the game. That is inevitable as taxes, so this might sound rather cavalier however I think there should be many ways to do it, so long as they're all fun and if you want to do it 'properly' you can do it that way too.

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Players finding ways to break the game >< Devs implement basic mechanics that breaks the game.

Last edited by Maximuuus; 02/04/21 08:14 PM.

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Anyone who buys the game is welcome to figure out whatever cheats, hacks, misuses they want from the game.

As for me, I'm astonished daily that people would even TRY such inane things as moving weapons from character to character during battle, swapping armor on and off during a battle, cramming 15 donuts down their characters throats every turn to heal, and some of the other nonsense, much less actually USE such mechanics.

But hey, if that is what makes the game rock for them, more power to them.

None of these issues spoil the game for me - nobody is going to MAKE me do any of these things.

Reality is EVERY mod out there is essentially somebody creating a hack/cheat from what the developers intended - and we each choose which, if any, of these to make use of.

Your balance might very well be my Imbalance, and vice versa.

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Originally Posted by Anfindel
Anyone who buys the game is welcome to figure out whatever cheats, hacks, misuses they want from the game.

As for me, I'm astonished daily that people would even TRY such inane things as moving weapons from character to character during battle, swapping armor on and off during a battle, cramming 15 donuts down their characters throats every turn to heal, and some of the other nonsense, much less actually USE such mechanics.

But hey, if that is what makes the game rock for them, more power to them.

None of these issues spoil the game for me - nobody is going to MAKE me do any of these things.

Reality is EVERY mod out there is essentially somebody creating a hack/cheat from what the developers intended - and we each choose which, if any, of these to make use of.

Your balance might very well be my Imbalance, and vice versa.

I absolutely agree. It was very funny when I found out that someone was carrying barrels with them. My first question was " Why?" and the second "How did you think of this?". Developers can add strange features, but my opinion is that many players spoil their own game.


I don't speak english well, but I try my best. Ty
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Originally Posted by Nyloth
Originally Posted by Anfindel
Anyone who buys the game is welcome to figure out whatever cheats, hacks, misuses they want from the game.

As for me, I'm astonished daily that people would even TRY such inane things as moving weapons from character to character during battle, swapping armor on and off during a battle, cramming 15 donuts down their characters throats every turn to heal, and some of the other nonsense, much less actually USE such mechanics.

But hey, if that is what makes the game rock for them, more power to them.

None of these issues spoil the game for me - nobody is going to MAKE me do any of these things.

Reality is EVERY mod out there is essentially somebody creating a hack/cheat from what the developers intended - and we each choose which, if any, of these to make use of.

Your balance might very well be my Imbalance, and vice versa.

I absolutely agree. It was very funny when I found out that someone was carrying barrels with them. My first question was " Why?" and the second "How did you think of this?". Developers can add strange features, but my opinion is that many players spoil their own game.

The barrel thing is mostly a holdover from DoS2 where you could just pick up barrels and then people figured out that when those barrels break you got a real fun time on your hands, and then if it was death fog damn you basically win the game.
Other things come up when you just try things and find holes in a system, like the weapon swapping which can be abused really easily.

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Originally Posted by CJMPinger
Originally Posted by Nyloth
Originally Posted by Anfindel
Anyone who buys the game is welcome to figure out whatever cheats, hacks, misuses they want from the game.

As for me, I'm astonished daily that people would even TRY such inane things as moving weapons from character to character during battle, swapping armor on and off during a battle, cramming 15 donuts down their characters throats every turn to heal, and some of the other nonsense, much less actually USE such mechanics.

But hey, if that is what makes the game rock for them, more power to them.

None of these issues spoil the game for me - nobody is going to MAKE me do any of these things.

Reality is EVERY mod out there is essentially somebody creating a hack/cheat from what the developers intended - and we each choose which, if any, of these to make use of.

Your balance might very well be my Imbalance, and vice versa.

I absolutely agree. It was very funny when I found out that someone was carrying barrels with them. My first question was " Why?" and the second "How did you think of this?". Developers can add strange features, but my opinion is that many players spoil their own game.

The barrel thing is mostly a holdover from DoS2 where you could just pick up barrels and then people figured out that when those barrels break you got a real fun time on your hands, and then if it was death fog damn you basically win the game.
Other things come up when you just try things and find holes in a system, like the weapon swapping which can be abused really easily.

I played DOS2. I took barrels only for Fane, because he can't use potions. I've never used barrels to kill. So it's your choice. I finished game in co-op and not one of us did not come up with idea "oh, let's take barrels everywhere to make it easier for us".


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Originally Posted by Nyloth
I played DOS2. I took barrels only for Fane, because he can't use potions. I've never used barrels to kill. So it's your choice. I finished game in co-op and not one of us did not come up with idea "oh, let's take barrels everywhere to make it easier for us".

I actually agree with this, but one also needs to consider that DOS2 as a whole was not really that tightly balanced around the existence of environmental cheese, it was balanced around what you could do with your actual skills. You could attempt using the same cheese tactics, but it wasn't really worth your time if you had the tactical thinking to achieve similar effects with a fraction of the time using your actual abilities.

BG3 has a much different context, where your standard actions and spells are a lot less powerful, while the concept of things like shoving, barrelmancy, and having party members sneak around to join battles late are also simultaneously far stronger than they were in DOS2 as a result (shoving and thus fall damage was actually NOT a thing in DOS2, barrelmancy damage quickly became outpaced by enemy stat bloat later in the game and were largely for creating field effects instead of being utilized purely for damage purposes, and having party members join battles late immediately shoved them to the back of the turn order for the entire rest of the fight when they would be near the front normally as the game ran on round robin initiative). It also really doesn't help when a lot of bosses in BG3 happen to be standing next to instant death pits too.

So this creates the perception that BG3 is balanced around the cheese, which is not helped by the fact that we're locked to level 4 for seemingly the entire EA period, meaning we don't get to play with anything native to base DnD rules at level 4 that can even compare, aside from spells that interact with the cheese like thunderwave.

Last edited by Saito Hikari; 04/04/21 10:49 AM.
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Originally Posted by Nyloth
Originally Posted by CJMPinger
Originally Posted by Nyloth
Originally Posted by Anfindel
Anyone who buys the game is welcome to figure out whatever cheats, hacks, misuses they want from the game.

As for me, I'm astonished daily that people would even TRY such inane things as moving weapons from character to character during battle, swapping armor on and off during a battle, cramming 15 donuts down their characters throats every turn to heal, and some of the other nonsense, much less actually USE such mechanics.

But hey, if that is what makes the game rock for them, more power to them.

None of these issues spoil the game for me - nobody is going to MAKE me do any of these things.

Reality is EVERY mod out there is essentially somebody creating a hack/cheat from what the developers intended - and we each choose which, if any, of these to make use of.

Your balance might very well be my Imbalance, and vice versa.

I absolutely agree. It was very funny when I found out that someone was carrying barrels with them. My first question was " Why?" and the second "How did you think of this?". Developers can add strange features, but my opinion is that many players spoil their own game.

The barrel thing is mostly a holdover from DoS2 where you could just pick up barrels and then people figured out that when those barrels break you got a real fun time on your hands, and then if it was death fog damn you basically win the game.
Other things come up when you just try things and find holes in a system, like the weapon swapping which can be abused really easily.

I played DOS2. I took barrels only for Fane, because he can't use potions. I've never used barrels to kill. So it's your choice. I finished game in co-op and not one of us did not come up with idea "oh, let's take barrels everywhere to make it easier for us".

Thats part of the issue where not everyone is going to encounter or even knowingly engage with these kinds of mechanics, so many will while seeing it as a main mechanic while others won't even think of it, but part of EA is us saying whether or not we like these mechanics and what faults we see with them, and to many the barrel thing has glaring faults. Especially when we consider that 5th Edition didn't have many of these mechanics which creates these newer issues for a lot of these players, but DoS did have these faults for many so it is an old issue for those players who used them in the previous game.

Personally, I don't use barrels, its a bit unfun to be able to just lug one barrel over and blow it up once for an instawin, but it did cross my mind among other things. Even for an EA game, BG3 is a bit easy to exploit, though I have yet to find an item duping exploit (which is good on larian for that).

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Originally Posted by Saito Hikari
Originally Posted by Nyloth
I played DOS2. I took barrels only for Fane, because he can't use potions. I've never used barrels to kill. So it's your choice. I finished game in co-op and not one of us did not come up with idea "oh, let's take barrels everywhere to make it easier for us".

I actually agree with this, but one also needs to consider that DOS2 as a whole was not really that tightly balanced around the existence of environmental cheese, it was balanced around what you could do with your actual skills. You could attempt using the same cheese tactics, but it wasn't really worth your time if you had the tactical thinking to achieve similar effects with a fraction of the time using your actual abilities.

BG3 has a much different context, where your standard actions and spells are a lot less powerful, while the concept of things like shoving, barrelmancy, and having party members sneak around to join battles late are also simultaneously far stronger than they were in DOS2 as a result (shoving and thus fall damage was actually NOT a thing in DOS2, barrelmancy damage quickly became outpaced by enemy stat bloat later in the game and were largely for creating field effects instead of being utilized purely for damage purposes, and having party members join battles late immediately shoved them to the back of the turn order for the entire rest of the fight). It also really doesn't help when a lot of bosses in BG3 happen to be standing next to instant death pits too.

So this creates the perception that BG3 is balanced around the cheese, which is not helped by the fact that we're locked to level 4 for seemingly the entire EA period, meaning we don't get to play with anything native to base DnD rules at level 4 that can even compare, aside from spells that interact with the cheese like thunderwave.

Excellent points! Hope Larian reads that.

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