I couldn’t agree more. And as EA testers it’s impossible to judge whether their “improvements†are necessary or not because we don’t get to try it any other way.
You can just play Solasta and have a perfectly working combat system that is (at least for me) about 10 times more fun than BG.
So yeah, for me, all that tweaking and half baked homebrew messing with the rules is completely unneccessary.
D&D 5e was developed with a lot of playtesting and an amazing humility from the game designers who listened to the community.
Larian clearly wanted to do "their thing", which is essentially DOS 2. I get it, they have their flair and their style. But the thing is; if they would have just started by implementing things well and true to the core rules, it would have been easier to start tweaking from that position. Actually, many of their stuff could have been made to fit far better even following the 5e rules, to be honest. Now it just feels like they're aimlessly changing things and it's spiralled out of their control. Too much homebrewing and changing a few things here and there until everything kind of ... is a mess.
What surprises me is creative items like oil flasks are native to D&D. There's room for sandbox ideas and creativity, native to the core rule set.
The current homebrew stifles creativity, I don't enjoy the encounter against Minthara at the gate at all. Zevlor literally says they didn't have any better ideas than to bury barrels to ignite. (Instead of doing anything to protect the exposed hill on the horn side of the gate). There are barrels around for the player to toss to keep the fire going. The player is railroaded into a barrel fight. Rather than let the player be creative, the tieflings figured it out for the player. We could have a cool quest to plan how to protect the gate.
The Ogre tosses goblins in barrels and the goblins are protected from collision damage. The Ogre toss should work like the spell catapult, those goblins should be taking 3d8 bludgeoning damage.
The way I've enjoyed this fight is to summon the Ogres from the Blighted Village. They will take out goblins and tieflings, no barrels required. It's just sad that it makes it harder to protect the tieflings.
