Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Too many overpowered encounters!

As far as I remember, they're invisible until you're going next to the boat ("far" means 30 minutes ago, I just tried).
Every exemples you gave rely on metagaming and being able to continue the game through another way doesn't prevent you to meet them. 2 dialogs choices rely on dice rolls : fail = combats, 2 options are answers that leads to combats.

All you wrote is "you're wrong, you can avoid combats" but there are 0 arguments related to OP's point (overpowered encounters) except "metagaming" or eventually "save scumming".


Sure, but remember our previous exemple ? You only talked about sneaking, pushing, remove OP advantage/disadvantage from highground to make combats "easier"... Not always... but often, it looks.


Is that supposed to be easier if you scout or is that supposed to be very hard if you don't ?

Making things wrong and "learn to play" is fine and usual
Being driven to a specific way of playing is bad especially in a tactical game, especially in a role playing game and even more in a DnD based game that's supposed to offer tons of valuable options (you know, "players creativity").

The game shouldn't be harder if you don't use the cheeses. The game shouldn't have chesses (cheese >< choices for fun (i.e barrels) >< unexpected creativity (i.e molotov cocktails)

This is absolutely bollocks. There are NATIONAL-scale surveys that are made on sample of 1000 units and are generally considered reliable.

If anything a legitimate objection would be that is a self-selected group. Incidentally, the criterium of self-selection here is "People who are already interest in the game" so not exactly a compromising trait for what the survey is asking about.

If anything that subreddit has a strong pro-Larian bias and tends to be insanely passive-aggressive toward any hint of criticism to the game.
You'd feel right at home, by the way.

Actually, that was a David Bowie album¹.

But let's not go down the Path of Snark, please.

¹ Probably.

Rly? I thought they were sneaking ...
Since if you sneak close enought to attack, they appeared last time i tryed. O_o

But it was patch 3, so i take your word for it.
Maybe something changed.

Well ... yes, i used metagaming and i believe i even said so ...
But all that gives me is knowledge of where those encounters are, so i dont need to sneak through whole area exploring what surprises are waiting for me around the corner ...

Its totally possible to scout ahead in your first gameplay, as in your fifth ...
Its just easier in fifth, bcs you allready know where it will be just waste of time.

On the other hand, come on.
Completely empty village in the Underdark? If you approach it from norht, whole path paved with corpses?
Lets be honest with each other, if that dont raise at least one red flag, then nothing will.

On the contrary ...
OP is talking about hard combats ... i provide options to avoid hard combats.

Either by avoiding combat in general, or by preparation that allows combat ... but makes it a lot easier.

Well, after all its mechanic that is in game for you to use ...
If you dont like it and decide not to use it, its totally your decision ... and your consequences. :-/

OP sounded me like: Here are examples of hard combats.
I answered: Here are examples of how to make those specific combats easier.

Use them as you will, or dont.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.

Sorry, i didnt resist ... O:)
Cannot be unambiguously determined ... if you ask about my own opinion, it should depend of chosen dificiulty ... right now, we have only one, so as long as Larian take the data in the end and say something like: "many players died in this settings ... lets make it harder dificiulty" ... or on the contrary "many players survived without a loss of single character in this settings ... lets make it easier dificiulty".
I shall say it was good work.

Agreed ...
The difference here is that i see creativity in scouting ahead, preparing your battlefield and expect the worse ...
And from some people (cant say everyone, but certainly some) it seem like DnD lovers see creativity in standing right in front of your oponent and simply take turns in bashing each other to head, until one of them fall on the ground dead.

HighGroundAdvantage=0;

I presume, it would look differently in actual game files, but ... you get the idea.
I mean, all you need is removing the effect itself ... AI would still try to get to high ground and behind your back ... but once you simply remove it giving advantage, it would have zero effect.

Its lazy solution and it have certainly many holes, like people would certainly start asking "why did that Goblin spend five turns to get on that hill, when there is no advantage" ... but i was allways lazy writer so ... that is probably why i will never do this for living.

Nothing changed by my side ...
As long as enough people take part in the survey, its usefulness is unquestionable.
And that's exactly what my argument was about ... if your opinion is supported by 500 people, then it is much weaker than if it is supported by 50,000 people.

That sounds odd ...
There simply MUST be some way wher game recognize that you should have advantage from high ground.
Then you have two ways of negating that ... either remove that recognization, or remove the effect. I dunno how to say it differently. :-/

Switch was simply an example, as it seems it was bad one ... but as i said, it was not supose to be manual for removing high ground.

You are mixing two things together ...

One thing are relative numbers that determine relevance of the survey ... IF the sample is variant enough to be relevant.
Another thing are absolute numbers, that only shows how many people are supporting specific idea ... if the numbers are big enough to be relevant.

So, you are saying they are biased? So essentially you are agreeing with me on why the sample is worthless.

Again I want as close as they can get to RAW, but I am not too worried if they can't do it. Life finds a way Tuco. The game is already amazing and will only get better.

By the way; to clarify, I am never passive-aggressive, and I never attack people. I attack behaviors*. I am not in agreement with people disguising abuse as feedback.


*But I promised to tone it down.

A sample that is generally biased IN FAVOR of the dev and the game is largely voting against one of their design decisions.
Take it as you want, but it doesn't seem to paint a flattering picture of the general feedback about this specific topic.

I'm confident the results would be even more hostile toward the changes Larian introduced if the context was, say, a "Dungeons & Dragons community".

Frankly I can name pretty much any minor or major forum I lurk or frequent and the outcome tends to stay pretty much the same across the board: most people don't like several of the changes Larian introduced and tend to be very vocal again it.
Sometimes so negative that I'm the one who has to play "good cop" and suggest to them to tone down their rants, pointing that "it's not all bad".

Incidentally, in case you missed, I also happen to disagree with a lot of what the OP said here. That doesn't mean I have to be in denial about how representative the survey he posted can be.
Now, we could have an argument about how much that survey ACTUALLY supports some of his claims, but that would be a different topic entirely.

I'd actually argue that the opinions on this forum are fairly varied, this is some consensus on big issues and even then not really cause each is an individual person with their own opinion, The sharing identifier is the people here care enough about the game to go to its "Official Forum." You got many who think a certain mechanic is fine, and others who think that the mechanic is completely detrimental, and a bunch in between, this range extending to nearly every issue.

So I would say, combining this forum with Reddit, Twitter, and the official Feedback Form (that I may or may not have forgotten to fill out enough for everything I think) Larian (if they actually engage and use it) have a very nice and diverse sample size for the production of a videogame. Many companies use focus groups way smaller of a fraction than 1/10th of this forum, and most EAs would kill for the level of engagement the fans of BG/cRPGs are giving BG3 and its feedback.

That's a good point. The thing is though that Baldur's gate 3 - this story - is a huge deal. We both know that. Its picking up where Descent From Avernus left off which is an incredibly popular module amongst higher-level groups. Whatever Larian writes is Canon at this point. So that subreddit is going to draw a huge number of people - who don't even own the game - who are going to have an opinion about what Larian is doing.

But here is the thing - at the end of the day it doesn't matter (to me) that Larian tweaks the rules - what matters is do they balance those tweaks by ensuring the encounters are challenging and fun. If no one was showing up on this forum saying the encounters are too difficult I would be worried. That people are showing up on the regular and doing just that makes me extremely happy.

This is a larger rant - but most game companies these days provide games with no real challenge, that feed people easy achievements and gear and in exchange they milk their little "herd" of gamers for microtransactions. This is the literal model for almost all game companies.

Larian is the opposite. And one of the few that is trying to do it the right way. No Microtransactions, just challenging, tactical encounters. Some gamers will struggle. That's fine, its not a reflection of Larian if they choose to quit.

I mean do you find it too challenging or unfair?

+1 for "500-1000" responses being a perfectly valid sample size. Basically every resource I've found says <1000 respondents gets you <5% margin of error. *Of course, you have to understand the implicit biases in your questions/available answers/and something about the response bias in order to use that knowledge.

Larian should definitely include a survey with the game, optimally one that pops up automatically the first time you close the game and then another one when you reach the end of the EA content. This would ensure that most players are reached.


+0 for "Too many overpowered encounters." This is either true or false depending on your definition of "overpowered." If you are going purely by D&D 5e rules/encounter calculator, then yes there are many BG3 encounters that would destroy a PnP party.

However, PCs are much more powerful in BG3: jump+disengage, high ground/backstab Advantage, BA shove, help restoring 1hp, everyone can use scrolls, and of course the unlimited resting. Particularly the last one: encounter balance in 5e is based off of the assumption that a party will face ~3-6 encounters in an Adventuring Day. A "Deadly" encounter becomes much easier if the party uses all their resources with the intention of long resting immediately after.

Too challenging? Depends on how much you weight fore-knowledge. Once you have the knowledge about the encounter it's easy, but for a player on a first playthrough... The game balance allows for little room to be proactive or reactive. Players should be able to react to a bad situation and turn it around, not get buried by damage because the enemy has Advantage from being a few meters up in space.

Unfair? Not really, but it's definitely lop-sided. The impact of verticality giving Advantage for attacks and Disadvantage on incoming attacks is enormous. The lop-sided homebrew makes combat stale. Too often the player is required to make the same few choices.

Combat, in early access, is stale and requires fore-knowledge.

Honestly, I find the combat too easy in some regards and too hard in others. If I try to play like normal DnD I get punished while if I play like Divinity I get rewarded. I'd really like things to be balanced towards dnd Ruleset and then add some divinity quality spice after its tested at the base, so we know what does and doesn't work for BG3 as a videogame based on 5e.

Incidentally, I'm looking at one of those right now.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/baldurs-gate-3-early-access-ot-rolling-the-dice.301235/page-37

I imagine none of these people aside from Tuco are even on the Larian forums.


I feel like the game is difficult for the wrong reasons. The systems are designed in a way that I feel that combat is entirely balanced around getting to high ground/front-loaded surprise round and first round alpha strikes to do as much as you can before the enemy party gets to retaliate. There's a huge difference in difficulty from going into a fight using conventional tactics VS splitting up the entire party/one party member initiating combat while the other three sneak around avoiding sight cones and drop stuff/shove people with 100% success chance because of the whole time bubble thing going on, and the combat difficulty feels like it's balanced for the latter rather than the former. It's one thing to reload to approach a fight from a different angle, and then there's outright abusing clairvoyance.

Things like this are why you still get complaints about the RNG despite Larian doing everything in their power to mitigate it through their own systems. It has an extreme psychological effect in that anything without advantage or anything that doesn't benefit from advantage rolls (spells targeting saving throws) suddenly feels absolutely awful to use. Incidentally, damaging spells that do target saving throws tend to be useful in that later variants inflict half damage if an enemy saves against them, rather than no damage at all. Problem is, there are very few such spells in EA right now, and most classes don't start seeing them until level 5+ anyway - which we probably won't see in EA period. That and many classes getting access to extra attack at level 5 is already going to result in a wildly different balancing situation.

(When the Bard class is released, people will get to play around with one such spell that does half damage upon a successful save, one exclusive to Bards called Dissonant Whispers. It's one of the Bard's few offensive spells at low levels, and it targets enemy wisdom saves. Full damage + enemy is immediately forced to move as far away from you as they can if they fail (will probably get turned into a frightened effect in BG3), half damage if they succeed.)

Incidentally, I just noticed you joined the forums about a month after I made a massive thread outlining how all of these systems negatively impact the overall experience in the long term. It's rather telling that the thread existed for a whole week, and no one even came into the thread to directly argue against any of the points being made at any point in that time period. I've just become even more pessimistic since due to the radio silence.

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=96428&Number=757307#Post757307

That's fair, but there are multiple reasons being aggressive makes sense and results in victory. if you are always facing the enemy instead of running away you are denying them advantage. If you play a defensive game you are trading some form of healing or mitigation for damage that could even out the action economy. Additionally you have to trust that your teammates will back your play the same way you would back theirs (in terms of multiplayer) and they will respond with the same level of aggression.


People can complain about RNG but what game - based on dice rolls - were they expecting? The smart play is to focus on spells and abilities that target an opponents weak saving rolls. Larian gives us a HUGE advantage by letting us examine the monsters before combat and work out where they have weaknesses, which is why the best spell to use against the Bullet is "Command:Halt" - since its wisdom is 10 and it doesn't have wisdom saving proficiency. Its also weak against Dissonant Whispers.


Dissonant Whispers is in game. GOO Warlocks get it on the bonus spell list. It works just like you mentioned.

https://baldursgate3.wiki.fextralife.com/Dissonant+Whispers



I have been on the forums for years but I forgot my old password. Too many guesses so its probably locked. So I just made a new account.

I read your post - and here is the thing, its all great points and if Larian decided to be more strict about where Advantage was applied I would be 100% behind that. However they also need to fix concentration so we can properly use spells that provide advantage on the battlefield and not lose the slot because somebody tossed a alchemist fire at your feet and you took 2 burn damage, or add the Feat that allows you to ignore the first ten points of damage against having to make a concentration check and giving you advantage on those checks.

Thanks for the link. I've submitted a ticket.

Ignoring the tendency of some users to go into a discussion assuming that the OP is a complete back-birth who has never played a game before, there are a number of good arguments made here on both sides. The statistical discussion has reminded me why I flat-out refuse to teach stats, no matter how often the department chair tries to talk me into it ( ), so I will skip all of that. I would like to address some of the other points, though.

1) Scouting is all well and good (and is the reason that I stopped trying to play anything other than a rogue), but if you scout into a group of mobs and they spot you (remember the RNG thing?) you're dead before you have a chance to assess the situation.

2) Barrelmancy is a thing, and some people may actually find it entertaining. I don't. If barrelmancy is the only "right" strategy for playing the game, then I'm not interested in playing.

3) Having to reload 40 times a week because most encounters start with the party outnumbered, surprised and having already lost the high ground doesn't make a game "tactical", it makes it poorly designed. Similarly, a game in which the best tactic is ALWAYS "climb the highest structure and play King of the Hill while yeeting oil barrels down onto the enemy" is also not "tactical", it's one-dimensional.

Since the I was foolish enough to drop $60 on a game in the mistaken belief that it would be a D&D game, rather than DOS 3, I'm forced to do what I can to make the game playable FOR ME. I don't care if the game is playable for you. It'd be nice if we all could enjoy it, but if I have to choose, I choose me. People who love barrelmancy already have multiple DOS games to slake their love of oil barrels. I just want another Neverwinter Nights, or something vaguely similar.

(As an aside, anyone who wants to Venmo me the $60 I spent on EA can buy my silence; I'll delete my forum account and mothball the game until 1.0 releases. DM me your account and I'll send you a request for payment.)

Personally, I found the combat serviceable. I didn't think it was terribly hard. I'm not super keen on barrelmancy and free disengages, and backstab cheese, etc., but I would much prefer that they focus their efforts on fixing the dialogue and giving us some immersive characters and story.

I mean if you are in stealth mode and you cross a red vision cone area then you roll to see if you have been spotted. I mean I am legitimately curious how you are handling scouting. Are you unlinking the rest of your party from your stealthy party member? Are you wearing padded armor? Are you stealthing right up to the mobs and standing in multiple red vision cones?


Barrelmancy is never needed. The people who think so are just not expending the effort to try to handle the combats without it. If barrelmancy ever gets removed those people will find themselves in the same place you are.


Like I said, if you want to get better maybe consider checking out multiplayer. I personally would be interested to see how you are handling combat and pre-combat encounters. You had mentioned previously that the Duegar fight was "unavoidable" which it isn't at all. That tells me you are missing a lot of things in your environment.

And hey, maybe this is you playing at your peak and you feel that you cannot possibly improve. Which if that is what you believe then it is of course true.

anyway, the Larian discord is below:

https://discord.com/invite/larianstudios


Well the good news is when the game is fully released they will likely have various modes of difficulty, such as Story mode. So you can simply have a combat experience that meets with your level of expertise and not get stressed about encounters.

Discussions in any games to handle hard encounters :
" I used this spell which has a good synergy with my other character's feature, I positioned 2 companions there and 2 other here. I builded my characters this way. Oh and I use this spell to buff and this one to have a better resistance to these damages".

Discussions in BG3 :
"You can avoid it, go higher, don't use true strike or faery fire, drink/eat at each turn, push, jump and don't forget about metagaming."

Being creative using the vast majority of the game's tools is never rewarded. You're only rewarded if you do what the game wants you to do or if you find "creative" ways to break the system.

Like using electricity spells (witch bolt), after your cleric or druid makes enemies wet (create water)?
Yeah ... totally not an option in BG-3

In other words, you send them higher.

So this other game have so badly created tooltips, that you dont even know wich stats is your class suposse to have? :-/

Sadly, BG-3 dont have any resistance potions that could be used before fight, and last until long rest, nor any cleric buff spells ... so once again, totally not an option.

Yeah that's definitely the kind of discussions / the kind of tips we can read A LOT on this forum (and any other).

Learn to read/understand

(3 smiles because I know you like them)