Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous vs BG3

Yeah. The game's no fun on it anything harder than normal. I did it on challenging because I wanted to have a legit playthrough where enemies do normal damage and not something that is reduced, but the game is balanced around your characters taking reduced damage. It was absolutely no fun I'm challenging for me.

That is exactly what I don't want for bg3. I don't want them creating this game balancing it with some Homebrew rules and then giving players a D&D 5e difficulty setting but making it so hard that it's frustrating. Only to then have them say "see we gave you 5e difficulty setting. What are you upset about?" I'll be upset because they created it balanced for some non-5e rules, said it was a 5e game, but then only gave us 5e rules in an unbalanced gameplay that makes it very frustrating to try to get through. If you're going to make it 5e, make it balanced for 5e. Don't give me the option to play 5e but have it totally unbalanced and difficult to get through.

To make it funnier, the kingmaker prologue is physically impossible without bending the mechanic on unfair.
The only option to get through this at any reasonable time was to overuse the mechanics so that your companions could not die permanently. So you sent the gnome over and over to his death until he finally managed to kill the enemy.
For some reason one of the npc (added in dlc) at this point in the game is completely immortal and slowly kills enemies during the final fight.
Lack of rest is not even a problem, because the spells that have the starting characters are completely useless except for one cantrip.
I will not believe that whoever tested it, even the most optimized tank I managed to create, has over 20% chance of being hit, which means one shot.
22 AC enemies are a bit too much for a level 1 character.
After that I decided that Owlcat had no idea how to design fights and modified all companions to give them 25 points and a reasonable stat distribution.

As for BG3, I would not worry too much, so far in previous games Larian proved that they can design fights (at least since Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance because it used to be different before).
In the worst case, reducing the difficulty level by 1 should easily be enough, although I bet that if they decided to introduce such an option, it would be tested.

Kingmaker and WotR are super fun and well balanced... On normal. I have had no issues whatsoever on that setting.

So even though it says Challenging dif is normal damage done to my characters, the game isn't balanced for those harder levels. It is meant for those who either super know the game, or they are just crazy,. So I don't think Owlcat sucks at encounter design. I just think they balanced it for the 20% damage reduction setting instead of 0%. Maybe they did this to have more enemies, or tougher monsters, in combat.

But then, isn't that what Larian is doing? Intellect Devourers and imps are WAY too tough for level 1. So, they nerfed um.

Seems like they're doing the same thing to me. Nerfed enemies on Normal. If they implement 5e, enemies would become way too tough.

Too be fair, even the random stunted devourers can kill a level 1 fighter in one lucky slap, so they still remain a threat. They definitely should have some explanation as to why the ones on the Nautiloid are so weak compared to their "real" counterparts, though.

And I agree about the Challenging balancing, having beaten Kingmaker on exactly that difficulty (Normal's settings seemed weirdly condescending). Taking the scripted fireball from Tartuccio in the face at the end of the Old Sycamore dungeon is an exercise in saving/loading until you get a less devastating result. And later on you get enemies who have double digits of extra damage on their attacks just added there for the heck of it. Having played a bit through the rogue-like version of the dungeon DLC, I ended up having a monk with ~50 AC whom most enemies couldn't really hit (them all becoming Wild Hunt about 30 floors in) but who also could barely land an attack, let alone any attack after the first one once the penalties set in. In the main game it's kinda offset by the game drowning you in +5 cold iron keen whateverelse weapons and +8 to all physical/mental scores accessories in the last third or so, but with randomly generated loot it turns into something even more miserable.

People have been saying that WotR basically relies on you re-specing on a regular basis on above Normal, and that most of your end-game power comes from the absolutely bonkers mythic path abilities. Honestly, the whole mythic path thing actually puts me off, personally, because it invalidates your original character? In BG2 or NWN: Hordes of the Underdark you ascended to practically godhood still remaining your own self, in most aspects (mileages differ, but still). I liked the epic character stuff and going past level 20, and as a shifter in NWN you got a bunch of cool forms to transform into on a whim, picking whichever fit the situation better. To each their own, obviously.

If they just called the intellect devourers Ustilagor, I'd feel much better about it. Baby intellect devourers that have no current 5e stats. Fine. They're all babies with no ability to devour intellect and no resistances. They're just brain dogs that slash you with claws. I can accept that.

Though... how do they eat if they can't devour intellect? Seems like even Ustilagors should be able to do that. Right?

And if they're just wounded intellect devourers, why don't they have resistance. I can accept that maybe they don't use devour intellect because you've got a parasite in your head, but they should still have resistances.

And finally, why are they attacking you anyway? On the ship, they were all friendly becuase you were assumed to be thralls and/or you had a parasite in your head. So, what's changed? They're intelligent creatures. They're not stupid dogs or something that would simply attack you out of fear. They should still be able to detect that you have parasites in your heads. Right? Wouldn't they then be wanting to protect you? I mean, the ones on the nautiloid only attacked you if you provoked them. So why are the ones on the beach attacking you?

The whole thing makes no sense.

And the imps are just too nerfed to be imps. They should be like winged lemures or something. They don't have any imp traits. They just look like imps. No resistances. No invisibility. No shapeshifting, and most of all, no sting attack. Sting is like their most potent ability.

But why do they have them on the nautiloid as your first encounter - AND 3 NO LESS? One imp can wipe a party of 4-5 level 1 characters. I mean, it is a fair fight and can be won, but it would be a challenge for 4-5 characters to beat 1 full health imp. A single sting can kill a PC. Not just render unconscious, but it could insta-kill them. So why? Why imps? That's too tough.

And what do they do? Give them normal weapons and have them fight with them instead of their stings? Makes no sense. At least call them something besides imps. Maybe Puck or something.

I'm telling you. I'm really worried they're going to give us 5e Difficulty setting, and just like Pathfinder, it's going to be Challenging or worse. It'll be the same enemies we have currently but with actual 5e stats. 3 Imps in the first fight with stings and invisibility and such. Yeah. It'll be a reload fest. Same with the 3 intellect devourers on the beach. You'll have to keep running and shooting constantly, trying to keep them from getting too close until you slowly dwindle them down.

Pathfinder is not balanced on normal it's just that terribly easy and if you have any experience with the 3e you'll hardly ever have any problems. Unless we are talking about players who intentionally mutilate their characters, e.g. with +1 +2 on their main stats, but this is quite an extreme case. The higher difficulty levels show how good the fights design is.
In the case of DOS2, even at the highest level, the fights were fairly well-balanced and you didn't feel that the game was constantly cheating. Of course, a lot of the fights were deadly, but at the same time dealing with the death of a character was relatively easy.
More importantly, there was no random attack ending the game because it hit the main character. For some reason, Owlcat won't let you revive your main character if they die in combat, even though there are spells that can revive your characters if they died within two turns and they are available quite early.

Honestly, I think no one in Owlcat really tests the game before the premiere. If it were otherwise, such blackwater would never appear in the full game as it was at the beginning.

while i have no issue with blackwater but i concur it probably annoy out of many.

Did you experience this "great" dungeon when the game came out? Since then, I think it got 3-4 nerfs.
Previously, to kill the enemy, you had to use electricity damage. To be fun, the demons in blackwater were 100% immune to electricity. This meant that you had to use the coup de grace while they were lying on the ground. Given that the enemies have a huge save and sick amounts of AC (it has been reduced at least once but still has they have at least 64 AC) you had to roll 20.
Nobody will tell me it was a good dungeon. Not only is it unlocked at the very beginning of Act 3, it also locks you in behind an absurdly high test for this level.
This dungeon might as well have been unlocked in act 5, and wouldn't be much easier than the rest.

Get good. Or ignore the dungeon. Plenty of content in this game.
Sheesh modern baby gamers...

You can justify all the goofy mechanics and design decisions that way.
If you want to be toxic go ahead, but next time you complain about bg3 you'll get the same answer.
Dungeon came out completely broken and your reality enchantment will not change that.
Next time you will write that bugs breaking the game and broken classes are also not a problem, or an inevitable failure (game end) in the game because you kicked a character from the team who completely betrayed you and the game did not give you any replacement.
If the game gives you a 5% chance to kill every single mob, because some developer has no brain, there's no way to defend it.
Killing a single mob for 5 minutes is not an interesting experience.
If everyone had this attitude, this dungeon would never be changed to the current, relatively playable version.

There is a difference between challenges that are fun and cathartic to overcome and the ones that leave one exhausted and relieved they don't have to ever do something like that again.

Take D:OS2, for example, with its Mord'Akaim fight in Act 2 and the arena and Adhramallik in Act 4. They all have very nasty tricks up their sleeves that you have to either power through or find a way to prevent them being used in the first place that aren't just ridiculously bloated numbers which reduce every encounter to praying to RNG that you land at least one. Freaking. Attack. You are rewarded for cleverly applying your toolset and thinking outside of the box instead of just metagaming the terribly designed fights to oblivion.

And if D:OS2 is too new of a game to appeal to as an example, how about the direct inspiration for the Pathfinder games - BG2? You have such an insane array of spells (instead of Kingmaker's / WotR's selection of mostly boring stuff and way too many polymorphs that are practically useless, at least in my experience) that you can (and should!) approach difficult fights creatively rather than just slam against them in hopes of bum-rushing the enemies. Why fight an entire colony of illithids with people who have brains they would so enjoy eating when you can summon a single Mordenkainen's Sword and clear the lot of them out? The stuff of blasting does insane damage but gets destroyed after a few hits? Give it to somebody who can backstab with a good multiplier and enjoy the result. Soloing the BG games with a spellcaster is a thing precisely because it allows for some really cool tricks to be pulled off.

Many of them are the relics of the 2e's era of completely bonkers balance of certain magic, but having bonkers magic is far better than having arcane spellcasters who deflate immensely in usefulness past the first half of the game when everything either has too much health or too high saving throws, and you don't have nearly as many nice high-level spells as the older D&D adaptations offered. Hell, an alchemist ends up being a better magic damage dealer than a sorcerer does, since you can just spam a particularly difficult enemy down with force bombs in a pinch. It is also a really questionable decision to introduce way too many enemies who have different types of DR/immunities and not give you any ability to create/enchant weapons (the random gifts from craftsmen don't count) so that you can equip people tailored to a specific weapon type with something actually useful against the more dangerous enemies. What's the point of having most of the weapon types from the rulebook if you don't find any worthwhile versions of about 2/3 of them in the entire game? You can't even reliably buy the at least +3 ones for most of them. Good luck using a crossbow or a - gods have mercy on your soul - sling staff when their unique/magic versions are mostly crap and quivers don't work with them.

Being designed like ass does not an interesting challenge make. It just highlights how the developers have no clue how to design something actually appealing to think about.

Honestly speaking, when playing unfair, I didn't even bother with the spells that require hitting. They practically never hit. In the case of WotR in the second act I practically stopped using any CCs, I decided that it makes no sense if you do not build a character specifically for what is possible and so only at the end of the act, and only because of a single mythic feat that clearly does not work as it should.
Spells that always hit but deal less damage on a successful save are probably the only sensible way to deal damage while playing caster.
Most of the time, magic is used to buff or summon skeletons (other summons are weak and not worth using).

That's very backwards considering how the design philosophy has always been that the real damage-dealing caster archetype is the sniper one, and the AoE stuff would eventually just run into lots of things having some form of evasion turning it all useless while high saves make the instakill-type spells a lottery. There not being at least an analogue of Isaac's Missile Storm in the Owlcat stuff is really annoying.

I guess that's also what turns kineticist very unreliable at later levels, because your BAB is garbage (as in, it's anything below a pure martial character's one) and you have very few ways to increase your accuracy since you don't attack with a weapon. You can't even fill your level 1 slots with True Strike to circumvent the insane AC at least somewhat unless you pick a few caster levels, dilluting your character progression.

I never have an interest in playing on anything higher than normal. And in specific cases of encounters, I have no ego invested in not lowering it down if necessary. And, I also use some of those optional toggles. I always turn off enemies critting you, for example, because if I do suffer one of those one-shot kills in my party I'm going to reload the game anyway, so why go through that hassle?

In Km on normal difficulty, with no mods or cheating of any kind, I've been able to get Valerie's AC to over 50, along with very strong saves. So I can just send her in alone, get the nastiest enemies to mob her, and then go in with the rest of my party and clean up.

i played the game during beta till the first playthrough with angel. i intend to replay it again with trickster. had 2-3 playthroughs IIRC during beta. angel then lich if not mistaken. blackwater has alot of lightning wand IIRC. also the key for me there is greater invisibility which will deny their DEX bonus. i love pathfinder where many obstacles and solutions lies within the use of its spells. also my min difficult for pathfinder is Core which i find the bare minimum. Hard is quite annoying during early game. Unfair is a no no for me.

KM is easier as enemies mainly just focus the first tank they see. in Wrath, they target the squishies. I'm not quite sure if is a difficulty thing. The minimum difficulty i play is Core. Which is still quite easy compare to Hard.

Originally it was impossible to kill demons with electricity. They were immune to electrical damage because of some strange reason.
Honestly ac is not a problem in this game, the brute force method is pretty effective and don't worry about touch ac.
Thanks to the broken mythic skill, you can easily achieve over 40 attacks in act 2 without favored enemy and similar bonuses. Sosiel is the most broken companion in the game along with Arueshalae.
With the right amount of buffs you can even hit playfull darkness.

What the angel were you playing with or without the merged book?

They're actually focusing on the main character.
You can see this with the gargoyles.
When new gargoyles appear on the battlefield, they automatically focus on your character, even if they have to receive an attack of opportunity from the rest of the party.

IINM certain high CR demon are immune to electricity. It's based on pathfinder lore.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/demon/balor/

With mythic power Ascendant Element you can bypass immunities. I have no problem with playful. Indeed the only way to beat playful would be stacking attack. Arueshalae isn't that good due to her subclass. But it can be bypassed with Instant Enemy. Yeap Sosiel is my favorite. Not just that Paladin and Shaman too. Stacking is the key to higher difficulty though. My first playthrough with Angel was a martial class. Can't recall well but i think it's a Dual Wield Fighter Slayer.