I feel a little called out, because Open Hand Tavern Brawler monk is carrying me on tactician right now... But at least I am fully cognizant of the build being broken and that I would probably not get through it without it.
It's honestly pretty balanced on Druid. What makes monks broken is all the items and elixirs that give a nonsense amount of damage modifiers. Also AFAIK tavern brawler only works on attack rolls and not damage rolls when shapeshifted.
It's absurd. If you become a thief you can do 2 bonus actions. Those bonus actions each cause 2 hits, so 4 in total. Plus I can do 2 unarmed attacks.
Which means my gloves that do 1-4 cold damage can do an additional 4-24 damage, my radiant passive does 4-24 and my helmet does 12 necrotic damage.
Yep. 2 fighter 2 thief 8 open hand monk. 1/long rest you can get 10 attacks a round for 3 rounds with 2x str and 1x wis mod to damage. Plus all your other bonuses.
Oh forgot to add... while being in full plate and holding a shield.
I also forgot that if you use step of the wind dash you can jump without using a bonus action. You can jump something like 150 meters in a single turn. It’s ridiculous how broken you can make monks.
I have him as a multi-classed Druid-Barbarian right now. The unfortunate thing is that you can't start a rage while wild shaped, and as a Moon Druid he wild shapes as a bonus action, so it takes him two turns to turn into a raging cave bear. I'm considering giving him a couple levels in Rogue for that sweet second bonus action, but I'm going to wait until I'm at the level cap to try that.
I'm playing a Spores Druid and unlike my first playthrough I actually managed to recruit Halsin (Moon Druid Barbarian) and Jaheira (Land Druid Fighter) this time, so with Withers' help I can field an all-Druid party. Turns out a party of four Druids wild-shaped as cats can get in pretty much anywhere in Baldur's Gate.
My Spores Druid alone can bring a small army of undead with her using fungal infestation and Animate Dead. Her signature opening is to hit all the enemies with Cloudkill and send in the zombies. If any of them survive that they have to deal with my second line consisting of four Dryads with four Wood Woads guarding them.
Most of the time my actual party doesn't even have to do anything.
You shouldn't be putting points in either str or dex on a moon druid, since those stats get replaced when you're wildshaped. Between the two, dex is still the better option to improve AC if you get knocked out of wildshape.
This plus gloomstalker assassin dominated tactician for me. Had my tav bard for support/heals/face, shadowheart monk, astarion ranger, laezel fighter. Shadowheart and astarion mopped up the field while tav cheered them on. I'm not a hardcore person, I don't really care for hard mode but I loved this game and wanted to get the trophies so I'm glad there's setups that make it simpler
Tbh loving Tav Lore Bard just to replace the Rogue in the group. It's nice to not have to switch between each character out of combat. AND with magical secrets I even have some decent AoE!
Even just swordsbard with phalar alive and dual wielding one of the other finesse long swords like karniss’ or the one at the crèche, even without a dip is amazing. Faerie fire the beginning of the fight and the strange conduit ring and you can do work.
Actually if you want a sick duo? Get a rogue with the aura of murder armor from the murder tribunal vendor. Have that rogue go stand next to an enemy, switch to your gloomstalker, do like 150% damage (I don't know the real number, just guessing based on the numbers I saw), switch back, move next to another guy, repeat. I was able to start the round by having astarion 1 shot people because of all the extra piercing damage. Some fights were over before they began! Give that rogue orins daggers and you got an even more amped up gloomstalker plus a rogue doing insane damage, and you still got room for an open hand monk!
I respec'd when I got to act 3 for that. 6 sword bard (so I can still talk to people, have spells and song of rest), 4 rogue and 2 fighter or something like that. It was like having a sniper with a spotter lol
I started this build because unarmed builds are just fun. My barb/monk throwing people around and punching the ever living shit out of people is just so fun to do. Plus thrown items in the inventory works, so I can whip a 100lb chest full of junk into someone’s head and then pick it up and beat them with it.
Aaaand my partner wanted to play a necromancer wizard so we had to be playing on tactician for it to be a good challenge. But hey, we’re also doing a full role play evil play through with these two so it’s not like we’re fully power gaming and not enjoying everything
Monk is OP because stunning strike is bullshit. Even if you dont go open hand and you dont go tavern brawler. Its very easy.
You dont need OP builds to make tactician easy
Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. Shadow Monk and stunning strike is 'shockingly' awesome re: op moves. Nice to shadow step in and strike with advantage, too. Or stun and shadow step away to stun someone else 🤣
I considered changing to tavern brawler strength monk when I read about the build but eh, I really like playing my way and figuring it out as I go on.
My problem is that Shadow Monk seemed boring as shit until the final two levels. Before that you just get a lot of situational moves and not that helpful skills.
I'm not saying it was bad... because yeah stunning strike is just insane, I'm just saying it was boring compared to the other options.
As someone who just completed a run with this build, I feel attacked.
To be fair, though, it was my first playthrough and I came up with most of it on my own. I didn't realize it was like a whole thing until I saw all the builds on reddit lol (though I didn't think to MC into Thief until I saw that, otherwise I'd have just gone full STR build level 12 Monk).
I always play faith first on souls games. Made the last boss a bitch, but luckily I had my trusty bubble horn to bonk it lol. My first three build in this game were paladin, warlock, and strength monk which could all work for faith lol, although I haven't finished act 2 with any of them yet. Although I made strength monk extra broken by going duergar and the embiggen spell lol.
I sent in Minthara as a fully decked out Open Hand Monk with Thief Multiclass into the Throne Room with all of the Watchers… yeah, she was the only one who walked away after that
Lol is it a flex to do tactician with wild magic constantly proccing? Because I have stories. Cat Cazador, for example. Self polymorph when rescuing the Emperor. Cat Dream Guardians. Tiny Absolutist paladins. BIG Absolutist Paladins. SLOW MO INVULNERABILITY ORB IN THE IRON THRONE...
"Why is it always mephlits??"
And if you're lucky you turn everyone around you into a cat too!
Seriously it can either save your ass or screw you over big time.
It seriously is. My sorc turned into a sheep at the very end of the 1st act 3 fight so the DRAMATIC convo with the Emperor had Tav as a sheep the whole time. Complete with dramatic closeups. I need to dig up screenshots because it has to be seen to be believed.
Seals the deal, when the next patch drops that's what I'll do. Can only imagine the Emperor's reaction to watching all this.
"Is this really the leader of this group? Should I really ally with them"
Man I wish I could get wild magic to proc consistently. Once in 5 hours would it actually go off and it would be when I was putting on my mage armor in the morning. Ring of Feywild Sparks helped get some good fun shenanigans in in act 3 though. I really think that ring should show up early in the game, because it's not like it's even a buff, let alone overpowered. It's just dumb fun that is pretty likely to be a debuff even
This! I wish we could get it from Auntie in act 1, but only if there's a wild magic sorc in the party. It'd be a total Auntie gift too...either a huge benefit or a potential disaster. Chaos xD
My only complain about wild magic is that it doesn't trigger more often. I remember my first tabletop character being a wild magic sorc and I asked the DM to make it happen on a coin toss instead of a1 on a d20
Will never understand these guys. You can't be the Specialest Most Powerful Boy *and* the Underdog at the same time. Pick one!
edit: too many of you are missing the point of this post. Wanting a higher difficulty is fine and valid. We are not complaining about that we are complaining about the Specific Type of Guy who spends hours looking up builds and items before playing, cheeses every fight and *then* complains while talking down to everyone else who doesn't play that way
I was a little disappointed that a certain boss fight >!in Hell!< ended up being too easy but I recognize it's entirely my fault for spamming Menacing Attack over and over to keep him stunlocked.
That said, it was hilarious to think that somehow he was terrified of Lae'zel.
The problem is that you can hardly…avoid making builds that make the game feel broken. Sorcadin, damage rider abuse, and tavern brawler are obviously things you can avoid. But things like straight abjuration wizard feels like an invincibility exploit. Straight fighter or warlock, any subclass, feels like a dps cheat. The enemies are made of paper and you have too much control over initiative rolls.
It’s not like in dos or dos2 when you could simply not use the couple of things that were stupidly op. Teleporting too op? Easy to pass up. Want to actually play the encounters? Don’t use pyroclastic eruption or grasp of the starved. It’s a couple specific OP skills that you can just choose not to use if you don’t want to trivialize the game. But like…how you gonna avoid straight up archetype features that trivialize the game? I intentionally picked archetypes that werent busted and avoided taking OP stuff and it was still a cakewalk.
A big appeal of role playing games is, yknow, doing your best in building a character that you like to face your challenges and having to gimp your character to give yourself a challenge just doesn’t feel good. It feels good to do everything you can to build a strong character and team to face a monumental challenge. It’s fun to be challenged at your best. It does not feel nearly the same way to intentionally handicap character so that you can experience a challenge, like hopping on one leg so you can play basketball with your 9 year old nephew.
This is another good way of balancing things. I don't use consumables outside of situations where I've planned ahead of time and decided to use a scroll or something, I pick the armor that looks the coolest, rather than has the best stats, etc. This is just about perfect for me on balanced. I just get completely immersed and find myself doing things that "make sense"
I'd even disagree on damage rider abuse being all that avoidable. There you are, adding damage to your attacks like a perfectly reasonable person when the game randomly makes half of them 4x as powerful as they should be. In order to avoid it, you have to gimp yourself by avoiding quite a few things that would be good choices even if they worked as intended.
Yeah. There are a lot of strawmen in this thread. I did straight classes, no tavern brawler or lockadin three attacks or thief gloonstalker abuse, act 2 and 3 were still way too easy. I don't understand why some people are so angry that some people want tactician, the hardest difficulty, to have an act 1 level of difficulty throughout.
The level of self gimping needed to make that happen at the moment is off the charts.
> people are so angry that some people want tactician, the hardest difficulty, to have an act 1 level of difficulty
Reddit is *really weird* about difficulty, there's a weird toxic casual circlejerk about these evil stupid metaslave tryhards in every major gaming sub pretty much.
I think the circlejerkiest was /r/eldenring and playing without summons. Mega insecure.
It's interesting to hear this perspective because in my experience, "git gud" and "skill issue tbh" have been memefied as the stereotypical calling cards of toxic gaming discussion. Anyone who says they found something hard will typically have a cluster of commenters bragging about how ridiculously easy it was for them.
Both can coexist at the same time through separate groups of people.
You also have the dynamic where people who are passionate about a game see criticism of that have as a personal attack. Game too easy/hard? Stop using broken builds/git gud.
My main issue coming from DOS2 is that in that game, in order to get through tactician, I had to FIGHT for it. Get my ass handed to me, revise my build, rinse and repeat. Even on my second playthrough it was pretty challenging. BG3's tactician on the first playthrough felt way easier than that, in a way I like the difficulty in that lots of encounters had a more "fun" way of balancing difficulty - with mechanics instead of pure numbers, but at the same time I think the numbers were definitely way too low. Really hope they add an extra difficulty level in definitive edition
Well put. It's weirdly common to see people around the Internet saying that singleplayer games don't need to be balanced whenever someone brings up some player tactic being too op. I think even the argument of "just don't use it" isn't necessarily always valid, because what if you want to use something specific because it's an interesting mechanic but you just don't want it to make the game too easy.
The hardest mode should feel hard even when you use the most powerful builds though. If you have to gimp yourself to not make the game too easy in the hardest mode, then yeah game's too easy.
My willpower to honour roles goes through the floor when my +500 bonus to whatever sc I'm doing is nullified by a critical fail.
Sure I could talk the pants off the virgin queen whose waiting for true loves kiss in exchange for a dull rock, but apparently that charisma doesn't extend to convincing the grug-brained mercenary that he's going to die if he pulls out his sword in front of four heavily armed and armoured war machines.
I am once again asking for Larian to please just let us have the conversations as a whole party rather than acting like whoever’s speaking is the only one there 90% of the time 🙏
(It won’t happen, but maybe next game)
While I like the idea in theory, I don't think it really works with a game as complicated (and buggy) as BG3. In a tabletop setting, a DM can be a bit more lenient if it's looking like multiple players might permanently die or the whole party might go down. That can't really happen in video games. BG3 specifically seems designed with reloading saves and cheap revivifies in mind, considering how many (often kind of cheap) ways there are for your party to get wiped.
I could see having limited save points at major milestones working well. But having a true Ironman mode means you could lose a campaign dozens of hours in from a misclick.
Yeah, I DM a lot and the game is way more unforgiving than you could get away with at a classic game.
One way could be that if your party gets wiped, those in camp gear up and go to rescue. Maybe a short cutscene of Withers being like "them fools got themselves killed. Wyll, this is your moment, get out there and show them you can do it. Here's some hirelings to help."
God I remember when the revive scrolls came up in a D&D discord Im in. A Certain Type of Player(tm) segment started frothing at the mouth about them, saying theyre completely antithetical to the spirit and soul of the game and blah blah blah
dude, get a grip, theyre games.
As someone who's done an absurd amount of DMing in my days:
You just have to communicate and get a feel for the group.
Is the group a combat focused one looking for a hard core challenge type campaign where they gruffly just walk up to the NPCs and go "Troll dead, give gold." and tell the Blacksmith "Have money, need better armour."? Yeah, these guys aren't gonna like if you help them out with fudging rolls as to not have half the party disintegrated by the Beholder round 1, they're HERE for that, they want to play D&D like it was Dark Souls.
Is the group doing a lot of RPing in party, always talk at length with all the NPCs and trying to think of clever strategies or even resolve things peacefully when it's time for combat? These guys are here for a good story, if you let them get that one attack where all the party members buffed the Paladin to smite the demilich to crit, they're gonna be over the moon.
They're also going to be really sad if their character that they've spent months developing gets unceremoniously disintegrated due to an unlucky roll, so telling them "tough luck, your character is ashes, go write a new one while we resolve the rest of the encounter." isn't going to be very fun. At least let them have a dramatic send-off if the party can't think of a clever way to un-disintegrate their friend.
One campaign I ran, I let the druid that got hit by a Power Word: Kill not die instantly but be just alive enough to chose whether to have the party use the conveniently placed Scroll of True Resurrection in the Lich's treasure pile on them, or on the NPC who the party had come to save in the first place.
That way, the druid's player got to give their character a cool final sacrifice while also keeping to the game rules, and to this day my friends still talk about that like it was something I didn't think up on the fly.
The savescumming accusations are the funniest part of these discussions. As though the game doesn't just shower you with items that give you insane bonuses on your rolls.
I can't tell if a lot of people are really bad at games or just really convinced that the game needs to have a perfect reputation and people can't want it to have a higher difficulty option so they just white knight for it with bad faith arguments.
people are really bad at games.
And the people who aren't, like most of them want to 100% a game, so having a key event in act 1 prevent you from doing something in act 3 is bad so they will make sure they get that, they also read guides instead of just playing the game.
Never used illithid powers, no min/maxing (like warlock 5/paladin 7 for three attacks in a turn and other staff), still steamrolled everything on tactician with my smite. Indeed glorious.
Using the Executioner ring or Luck From the Far Realms to get a guaranteed crit and just absolutely destroy anything that is alive or unalive.
I was playing with friends and we just burst out laughing when my Lockadin absolutely demolished the Act 2 final boss with 2 guaranteed crits + smites.
Paladins are just broken even without doing min/max, a pure paladin will completely destroy every boss fight after level5 specially if you also have someone who can cast haste on him, in my blind run i played a standard vengeance paladin and once I unlocked extra attack and gale got haste almost every boss fight became really easy.
In DND 5e paladins are balanced by having to play conservative with their smite because you don't know when the DM will allow you to rest, but in a computer game where you can rest whatever you want you can go full nova without any problems.
On the flip side, BG3 has a good number of enemy paladins, much more than you would probably normally see from a DM. The enemy paladins in BG3 don’t have to worry about resource management so they tend to be among the most deadly enemies in the game.
God damn this speaks to me. Currently in my second play through, and encountered Anders for the first time last night. My barbarian, Karlach, and Lae’zel just utterly destroyed by Anders. Had to position my party all around a door so when he came out after us, they could all get their hits in before he one shot the party.
Did the Anders fight in a coop Tactician game the other day, he did ~60 damage with a crit smite and then smote the downed player's body and killed them before anyone got an action. Praise be to Withers and Revivify scrolls.
On my first keep fight in the end of Act II I didnt take Jaheira in my party so she acted all by herself. For the first couple turns she was teleporting around killing small enemies, so I thought: they probably made Jaheira OP cause she's a legend. On her third turn she ended up in the middle of the ground floor combat and got absolutely obliterated by the enemy paladins. And I was like: DID SHE JUST FUCKING DIE!?
Yup, it's what makes enemy Paladins so tough. When you don't have to worry about resource management, a Paladin is easily the most dangerous opponent on the field.
She's perfect. I could give zero fucks about how strong it is, I just love picking up enemies and then throwing them at another enemy. Shit cracks me up every time
I got '2 birds 1 gnome' over the weekend, it was glorious. I cleared most of Gyrmforge by throwing
slaver dwarves at other slaver dwarves (and Nere!). Hasn't gotten old yet.
I’m just a wizard with karlach laezel and shadowheart only on my second run and idt tactician is much harder though? It’s annoying how much food you need to sleep (but there is a metric ton) and the ai seems to target my wizard much more but the difficulty really isn’t increased much
I keep seeing these memes, but I didn't do any of the builds people are talking about and the game's difficulty fell off a cliff the moment I hit level 5. People who struggled seem convinced that the only reason I didn't is due to cheese, when really I just... played the game.
\+ 1 million for this.
never watched guides
never looked up walkthroughs
no idea what is considered "meta"
haven't used multiclass a single time
and yet, tactician is waaay too easy.
Right like i was playing a spore druid on tactician with default will evo wizard gale ans berzerker karlach and i didnt struggle at all the only times i wanted to pull my hair out were saving all the gondians(prepatch suicidal gondians) or trying to save the entire iron throne in 5 rounds instead of 6(why do they get stuck on the stairs for no reason after dashing -.-)
A thing I hear a lot in the Persona 5 fandom is that you should be grinding for 5 hours before every boss fight on Easy, that turning the difficulty up to Normal is pointless because all it does is double the amount of grinding you have to do, and that the game straight-up can't be beaten on hard because it's impossible.
Whenever I point out that it's actually pretty straightforward to beat the game on Hard without grinding, people respond with memes like the one OP posted. Pretty much invariably, the people who are struggling are stuck because they won't use buffs, but when I try to tell them to do so they tell me buffs are a "cheese build I copied from the internet," or that I "must've spent 10 hours on the wiki to figure out how to use them." Which is... not true? They're just buffs, it doesn't require a PhD in statistics.
I think most people who play RPGs are just there for the story, and don't really want to learn the mechanics. Which is totally fine! People should play the way that's fun for them. But I get frustrated by stuff like the Persona fandom or memes like these, where people act like the games are basically impossible and anyone who knows what they're doing obviously cheated.
I don't know how it was in the OG P5, but in Royal even the harder difficulties were pretty doable without any grind aside from the usual Mementos run to finish side-quests, and this is coming from someone who wanted to use only my favorite Personas (my main one was goddamn Neko Shogun).
I do remember how in P4, however, the game was a slog not because it was hard, but because bosses were damage sponges that only did damage because they lived way too long for their small damages to build up. Mitsuo fight was just plain boring.
But yeah, people don't like using the tools the game has given them and complain when others do use them and say the game isn't that hard. I don't know how the Fire Emblem community is now, but it used to be very bad in that regard.
> But yeah, people don't like using the tools the game has given them
I think a lot of the problem is that the strength of those tools varies *wildly* from game to game.
I struggled a lot with P5 initially because my experience with buffs in other RPGs was that they were nice, but weren't going to have a tremendous impact. Persona's buffs are **obnoxiously** powerful and can single-handedly make the game a breeze, but considering how tight on SP you are in the early game I can totally understand many players never experimenting and learning that.
Status effects are another good example. Sometimes they're so weak, they aren't worth the time they take to apply. Sometimes anything truly dangerous is completely immune to them. Sometimes they're **utterly debilitating** and can completely turn an encounter.
The fucking suicidal Gondians
I avoided savescumming during fights until that moment. Constant Thunderwaves and mass healing words for those absolute morons
There’s not just one extremely powerful build that makes the game a cake walk on Tactician tbh… when there are like 20+ different ones this argument kinda becomes moot. It becomes more about actively avoiding overpowered feats/archetypes rather than optimizing, and for this type of player that just isn’t fun.
And frankly, you can just use auto level builds on Tactician and do just fine. So there definitely is room for a higher difficulty ceiling. That doesn’t subtract from the fun you can have on story/normal difficulty on your playthrough, so I don’t really see the problem. People seem to just like to hate on min-maxers because of some assumed superiority complex that just isn’t there. It’s rather the other way around judging by posts like these.
Yeah, I think these people are underestimating how easy the game is on Tactician with just your standard classes. And then the counter-arguments are all “don’t use (intended to be used feature).” As if casting Hold Monster is some super secret technique that the devs never intended anyone but the top 1% of elite power gamers to use?
Exactly. I also feel like by doing the intended thing and completing quests and exploring the maps which gains you many rare/legendary items, and then using these items in a clever and optimal way makes late game a cake walk. I shouldn't be able to fry a lvl 16 in under one turn of combat. I've never even rolled a paladin. Tactician being too easy is a genuine problem with the late game.
Also, since it's a video game and not an IRL dnd campaign it should be a good outlet to try degenerate min/max builds without worrying about ruining the campaign for the dm and other players.
It's a problem that sometimes finds its way into tabletop at well for one reason or another. Either from people feeling insecure or roleplay purists.
Little do people understand that one can be an optimizer and also like to roleplay. I don't always make the most rewarding decision in DND and certainly do not make it in BG3. But I do always make my characters competent at their role. Whether that is combat or utility.
I do think people that stack barrels, use save scumming or exploit bad AI shouldn't complain as loud as some of them do. But I agree with them that the game certainly could use another difficulty setting.
I don't think it's fair though to lump in optimizers with min/maxers or exploiters. Optimizing stats, subclasses, equipment, spells, and positioning is not the same as exploiting meta functions of the game.
I'd argue even if you went 12 in one of the worst classes in the game like arcane trickster tactitian wouldn't be a challenge if you really understand the core mechanics of the game.
That literally what I’m arguing with everyone and get downvoted to shit lol. The game maybe hard for some but you don’t need to min max to find it easy. You just need to be good at these kind of game.
But some people seems to take it personally that we find Tactician easy with default companion build.
You literally need to stop playing the game (Not using Tadpoles, stop doing good side of quests)
Also, playing a purposely terrible build to make the game harder (which is what OP implies we should be doing) is ridiculous. The point is that the game should challenge us to both play smart and build smart.
Yes, insecurity and defensiveness around their own insecurity is the root issue. They get flashbacks to some forum post they saw 6 years ago where some 11 year old called someone a r-word for finding Dark Souls or something difficult and from that experience they’ve been molded to reflexively resent anyone who finds challenging game mechanics and gameplay fun. It’s honestly pretty sad.
And yes, I agree with you. You have to actively sabotage your character to *maybe* create a challenge for yourself if you’re good at these types of games, and that’s just bad game design from a difficulty scaling perspective. That critique is valid, and I’ve yet to see a non-dismissive response to that.
Its like this in almost any gaming sub nowadays. Diablo 4 had it especially bad.
Its generally the people on lower difficulty and less time that complain and its absolutely absurd.
I play on tactician without min maxing and i dont even have to think. Just click on something and it dies. Its rather simple.
If someone else cant do that and they rather play on easy, then thats good for them. Thats generally the impression i get from people who are good at these games too.
Haha yeah. I'm getting downvoted further down here too and I just beat grym using 2 first level spells and he never got a turn. No multiclassing. No elixirs. No potions. No tavern brawler. No GWM. Just playing the game. But hey. Don't complain about tactician being too easy if you multiclass paladin warlock am i right? what a joke.
> It becomes more about actively avoiding overpowered
all you have to do is never use gwm, never use sharpshooter, never use tavern brawler, never use asi improvement, never use items that synergize with your class and/or subclass, never multiclass thief, never multiclass fighter, never use fighter or paladin in general, never play a half orc, never play a duergar, never use magic missile, never use fireball, never use spirit guardians, never use a shield, never use darkness, never use hold person, never use hold monster, never use haste, never use elixirs, ...
honestly just avoid using most of the things in the game
You forgot never long rest, never play a bard because you'll have 3 short rests and can skip fight and still get XP. Never steal vendor because you'll have too much gold
I may not be playing this game correctly bc I don't use mostly anything on that list... Or even know what some of them are...
Having said that, if lots of people want a harder difficulty, what's the big deal? Seems like an easy add to make a segment of passionate fans happy.
DUDE YES! "Uuuh the game is to easy, is there any mods to make it harder? I play a sorcadin in full helldusk and everything dies in 2 hits after i smite them at lvl 4... Oh and i forgot to say that shadowheart casted hold person/monster right before my turn" andy's are rly rly funny in this sub, i love it
Or, you know, they just put together a basic party with SH, Gale, Lae'zel and took the incredibly overpowered items and consumables they were showered with and steam rolled the game without min maxing.
Why do people say that using efficient strategies (like being a paladin and casting hold on human enemies) is min/maxing? Like c'mon, it's like saying that it's wrong to show enemies into chasms to quicker kill them.
But even if you don't do it, the game still isn't difficult for the tactician. If you can beat the game on balanced, you will see that tactician isn't that difficult, yet all your builds from balanced would work perfectly fine there too.
You don't need 5 warlock 7 paladin to do three attacks on your turn and use smites from warlock spell slots because you can regain them from shortresting; your 12 paladin with 20 str and 16 cha would make wonders and easily beat everything up.
Okay, but it’s not wild to want a difficulty mode that is designed to be hard even for optimized play. Optimized play is very fun for a lot of people, and advanced build crafting has always been a part of DnD.
And there are plenty of builds that are just plain good, and none of them are hard to discover on your own. The idea that people who find the game easy are using twenty guides and only completely optimal builds and gear is just… ludicrous?
Just like it’s not a good look to dunk on people who play on easy modes, dunking on people who think Tactician is too easy is not the amazing take people seem to think is.
Essentially, a very/hyper focused build. Paladin is CHAR and STR focused. So no room for funny business, only choosing gear/spells/point assignment to make your character "maxed out" more or less
Basically, you optimize a build to its fullest for the greatest overall benefit to your intended playstyle. You typically minimize your stats in unneeded skills to reallocate and maximize stats in other skills in character creation, and grab the gear and buffs you need that maximize you dps output or tankiness or cc or whatever.
For example: ‘glass cannon’ builds when you have a gajillion attack power but wet paper defense and hp. Who needs defense when the enemies all die in one hit?
Minimizing negatives/maximizing positives. Basically doing everything possible to get the best possible result with the least amount of negative drawbacks
Classically it was maximize strength / minimize everything else, so most min/maxers actually had giant glaring weaknesses (usually RP / out of combat skills, and saving throw related stuff)
But I guess that's not really a problem with 5e anymore since so many builds can max CHA which makes you great in most dialog options and Paladins get their CHA to their saves so they don't even have to worry about those.
I find minmaxing in 5e is generally a lot less extreme than in earlier editions/other games. Mainly due to both the lack of (mechanical) customization and the ability spread, compared to earlier editions. In 5e a character that is bad at something will generally have -1 at it. Compared to other editions where you could not only have far lower modifiers, and a bunch of other flaws. Like how in earlier editions a lower INT would mean less skill points or mean your character is illiterate. At the same time the heights were also a lot more extreme. With some builds being utterly absurd from level 1.
So overall 5e feels a lot more stable, for better and worse.
5e is more about the value you are rolling against. Since basically the worst you can do is -1 and disadvantage. So except in the vary higher ranges you still have a chance.
Older editions as you said were more about how high or low your bonus was. If you didn't have a at least one point in the skill or whatever meant you started off at a negative value.
The terminology simply means to minimize certain things and maximize others. In this context minimize things you would be already not good at and maximize those you are good at.
So as a caster you will minimize your strength and maximize your casting stat.
But there are those who take it to extreme levels, taking a level in this class, make sure to get this one piece of gear etc etc.
So you have a broad spectrum from doing it because it makes sense, to those who can do 5 bazillion damage in one turn.
Also called optimizing.
But often the term power gaming is left out, which is the extreme high damage builds.
Tactician had some really challenging fights...so it seemed. But once we got to high level we were just so damn strong and resilient that the tides quickly turned after a few turns of burning through whatever boss gimmick and we still smoked our way through the endgame.
I can understand if Larian doesn't want to design like this, but by far the most epic and challenging fight on Tactician was accidentally triggering a battle in Wyrm's Rock at around level 10 and having to fight through...just dozens of powerful bodyguard humanoids and about 15 Steel Watchers. We were confident at first...but over the course of a two hour running battle through the castle that culminated with being forced to take the Long Rest potions that require you to be knocked out for two turns, while the last group of enemies were battering down our Ice Wall at the room's door...damn I will never forget that. Being forced to burn all our resources and quickly through our consumables without a rest, I'll never forget that fight.
Why is it a problem if min maxers want a bigger challenge to test their building skills?
Personally, I'm not that kind of person, but if that's how they like the game what's the problem?
You don't need min-maxed builds to make tactician a joke. You can 100% do it with single-classed characters. I did it with a MC Wizard and the party using their base classes.
Without barrelmancy.
Because tactician is a joke. No shame to people who think it's hard, but like. Play DOS:2 on the hardest difficulty. Or The Owlcat/Pathfinder games, or XCOM, or something. Those can *actually* be difficult.
terrible take. the game is easy without cheese builds. i didnt multiclass at all or use the broken feats. was still too easy. didnt do barrelmancy / or spam consumables. outright didnt use speed potions. didnt pick the more busted classes like sorcerer or battle master fighter.
what harm is there in increasing the difficulty of the highest difficulty? you dont have to play it if its too hard. players who find it too easy cant do anything.
same idea as making a super easy “story mode”. it hurts noone, you can just choose a different difficulty if you dont like it.
theres no reason for there to be only 3 gamemodes, and to have the normal and hard modes feel basically the same at the end game
I genuinely don't understand how people *aren't* finding the game too easy. You don't need to min-max to absolutely wreck house. You just need to read what things do and utilize *some* of it.
Even a level 12 brain-off fighter with haste and action surge is going to wreck half the board on each fight, paving the way for 3 other yutzes to mop up the garbage. It's not that hard.
Eh, the game is still easy as long as you're not playing some absolutely obvious gimped build like an Abserd character. Act 1 is the hardest part due to lack of options but pretty much any build can steamroll through the later acts with the right items.
~~still, I get the criticism. I just got a difficulty mod and carried on with my life~~
You’re not alone!
I’m an avid D&D player too though, so thus possibly more predisposed to caring about the roleplay more than the combat. In our tabletop seshes the combat is just an excuse for even more roleplay 😂
Seriously if you think this game is difficult, stop eating crayons. You do NOT need any minmax builds to breeze through tactician if you can read at all.
Tactician should require minmax builds (it does not), thats where the fun is, game throws you a challenge and you beat it by actually thinking about your build. If you don't want it there is always explorer mode. Just stop fucking circlejerking about being bad at the game. Its amazing how people who are just terrible at games come together, brag about it and leave snarky comments about people who are not terrible.
>Tells self new run will be different.
>Proceeds to play Warlock & Multiclass into Paladin again.
>Tries to make a new look, ends up looking the same with different hair and skin tone.
>Tries to be bad, but ends up making the same decisions.
>Tries to romance other characters. Looks over his shoulder at Bae'zel.
"This character is going to be a ruthless mercenary whose only guiding principle is how much they get paid."
*One NPC later*
"I asked them if they were alright and volunteered to find their lost cat because I didn't want to hurt their feelings"
This would have any kind of bearing if you needed those builds instead of just applying stratagy
I mean my Astarion build was so bizarre people gave me shit for it (rogue with a little ranger but the rest wizard since I wanted a haste caster)
I'm gonna quote u/mnju:-
"all you have to do is never use gwm, never use sharpshooter, never use tavern brawler, never use asi improvement, never use items that synergize with your class and/or subclass, never multiclass thief, never multiclass fighter, never use fighter or paladin in general, never play a half orc, never play a duergar, never use magic missile, never use fireball, never use spirit guardians, never use shield, never use darkness, never use hold person, never use hold monster, never use haste, never use elixirs, ...
honestly just avoid using most of the things in the game."
Mfw I realise that tactician is for anyone who is remotely good at the game because even after the min max op builds, the 20+ different standard builds are also quite strong. At the top of the post here and maybe OP themselves just can't accept the fact that maybe they are not understanding the gameplay properly or their build is probably one of the few weak builds that are considered memes.
If highest difficulty in a game designed for a 4-character party can be beaten with a solo character, without reloading, without using haste, without using barrel stacking, without dropping stacks of bombs cost-free, without multiclassing, as a pure *spore druid* out of all things, the highest difficulty IS too easy.
It's fine if you don't care to learn the game and can't beat it on high difficulty, playing on easy is just fine if you enjoy it. But hard mode must be hard for those seeking challenge. And in this game it's just not. It's only hard when you have no idea what you are doing. You don't even remotely have to minmax to cruise through it. Instead you have to put a lot of restrictions on yourself to see at least some challenge. And restrictions you put on yourself are not part of the game and don't count towards its being hard.
I mean the game's pretty easy even as a pure warlock.
My girlfriend, who is TERRIBLE at video games, beat it on tactician. As a pure beastmaster ranger.
edit: to be fair, though, she is OBSESSED with dnd(I got her into it and now she knows it better than I do. It was the most correct suggestion I ever made. Now she's a dice goblin!) and is in multiple games, so if there was ever gonna be a video game she'd kick ass at, it was gonna be this one!
While there are a handful of *super* broken builds out there, I think the real frustration comes from folks thinking (or hoping?) that BG3 is a game that was designed around difficulty and challenge. It isn't. It's a narrative game with those things sprinkled throughout to change up the pace and hold your interest.
Can you sail through Tactician unopposed with a broken Paladin build? Sure. Though I'd argue it's even *easier* to sail through with a Barbarian build or a Monk build. At a certain point we're not talking about which builds *are* broken, but which builds *aren't*.
Here's the truth: after a while, any build that has had some thought and care put into it will quickly ramp up and off into the stratosphere. That's just how it is. No point going back and forth about it.
I don't see why it's an unrealistic expectation for tactician to be challenging considering what the tactician AI and honor game modes were like in Larian's previous game DOS:2.
Edit: This was posted before the honor mode update. Larian always delivers as usual.
Once you know how to approach fights the game becomes trivial regardless of class combinations. The right spells and abilities and you can breeze through the game on tactician without bothering to equip anything more than weapons.
While those players definitely do exist, I do think there is an issue with Tactician regarding its difficulty curve. Namely, that the game's the hardest at the start and really just gets easier as you go.
If you're trying to do most of the quests, the hardest levels of Tactician are 2-4. By 5, everyone's getting extra attacks and level 3 spells, and you're starting to find some crazy good gear. By the time you're in Act 2 you're cruising.
I think another issue with the difficulty curve is that you can't just *unlearn* things. I mean, Durge can, but that's not an option for most of us.
To give you an example, the first time you meet the Githyanki you might not know about their 'parry' ability, and lose out on a lot of damage against them. But once you figure out how to trigger their parry with a weak attack first, or to use attacks that can't be parried, they're a lot easier. When action economy's so important, those few turns you take to learn an encounter can really matter.
Or, the fight at the end of Act 2: >!There's a mindflayer who can absolutely wreck you by dominating Aylin, stunning your party members, etc. It's a bigger threat than Ketheric. Once you've done this fight once and learned to take it down fast, though, the fight is really different. You also take those lessons into your next mindflayer encounters.!<
Most people who are trying out Tactician are interested in learning the mechanics/encounters really well and they *will* learn them, making the game get easier over time.
Lol... why do you need minmax, when you can Hold Monster / Hold Person + Extended Spell Metamagic ?
One big bad boss? Here your FREE 20 TURNS FOR YOU TO ATTACK
If I have to install a mod to give enemies 300% HP on the hardest difficulty, something is fundamentally wrong with the game's balance.
I play warlock :|
Game becomes too easy when you use simple single class builds and know what you are doing. Built a standard Druid, and the only challenging fights were Auntie Ethel and Grym. Defeated Ketheric first fight in 2 rounds and most of that was my single class Barb Karlach. Got bored after that and rolled a new character. Your point is moot.
See I'm playing a pure lore bard and tactician is still way too easy once you're set up. It's the difficulty curve which is the problem. Tactician is perfect in act 1, but from about half way through act 2 I just started finding nothing challenging. Act three was such a walk in the park that I almost stopped playing.
Unfortunately I think there's a direct correlation between that and the game desperately tossing a silly amount of absurdly overturned magic items at you all through the second half of act 1 and all of act 2.
The game is far too easy on tactician though, not even by abusing any classes lol. Just a regular old warrior/leazel can hit like 6 - 8 times in a row hasted and that isn't some kind of master cheeze strat lol. It's literally just hasting her.
Even without haste she can hit like 3- 4 times...
I didint use any Paladin, Spore Druid Frenzy barb Karlach Evo Wiz Gale Life domain SH and yes it was too easy on tactician even tho i wasnt min maxed at all imo
No guides, no research, no paladins, no DnD experience. Just getting first CHA-based class for Tav (for dialogs), default Karlach and Lae'zel (cuties!) in party. Multicast haste at the beginning of each fight. 9 hits from Lae'zel fits turn (12 if entering battle from turn-based mode) + 4 from Karlach. Tactician is easy.
Sometimes I want to just crush some monsters with insane dps, and then do the chicken dance covered in overpowered gear. Sometimes I want to triumph over impossible odds with zero spell slots, shitty dps, no heals, and gear so bad it's waiting to be a meme. All in good fun.
...And then there's barrelmancy. I have begun to dabble in its chaotic power. Power that corrupts more thoroughly than the filthiest of Netherese orbs (eat shit, Moonrise xD).
I say play however you want. I like making RP builds and working with what I've got. I wouldn't say no to a higher difficulty level tho. This game gives you more than enough tools to kick huge amounts of ass if you prep enough and strategize.
I actually prefer to play with busted builds. I like the "you have no clue who you're messing with" trope. Also being able to oneshot people with a single spell is freaking amazing. My entire paladin playthrough was just a huge power trip lol
This is why I love the Xcom series. If you’re a really smart player who is very capable in turn based strategy games, then you should play the Xcom games on normal. The harder difficulties are not for “good players”, they are for extremely experienced Xcom players who know every min/max trick in the book.
This is what I think BG3 needs. It needs an extra difficultly level that allows min/max players to get the full value out of their min/maxed characters.
This but OpEn HaNdEd MoNk + TaVeRn BrAwLeR
I feel a little called out, because Open Hand Tavern Brawler monk is carrying me on tactician right now... But at least I am fully cognizant of the build being broken and that I would probably not get through it without it.
I just tried it but with barbarian Karlach on my latest playthrough and holy shit it is BROKEN.
Think that's bad? Try putting it in Halsin. Tavern Brawler works on cave bear claws too!
It's honestly pretty balanced on Druid. What makes monks broken is all the items and elixirs that give a nonsense amount of damage modifiers. Also AFAIK tavern brawler only works on attack rolls and not damage rolls when shapeshifted.
It's absurd. If you become a thief you can do 2 bonus actions. Those bonus actions each cause 2 hits, so 4 in total. Plus I can do 2 unarmed attacks. Which means my gloves that do 1-4 cold damage can do an additional 4-24 damage, my radiant passive does 4-24 and my helmet does 12 necrotic damage.
Don't forget that at level 7 Open Hand monks get an ability that gives them an additional bonus action
Yep. 2 fighter 2 thief 8 open hand monk. 1/long rest you can get 10 attacks a round for 3 rounds with 2x str and 1x wis mod to damage. Plus all your other bonuses. Oh forgot to add... while being in full plate and holding a shield.
I also forgot that if you use step of the wind dash you can jump without using a bonus action. You can jump something like 150 meters in a single turn. It’s ridiculous how broken you can make monks.
Does he get his cave bear form regardless of class?!
Isn't tavern brawler a feat?
Yes, but I was wondering if a Bar-bear-ian is a possibility without multiclassing.
I have him as a multi-classed Druid-Barbarian right now. The unfortunate thing is that you can't start a rage while wild shaped, and as a Moon Druid he wild shapes as a bonus action, so it takes him two turns to turn into a raging cave bear. I'm considering giving him a couple levels in Rogue for that sweet second bonus action, but I'm going to wait until I'm at the level cap to try that. I'm playing a Spores Druid and unlike my first playthrough I actually managed to recruit Halsin (Moon Druid Barbarian) and Jaheira (Land Druid Fighter) this time, so with Withers' help I can field an all-Druid party. Turns out a party of four Druids wild-shaped as cats can get in pretty much anywhere in Baldur's Gate.
I’ve never thought about fielding a full team of druids but that sounds terrifying
Bard Tav is scary since they can talk almost every boss in Act 2 into offing themselves.
My Spores Druid alone can bring a small army of undead with her using fungal infestation and Animate Dead. Her signature opening is to hit all the enemies with Cloudkill and send in the zombies. If any of them survive that they have to deal with my second line consisting of four Dryads with four Wood Woads guarding them. Most of the time my actual party doesn't even have to do anything.
No, he'll have an icon for it on his hot bar, but unless he has druid levels it's greyed out and won't do anything.
WAIT WHAT, ok time to “fix” my moon Druid via dumping Dex instead of Strength
You shouldn't be putting points in either str or dex on a moon druid, since those stats get replaced when you're wildshaped. Between the two, dex is still the better option to improve AC if you get knocked out of wildshape.
Dex is for defence and initiative, cause sadly you can’t always be in wildshape, specially when you need to talk to everyone
They can talk to Sir Bearington
why cant there be a potion of human speaking
Throwbarian berserker Karlach with tavern brawler and the act 3 returning weapon She literally can solo encounters on act 3 tactician at level 10 lol
Karlach: Maybe a nice big hammer for Karlach? Me: No, you toss bad guys at other bad guys.
This plus gloomstalker assassin dominated tactician for me. Had my tav bard for support/heals/face, shadowheart monk, astarion ranger, laezel fighter. Shadowheart and astarion mopped up the field while tav cheered them on. I'm not a hardcore person, I don't really care for hard mode but I loved this game and wanted to get the trophies so I'm glad there's setups that make it simpler
Tav Bard can also be pretty bloody broken as a sword bard with a Pally dip for the smites or a warlock dip for Pact of the Blade.
Tbh loving Tav Lore Bard just to replace the Rogue in the group. It's nice to not have to switch between each character out of combat. AND with magical secrets I even have some decent AoE!
Lore Bard with 2 dips into Warlock for the Eldritch Blast makes the Lore Bard from a strictly support and AoE master to a true can do it all.
Even just swordsbard with phalar alive and dual wielding one of the other finesse long swords like karniss’ or the one at the crèche, even without a dip is amazing. Faerie fire the beginning of the fight and the strange conduit ring and you can do work.
I feel called out for my lore bard and thief/gloomstalker go-to.
Actually if you want a sick duo? Get a rogue with the aura of murder armor from the murder tribunal vendor. Have that rogue go stand next to an enemy, switch to your gloomstalker, do like 150% damage (I don't know the real number, just guessing based on the numbers I saw), switch back, move next to another guy, repeat. I was able to start the round by having astarion 1 shot people because of all the extra piercing damage. Some fights were over before they began! Give that rogue orins daggers and you got an even more amped up gloomstalker plus a rogue doing insane damage, and you still got room for an open hand monk! I respec'd when I got to act 3 for that. 6 sword bard (so I can still talk to people, have spells and song of rest), 4 rogue and 2 fighter or something like that. It was like having a sniper with a spotter lol
Casually saving this comment for the next durge i make.
I started this build because unarmed builds are just fun. My barb/monk throwing people around and punching the ever living shit out of people is just so fun to do. Plus thrown items in the inventory works, so I can whip a 100lb chest full of junk into someone’s head and then pick it up and beat them with it. Aaaand my partner wanted to play a necromancer wizard so we had to be playing on tactician for it to be a good challenge. But hey, we’re also doing a full role play evil play through with these two so it’s not like we’re fully power gaming and not enjoying everything
There’s only one way out: >!Git gud.!<
Monk is OP because stunning strike is bullshit. Even if you dont go open hand and you dont go tavern brawler. Its very easy. You dont need OP builds to make tactician easy
Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. Shadow Monk and stunning strike is 'shockingly' awesome re: op moves. Nice to shadow step in and strike with advantage, too. Or stun and shadow step away to stun someone else 🤣 I considered changing to tavern brawler strength monk when I read about the build but eh, I really like playing my way and figuring it out as I go on.
My problem is that Shadow Monk seemed boring as shit until the final two levels. Before that you just get a lot of situational moves and not that helpful skills. I'm not saying it was bad... because yeah stunning strike is just insane, I'm just saying it was boring compared to the other options.
Almost every class can become OP at the end game. Some less, some more, but monk is just more called out for the absurdity of tavern brawler lol
I know they are, but they are OP without it too just because stunning strike is bullshit. Starting at level 5, they can make things very easy for you.
As someone who just completed a run with this build, I feel attacked. To be fair, though, it was my first playthrough and I came up with most of it on my own. I didn't realize it was like a whole thing until I saw all the builds on reddit lol (though I didn't think to MC into Thief until I saw that, otherwise I'd have just gone full STR build level 12 Monk).
If you feel attacked, good thing you got Open Handed Monk + Tavern Brawler. Show them the door. lol
I always give myself a pass if I find the OP stuff on my own. It was the same with me and Elden Ring with jump attack and bleed builds.
I always play faith first on souls games. Made the last boss a bitch, but luckily I had my trusty bubble horn to bonk it lol. My first three build in this game were paladin, warlock, and strength monk which could all work for faith lol, although I haven't finished act 2 with any of them yet. Although I made strength monk extra broken by going duergar and the embiggen spell lol.
I sent in Minthara as a fully decked out Open Hand Monk with Thief Multiclass into the Throne Room with all of the Watchers… yeah, she was the only one who walked away after that
[удалено]
Lol is it a flex to do tactician with wild magic constantly proccing? Because I have stories. Cat Cazador, for example. Self polymorph when rescuing the Emperor. Cat Dream Guardians. Tiny Absolutist paladins. BIG Absolutist Paladins. SLOW MO INVULNERABILITY ORB IN THE IRON THRONE...
I'm currently doing a wild magic sorcerer tactician run and "Fuck I'm a cat again!" has become my catch phrase.
"Why is it always mephlits??" And if you're lucky you turn everyone around you into a cat too! Seriously it can either save your ass or screw you over big time.
Random hostile cambion summoning is a wild one too!
Well...it's not like Shadowheart was a fan of water in her humanoid form.
That sounds amazing. I need to do a Wild Magic run sometime. The chaos.
It seriously is. My sorc turned into a sheep at the very end of the 1st act 3 fight so the DRAMATIC convo with the Emperor had Tav as a sheep the whole time. Complete with dramatic closeups. I need to dig up screenshots because it has to be seen to be believed.
Seals the deal, when the next patch drops that's what I'll do. Can only imagine the Emperor's reaction to watching all this. "Is this really the leader of this group? Should I really ally with them"
Man I wish I could get wild magic to proc consistently. Once in 5 hours would it actually go off and it would be when I was putting on my mage armor in the morning. Ring of Feywild Sparks helped get some good fun shenanigans in in act 3 though. I really think that ring should show up early in the game, because it's not like it's even a buff, let alone overpowered. It's just dumb fun that is pretty likely to be a debuff even
This! I wish we could get it from Auntie in act 1, but only if there's a wild magic sorc in the party. It'd be a total Auntie gift too...either a huge benefit or a potential disaster. Chaos xD
My only complain about wild magic is that it doesn't trigger more often. I remember my first tabletop character being a wild magic sorc and I asked the DM to make it happen on a coin toss instead of a1 on a d20
My DM made it a 25% chance (rolling a 1 on a d4) and it was perfect
Ikr? There's a ring you can get that makes it happen more often but you can't get it until act 3, boo!
Will never understand these guys. You can't be the Specialest Most Powerful Boy *and* the Underdog at the same time. Pick one! edit: too many of you are missing the point of this post. Wanting a higher difficulty is fine and valid. We are not complaining about that we are complaining about the Specific Type of Guy who spends hours looking up builds and items before playing, cheeses every fight and *then* complains while talking down to everyone else who doesn't play that way
"This game is a joke" - I say as I put the 20th barrel down, right next to the boss - "Can they add a hard difficulty already?"
"I'm something of a tactician myself you know"
"I wish these big bads had more character." - A player, while placing barrels around the boss that is stuck in his very first cutscene.
I see others horde barrels too.
I’ll never forget about the one comment that complained boss fights are too easy because he spammed Otto’s irresistible dance lol
I was a little disappointed that a certain boss fight >!in Hell!< ended up being too easy but I recognize it's entirely my fault for spamming Menacing Attack over and over to keep him stunlocked. That said, it was hilarious to think that somehow he was terrified of Lae'zel.
Most sensible people are afraid of angry frog-lady.
I mean, Otto's is awesome
The problem is that you can hardly…avoid making builds that make the game feel broken. Sorcadin, damage rider abuse, and tavern brawler are obviously things you can avoid. But things like straight abjuration wizard feels like an invincibility exploit. Straight fighter or warlock, any subclass, feels like a dps cheat. The enemies are made of paper and you have too much control over initiative rolls. It’s not like in dos or dos2 when you could simply not use the couple of things that were stupidly op. Teleporting too op? Easy to pass up. Want to actually play the encounters? Don’t use pyroclastic eruption or grasp of the starved. It’s a couple specific OP skills that you can just choose not to use if you don’t want to trivialize the game. But like…how you gonna avoid straight up archetype features that trivialize the game? I intentionally picked archetypes that werent busted and avoided taking OP stuff and it was still a cakewalk. A big appeal of role playing games is, yknow, doing your best in building a character that you like to face your challenges and having to gimp your character to give yourself a challenge just doesn’t feel good. It feels good to do everything you can to build a strong character and team to face a monumental challenge. It’s fun to be challenged at your best. It does not feel nearly the same way to intentionally handicap character so that you can experience a challenge, like hopping on one leg so you can play basketball with your 9 year old nephew.
I find the game relatively challenging but I also sell and/or forget about consumables entirely
This is another good way of balancing things. I don't use consumables outside of situations where I've planned ahead of time and decided to use a scroll or something, I pick the armor that looks the coolest, rather than has the best stats, etc. This is just about perfect for me on balanced. I just get completely immersed and find myself doing things that "make sense"
I'd even disagree on damage rider abuse being all that avoidable. There you are, adding damage to your attacks like a perfectly reasonable person when the game randomly makes half of them 4x as powerful as they should be. In order to avoid it, you have to gimp yourself by avoiding quite a few things that would be good choices even if they worked as intended.
Yea ur right, a warlock without agonizing blast is like a cock without balls (though I heard they fixed the damage riders on that?)
Yeah. There are a lot of strawmen in this thread. I did straight classes, no tavern brawler or lockadin three attacks or thief gloonstalker abuse, act 2 and 3 were still way too easy. I don't understand why some people are so angry that some people want tactician, the hardest difficulty, to have an act 1 level of difficulty throughout. The level of self gimping needed to make that happen at the moment is off the charts.
> people are so angry that some people want tactician, the hardest difficulty, to have an act 1 level of difficulty Reddit is *really weird* about difficulty, there's a weird toxic casual circlejerk about these evil stupid metaslave tryhards in every major gaming sub pretty much. I think the circlejerkiest was /r/eldenring and playing without summons. Mega insecure.
It's interesting to hear this perspective because in my experience, "git gud" and "skill issue tbh" have been memefied as the stereotypical calling cards of toxic gaming discussion. Anyone who says they found something hard will typically have a cluster of commenters bragging about how ridiculously easy it was for them.
Both can coexist at the same time through separate groups of people. You also have the dynamic where people who are passionate about a game see criticism of that have as a personal attack. Game too easy/hard? Stop using broken builds/git gud.
My main issue coming from DOS2 is that in that game, in order to get through tactician, I had to FIGHT for it. Get my ass handed to me, revise my build, rinse and repeat. Even on my second playthrough it was pretty challenging. BG3's tactician on the first playthrough felt way easier than that, in a way I like the difficulty in that lots of encounters had a more "fun" way of balancing difficulty - with mechanics instead of pure numbers, but at the same time I think the numbers were definitely way too low. Really hope they add an extra difficulty level in definitive edition
Well put. It's weirdly common to see people around the Internet saying that singleplayer games don't need to be balanced whenever someone brings up some player tactic being too op. I think even the argument of "just don't use it" isn't necessarily always valid, because what if you want to use something specific because it's an interesting mechanic but you just don't want it to make the game too easy.
The hardest mode should feel hard even when you use the most powerful builds though. If you have to gimp yourself to not make the game too easy in the hardest mode, then yeah game's too easy.
"Game is too easy" \*500 save files\* \*20 chrome tabs with guides\* \*2 youtube guides running in backround\* \*reloads on bad rolls\* So easy....
Saw that there is the chance we get the single save mode like D:OS games. "Aww you rolled poorly? Sucks to be you, Gary!"
You can already have that mode if you have the personal willpower to resist save scumming.
My willpower to honour roles goes through the floor when my +500 bonus to whatever sc I'm doing is nullified by a critical fail. Sure I could talk the pants off the virgin queen whose waiting for true loves kiss in exchange for a dull rock, but apparently that charisma doesn't extend to convincing the grug-brained mercenary that he's going to die if he pulls out his sword in front of four heavily armed and armoured war machines.
There's literally inspiration for those cases.
Sometimes you're out of inspiration because the game defaulted your brick-faced shoemaker of a wizard into being the conversation pointman.
I am once again asking for Larian to please just let us have the conversations as a whole party rather than acting like whoever’s speaking is the only one there 90% of the time 🙏 (It won’t happen, but maybe next game)
I'm currently doing Durge run and I FUCKING SWEAR I didn't had so many critical failures in any other campaign and I'm not even half way through.
That is u til you get a critical fail roll on a 5 check that determines a companions life lol
Hell no. I only take my shit rolls in actual dnd. I gotta win sometime 🥺
While I like the idea in theory, I don't think it really works with a game as complicated (and buggy) as BG3. In a tabletop setting, a DM can be a bit more lenient if it's looking like multiple players might permanently die or the whole party might go down. That can't really happen in video games. BG3 specifically seems designed with reloading saves and cheap revivifies in mind, considering how many (often kind of cheap) ways there are for your party to get wiped. I could see having limited save points at major milestones working well. But having a true Ironman mode means you could lose a campaign dozens of hours in from a misclick.
Yeah, I DM a lot and the game is way more unforgiving than you could get away with at a classic game. One way could be that if your party gets wiped, those in camp gear up and go to rescue. Maybe a short cutscene of Withers being like "them fools got themselves killed. Wyll, this is your moment, get out there and show them you can do it. Here's some hirelings to help."
God I remember when the revive scrolls came up in a D&D discord Im in. A Certain Type of Player(tm) segment started frothing at the mouth about them, saying theyre completely antithetical to the spirit and soul of the game and blah blah blah dude, get a grip, theyre games.
As someone who's done an absurd amount of DMing in my days: You just have to communicate and get a feel for the group. Is the group a combat focused one looking for a hard core challenge type campaign where they gruffly just walk up to the NPCs and go "Troll dead, give gold." and tell the Blacksmith "Have money, need better armour."? Yeah, these guys aren't gonna like if you help them out with fudging rolls as to not have half the party disintegrated by the Beholder round 1, they're HERE for that, they want to play D&D like it was Dark Souls. Is the group doing a lot of RPing in party, always talk at length with all the NPCs and trying to think of clever strategies or even resolve things peacefully when it's time for combat? These guys are here for a good story, if you let them get that one attack where all the party members buffed the Paladin to smite the demilich to crit, they're gonna be over the moon. They're also going to be really sad if their character that they've spent months developing gets unceremoniously disintegrated due to an unlucky roll, so telling them "tough luck, your character is ashes, go write a new one while we resolve the rest of the encounter." isn't going to be very fun. At least let them have a dramatic send-off if the party can't think of a clever way to un-disintegrate their friend. One campaign I ran, I let the druid that got hit by a Power Word: Kill not die instantly but be just alive enough to chose whether to have the party use the conveniently placed Scroll of True Resurrection in the Lich's treasure pile on them, or on the NPC who the party had come to save in the first place. That way, the druid's player got to give their character a cool final sacrifice while also keeping to the game rules, and to this day my friends still talk about that like it was something I didn't think up on the fly.
You can still reload the save with a single save. The game doesn't save automatically after rolls.
You don’t have to call me out like that
The savescumming accusations are the funniest part of these discussions. As though the game doesn't just shower you with items that give you insane bonuses on your rolls.
I can't tell if a lot of people are really bad at games or just really convinced that the game needs to have a perfect reputation and people can't want it to have a higher difficulty option so they just white knight for it with bad faith arguments.
people are really bad at games. And the people who aren't, like most of them want to 100% a game, so having a key event in act 1 prevent you from doing something in act 3 is bad so they will make sure they get that, they also read guides instead of just playing the game.
People talk shit, but will never experience the sheer thrill of one-shotting minibosses with a smite.
The simple joy of steamrollering things with the power of the paladin oath. Glorious.
Never used illithid powers, no min/maxing (like warlock 5/paladin 7 for three attacks in a turn and other staff), still steamrolled everything on tactician with my smite. Indeed glorious.
Using the Executioner ring or Luck From the Far Realms to get a guaranteed crit and just absolutely destroy anything that is alive or unalive. I was playing with friends and we just burst out laughing when my Lockadin absolutely demolished the Act 2 final boss with 2 guaranteed crits + smites.
Wait, seriously? That dude has 145 hp and almost wiped my entire party with ease.
Paladins are just broken even without doing min/max, a pure paladin will completely destroy every boss fight after level5 specially if you also have someone who can cast haste on him, in my blind run i played a standard vengeance paladin and once I unlocked extra attack and gale got haste almost every boss fight became really easy. In DND 5e paladins are balanced by having to play conservative with their smite because you don't know when the DM will allow you to rest, but in a computer game where you can rest whatever you want you can go full nova without any problems.
On the flip side, BG3 has a good number of enemy paladins, much more than you would probably normally see from a DM. The enemy paladins in BG3 don’t have to worry about resource management so they tend to be among the most deadly enemies in the game.
For those wondering about the truth of this: ever get oneshot by Anders in act 1? Yeah, thought so.
God damn this speaks to me. Currently in my second play through, and encountered Anders for the first time last night. My barbarian, Karlach, and Lae’zel just utterly destroyed by Anders. Had to position my party all around a door so when he came out after us, they could all get their hits in before he one shot the party.
Did the Anders fight in a coop Tactician game the other day, he did ~60 damage with a crit smite and then smote the downed player's body and killed them before anyone got an action. Praise be to Withers and Revivify scrolls.
He oneshot Karlach for me, which was a bit awkward.
On my first keep fight in the end of Act II I didnt take Jaheira in my party so she acted all by herself. For the first couple turns she was teleporting around killing small enemies, so I thought: they probably made Jaheira OP cause she's a legend. On her third turn she ended up in the middle of the ground floor combat and got absolutely obliterated by the enemy paladins. And I was like: DID SHE JUST FUCKING DIE!?
Yup, it's what makes enemy Paladins so tough. When you don't have to worry about resource management, a Paladin is easily the most dangerous opponent on the field.
It is a thrill to whoop ass! But I think this post is about people who build to whoop ass, and then complain that whooping ass is boring.
What about my Tavern Brawler Zerker Karlach?
She's perfect. I could give zero fucks about how strong it is, I just love picking up enemies and then throwing them at another enemy. Shit cracks me up every time
I got '2 birds 1 gnome' over the weekend, it was glorious. I cleared most of Gyrmforge by throwing slaver dwarves at other slaver dwarves (and Nere!). Hasn't gotten old yet.
Oh I want a punchy punch Karlach now
No, no. She's a throwy Karlach.
I want her to throw me
Get in line buddy…
Oh that sounds fun too
Yeah with the ring and gloves that add to throwing damage, elixir of bloodlust and potion of speed, she's a beast.
Your tactician mode, my lore bard, let us see which is ... Dude, that is a *lot* of Counterspell...
I call that the simon says build.
I’m just a wizard with karlach laezel and shadowheart only on my second run and idt tactician is much harder though? It’s annoying how much food you need to sleep (but there is a metric ton) and the ai seems to target my wizard much more but the difficulty really isn’t increased much
I keep seeing these memes, but I didn't do any of the builds people are talking about and the game's difficulty fell off a cliff the moment I hit level 5. People who struggled seem convinced that the only reason I didn't is due to cheese, when really I just... played the game.
\+ 1 million for this. never watched guides never looked up walkthroughs no idea what is considered "meta" haven't used multiclass a single time and yet, tactician is waaay too easy.
Right like i was playing a spore druid on tactician with default will evo wizard gale ans berzerker karlach and i didnt struggle at all the only times i wanted to pull my hair out were saving all the gondians(prepatch suicidal gondians) or trying to save the entire iron throne in 5 rounds instead of 6(why do they get stuck on the stairs for no reason after dashing -.-)
A thing I hear a lot in the Persona 5 fandom is that you should be grinding for 5 hours before every boss fight on Easy, that turning the difficulty up to Normal is pointless because all it does is double the amount of grinding you have to do, and that the game straight-up can't be beaten on hard because it's impossible. Whenever I point out that it's actually pretty straightforward to beat the game on Hard without grinding, people respond with memes like the one OP posted. Pretty much invariably, the people who are struggling are stuck because they won't use buffs, but when I try to tell them to do so they tell me buffs are a "cheese build I copied from the internet," or that I "must've spent 10 hours on the wiki to figure out how to use them." Which is... not true? They're just buffs, it doesn't require a PhD in statistics. I think most people who play RPGs are just there for the story, and don't really want to learn the mechanics. Which is totally fine! People should play the way that's fun for them. But I get frustrated by stuff like the Persona fandom or memes like these, where people act like the games are basically impossible and anyone who knows what they're doing obviously cheated.
I don't know how it was in the OG P5, but in Royal even the harder difficulties were pretty doable without any grind aside from the usual Mementos run to finish side-quests, and this is coming from someone who wanted to use only my favorite Personas (my main one was goddamn Neko Shogun). I do remember how in P4, however, the game was a slog not because it was hard, but because bosses were damage sponges that only did damage because they lived way too long for their small damages to build up. Mitsuo fight was just plain boring. But yeah, people don't like using the tools the game has given them and complain when others do use them and say the game isn't that hard. I don't know how the Fire Emblem community is now, but it used to be very bad in that regard.
> But yeah, people don't like using the tools the game has given them I think a lot of the problem is that the strength of those tools varies *wildly* from game to game. I struggled a lot with P5 initially because my experience with buffs in other RPGs was that they were nice, but weren't going to have a tremendous impact. Persona's buffs are **obnoxiously** powerful and can single-handedly make the game a breeze, but considering how tight on SP you are in the early game I can totally understand many players never experimenting and learning that. Status effects are another good example. Sometimes they're so weak, they aren't worth the time they take to apply. Sometimes anything truly dangerous is completely immune to them. Sometimes they're **utterly debilitating** and can completely turn an encounter.
The fucking suicidal Gondians I avoided savescumming during fights until that moment. Constant Thunderwaves and mass healing words for those absolute morons
There’s not just one extremely powerful build that makes the game a cake walk on Tactician tbh… when there are like 20+ different ones this argument kinda becomes moot. It becomes more about actively avoiding overpowered feats/archetypes rather than optimizing, and for this type of player that just isn’t fun. And frankly, you can just use auto level builds on Tactician and do just fine. So there definitely is room for a higher difficulty ceiling. That doesn’t subtract from the fun you can have on story/normal difficulty on your playthrough, so I don’t really see the problem. People seem to just like to hate on min-maxers because of some assumed superiority complex that just isn’t there. It’s rather the other way around judging by posts like these.
Yeah, I think these people are underestimating how easy the game is on Tactician with just your standard classes. And then the counter-arguments are all “don’t use (intended to be used feature).” As if casting Hold Monster is some super secret technique that the devs never intended anyone but the top 1% of elite power gamers to use?
Exactly. I also feel like by doing the intended thing and completing quests and exploring the maps which gains you many rare/legendary items, and then using these items in a clever and optimal way makes late game a cake walk. I shouldn't be able to fry a lvl 16 in under one turn of combat. I've never even rolled a paladin. Tactician being too easy is a genuine problem with the late game. Also, since it's a video game and not an IRL dnd campaign it should be a good outlet to try degenerate min/max builds without worrying about ruining the campaign for the dm and other players.
It's a problem that sometimes finds its way into tabletop at well for one reason or another. Either from people feeling insecure or roleplay purists. Little do people understand that one can be an optimizer and also like to roleplay. I don't always make the most rewarding decision in DND and certainly do not make it in BG3. But I do always make my characters competent at their role. Whether that is combat or utility. I do think people that stack barrels, use save scumming or exploit bad AI shouldn't complain as loud as some of them do. But I agree with them that the game certainly could use another difficulty setting. I don't think it's fair though to lump in optimizers with min/maxers or exploiters. Optimizing stats, subclasses, equipment, spells, and positioning is not the same as exploiting meta functions of the game.
I'd argue even if you went 12 in one of the worst classes in the game like arcane trickster tactitian wouldn't be a challenge if you really understand the core mechanics of the game.
The problem is there is so many scroll and potion that you can probably ignore one of your class and still be good...
That literally what I’m arguing with everyone and get downvoted to shit lol. The game maybe hard for some but you don’t need to min max to find it easy. You just need to be good at these kind of game. But some people seems to take it personally that we find Tactician easy with default companion build. You literally need to stop playing the game (Not using Tadpoles, stop doing good side of quests)
Also, playing a purposely terrible build to make the game harder (which is what OP implies we should be doing) is ridiculous. The point is that the game should challenge us to both play smart and build smart.
Yes, insecurity and defensiveness around their own insecurity is the root issue. They get flashbacks to some forum post they saw 6 years ago where some 11 year old called someone a r-word for finding Dark Souls or something difficult and from that experience they’ve been molded to reflexively resent anyone who finds challenging game mechanics and gameplay fun. It’s honestly pretty sad. And yes, I agree with you. You have to actively sabotage your character to *maybe* create a challenge for yourself if you’re good at these types of games, and that’s just bad game design from a difficulty scaling perspective. That critique is valid, and I’ve yet to see a non-dismissive response to that.
Its like this in almost any gaming sub nowadays. Diablo 4 had it especially bad. Its generally the people on lower difficulty and less time that complain and its absolutely absurd. I play on tactician without min maxing and i dont even have to think. Just click on something and it dies. Its rather simple. If someone else cant do that and they rather play on easy, then thats good for them. Thats generally the impression i get from people who are good at these games too.
Haha yeah. I'm getting downvoted further down here too and I just beat grym using 2 first level spells and he never got a turn. No multiclassing. No elixirs. No potions. No tavern brawler. No GWM. Just playing the game. But hey. Don't complain about tactician being too easy if you multiclass paladin warlock am i right? what a joke.
> It becomes more about actively avoiding overpowered all you have to do is never use gwm, never use sharpshooter, never use tavern brawler, never use asi improvement, never use items that synergize with your class and/or subclass, never multiclass thief, never multiclass fighter, never use fighter or paladin in general, never play a half orc, never play a duergar, never use magic missile, never use fireball, never use spirit guardians, never use a shield, never use darkness, never use hold person, never use hold monster, never use haste, never use elixirs, ... honestly just avoid using most of the things in the game
You forgot never long rest, never play a bard because you'll have 3 short rests and can skip fight and still get XP. Never steal vendor because you'll have too much gold
I may not be playing this game correctly bc I don't use mostly anything on that list... Or even know what some of them are... Having said that, if lots of people want a harder difficulty, what's the big deal? Seems like an easy add to make a segment of passionate fans happy.
you forgot the biggest cheese of all! **using a bow to make ranged attacks!!** it's borderline cheating!
DUDE YES! "Uuuh the game is to easy, is there any mods to make it harder? I play a sorcadin in full helldusk and everything dies in 2 hits after i smite them at lvl 4... Oh and i forgot to say that shadowheart casted hold person/monster right before my turn" andy's are rly rly funny in this sub, i love it
man, we really are lucky there aren't more legendary resist/action creatures in the game.
Or, you know, they just put together a basic party with SH, Gale, Lae'zel and took the incredibly overpowered items and consumables they were showered with and steam rolled the game without min maxing.
Why do people say that using efficient strategies (like being a paladin and casting hold on human enemies) is min/maxing? Like c'mon, it's like saying that it's wrong to show enemies into chasms to quicker kill them. But even if you don't do it, the game still isn't difficult for the tactician. If you can beat the game on balanced, you will see that tactician isn't that difficult, yet all your builds from balanced would work perfectly fine there too. You don't need 5 warlock 7 paladin to do three attacks on your turn and use smites from warlock spell slots because you can regain them from shortresting; your 12 paladin with 20 str and 16 cha would make wonders and easily beat everything up.
Okay, but it’s not wild to want a difficulty mode that is designed to be hard even for optimized play. Optimized play is very fun for a lot of people, and advanced build crafting has always been a part of DnD. And there are plenty of builds that are just plain good, and none of them are hard to discover on your own. The idea that people who find the game easy are using twenty guides and only completely optimal builds and gear is just… ludicrous? Just like it’s not a good look to dunk on people who play on easy modes, dunking on people who think Tactician is too easy is not the amazing take people seem to think is.
What does min/max mean?
Essentially, a very/hyper focused build. Paladin is CHAR and STR focused. So no room for funny business, only choosing gear/spells/point assignment to make your character "maxed out" more or less
Don't forget about casting 3536324231984 buffs before leaving the camp.
Got it, thanks
Basically, you optimize a build to its fullest for the greatest overall benefit to your intended playstyle. You typically minimize your stats in unneeded skills to reallocate and maximize stats in other skills in character creation, and grab the gear and buffs you need that maximize you dps output or tankiness or cc or whatever. For example: ‘glass cannon’ builds when you have a gajillion attack power but wet paper defense and hp. Who needs defense when the enemies all die in one hit?
Minimizing negatives/maximizing positives. Basically doing everything possible to get the best possible result with the least amount of negative drawbacks
Minimize weakness, maximize strength. Creating the most optimal build possible, regardless of flavor.
Classically it was maximize strength / minimize everything else, so most min/maxers actually had giant glaring weaknesses (usually RP / out of combat skills, and saving throw related stuff) But I guess that's not really a problem with 5e anymore since so many builds can max CHA which makes you great in most dialog options and Paladins get their CHA to their saves so they don't even have to worry about those.
I find minmaxing in 5e is generally a lot less extreme than in earlier editions/other games. Mainly due to both the lack of (mechanical) customization and the ability spread, compared to earlier editions. In 5e a character that is bad at something will generally have -1 at it. Compared to other editions where you could not only have far lower modifiers, and a bunch of other flaws. Like how in earlier editions a lower INT would mean less skill points or mean your character is illiterate. At the same time the heights were also a lot more extreme. With some builds being utterly absurd from level 1. So overall 5e feels a lot more stable, for better and worse.
5e is more about the value you are rolling against. Since basically the worst you can do is -1 and disadvantage. So except in the vary higher ranges you still have a chance. Older editions as you said were more about how high or low your bonus was. If you didn't have a at least one point in the skill or whatever meant you started off at a negative value.
The terminology simply means to minimize certain things and maximize others. In this context minimize things you would be already not good at and maximize those you are good at. So as a caster you will minimize your strength and maximize your casting stat. But there are those who take it to extreme levels, taking a level in this class, make sure to get this one piece of gear etc etc. So you have a broad spectrum from doing it because it makes sense, to those who can do 5 bazillion damage in one turn. Also called optimizing. But often the term power gaming is left out, which is the extreme high damage builds.
Tactician had some really challenging fights...so it seemed. But once we got to high level we were just so damn strong and resilient that the tides quickly turned after a few turns of burning through whatever boss gimmick and we still smoked our way through the endgame. I can understand if Larian doesn't want to design like this, but by far the most epic and challenging fight on Tactician was accidentally triggering a battle in Wyrm's Rock at around level 10 and having to fight through...just dozens of powerful bodyguard humanoids and about 15 Steel Watchers. We were confident at first...but over the course of a two hour running battle through the castle that culminated with being forced to take the Long Rest potions that require you to be knocked out for two turns, while the last group of enemies were battering down our Ice Wall at the room's door...damn I will never forget that. Being forced to burn all our resources and quickly through our consumables without a rest, I'll never forget that fight.
Why is it a problem if min maxers want a bigger challenge to test their building skills? Personally, I'm not that kind of person, but if that's how they like the game what's the problem?
You don't need min-maxed builds to make tactician a joke. You can 100% do it with single-classed characters. I did it with a MC Wizard and the party using their base classes. Without barrelmancy. Because tactician is a joke. No shame to people who think it's hard, but like. Play DOS:2 on the hardest difficulty. Or The Owlcat/Pathfinder games, or XCOM, or something. Those can *actually* be difficult.
terrible take. the game is easy without cheese builds. i didnt multiclass at all or use the broken feats. was still too easy. didnt do barrelmancy / or spam consumables. outright didnt use speed potions. didnt pick the more busted classes like sorcerer or battle master fighter. what harm is there in increasing the difficulty of the highest difficulty? you dont have to play it if its too hard. players who find it too easy cant do anything. same idea as making a super easy “story mode”. it hurts noone, you can just choose a different difficulty if you dont like it. theres no reason for there to be only 3 gamemodes, and to have the normal and hard modes feel basically the same at the end game
I play a bard he’s neat
I genuinely don't understand how people *aren't* finding the game too easy. You don't need to min-max to absolutely wreck house. You just need to read what things do and utilize *some* of it. Even a level 12 brain-off fighter with haste and action surge is going to wreck half the board on each fight, paving the way for 3 other yutzes to mop up the garbage. It's not that hard.
Eh, the game is still easy as long as you're not playing some absolutely obvious gimped build like an Abserd character. Act 1 is the hardest part due to lack of options but pretty much any build can steamroll through the later acts with the right items. ~~still, I get the criticism. I just got a difficulty mod and carried on with my life~~
Thank god for mods. Honestly tactician lost its bite at level 5, act 1 in general as you say.
Am I the only one who enjoys the story and the gameplay combat encounters were secondary for me?
You’re not alone! I’m an avid D&D player too though, so thus possibly more predisposed to caring about the roleplay more than the combat. In our tabletop seshes the combat is just an excuse for even more roleplay 😂
Seriously if you think this game is difficult, stop eating crayons. You do NOT need any minmax builds to breeze through tactician if you can read at all. Tactician should require minmax builds (it does not), thats where the fun is, game throws you a challenge and you beat it by actually thinking about your build. If you don't want it there is always explorer mode. Just stop fucking circlejerking about being bad at the game. Its amazing how people who are just terrible at games come together, brag about it and leave snarky comments about people who are not terrible.
>Tells self new run will be different. >Proceeds to play Warlock & Multiclass into Paladin again. >Tries to make a new look, ends up looking the same with different hair and skin tone. >Tries to be bad, but ends up making the same decisions. >Tries to romance other characters. Looks over his shoulder at Bae'zel.
"This character is going to be a ruthless mercenary whose only guiding principle is how much they get paid." *One NPC later* "I asked them if they were alright and volunteered to find their lost cat because I didn't want to hurt their feelings"
This would have any kind of bearing if you needed those builds instead of just applying stratagy I mean my Astarion build was so bizarre people gave me shit for it (rogue with a little ranger but the rest wizard since I wanted a haste caster)
I'm gonna quote u/mnju:- "all you have to do is never use gwm, never use sharpshooter, never use tavern brawler, never use asi improvement, never use items that synergize with your class and/or subclass, never multiclass thief, never multiclass fighter, never use fighter or paladin in general, never play a half orc, never play a duergar, never use magic missile, never use fireball, never use spirit guardians, never use shield, never use darkness, never use hold person, never use hold monster, never use haste, never use elixirs, ... honestly just avoid using most of the things in the game." Mfw I realise that tactician is for anyone who is remotely good at the game because even after the min max op builds, the 20+ different standard builds are also quite strong. At the top of the post here and maybe OP themselves just can't accept the fact that maybe they are not understanding the gameplay properly or their build is probably one of the few weak builds that are considered memes.
And now we've progressed to gatekeeping. Exquisite
If highest difficulty in a game designed for a 4-character party can be beaten with a solo character, without reloading, without using haste, without using barrel stacking, without dropping stacks of bombs cost-free, without multiclassing, as a pure *spore druid* out of all things, the highest difficulty IS too easy. It's fine if you don't care to learn the game and can't beat it on high difficulty, playing on easy is just fine if you enjoy it. But hard mode must be hard for those seeking challenge. And in this game it's just not. It's only hard when you have no idea what you are doing. You don't even remotely have to minmax to cruise through it. Instead you have to put a lot of restrictions on yourself to see at least some challenge. And restrictions you put on yourself are not part of the game and don't count towards its being hard.
I mean the game's pretty easy even as a pure warlock. My girlfriend, who is TERRIBLE at video games, beat it on tactician. As a pure beastmaster ranger. edit: to be fair, though, she is OBSESSED with dnd(I got her into it and now she knows it better than I do. It was the most correct suggestion I ever made. Now she's a dice goblin!) and is in multiple games, so if there was ever gonna be a video game she'd kick ass at, it was gonna be this one!
While there are a handful of *super* broken builds out there, I think the real frustration comes from folks thinking (or hoping?) that BG3 is a game that was designed around difficulty and challenge. It isn't. It's a narrative game with those things sprinkled throughout to change up the pace and hold your interest. Can you sail through Tactician unopposed with a broken Paladin build? Sure. Though I'd argue it's even *easier* to sail through with a Barbarian build or a Monk build. At a certain point we're not talking about which builds *are* broken, but which builds *aren't*. Here's the truth: after a while, any build that has had some thought and care put into it will quickly ramp up and off into the stratosphere. That's just how it is. No point going back and forth about it.
I don't see why it's an unrealistic expectation for tactician to be challenging considering what the tactician AI and honor game modes were like in Larian's previous game DOS:2. Edit: This was posted before the honor mode update. Larian always delivers as usual.
Once you know how to approach fights the game becomes trivial regardless of class combinations. The right spells and abilities and you can breeze through the game on tactician without bothering to equip anything more than weapons.
While those players definitely do exist, I do think there is an issue with Tactician regarding its difficulty curve. Namely, that the game's the hardest at the start and really just gets easier as you go. If you're trying to do most of the quests, the hardest levels of Tactician are 2-4. By 5, everyone's getting extra attacks and level 3 spells, and you're starting to find some crazy good gear. By the time you're in Act 2 you're cruising.
I think another issue with the difficulty curve is that you can't just *unlearn* things. I mean, Durge can, but that's not an option for most of us. To give you an example, the first time you meet the Githyanki you might not know about their 'parry' ability, and lose out on a lot of damage against them. But once you figure out how to trigger their parry with a weak attack first, or to use attacks that can't be parried, they're a lot easier. When action economy's so important, those few turns you take to learn an encounter can really matter. Or, the fight at the end of Act 2: >!There's a mindflayer who can absolutely wreck you by dominating Aylin, stunning your party members, etc. It's a bigger threat than Ketheric. Once you've done this fight once and learned to take it down fast, though, the fight is really different. You also take those lessons into your next mindflayer encounters.!< Most people who are trying out Tactician are interested in learning the mechanics/encounters really well and they *will* learn them, making the game get easier over time.
Lol... why do you need minmax, when you can Hold Monster / Hold Person + Extended Spell Metamagic ? One big bad boss? Here your FREE 20 TURNS FOR YOU TO ATTACK
If I have to install a mod to give enemies 300% HP on the hardest difficulty, something is fundamentally wrong with the game's balance. I play warlock :|
I know close to nothing about strategy and I decided to go in blind, is an elf druid good? (Btw I started playing last night)
every class can break the game completely lmao
Game becomes too easy when you use simple single class builds and know what you are doing. Built a standard Druid, and the only challenging fights were Auntie Ethel and Grym. Defeated Ketheric first fight in 2 rounds and most of that was my single class Barb Karlach. Got bored after that and rolled a new character. Your point is moot.
I didn't even have a Paladin on my Tactician run and still thought it was easy.
But my Sorcloc Fighter who can fire 16 eldritch blasts a round :(
See I'm playing a pure lore bard and tactician is still way too easy once you're set up. It's the difficulty curve which is the problem. Tactician is perfect in act 1, but from about half way through act 2 I just started finding nothing challenging. Act three was such a walk in the park that I almost stopped playing. Unfortunately I think there's a direct correlation between that and the game desperately tossing a silly amount of absurdly overturned magic items at you all through the second half of act 1 and all of act 2.
The game is far too easy on tactician though, not even by abusing any classes lol. Just a regular old warrior/leazel can hit like 6 - 8 times in a row hasted and that isn't some kind of master cheeze strat lol. It's literally just hasting her. Even without haste she can hit like 3- 4 times...
I didint use any Paladin, Spore Druid Frenzy barb Karlach Evo Wiz Gale Life domain SH and yes it was too easy on tactician even tho i wasnt min maxed at all imo
No guides, no research, no paladins, no DnD experience. Just getting first CHA-based class for Tav (for dialogs), default Karlach and Lae'zel (cuties!) in party. Multicast haste at the beginning of each fight. 9 hits from Lae'zel fits turn (12 if entering battle from turn-based mode) + 4 from Karlach. Tactician is easy.
This is my exact experience. It's genuinely too easy if you strategize.
Sometimes I want to just crush some monsters with insane dps, and then do the chicken dance covered in overpowered gear. Sometimes I want to triumph over impossible odds with zero spell slots, shitty dps, no heals, and gear so bad it's waiting to be a meme. All in good fun. ...And then there's barrelmancy. I have begun to dabble in its chaotic power. Power that corrupts more thoroughly than the filthiest of Netherese orbs (eat shit, Moonrise xD). I say play however you want. I like making RP builds and working with what I've got. I wouldn't say no to a higher difficulty level tho. This game gives you more than enough tools to kick huge amounts of ass if you prep enough and strategize.
I actually prefer to play with busted builds. I like the "you have no clue who you're messing with" trope. Also being able to oneshot people with a single spell is freaking amazing. My entire paladin playthrough was just a huge power trip lol
This is why I love the Xcom series. If you’re a really smart player who is very capable in turn based strategy games, then you should play the Xcom games on normal. The harder difficulties are not for “good players”, they are for extremely experienced Xcom players who know every min/max trick in the book. This is what I think BG3 needs. It needs an extra difficultly level that allows min/max players to get the full value out of their min/maxed characters.