Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Panel From Hell 6 (Patch 8) - Live thread

As usual: I like all that was showed, am still distressed to see or hear about no changes to things that IMO need serious improvement (controls, reactions).

A surface look at bard - I do appreciate a lot of the detail. I am pretty sure I won’t be able to resist making a violin bard once 1.0 dropped. I love spell castings through the instrument. The spell/skill submenus in the UI made me most happy - am looking forward to trying the UI once I can at the end of July and seeing if any other issues were addressed. Swarm AI should make some people happy, looks like a cool feature.

Fireballs have been thrown at characters since the birth of DnD, and counterspell wasn't always a thing.

Irrelevant attempt at a gotcha. Counterspell is a thing now in 5th Edition DnD which this game is modeled after, people have the right to be disappointed at the possibility of a lesser version of it.

I really don't care that much about reactions. I suspect they're not making it in the game because Larian thinks the average player will be annoyed by reactions slowing down combat. Making a decision with every other swing of the sword kinda thing.

*

Anyway, what disappoints me is the lack of level five. I also really wish they would open up new body types so every character isn't dwarfed by massive Halsin.

This is not a big deal. If you die, you will die.
There is such a thing as fight's design.
It depends on it whether it will be a problem or not.

I'm not saying don't be disappointed. By all means. We all get disappointed when we don't get things we're invested in.

I'm just saying that I don't think you're right about the necessity of counterspell, that's all.

Isn't counterspell the most often banned spell in 5e? I like reactions, but counterspell is probably the worst advocate for implementing them.

Very true. Given Larian's history though? I don't have the highest faith in this department.

Right now, we can't even get a clear idea on the intended difficulty of many of the EA fights because we're locked to level 4, with a lot of the harder fights supposedly being designed for level 5 and up. Forgive me for having a lot of concerns with the seeming insistence on things being hidden from us, considering how I witnessed DOS2's Fort Joy being one of the most meticulously balanced experiences I've seen out of every game I've played, while the rest of the game past the EA phase was a complete balancing mess in comparison.

watched the panel it seems there's attack of opportunity. if there's aoo then perhaps i think reaction shouldn't be that far off?

In DoS2 the further in the game, the easier it gets.
The fight with Alexander is literally the most difficult moment of the game and if you complete it, nothing will ever come close to it.

Yep. "Kill the guy in a robe first" is one of the first lessons rpg players of all types learn

Idk man those crazy dwarfs at the statue soft locked me

To be fair, one could argue that (at least the combats in) BG3 *aren't* modeled exactly using 5e combat design, because Larian has made so many changes. Supposedly*, Larian will be balancing combats based on the fact that counterspell (and all their other homebrew) is implemented in X way, correcting for the fact that it's weaker than in tabletop.

Of course, Larian might also make fireball stronger by creating fire surfaces everywhere, so who really knows at this point. And fireball is already OP for its level, so any additional buff would make it *extremely* lethal if used on level ~4-6 characters (fireball should be 6d6). We'll find out on launch I suppose..

That's one of the many ways in which Larian's communication is disappointing. Even when they deign giving news about the game's development (which happens "once in a blue moon", as the saying goes), they give zero acknowledgement about the main topics of feedback that the players' community is discussing.

It's not just that they refuse to engage with their own forums. They also actively give the impression that, when we are sending feedback their way, we are talking to a wall.

A note on the topic of Larian's direct engagement with player feedback : pretty much the only place I've seen it happen is on Reddit, by a couple of Larian QA folks, and the only topic I've seen them engage with are small bugs, not systems. Which is very, hm ... ironic, shall I say, when Swen explained in an interview that the Early Access was not a testing ground for QA, but instead was there for community feedback on systems.

Anyway, aside from this ground for disappointment ...

• We still haven't heard about how Larian process & parse the feedback and data they get from "talking" with us. This is something they announced on 12th May 2021 and many were quite looking forward to it.
  
  
• We still haven't heard community manager news. They announced on 3rd June 2022 that this would be coming over the summer. Admitted the (Northern Hemisphere) summer is not over, but the Panel From Hell was probably a good place to give news.

Fort joy isn't really easy by any means. Griff or the Houndmaster will dump you if you arnt leveled enough. You actually have to seek out the turtles/frogs/crocodiles to train up.

Ignoring 5e entirely... The current reaction system is just flat out bad. Consuming very limited resources on a random automatic target isn't anyone's idea of good game design.

I don't know about that. I can understand why there are people who don't want to deal with pop-ups asking if they want to use this or that reaction.

You forgot about Orivand which is also murderous. In general, the difficulty of fighting in DoS2 depends mainly on how well you know the mechanics and whether you have chosen good skills.
For example, if you know how initiative works in this game (completely different to most other games) most of the fights become much easier.

I was talking about balance, not so much about difficulty. It's important to understand the difference.

Alexander was definitely the hardest fight in the game, but for very fair reasons. The environment gives a lot of room to plan out your defensive tactics, Alexander himself isn't capable of massively bursting down your party, and the party usually doesn't have the power to do the same to him yet either. The real boss that shows up mid-fight throws a wrench in everything, but it forces you to adapt to the fight in a new way that later fights absolutely don't capture at all.

Literally every boss fight after that point immediately devolves to into said fights more or less being resolved within the first 3 turns, due to environmental design not really allowing you to play defensively, and bosses suddenly having ridiculous abilities capable of one-rounding most of your party members. Maybe it's a response to how the power of player characters exploded with the new abilities gained in act 2 too, but who knows.

- Mordus? Kill him first, or he'll source drain whoever else dies first and transform into his super mode. You're not beating his super mode without casualties unless you're overleveled for the fight. Oh, and the arena is mostly flat.

- Alice Aliceson? Split up your whole party before even talking to her, or else you're going to get party wiped immediately before you can even react. Oh, the arena here is mostly flat too unless you had the foresight to split up your party and put your ranged on the nearby walls - which a normal player will absolutely not do the first time around.

- Eternal Alterna? Better hope you have a plan to burst her down immediately, because she has absurd action economy along with specializing in ice/lightning magic to freeze/stunlock your party. I do not imagine most people defeating her on a first try, though I somehow managed that only because I had Fane put Time Warp on my archer (which allowed him to recover from being frozen early, due to the time warp eating that frozen turn), and he had enough damage to burst her down in one round due to the absurdity of ballistic shot punishing her hardcore for teleporting so far away from the party. Of course the obvious solution is to split everyone up, though there are also the wolves to be concerned about too. Oh yeah, sort of a flat arena too, though there are walls/gaps in the flooring.

And that's just the biggest offenders in act 2.


This is more or less the gist of my grievances. I only use 5E as a reference because that's how it exists there. If Larian could come up with something better than how reactions are implemented in 5E, more power to them. But the current implementation is just bad and is going to lead to a lot of problems later. It's already another factor pushing encounter design towards prescience, which I consider to be in the realm of fake difficulty.

Sure, but people who don't want to deal with reactions at all also aren't going to be picking reaction spells or reaction-heavy classes. Does anyone currently enjoy how Hellish Rebuke works?

At the absolute minimum it could be an optional prompt. If you just want to fire automatically? Set it and forget it, but let everyone else decide when to use them.