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

At least we dont get "git gud" kind of tips. :-/
Right?

No, never...

I realize that replying to Blackheifer is a waste of time, but here goes:

Your assumptions about my lack of skill are both wrong and completely besides the point. The point is that in a game "based on D&D" these encounters SHOULD NOT HAPPEN at these levels. Unless the intention is for 1.0 to have the group at level 5-6 by the time you hit the Underdark, these battles are WAY BEYOND the power level of the standard 4-PC party. Therefore, the only way to win them is to manipulate the rules.

On that note, I'd like to hear how YOU handled the Spectator encounter without barrelmancy and without just parking everyone on the high ground. Explain to me, in your infinte wisdom, how you cleverly used the abilities of your party synergistically in order to defeat a Spectator with double eye rays and double HP, as well as the half-dozen charmed 4th level Drow rangers that add into the combat, simply using the spells and weapons the game makes available to that point. It still wouldn't matter, because THAT WASN'T MY POINT. You can mansplain to someone old enough to be your father's older brother all you want. It doesn't change the fact that Larian has a well-established history of throwing characters into battles against significantly superior opponents, or that they are completely ignoring the VERY WELL ESTABLISHED balance that D&D has built over ~40 years between monsters and PCs, seemingly just so they can keep the "game play" consistent with DOS (which, as I stated earlier, I find to be a completely s4!t game).

That having been said, thank you to everyone who actually engaged with the topic I brought up. I really only meant it for the devs (I didn't realize there was a direct feedback link, so thanks again for the link!), but it's nice to see that other people out there are noticing this problem and thinking about it.

I'll be real, it's been hard to explain how encounters are balanced in D&D 5e to folks who haven't played. The encounter design in Baldur's Gate 3 is that of a dick-ish/powertripping DM (for lack of nicer terminology to use, I really did think about what descriptive words to use), especially in the Underdark.

I really dislike the Underdark encounters simply because it is where I'm absolutely forced to use Larian's homebrew. I can't just be a cool warlock/wizard fighting two minotaurs with my party, I have to exploit the homebrew.

Right.

So emotional.

1) The charm the beholder uses is a double-edged sword. It breaks on minor damage, so every time he releases one and you hit it there is a 50% chance they attack the beholder depending on who is closest. This further saturates the environment with targets for the beholder to go after besides yourself. It's sort of brilliant because its almost like the fight is designed to upend and randomize the action economy. You may own the action economy, or you may not.

2) The Explosive plants that are littered through the battle area can be used to; damage the drow to release them from the charm or damage the beholder who often moves itself into a position near one. Just shoot them.

3) There is a Spear you can find that deals additional damage to enemies with multiple eyes and has a chance to blind them. You may have found it by now if you dealt with the owlbear.

4) This is a good battle to bring in the Ogres if you managed to convince or bribe them to allow you to call them into battle since they will fight on your side.

5) There is also the Spectator in a Bottle you can use for some funny spectator on spectator violence. of course you have to kill that spectator then as well. To be honest I only use this method if I want to randomize the action economy further and up the possible challenge level.

6) This is one of those encounters you want to save potions of speed for as well as Hill Giant strength, void bulbs and other explosive items. Invisibility pots can give you an edge allowing your strongest fighter to get close (lae'zel), pop a speed pot use the wyvern poison and then go to town on the spectator.

7) Glut is also a huge help here, especially if you use him to Myconize a Deugar or a Minotaur. Duegar are easier to transplant.

So just some background. I played original Vanilla WoW when it released in 2004 and I was a hardcore Raider that worked with a lot of other guilds on theorycrafting for the higher-end Raid dungeons and bosses from AQ40 to Naxxramus. I was one of the 1% to complete Naxx when it was originally released. So to me, I love a good challenge like this, the harder the better.

I totally get that not everyone likes that sort of thing, and meaning no disrespect it's my hope that on release they have multiple difficulty settings that will solve the issue for both of us. I want a harder difficulty setting - and a LOT of people feel the same way. I get there are people that find these fights frustrating to no end and don't want the hassle.

I feel that Larian gives us all the tools we need to handle these encounters but this favors meticulous (possibly AR), highly focused people like myself and is a disadvantage to more casual players. This is actually in some ways no different than actual D&D where you will have DM's who like to up the challenge level for the players depending on skill level and creativity, and DM's who are far more casual and focus on the social aspect of the play session for more casual gamers. At the end of the day you won't make everyone happy.

Blackheifer would make some good points, if they didn't continually feel the need to dip the beginning and ends of their posts in back-handed insinuation, belittling tone and condescension, or personal boasting. Maybe lay off with that?

Answering the complaint that a particular fight is unbalanced and unfair without abusing Larian's abusable cheese mechanics, by listing a whole bunch of things that you should considering bringing to the fight with excessive meta-knowledge, or more of said cheap mechanics isn't really that helpful... it mostly just reaffirms the point being made.


This is a legitimate point - however it trades on the 'tactic' of "Hey, use YOUR turns to break charms and HOPE that you get LUCKY enough that the drow decide to attack the Spectator before you! (They might not, and even if they do they still consider you an enemy and will attack you during and after the fight with the spectator)"


This is saying: You don't NEED to use Larian's cheap cheesy things... you can just use the terrain that's littered with an excess of explodable objects! This is like arguing that you don't need to drink water - you can just drink the naturally occurring H2O instead.


Legitimate point, although, I only tried using the spear on a spectator once or twice, and it truly didn't seem to have very much effect at all worth noting; blinding the spectator (when it worked) didn't really inhibit it much. It certainly didn't stop its eye rays. On a related point, I'm generally not a fan of "Here's this overtuned fight, but here is also a special magical maguffin that is only going to be useful in this fight that will make it better." It's a cheap, dull and utterly uninteresting story mechanic and even worse as a combat device.


Which is equivalent to saying "The fight is not overpowered for the party or too hard - you just have to bring along something even more overpowered to beat it with!" That's not strategy, it's a cop out. It's an admission that the fight IS overtuned. Also, once again, it's relying on coming into the fight and situation with foreknowledge of it.


This one I did just for the fun of it... but in reality, both spectators treat you as an enemy, and are far more likely to target your party than each other.


This is equivalent to saying "The fight isn't overtuned, you just have to metagame the hell out of it by saving a bunch of specific items specifically to use for it!" Again, no, that doesn't fly.


This is the same as point 4, although I'll allow it a bit more leeway in terms of fairness, since Glut is more likely to be with you organically at this point, possibly. Unlikely still, considering but more likely than point 4.

Ultimately, they have not actually answered Ibrahim's question, either - they asked how they used the abilities of their party members intelligently to best the fight. None of THESE solutions have anything to do with using your actual party or their class abilities.... it's almost all external stuff that could be just as easily activated by moderately well-trained dog (#CompanionScratch):

1) Get other people to fight for you, you might get lucky!
2) Get other things to do damage for you, there's lots of them!
3) Use the maguffin that was conveniently designed for this fight!
4) Get another monster to fight for you, then kill it afterwards!
5) Get other monsters to fight for you!
6) Stockpile strong items (and explosives!) to use for this fight - like you know it's coming!
7) Get other monsters to fight for you!

NONE of those have anything to do with using your actual party and their actual class abilities strategically or intelligently.

If more than half of your suggestions involve getting other, stronger monsters to fight on your behalf, that rather sounds like a resounding admission that the fight is, in fact, overtuned.

I must have missed it when he provided me his party and class composition, could you link that information for me? make sure it contains his loadout plus available abilities.


I categorically reject that D&D isn't about utilizing your surroundings to defeat the enemy. I'd also like to point out that the Spectator Fight is OPTIONAL. You can completely avoid that entire area. In fact MOST combat in the game is avoidable.

The overwhelming wrong assumption here is that you HAVE to fight this Spectator. This is the same person who insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that you HAD to fight the Duegar - and this was pointed out to them multiple times, by multiple people.

Even if you trigger the fight you can RUN AWAY.

I reject the idea that you don't have options in this game. I reject that using your environment, or running away, or avoiding encounters through dialogue are not CORE parts of D&D. Descent to Avernus, the actual D&D module that precedes these events has examples of ALL of that. There are mobs that will kill you that you need to run away from, there are evil creatures you have to make deals with or have good dialogue checks with, there are things in your environment you have to notice that will help you.

And using potions and buffs during combat isn't metagaming, you are just utilizing resources and being prepared. if you are going to poke around in a clearly dangerous place its reasonable to assume you should be prepared right?

and listen if you want Solasta then play Solasta, its a great game. It has its own limitations though.

To be honest, I didn't really find the Spectator fight that hard when I did it about six months ago. In fact, I was mildly surprised to learn that it was considered one of the hardest fights in the game, when I struggled to remember what the fight even was, with how people were describing it.

Then again, I was playing with the Bard mod, and my Bard/Wyll/Gale Shatter(ed) and Thunderwave'd the shit out of everything in that encounter, with Shadowheart throwing out Guiding Bolts too. I don't think the fight lasted longer than 3 rounds for me. Then again, one could chalk down my experience as 'ridiculous alpha strike'.

The point: ----------------------->
____________ you

You just missed it.
This isn't a "Give me tips to win fights"
This is "Most battles are at their core unbalanced since I'm supposed to abuse gimmick homebrewed systems to win them!"

Right and I don't agree. Unfortunately with this kind of thing it's impossible to disagree and not provide examples of the tools available that can be used to win these fights.

So you can say nothing, and let the person rant or agree with them and get a pat on the head, or take the risk of disagreeing with them but not use any evidence to back it up.

And the Op's post was full of inaccuracies - they mischaracterized the fight as "unavoidable", claimed the Duegar could all cast "infinite Mirror Image" (not true only Ghek can cast it and only twice based on the two scrolls he is carrying which you can steal from him and prevent him from using) and didn't provide any concrete examples of how it was overpowered against what he had available.

I presume this sentece was meaned for Blackheifer ...
Yet i would like to add my experience.

First time i get to that place, it was from temple side ...
So first thing i found was petrified Drow ... funny enough, my own PC was Drow, and i wondered if i may save the Drow, if i shatter his stone prison ... so i equipped 2H mace and smash the statue for so long, until dead Drow fall to my feets ... then i found loot.
So, as greedy bastard as Galanis is ... i smashed every Drow i found ... i was quite surprised when Spectator jumped on me, and it was huge relief when he de-petrify one of two remaining Drows, and i realized that my greedyness just saved me a lot of throubles.

Anyway, i droped most of them down, since i was Warlock with pushing eldrich blast ... if that was a cheese or not i dunno, nor i care to be completely honest.
And Spectator was locked in fear for multiple rounds bcs of Lae'zel frightening strike ... yes, the gods of dices standed by me that day.

In the end it simply dont seemed like so hard encounter.

Right now the fight is a bit buggy (at least for me). The drows only attack my team, which made the fight much more difficult than before. However, you can still win it without tricks such as bunches or high terrain (mainly because there is no comfortable place to climb).
The most important thing is a good team composition. Shadowheart + Lae'zel are able to kill most of the opponents together during a turn. If you additionally have a druid in your group, there is no opponent who can survive for more than 2 turns (unless you have extremely bad rng).
In addition, it is worth having Gale in your team along with the magic missile amulet to finish everything that ends up with low hp.

Apparently you didn't care enough to ask the OP that yourself, Blackheifer. Niara is right - you didn't answer the OP's question: "how you used the abilities of your party synergistically [...] simply using the spells and weapons the game makes available to that point." It's not about whether the tactics you listed are valid or not, it's that you didn't answer OP's question in a satisfactory manner.

I'm joining this conversation because after all these posts no one has actually addressed what the OP brought up, and I myself am curious about the solutions, if they exist, to his problems. Blackheifer, I think you've been missing Ibrahim's main point the whole time: what Ibrahim is trying to say is that these encounters are poorly balanced. And to support his point, he listed more detailed stats such as enemy damage vs party members' health, enemy in-game stats vs rule book, etc. Not a post in here has actually addressed these details. All I've read is that "oh but this encounter can be avoided" and "you can utilize the environment and/or external circumstances" - none of these have anything to do with party composition, individual party member abilities, and synergy between party members.

I'm getting the main point here is that these encounters are poorly balanced, a point which some folks here seem to be missing, it seems. Whether the OP is accurate or not about whether a fight is avoidable or not, that's not his point at all. I don't know why you keep clinging to that as an argument against the OP.

Imagine voicing your opinion saying that an encounter is poorly balanced, and someone answers you with "but you can avoid it". By saying that you automatically acknowledge that it is poorly balanced. If you don't think it's poorly balanced, you should explain why you think it's not.


I haven't seen a single post addressing these specific points the OP brought up. Are these duergars indeed violating 5E rules? If they are, is there a good reason for this violation? If the bulette is so deadly, how do you soak up its damage/tank it? What about the spectator, is it violating 5E rules too? And no, I don't think answering these points with "this fight is avoidable" or "but you can exploit this and that in the environment" is satisfactory.

So just to be clear, we have one side who is screaming that the Homebrewed extra abilities that players have makes the game too easy, and you have another vocal group that says that the encounters are overpowered - myself I am fine with the balance but I would like to see some of the more exploitative stuff- that players have -removed or tightened up.

But so be it:

Spectator:
Other posters have mentioned specific abilities which are helpful on these fights and party composition that is good for the encounter. I guess you didn't see those? I think Ragnarok mentioned a few that Lae'zel's Frightening strike was extremely effective as well as push attacks from Eldritch blast (Wyll), and Thunderwave(Gale). None of that is Homebrew btw. using potions is apparently homebrew despite being in the DMH so we will leave those out I guess.

Dissonant Whispers is amazing as a spell if you have a GOO lock. A Ranger or Astarion with two handed fighting or a ranged attack is great for hitting multiple drow to break the charm effect.
Shadowhearts Guiding Bolt OR Inflict Wounds upspelled to level 2 is a shocking level of damage, plus her divine channel ability to create a decoy is great for protecting the group by giving disadvantage on attacks against her and party members close by.

Personally at 800+ hours I have used every single party composition imaginable and beaten this encounter with just the abilities we had. Like other experienced players have said, I just don't even think its that challenging. And I don't use barrelmancy or throw people around or use mods.

Bullette -

Ok, this is a rough encounter. Again an optional one but still can go badly. I do agree that the Leap damage and the attack can be a bit much, at best you will lose a party member. The game tries to help you here by placing you in Turn Based mode which you should use to spread the party out and hide if you can.

After that you need to use Lae'zels Frightening Strike, and Shadowhearts Command:Halt abilities immediately and repeatedly.

The surprise issue: Surprise is bugged right now and the Duegar don't always start with surprise, nor do I think its intended that they start with surprise except under really unlucky circumstances. I think you have to see none of them (fail all perception checks) and try to access the boat. I am not 100% sure as while I have had a surprise round here, its not a typical occurrence.

Ok fair enough, I'd like to understand this better, can you give me an example of choices you can make with single player that would not give you an ability set that would work with this encounter? Assuming level 4, current choices and no mods, no barrelmancy, no cheap stuff, no cheats. Any other limitations?



If you haven't guessed I will replicate those choices and use them to kick this Spectator across the Underdark like a multi-eyed soccer-ball

I say good day sir! Ahahaha!

Fair enough, you are right. You could say that for an inexperienced player on the first playthrough who has no experience with D&D this is a rough encounter that will likely result in a TPK. Then again an equal number of people seem to feel they ran into this for the first time and had no problem with it. Maybe there is a common denominator, but just like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop, the world may never know. ;D

Here are some things, I do in the mentioned fights:
With the Bulette it is good to try and get highground, somewhere the Bulette can not jump too - like those mushrooms. Try using Misty Step: Gale and Wyll and OC who is warlock or wizard can get it via their spell list - I would always take that spell, it's really useful to get your squishy spellcasters out of the way and you get an amulet of Misty Step from Mintharas corpse. I normally try mistystepping away with the characters that can do it (to the big mushrooms, that aren't reachable via foot - the Bulette can't jump there) and use spells and ranged attacks to get Bulli down. The character, that doesn't have Misty Step, might die, but you can revive them later. For me, that works well. The problem is, that the Bulette can appear anywhere, that makes it one of the toughest fights for me. You can't really plan ahead. There are some points, where she always appears (like right before that cave, where you find that nice drow armor). I sometimes prepare an ambush there, if I manage to escape her until then - use Lae'Zel as lure, she can survive the best.

The Spectator is a tough one too. I try to keep the spellcasters and ranged attackers in the background and attack with Lae'Zel (or fighter OC). But before that, I make sure to destroy the petrified drow (I did that in my first playthrough, when I saw, that I can do it, because I thought, that if those drow come alive, they are probably not nice ... the chance to meet a Drizzt in the Underdark is pretty slim). You can reach the ones, that can't be killed by a melee (for melee you need a blunt weapon btw) with Eldritch Blast for example, so that you don't need to sacrifice a spell slot. I give the thief (either Astarion or OC) the Misty Step amulet and position them behind the Spectator, poison their weapons with the strongest poison possible (that would be Wyvern) and let them sneak attack - that does a lot of damage.

The Gith patrol I nowdays just barrelmance because I'm lazy and the fight takes so long, but when I try it proper, I position the group up on the highground - preferrably not all together, but spread out a bit. And when they teleport up, I try to get them down again via thunderwave. Lae'zel is normally down with that really hard hitting fighter, because I let her do the talking (everything else wouldn't make sense roleplaying wise if you have recruited Lae). It's tough, but with using everything, I have - fire arrows, poisoned weapons, spells- , I nomally succeed after a while.
The Gith patrol is really hard imo - I find that fight even worse than Bulli.

My least favorite is the spider matriarch though. I find it hard, plus I really hate spiders, so two nogos. I do it anyway even though, I wouldn't need to (you can go to the stone for the Necromancy of Thay via invisibility potion and patience - if mother dearest is right above you, don't grab it, wait until she moved on), because I'm always very proud of me, when I manage to kill the spiders. There, I let Astarion sneak in to destroy the spider eggs (first the one downstairs, then the one on the first plattform and lastly the one on the second - that will automatically trigger the fight, I never managed to do it without the mother noticing me).

I hope, that helps a bit, but I would love to have difficult settings too. I like a challenge, but sometimes, I just want to play out the story and not have to deal with fights, that last half an hour. Tbh, when I use barrels, then mostly to just make the fights shorter (like the group around Dror Ragzlin or the gobbos in the courtyard), because it just takes so long to take them out one by one.


Edit: I forgot, because it'S second natur for me: always use Bless and whatever you have to buff and protect the party. It helps a lot imo.

Frightening strike is homebrew though. It is way much stronger that its tabletop counterpart.

No need to be patronizing and make it an issue of "expertise." The issue is that Larian's kind of "challenge" in combat is not really challenging but rather just repetition, tedium, aggravation, and stupidity. And whereas all those things may be great fun for you and some others, there are those of us for whom it is decidedly not fun.

I largely agree with the OP. And I am yet to see anyone actually posting a thoughtful and well-reasoned counter-post, as opposed to just attacking or flaming the OP.

Edit: Okay, credit to @fylimar's last post for being a thoughtful and helpful post.

Sorry, the correct name of that ability is Menacing Attack and it appears to work exactly the same as listed in the PHB.

"When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can expend one superiority die to attempt to frighten the target. You add the superiority die to the attack's damage roll, and the target must make a Wisdom saving throw. On a failed save, it is frightened of you until the end of your next turn."

What's different?