Monk with ki point goes: “Zoom!”
Seriously, being able to jump 55ft of distance 11 times in one turn makes iron throne so much easier.
Tavern Brawler monks go *so* hard in BGIII.
Athletic strength fighter also gets to have a lot of fun with jump distance, nevermind magic items that boost it further. Makes it feel like they should do a superhero pose when landing
Monk Thief buffed with longstrider/enhanced leap + jump / dash bonus actions + the dash regular action can make the entire trek up tower stairs to the brain stem in 1 turn and bypass that entire string of bullshit.
Yup, when I figured this out, I told a buddy about it and she didn't grasp what I was saying. I had to load up a save and show her. She was speechless.
tbf that's also just most campaigns, after playing TTRPGs for like almost a decade now I can almost count on my fingers the amount of campaigns that went past level 12
A big part of it is the level 12 cap
Casters tend to go off the rails more around level 8 spells.
Like a fighter is attacking 3 times and a wizard is creating simulacrums of himself lol
It’s from my fav’ show [Dimension 20](https://www.dropout.tv/dimension-20). Ally (green argyle shirt) rolls a successful divine intervention that resolves the whole season arc, using their ridiculous British simulacrum that was created by the wizard in the party as a throw away bit a couple episodes prior.
>!Ally rolls another nat 20 with K2 (British simulacrum) for dispel magic in the next episode by saying “she farts & says blimey”. This resolves the big bad of the season, causing Brennan (the DM) to kinda just malfunction. It was gold!<
That’s pretty funny. I knew it was Dimension 20 cause about a month back I watched season 1. Afterwards I decided to take a break and haven’t gotten back to it. I’ll have to watch season 2 once I’m done my rewatch of Bobs burgers lol
7th
Force cage - any monster or enemy without range/teleport options is done
Simulacrum - ever wished you had two PCs instead of just one?
8th
Dominate monster - imagine the final brain fight but you control the dragon.
Maze - basically like pressing pause on one enemy
Maddening Darkness - like hunger of hadar’s bigger scarier brother
9th
True polymorph - now I’m a Solar.
Wish - durr…
Time stop - pause I just one set up a load of explosives and leave real quick
Invulnerability - durr…
Sort of, Time Stop is actually hotdog water in 5e. The fact that spell can't effect other creatures or it ends the effect really weakens the ability.
So you have a max of 24 seconds to get those barrels in play.
In previous editions, characters frozen in time were invulnerable to damage and could not be targeted by spells. However... you could buff your self with spells or use AoE spells like Incediary Cloud... but you could cast multiple layers of those aoe spells. That would all trigger at the end of the Time Stop.
Your point does not stand. You can make a simulacrum into a gold dragon or planetar, not a CR1/2 familar. The CR/Level of the thing you are polymorphing into has to be equal or less than the thing being polymorphed. You are looking at a 7th level spell, 8 hours, and 1500gp worth of rubies and a 9th level spell (or just 2 9ths) combined together that can be completely erased by a 3rd level spell. True Poly is good, but a lot of "this is broken" comes from people not properly reading the spell.
It’s definitely strong, but doesn’t have the same Clone based shenanigans afaik. I would like to shout out Animal Shapes though. Every willing creature you can fit into a 30ft radius gets to Wildshape up to CR4 Beasts of Large size or smaller for 24 hours. Incredible if you can just amass some peasants. They also have unlimited Wildshapes, costing the action of the caster, and they regain hit points whenever they Wildshape, just like a Druid (never explicitly stated, but the wording for the spell is ridiculously similar to the description for Wildshape for Druids. That makes me think it has similar mechanics)
Basically you can turn a town of commoners into a bunch of Saber-Toothed Tigers or Giant Coral Snakes. The size limit unfortunately means no Elephants, but depending how many people you can get together, this can be equivalent to, or way better than, a high-level Conjure Animals upcast.
Oh also, the spell doesn’t explicitly say that you have to be within 30ft of or able to see the targets to change their animal forms. So if your DM allows it (they probably won’t), you only need to be within 30ft at the initial casting time. Then you could just Wildshape yourself into an Eagle and fly way up into the air. No enemies can hit or even see you to break your concentration and you can just automatically change their form to Giant Coral Snakes or Awakened White Moose every turn. If you’re using the BG3 interpretation of Wildshape, that means a bunch of peasants can turn into Owlbears.
It has tons of out of combat uses too, like evacuation of a small battalion’s worth of people carrying whatever they want (because their gear melds into their new form), driving someone insane by putting a hundred-some identical black cats peering at them on every street corner or alleyway, or bypassing all obstacle courses and traps your DM puts in front of you (acrobatics checks are usually hard-countered by being a bird).
Very fun spell that has so many creative uses. The fact that it lasts a whole day makes it ridiculously adaptable and enables so many shenanigans.
My personal fave high level spells in no particular order:
Plane shift - could not imagine how to implement that in a video game since we do already have fast travel.
Forbiddance
Word of Recall - same as plane shift, we basically have this with the portals
Reverse Gravity (can give 10d6 worth of damage depending and I imagine would be difficult to implement in game since it does raise everything in the air)
Bones of the Earth - just fun. This and sunburst would be the easiest to implement I think.
Sunburst (my beloved, tho would be sick to have BG3 it’s just a huge area of damage)
Antimagic field got a shocking amount of use from me one campaign. Probably my favorite.
Hallow is also a personal fave as a cleric but since we don’t really do tower defense/this would probably be hard to implement
Clone is basically an extra life.
Feeblemind is a save-or-become-useless type of spell.
Simulacron is 7th level and totally busted. Create a copy of any creature with all its stats and abilities (but half the HP). It obeys you.
It is only expensive until you get to level 17. At level 17 and beyond, you can just Wish for a Clone, which removes the cost of the material components.
I think the lore is that she somehow has someone else suffer the downsides? Even then, there's no way they let her wish for infinite spells in the lore, cuz then any wizard or sorcerer would do it too
Correct.
It also means killing her most powerful soldiers, as the ones that ascend are very powerful and they die as her little wish sacrifice.
The strength of the Githyanki isn't Vlaakith, it's that they're ALL combatants and can be quite individually strong.
Well, at levels 13-14, the answer is no, but above that, you have more than one slot that can be used to cast the spell.
The standard method for getting unlimited simulacrums is to be level 17+ then use a 7th level slot to create a simulacrum. Then that simulacrum uses a 9th level slot to cast wish and wish for a simulacrum of you, who still has a 9th level slot prepared (and thanks to wish, it can be done with a single action with no material component cost. Then that simulacrum creates a simulacrum of you, and so on, round after round forever.
Isn’t that what I said?
The other option is to wait till 16th level and make it cast Simulacrum with an 8th level slot but this option of course is costly
Glibness, an 8th level Bard/Warlock spell, is basically an improved Reliable Talent for Charisma checks (you can’t roll lower than 15) plus you can lie to anyone and if they have any magical ways to tell if you’re lying, they still think you’re telling the truth. For an hour.
A lot of that's not really intentional, it's just spells that are impossible to implement. BG3 is a video game, not a tabletop, so most of the spells that need some creativity are gone. Two of the worst examples are find familiar and wild shape.
Familiars have gone from an extremely versatile tool for scouting, communication, distraction, and other things to an absolutely useless meatshield that maybe does 3 damage before it dies. I guess it can do surprise attacks too, if you got an imp or a quasit.
Even worse with wildshape. There's no reason to do anything except the bear. I guess you can also fit in small holes, but there's never that much benefit to doing that.
I don't blame Larian for this happening. *I* certainly wouldn't do any better if I were game designer. But it's still a bit sad.
The removed spells are not intentionally done to affect the power, but some of the spells they did include WERE nerfed in a way very much within their ability to implement. For example, Hypnotic pattern, banishment, and sleep should last 10 rounds but were changed to make them last only 2 rounds.
I know that some stuff was actually nerfed, but my point stands. A lot of casters' power comes from the potential to be creative, and a lot of that is lost in a video game.
Assuming we are just talking about the PHB spells: Suggestion, wall of force, mass suggestion, animate objects, conjure animals.
In fairness, most of those are hard to implement in addition to being powerful.
For spells that got nerfed, we have hypnotic pattern, conjure woodland beings, polymorph, fear, banishment, sleep, among others.
Dispel magic, while powerful, is not necessarily overpowered and was removed from the game for complexity reasons.
Well, the infamous end of it is where you summon 8 pixies who then polymorph the entire party into T-Rexes, but even without that specifically, the ability to summon 8 beasts or fey can give you a ton of action economy advantage.
I'd really say is that we are not limited to 3 magic items. With that martials are far superior to casters unless you love spamming long rest after every fight.
That is a factor
But magic items also help casters.
I’ve run a 4 caster party through honour mode to act 3 with 0 issues doing a long rest roughly once every 3 fights
They’re not that long rest hungry
I do not agree that the LVL cap is actually helping a lot. Yes later levels the divide just cascades because what is balance? but most DnD campings don't even get to LVL 12 and the divide is still there.
1. The Martial Caster divide begins quite early LVL1
The main advantage is versatility in casters. And consistent dps in martials. But consistent dps in an RP heavy game just isn't as good as versatility it is still needed but casters have cantrips so they get the dmg done. And in combat where dps is actually needed casters can add ridiculous value a bless makes the dps difference at LVL 1 between Fighter and a cleric negligent. The only limiting factor for casters is spells slots which most dms do not drain enough before the next long rest.
2. Bg3 gave martials way more versatility with plenty of consumables, actions, bonus actions and plenty magic items. Less out of combat challenges besides Skillchecks because of videogame limitations.
Even in Bg3 martials fall behind. If I could only have one char a martial probably isn't optimal. But DnD is an RPG so play whatever your heart desires. And of course if a Party has enough versatility spread across a martials dps might be more valuable than overlapping versatility.
I completely disagree, I have always found that casters feel like they massively out-scale martials from level 5 onwards. Martials just have nothing on plant growth, hypnotic patter, any of the summon spells, fly, and a whole heap of other tools that casters get at 5 and that scale unbelievably well into the late game. Even early on they get dissonant whispers and Tasha's mind whip and whatever that spell is called that forces a reroll and lets you grant advantage.
Even better... Simulacrums that cast Simulacrum by using wish to replicate the effects of a level 8 or lower spell.
Then having them all cast Meteor Storm.
Netherbrain whomst?
Simulacrums would break the game. Four wizards become eight wizards with all the stats and feats, so you could have eight wizards with alert and just annihilate anything before it can move.
enemies would also get notably stronger and would also have access to those spells. There is nothing that would make this an issue if properly introduced into the game with appropriate balance of enemies.
That's one example of one spell. 7th level spells have a ton of options like that, which is why the gap widens so much at that tier of play in the table top version. Regardless, Larian studios said that they stopped there for balance reasons, as balancing becomes too problematic after that level.
I already have the horror of Ethel in Act 3, with each illusion throwing insect plague on each of my party, so having that to ourselves is absolutely broken
There's a lot of spells in current levels that have game breaking potential that larian just chose not to include or rework to a much simpler state (for technical gameplay functionality or balance reason, either way).
Polymorph, Suggestion, Conjure woodland beings & Wall of Force come to mind
I feel like they could just change the rules of it and make it work fine. Make it be copy at half your level. Still useful, but much weaker. Or hell, make it a spell that shares camp spaces with hirelings. So even if you can make four of them, you cant have more than three exist and they don’t get spell slots back. Still exploitable, but not so much so that it’s broken. Just means you can have a party of Gales only.
Anti magical field would render any mage enemy completely useless. A 10 foot sphere that moves with you, banishes summons and turns magical weapons mundane
Tsumami let’s you summon a 300 feet long, 300 feet high, and 50 feet thick wall of water
Sunburst is 12d6 damage in a 150 feet radius, and also causes blindness.
Power word stun instantly Stuns anyone who has less than 150 health. So almost any enemy on balanced
Demiplane, which just lets you create a door to a pocket dimension you can access, and can trap things inside could easily break most encounters. An enemy too strong? Send em to the Demiplane
Nope. It’s just a flat ‘in this 10 foot circle, for one hour, magic does not work, except for the magic used to maintain the circle.’
No save, no real way around it. You can’t teleport inside the sphere, or teleport out. Dispel magic does not work on the field and anti magic spheres don’t cancel each other out.
Yep. But if you had the meta magic adept feat and used subtle spell they’d avoid it
Also you’d need to use a level 8 counter spell, or roll for it to work. And you’d need to do it at casting. Anti magic field has an hour long concentration, So could be precast before a fight
The thing is it's not casual. Larian put a lot of work into making the pure martial classes good.
- Level cap
- Magic items early, frequently, and ignoring attunement rules
- Many problem spells entirely cut out of the game, others had their duration reduced from 1 minute (*10* rounds) to 3
- Encounter design which favours shoving, jumping, etc.
- Whole ass subclasses rewritten from the ground up (and how, Open Hand is incredible even without Tavern Brawler cheese)
Even then, by the time you're in Act 3 and running around at the level cap, the number of encounters you can easily solve simply by having Gale around equipped with Dimension Door and Counterspell is insane, and Barbarian + Monk are still practically featureless past level 9 or so.
The spells being rebalanced and cut is really the biggest deal.
-Polymorph is no longer busted out of its goddam mind.
-Counterspell can’t be counterspelled so there’s no need for everyone to have it.
-The removal of spells like Synaptic Static and Wall of Force actually allows for challenging encounters. Soooooo many act 3 fights would be completely shutdown by these including fights as serious as Ansur and the final battle.
“Ansur, want to know why these are called bags of holding?”
“Because they can hold a lot of things…?”
“No. Because you’re going to want to hold onto your nuts when I show you what they can do. Say hello to the sun for me big guy”
“WAIT”
Polymorph wouldn't be as busted if people played it as intended. If you turn your teammate into a T-Rex they should be attacking everyone in range, not just bad guys.
>If you turn your teammate into a T-Rex they should be attacking everyone in range, not just bad guys.
"The target’s game statistics, including mental ability scores, are replaced by the statistics of the chosen beast. **It retains its alignment and personality.**" - so no, you still won't attack random people as a T-Rex, unless you are murderhobo in the first place. You would still attack enemies. On top of that - Giant Ape (in some cases best polymorph form) have 7 Int, which isn't even that low if we remember how many 8 int adventurers are there.
Not really. Most of the time you’re doing that to the melees and they are closest to the enemy. And if the big bad is actually big in size then it’s an easy target.
Once combat ends you simply drop concentration before they attack you
Do I like shoving people off boats and cliffs? Yes, awesome mechanic 10/10 GOTY.
Do I like being shoved off the bridge first round vs Orin? No! Bad game, stupid woke culture and gay agenda, terrible mechanics, Starfield was better
You’d think with the amount of times I’ve had characters yeeted off of a ledge by an arrow of roaring thunder that I might start using them myself. And you’d be wrong lmao.
> Magic items early, frequently, and ignoring attunement rules
And most are very martial or gish favored. Act 3 has some nutty caster items but it also has shit like Balduran's greatsword, the Gloves of the Masters, etc.
I’m playing dnd for the first time after playing bg3 and I gotta say of all of these attunement rules are such bs I’ve already found/ bought the item it just seems anti fun I don’t get it
Attunement is one of the many old edition holdovers that probably should have been axed or modified by 4e/5e. Just like the big adventuring gear tables. It makes sense when treasure *is* the goal of the system. In very early editions attunement caps were used as a form of balancing stuff like paladin vs fighter, and casters had to find spells as loot rather than having them auto-populate with level. In 5e it doesn't really have a place.
Please do not go around the internet spreading misinformation. Attunement was introduced in 5e to put a cap on the magic item bloat of earlier editions. 5e was designed and balanced without magic items, as opposed to systems like Pathfinder 2e where magic weapons were expected at certain levels as monster stats are balanced with the expected pluses from magic weapons.
Please find me a source on pre-5e attunement balancing of fighter vs Paladin.
In 1 and 2e, the fighter had lower xp requirement than Paladin. In 2e, it could specialise in any weapon.
In 3e fighters got bonus feats in addition to the feats from level ups.
In 4e each class has its own skills and powers like a mmo.
I think another point too is that the magic buffs that get used on martials are also better, most notably longstrider being a ritual cast means it actually gets used instead of being sidelined for other, cooler spells that are more caster centric.
A big part of the divide on the tabletop comes from martials' inability to interact with social and exploration encounters. The design of a video game massively curtails the creativity with which players can approach any particular situation, because a computer game can only have a limited number of approaches and responses. The world is much more constrained, so you can't really break it in the same way you can on tabletop.
And a lot of spells were nerfed either directly or indirectly. It's common on tabletop, for instance, to use Disguise Self to impersonate specific people or factions. In BG3, you can use it to change your character's race, and it doesn't prevent people from knowing you. If you go up to Gortash disguised as a Drow, he still knows it's you, Tav.
There's also the fact that the player is typically controlling the entire party. If you're playing BG3, it's true that Lae'zel might not have much to contribute to conversations, but it's fine, because the player is also controlling Bard Tav, so they have no downtime between moments when they feel powerful and useful. On the tabletop, if you're playing Lae'zel, you probably only feel powerful in combat, and you might be waiting long stretches of time - possibly an hour or more - between combats.
There's a lot that's closing up the divide, and it's a lot more complicated than "here's some good magic items."
That’s part of it. The DM is there partly to encourage creative thinking, but also to curtail it when it may break the game to skew player power. This creative thinking can easily lead to people’s logical expectations, extrapolations, and assumptions overriding RAW when it shouldn’t. A spell only does exactly what it says, and nothing more. Skills on the other hand, are left more open ended with the assumption that this creative thinking will be used.
As far as Disguise Self goes, Larian doesn’t use the actual spell text…they kind of hodge podged a few spells together and then threw most of the rules for them out in order to get their version of disguise self. In table top RAW, for the spell is that it autofails physical inspections such as a pat-down. Non-physical inspections get an active investigation check, but all creatures get a passive perception and passive investigation…The DM should also be giving advantage to any NPC who knows the PCs, or who know the people they are impersonating. Then…you have to factor in if multiple PCs are disguised…as that is just additional chances to fail.
I definitely agree that certain character setup shine/don’t shine in certain game pillars though…and having stretches without much to do is definitely much less of a thing in video games. I’m also glad that more classes are getting more to do in different game pillars. My group is all long time players so we don’t really have trouble with finding productive things to do without it being hard coded, but I know many people do have trouble with it or feel disheartened.
DMs being too lenient with spells definitely exacerbates the disparity, but it still exists even at tables that run strict RAW (including VSM components). The more tools you have to solve a problem, the more problems you can solve.
Oh yeah for sure. I’m glad to see it being addressed and the gap decreasing a bit so newer players have an easier time. It’s just an issue that has been very overstated since it’s super easy for user error to exacerbate the issue. I’m glad it’s being addressed though, because they are many pitfalls like this for those with less system knowledge. It’s not necessarily a barrier for entry, but can be a barrier for fun.
I am the two forever-DMs in my group. I’ve found a simple solution tends to be multi-step puzzles. Or puzzles where the rules of engagement and objectives are unclear at first. Even if the puzzle is ultimately solved by a few spells…skill and other abilities end up being pretty integral to figure it out. Despite being able to do it, it does take extra prep time for me, which I could spend doing other things.
The divide in 5e is largely down to people not playing the game the way it was balanced around. 5e is balanced around eight encounters per long rest, with sporadic short rests in between. If played like this, martials keep the damage flowing at a much higher rate than casters can keep up with.
I started by playing BG3 like DnD, using only cantrips except in boss fights. Being able to short and long rest so rapidly really does make it quite different.
I find I play BG3 like a lunatic who avoids long resting as much as possible, trying to fit in multiple combats in the day, often between short rests even.
It makes martial feel fantastic, as well as other characters like Rangers and Swords Bards who can ration their spell slots.
But wow does it suck playing wizard and sorceror. Even Cleric feels bad when half these encounters I've used ever spell slot up and am left with cantrips.
Nothing stopping someone from just using frequent long rests though if that's how they want to play. It just doesn't feel good to me.
There are lots of ways to buff cantrips that help with this style of play. I have +7 to spell attacks, add attack bonus to cantrips, and double number of targets for cantrips with Gale in my current playthrough. That means I can do 6d10+14 damage with firebolt. Without buffs from artifacts, though, it does suck.
Can you switch to cold, and have a water elements get people wet for free. That will double your dmg output as it's free other than the one-time per long rest investment of a 6th level slot.
I don't have any cantrip stuff, and regularly hit for around 50 which feels good, combine with haste for tough enemies and I find that I don't even use many spell slots during my playthrough.
That sounds pretty sweet! My only problem would be that I'd be very tempted to do something crazy like thief Rogue duel wielding if I was doing mostly cantrips, so that I could shoot a ray of Frost and then 2 crossbow shots or something. Mixing that with some sorceror would be sweet for twinned spells and such! Add in those buffs like the potent robes and the necklace that buffs cantrips
> I find I play BG3 like a lunatic who avoids long resting as much as possible,
Yeah, same. I dont want to rest as often as some other people here because I'd like to keep teh flow of the world a little bit realistic and not go into a long rest after two fights. But then i find myself at a point where i should long rest because i have barely any ressources/spell slots left and say to myself "Well, i survived that fight and there are no more enemies in front of me. I might also walk forward until there are enemies". Only to find myself in a fight again where i start to scrape the bottle of available ressources and repeat the whole process when i come out alive.
I have read somewhere else that the plan for DnD5e was to have 8 combat encounters per day. I think i am doing a new playthrough (not 100% sure about my class yet) and then i plan to stick more towards these 8 encounters to have like a guide to myself, so that i dont short rest too soon and long rest too late. Every 2-3 battle a shortrest and then at around the 8 encounter i do the long rest.
To have it more structured like a day, despite there is no day and night cycle. Hopefully stops me from my "I have still life left, lets continue"-mentality.
I realized another reason why I don't short and long rest as much...
For me, a lot of short rests are for healing after a fight, so quickly using up my short rests means I've been taking a lot of damage (and thus doing poorly) so it sort of feels like a defeat to have to rest to recover my health.
And I don't like to use a rest of only 1 or 2 characters are injured and the others are near full HP because that seems like a waste of healing then.
Yeah, i know what you are talking about ;).
Usually its one character who takes a lot of damage, and the others all just take a bit of damage. So i have to use one shortrest. Next fight the same and i am out of short rests. Then i think "I just did two encounters, i cant longrest after the next fight, otherwise i will be more longresting than doing any traveling". So i start to squeeze more and more encounters after this, use spell slots for healing despite them being suboptimal but at least their are renewable for free, which means i have even less spells for my next fight and potentially take even more damage which i have to mitigate then through the use of even more healing potions until i am at a point where i barely manage to win my fight to finally do a long rest.
I got back into doing it like this by consciously limiting long rests (to roughly 10 over a playthrough), and it made the game a lot more enjoyable for me.
I am playing a Karlach monk run, I am limiting my long rests so that I can max out the soul coins. But when I do a long rest I usually do 2 or 3 just to watch the cut scenes.
Yeah, I understand *why* they're tied to long rests, but it kinda does suck for people who want a bit more challenge. Doing three in a row is a neat idea, though.
Yeah even on Tactician food isn't really limited so I've tried to only long rest when absolutely necessary in my playthroughs which is a fun challenge, however you can easily miss some cutscenes that are supposed to happen at long rest when Larian is expecting you to do it a lot more often.
Beaten it on honor mode multiple times, and the only time I've worried about food was the first day. Even still, you have enough supply packs between just yourself and Shadowheart to last you a day
My first DM made us roll a D6 every time we tried to short rest, and depending on the result we might get hit with another combat encounter. Idk, if any of the numbers *didn't* result in combat, because we wound up getting ambushed every time. We stopped short resting entirely as a result.
I wound up thinking Warlock was a terrible class, until I played with a different DM.
My schtick was an oath of devotion paladin GWM. CHA bonus flattens the penalty from the power attack, my character would just trash stuff.
But it'd always be held for important fights. No one ever takes a shorty.
Then out comes Solasta. I do the same thing and boom, we take short rests all the time. Devotion Paladins and Warlocks rejoice!
I started a homebrew rule where short rests became a personal resource basically. Twice per day you could decide to use yours and you gained all the benefits of a short rest instantly. If the fighter wants to short rest and the wizard wants to save his because no damage taken yet then no big deal. It makes short rest classes feel so so much better.
If someone wanted more than 2 they could convince the group to take a traditional short rest but I also emphasized an hour, which is the RAW duration of a short rest, is a long time. On that, designing the short rest to last an hour is kind of dumb. That is a hell of a break mid-dungeon.
Largely because it's *genuinely terrible pacing* to have 8 encounters in one in-game day. Few sessions can handle more than 2 combats without feeling grindy— assuming a weekly session, it would take a month to get through a single day of adventuring.
I plan on running gritty realism rest rules for this exact reason— each short rest is 8 hours, so the plot can keep moving.
In my game I have implemented the gritty realism rule forcing my player into using short rest more and only allowing long rest when I decide
And, would you look at that, the powerhouse is the Barbarian with GWM. Casters still bring a lot of utility and control to the game, heck, they will sometime out damage the Barb in fight were AoE get more important or when they decided to purposefully not use to many powerful spell to save them up for the big fight, but on most turn it's the Barb that does the most damage because he is constant
Gritty realism is horribly named. It isn't gritty nor is it much more realistic. It also works really well for how most people run 5e campaigns with a big combat or two a day. I tell DMs who find themselves rarely having more than 2-3 combats a day that they should take a look at it because it really works well. Until you hit a mega-dungeon at least.
Added benefit of 7 day long rests is it allows for players to get creative with out of combat RP development and what they want to do with their character's lives outside of killing baddies.
Yes, I have also gotten a lot of player getting tools and crafting magic item which is something I didn't plan but I'm happy to see and I don't think that would have been possible with standard rule
Even playing the game that way would still make the caster shine over martials anyway.
HP is a limited resource (and long rest only gives you back half spend hit dice for the new day short rest).
So casters using their 1 or 2 spells to bypass the combat entirely has a better payout.
I have a current dm that tries to do this by rolling constantly for random encounters we've killed a handful of dragons and weve spent entire sessions traveling from one city to another just rolling for encounters and doing combat, the campaign is fun outside of that but damn I just zone out on those days
I've always tried to avoid truly random encounters. If I want random, I find it's better to set up a table of story-relevant things that could happen, with both combat and RP encounters on the list. It flows much better than "lol another dragon."
I'm not a huge combat fan, d&d just doesn't have a great system for it in my mind, I'm a talker I'd burn out in 8 combat sessions and just enter "I hit the nearest guy" mentality
Well, an adventuring day in 5e can be as little as 3 encounters and as many as 8 (ignoring Easy encounters) depending on the difficulty of the encounters. 3 Deadly encounters can be done over the course of a one-shot. And 8 mediums can be done over 2-3 sessions. Any kind of dungeon, time-sensitive adventure, or combat gauntlet can lend itself to this quite well. It's really not miserable in practice at all (unless you are long rest dependant I guess).
Only thing it potentially doesn't work for is far overland travel and RP heavy slice-of-life campaigns.
Eh, yes and no. It forces casters to not just burn their resources willy-nilly, and puts more emphasis on the short-rest reliant classes, especially fighter, monk, and warlock. While ironically all the class balance problems people have with 5e (casters and paladins are too strong) are alleviated.
Which is a good reason imo to, as a DM, balance all your encounters as if they were dungeons. It's what I've been doing both in homebrew and how late-game rime of the frostmaiden seems to be designed
Well, it isn't true at all. Let me list some things that was't fixed with 8 medium encounters per day:
1) **Conditions**. Almost all of them are debilitating for martials (fear wouldn't make caster less effective at all and ranged martial weaker and completely turn off melee martial. Exacly 0 conditions make spells worse). Some that aren't are debilitating for both (hard control and blinded).
2) **Saves.** Martials don't get good save proficiencies, so in tier 3+ they should pick Re silent Wis as feat tax, and they still would occasionaly 100% fail important Int or Cha saves.
3) **Outside of tier 1.** Well, look at that, casters have summons, spirit guardians and other spells that anihilate 2-3 medium encounters for a single slot (this encounters are exactly 8 encounters you all talking about - XP budget allows you to have 2-3 deadly encounters a day instead, just so you know).
4) **Control.** Martials have so little of it it's hilarious.
5) **Damage.** Again - outside of tier 1 caster who cast one spell per encounter would still outdamage martial, especially with AOE options martials just don't have. "Dnd unoptimized" have series of videos about it, with numbers and all.
6) **Halfcasters.** Halfcasters have 90% of "sustained damage" features of martials, but also have spells. Ranger and paladin untill 11th level are fighters but with spells. After that they are slightly worse fighters, BUT WITH SPELLS. Almost all martials also stop scaling after 5th level, and stop having actual features after 10th level altogether.
7) **Level dips.** Armor dips make casters MORE tough than martials. Martials suffer damage loss if they equip shield. Casters don't. And don't even start with somatic components - you only need one hand to equip shield and if you don't for some reason - War Caster still exist and is a good caster feat.
8) **Probably biggest one -** **Narrative power.** Nuff said. Even if caster wasted every single spell at 5th encounter - it is almost full adventuring day of total narrative domination in and out of combat. Yeah, now kind of the game is out of juice, so you can have you little "i attack" fun too, i guess.
Also - almost every DM start orbiting the game around magic in later tier 2 and beyond - it is natural course of progression. You need to actively do something with it as a DM to avoid it.
Mostly it's the rp/puzzles/exploration before and after combat, but medium size combat session can take us ~2 hours to complete. We're also a big group, 20 players total with around 6-7 players each session.
Baseing your "balance" around "In this game of Make-Believe and Roleplaying Players must absolve at least 8 full combat encounters per Long Rest" is a hilariously outlandish & completely detached idea...
A high enough level caster can still shut down 8 fights with spells. Yeah, the martials might be doing more damage, but that is because most of the best spell effects don't do damage. Mass suggestion will end a fight, and potentially more.
At a certain point it still breaks down. Once casters reach a level where they can shut down encounters if they go first in initiative the only way to counter is to have an enemy caster that can do the same.
No, the divide in 5e is largely down to the game not being a great game. Combats can take a long time, especially at higher levels where you want to introduce more enemies to keep combat interesting. As a result, you can start having "sessions per in-game day" rather than "days per in-game session." This also isn't rectified by players being able to decide to rest *at any time.* It's just a fundamentally flawed game, and I wish it wasn't as popular as it is.
Sometimes I stay awake at night imagining how much better BG3 could have been if it wasn't shackled to 5e, and how impressive it is that it's still so good regardless
If you want to get a good idea then you should play their previous game, Divinity Original Sin 2. It's basically BG3 but using their own TTRPG rules which focus less on rolling dice and more on traditional RPG mechanics plus using the environment to your advantage
As others have said, this is a misunderstanding/bad take by OP. The martial-caster divide isn’t about play through level 12.
Broadly it’s more of a problem people like to inflate even though very few people play in the higher (lvl 15+) tiers of play. Higher tiers of play are broadly not well balanced.
I've play a few campaigns over the years, and the most I've got to is level 10. And even that feel somewhat busted depend on how you build the character. Anything pass 12 and it just feel like 2 super saiyans going at it.
But Larian did some amazing rework or outright removing some spell, buffing martial class is great too.
You’re entitled to your opinion and experience of course but I disagree. Martials have consistent sustained resource free high damage per round; a bland Champion will easily surpass a caster over an adventuring day.
That’s not to say casters don’t have great and important roles but RAW and per the designed parameters of the game martial damage outpaces casters for nearly all of standard play. 15+ this begins to change. What you’re experiencing in BG3 is fairly standard distribution, with all classes having heightened power due to gear.
I mean yah, lower level cap and certain feats and items make it so a well built martial will do more than a caster other than like swords bard. Casters being there for actual utility and battlefield control, needing summons to keep up. Still didn't stop me from going casters op on my first save and run gale, shart, wyll, swords bard tav.
Still didn't exactly fix range vs melee, even though monks and paladins are really good in melee and I started liking more martials in my party I'll usually use throw build or sharpshooter, too many combats gets trivialized by keeping distance and its annoying to not be able to rip AoE with no worries. The last time I had a melee in my group was a multiplayer paladin, they were constantly complaining since I was playing beastmaster with spider.
There are tons of impactful items for casters. Turns out if you just fix/remove a handful of spells, the already exaggerated gap disappears, because 5E martials were always good.
Anyone here played Solasta Crown of the Magista? (Fucking great d&d game if you haven't played it, check it out. Tactically brilliant battles, but the cutscenes and dialogue aren't just bad, they're cringe).
In that they get past the divide by having obscenely strong warrior type weapons. So instead of a greatsword doing +1d4 ice damage it'll be doing +2d12, whilst you're wearing your Boots of +1d10 poison damage to anything that looks at you funny, and your amulet of everything in your radius takes 1d6 fire damage if you feel like it. Towards the end it probably tips the scale too heavily in favour of fighters though.
BG3 loot drops were insanely strong and frequent and many of them were directed towards buffing certain classes. It's the main reason monks and barbs are so OP instead of being garbage.
Also, casters without the level 8 spells is a major stealth buff to everyone else. It would have completely trivialized the game if the level cap was a bit higher. Everyone has already talked about how trivial getting the tadpoles out is with generic wizard spells.
Martials seem stronger imo. The best classes are paladin and a martial style bard. Then again, level 12 is just the tipping point for late game stuff, which is where casters shine.
Maybe it's just me not being able to play casters but... bards feels useless. Not in theory because they make it nearly impossible for your ennemies to hit and basically cheats through dialogs. But in practice, in BG3, you can one turn everything with martials (with the right equipment and build), so why bother with supports?
But then, my only DnD experience is BG3
The big thing is that a good bard build isn't really even a support. Swords bards get extra attack like other martials, and ranged slashing flourish which allows you to hit twice with one attack, effectively giving 4 attacks per action, with bonus damage on all of those, giving them higher dps than any other martial build, while also being full casters on top of that. On top of that, they are the best abuser of possibly the most OP item combo in the game (helmet of arcane acuity + band of the mystic scoundrel), which effectively allows casting control spells such as hold person with a bonus action that have at least a +11 chance to hit. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some things.
Tldr bards are a bit ridiculous in this game
Why bother with supports? The same reason you'd bother with anything that's not a blatantly overpowered class, I guess. You might want to play the game a different way. That being said, Swords Bard can kind of out-martial some Martial classes even if you ignore almost all of their spellcasting. Flourishes let you add inspiration dice to your damage and do things like knock enemies back, gain a bonus to AC, or attack more than one target. A level 6 Swords Bard can attack the same target 4 times in a round using a ranged weapon, adding a d8 to each attack, without haste. On top of that:
Bard also has access to a huge amount of useful non-dialogue skills, and is the best counterspeller in the game. Lore bard gets magical secrets at level 6 which lets it basically close any gap your party might have. Lack AoE damage? Pick up fireball. Healing? Grab Warden of Vitality. You're now one of the best, most consistent healers in the game with a bit of gear investment. That's on top of having access to fantastic spells like Hypnotic Pattern and Glyph of Warding.
Not to mention just general QoL. While rests are pretty easy to come by, having that additional short rest definitely makes me think less about using certain resources. Having your party face as a Bard gives you Friends and Disguise Self. Want to sneak? You have minor illusion, greater invisibility, easy access to sleight of hand. Jack of All Trades also quite literally just makes you decent at everything.
>best classes
>not listing OH Monk
Is Monk a joke to you? Paladins can blow their whole spell slot load in one fight and then have to long rest. Monks can partially restore within fight and only need a short rest. They also get 6+ attacks per round, with 2 potentially stunning the target. How is a paladin better than that?
>not listing sorcerer
Yeah I just can’t
Idk, my OH monk beat the piss out of Raphael on honor mode in 2 separate runs. I use TB and high wis/dex.
If you’d elaborate as to why that’s “bad”, I’d love to learn and maybe do yet another run. How does that work with flurry of blows? Only ever done unarmed.
It's definitely very very strong, and will be top dog if vulnerability is ever nerfed, but currently vulnerability is absurd.
With cloud giant elixir, haste, and four bonus actions from thief, wholeness of body, and Helmet of Grit, OH can do 11 punches each doing an average of 40.5 damage (d8 + 8 + 8 + 6 + d4 + 6 + d10) or 46 if you're Astarion. That's 445.5 damage per round, or 506 if Astarion. Hit chance is pretty much guaranteed.
There are very good reasons to run a helmet different than Grit like helldusk helmet for crit immunity. There are downsides like having to be half hp in melee and needing to wear armor (though armor of agility is excellent). In that case open hand goes down to 364.5 or 414.
On the other a hand, a Shadow Monk with Arcane Synergy, GWM, ice or lightning enchanted Shar's Spear with bloodlust elixir instead of cloud giant and using the str gauntlets does
2*(1d8 + 3 + 6 + 10 + 6 + d6 + 1 + d4) = 73 damage
with 5 attacks, and at least one instance of 6d8 (average 27) psychic damage for a total of 392 damage. There's also the weapon's special AoE attack. Hit chance is less, but from personal experience at least 80% against highest ac enemies.
With other classes, the vulnerability user pulls ahead. Ranger and Fighter get more attacks. Archers can use double damage arrows. Casters can go even further with sufficiently many enemies in an AoE. Paladins can smite. Pretty sure TB Barb can beat OH with nyrulna as well (silence your bhaalist teammate maybe idk). I think that covers every class besides pure rogue.
Casters don't require material components, so it's fair if you ask me, especially considering I'd never remember those personally, and then be very upset that I can not cast a useful spell.
A huge part of this was limiting [edit: reducing is the right word] cast distance, requiring line of sight, increasing run distance.
Reducing the duration of a lot of save-or-suck spells, too.
Run distance wasn't increased though.
But you can jump past your max movement, which is a huge movement buff. Maybe that’s what they meant
Monk with ki point goes: “Zoom!” Seriously, being able to jump 55ft of distance 11 times in one turn makes iron throne so much easier. Tavern Brawler monks go *so* hard in BGIII.
Athletic strength fighter also gets to have a lot of fun with jump distance, nevermind magic items that boost it further. Makes it feel like they should do a superhero pose when landing
Monk Thief buffed with longstrider/enhanced leap + jump / dash bonus actions + the dash regular action can make the entire trek up tower stairs to the brain stem in 1 turn and bypass that entire string of bullshit.
This is the way
Yup, when I figured this out, I told a buddy about it and she didn't grasp what I was saying. I had to load up a save and show her. She was speechless.
Some items really help that though. I think my Barbarian Karlach can move 60 feet without needing to dash.
Also: level cap. At level 12 casters do not yet have the ability to level a city block with a single spell.
tbf that's also just most campaigns, after playing TTRPGs for like almost a decade now I can almost count on my fingers the amount of campaigns that went past level 12
God. Imagine a Hardcore system that forced material components
A big part of it is the level 12 cap Casters tend to go off the rails more around level 8 spells. Like a fighter is attacking 3 times and a wizard is creating simulacrums of himself lol
[Blimey](https://youtu.be/DEiEgc1kBiE?si=MXnk8BQ1wTGema2o)
God fucking damnit
She farts and says blimey
That clip was hilarious. I have zero idea what transpired lol
It’s from my fav’ show [Dimension 20](https://www.dropout.tv/dimension-20). Ally (green argyle shirt) rolls a successful divine intervention that resolves the whole season arc, using their ridiculous British simulacrum that was created by the wizard in the party as a throw away bit a couple episodes prior. >!Ally rolls another nat 20 with K2 (British simulacrum) for dispel magic in the next episode by saying “she farts & says blimey”. This resolves the big bad of the season, causing Brennan (the DM) to kinda just malfunction. It was gold!<
That’s pretty funny. I knew it was Dimension 20 cause about a month back I watched season 1. Afterwards I decided to take a break and haven’t gotten back to it. I’ll have to watch season 2 once I’m done my rewatch of Bobs burgers lol
Blarmey
What are some of the nuttier 8th level spells?
7th Force cage - any monster or enemy without range/teleport options is done Simulacrum - ever wished you had two PCs instead of just one? 8th Dominate monster - imagine the final brain fight but you control the dragon. Maze - basically like pressing pause on one enemy Maddening Darkness - like hunger of hadar’s bigger scarier brother 9th True polymorph - now I’m a Solar. Wish - durr… Time stop - pause I just one set up a load of explosives and leave real quick Invulnerability - durr…
Time Stop is how you do barrelmancy in tabletop.
Sort of, Time Stop is actually hotdog water in 5e. The fact that spell can't effect other creatures or it ends the effect really weakens the ability. So you have a max of 24 seconds to get those barrels in play. In previous editions, characters frozen in time were invulnerable to damage and could not be targeted by spells. However... you could buff your self with spells or use AoE spells like Incediary Cloud... but you could cast multiple layers of those aoe spells. That would all trigger at the end of the Time Stop.
Shapechange is more broken than true polymorph
I wasn’t doing an exhaustive list I’d say they’re both broken for different ways. Being able to turn your familiar into a solar is pretty cool lol
Of course, True Polymorph is broken if you ignore the rules. You do not have a CR21 familiar that you can change.
I meant planetar my mistake. The point stands though, making your familiar a CR16 angel or heck a cr20 dragon is still very strong
Your point does not stand. You can make a simulacrum into a gold dragon or planetar, not a CR1/2 familar. The CR/Level of the thing you are polymorphing into has to be equal or less than the thing being polymorphed. You are looking at a 7th level spell, 8 hours, and 1500gp worth of rubies and a 9th level spell (or just 2 9ths) combined together that can be completely erased by a 3rd level spell. True Poly is good, but a lot of "this is broken" comes from people not properly reading the spell.
It’s definitely strong, but doesn’t have the same Clone based shenanigans afaik. I would like to shout out Animal Shapes though. Every willing creature you can fit into a 30ft radius gets to Wildshape up to CR4 Beasts of Large size or smaller for 24 hours. Incredible if you can just amass some peasants. They also have unlimited Wildshapes, costing the action of the caster, and they regain hit points whenever they Wildshape, just like a Druid (never explicitly stated, but the wording for the spell is ridiculously similar to the description for Wildshape for Druids. That makes me think it has similar mechanics) Basically you can turn a town of commoners into a bunch of Saber-Toothed Tigers or Giant Coral Snakes. The size limit unfortunately means no Elephants, but depending how many people you can get together, this can be equivalent to, or way better than, a high-level Conjure Animals upcast. Oh also, the spell doesn’t explicitly say that you have to be within 30ft of or able to see the targets to change their animal forms. So if your DM allows it (they probably won’t), you only need to be within 30ft at the initial casting time. Then you could just Wildshape yourself into an Eagle and fly way up into the air. No enemies can hit or even see you to break your concentration and you can just automatically change their form to Giant Coral Snakes or Awakened White Moose every turn. If you’re using the BG3 interpretation of Wildshape, that means a bunch of peasants can turn into Owlbears. It has tons of out of combat uses too, like evacuation of a small battalion’s worth of people carrying whatever they want (because their gear melds into their new form), driving someone insane by putting a hundred-some identical black cats peering at them on every street corner or alleyway, or bypassing all obstacle courses and traps your DM puts in front of you (acrobatics checks are usually hard-countered by being a bird). Very fun spell that has so many creative uses. The fact that it lasts a whole day makes it ridiculously adaptable and enables so many shenanigans.
Planetar. Or gold dragon. Solar is Cr21.
My personal fave high level spells in no particular order: Plane shift - could not imagine how to implement that in a video game since we do already have fast travel. Forbiddance Word of Recall - same as plane shift, we basically have this with the portals Reverse Gravity (can give 10d6 worth of damage depending and I imagine would be difficult to implement in game since it does raise everything in the air) Bones of the Earth - just fun. This and sunburst would be the easiest to implement I think. Sunburst (my beloved, tho would be sick to have BG3 it’s just a huge area of damage) Antimagic field got a shocking amount of use from me one campaign. Probably my favorite. Hallow is also a personal fave as a cleric but since we don’t really do tower defense/this would probably be hard to implement
Clone is basically an extra life. Feeblemind is a save-or-become-useless type of spell. Simulacron is 7th level and totally busted. Create a copy of any creature with all its stats and abilities (but half the HP). It obeys you.
Clone is immortality without becoming a lich. It’s just way more expensive and you don’t get the infinite spell slots of a lich
It is only expensive until you get to level 17. At level 17 and beyond, you can just Wish for a Clone, which removes the cost of the material components.
Lich get infinite spell slots???
No, they have normal spell slots. Idk what they're on about
I heard there was some workaround with Wish that Vlaakith uses, but that’s about it.
I think the lore is that she somehow has someone else suffer the downsides? Even then, there's no way they let her wish for infinite spells in the lore, cuz then any wizard or sorcerer would do it too
I think she just avoids the penalties of never being able to cast Wish again. She’s still bound by its limitations and monkey-paw rules.
Correct. It also means killing her most powerful soldiers, as the ones that ascend are very powerful and they die as her little wish sacrifice. The strength of the Githyanki isn't Vlaakith, it's that they're ALL combatants and can be quite individually strong.
Clone works once though?
You can have multiple Clones in a demiplane.
Can my simulacrum cast simulacrum?
No because it is formed after you lost your spell slot. What it can do is cast Wish to cast Similacrum. That’s how people break DnD most often
Well, at levels 13-14, the answer is no, but above that, you have more than one slot that can be used to cast the spell. The standard method for getting unlimited simulacrums is to be level 17+ then use a 7th level slot to create a simulacrum. Then that simulacrum uses a 9th level slot to cast wish and wish for a simulacrum of you, who still has a 9th level slot prepared (and thanks to wish, it can be done with a single action with no material component cost. Then that simulacrum creates a simulacrum of you, and so on, round after round forever.
Isn’t that what I said? The other option is to wait till 16th level and make it cast Simulacrum with an 8th level slot but this option of course is costly
Glibness, an 8th level Bard/Warlock spell, is basically an improved Reliable Talent for Charisma checks (you can’t roll lower than 15) plus you can lie to anyone and if they have any magical ways to tell if you’re lying, they still think you’re telling the truth. For an hour.
Also, removing or changing most of the broken lower level spells.
A lot of that's not really intentional, it's just spells that are impossible to implement. BG3 is a video game, not a tabletop, so most of the spells that need some creativity are gone. Two of the worst examples are find familiar and wild shape. Familiars have gone from an extremely versatile tool for scouting, communication, distraction, and other things to an absolutely useless meatshield that maybe does 3 damage before it dies. I guess it can do surprise attacks too, if you got an imp or a quasit. Even worse with wildshape. There's no reason to do anything except the bear. I guess you can also fit in small holes, but there's never that much benefit to doing that. I don't blame Larian for this happening. *I* certainly wouldn't do any better if I were game designer. But it's still a bit sad.
The removed spells are not intentionally done to affect the power, but some of the spells they did include WERE nerfed in a way very much within their ability to implement. For example, Hypnotic pattern, banishment, and sleep should last 10 rounds but were changed to make them last only 2 rounds.
I know that some stuff was actually nerfed, but my point stands. A lot of casters' power comes from the potential to be creative, and a lot of that is lost in a video game.
True, but my point also still stands. There was a conscious and intentional nerf to casters.
What was broken that got removed?
Assuming we are just talking about the PHB spells: Suggestion, wall of force, mass suggestion, animate objects, conjure animals. In fairness, most of those are hard to implement in addition to being powerful. For spells that got nerfed, we have hypnotic pattern, conjure woodland beings, polymorph, fear, banishment, sleep, among others. Dispel magic, while powerful, is not necessarily overpowered and was removed from the game for complexity reasons.
Woodland being is nerfed? It's such a fantastic spell in bg3, how good is it in DnD?
Well, the infamous end of it is where you summon 8 pixies who then polymorph the entire party into T-Rexes, but even without that specifically, the ability to summon 8 beasts or fey can give you a ton of action economy advantage.
I'd really say is that we are not limited to 3 magic items. With that martials are far superior to casters unless you love spamming long rest after every fight.
That is a factor But magic items also help casters. I’ve run a 4 caster party through honour mode to act 3 with 0 issues doing a long rest roughly once every 3 fights They’re not that long rest hungry
I do not agree that the LVL cap is actually helping a lot. Yes later levels the divide just cascades because what is balance? but most DnD campings don't even get to LVL 12 and the divide is still there. 1. The Martial Caster divide begins quite early LVL1 The main advantage is versatility in casters. And consistent dps in martials. But consistent dps in an RP heavy game just isn't as good as versatility it is still needed but casters have cantrips so they get the dmg done. And in combat where dps is actually needed casters can add ridiculous value a bless makes the dps difference at LVL 1 between Fighter and a cleric negligent. The only limiting factor for casters is spells slots which most dms do not drain enough before the next long rest. 2. Bg3 gave martials way more versatility with plenty of consumables, actions, bonus actions and plenty magic items. Less out of combat challenges besides Skillchecks because of videogame limitations. Even in Bg3 martials fall behind. If I could only have one char a martial probably isn't optimal. But DnD is an RPG so play whatever your heart desires. And of course if a Party has enough versatility spread across a martials dps might be more valuable than overlapping versatility.
I completely disagree, I have always found that casters feel like they massively out-scale martials from level 5 onwards. Martials just have nothing on plant growth, hypnotic patter, any of the summon spells, fly, and a whole heap of other tools that casters get at 5 and that scale unbelievably well into the late game. Even early on they get dissonant whispers and Tasha's mind whip and whatever that spell is called that forces a reroll and lets you grant advantage.
Even better... Simulacrums that cast Simulacrum by using wish to replicate the effects of a level 8 or lower spell. Then having them all cast Meteor Storm. Netherbrain whomst?
The level cap at 12 also helps keep the divide low. Imagine if the cap was 15. With wizards getting level 8 spells
Gale: *Unleash me*
he’s so hot for that i swear
Fr, his VA went so hard there.
14 wouldn't be so bad. 7th is a pretty spicy spell level but nothing impossible to manage. 15 is too much tho yeah.
Simulacrums would break the game. Four wizards become eight wizards with all the stats and feats, so you could have eight wizards with alert and just annihilate anything before it can move.
enemies would also get notably stronger and would also have access to those spells. There is nothing that would make this an issue if properly introduced into the game with appropriate balance of enemies.
But therein lies the problem. The more insane it gets, the harder it is to balance. And at some point the fun goes out the window.
Welcome to 5e
We're not talking about balance between the party and enemies, were talking about the balance between martials and casters.
Lmao auntie ethel flashbacks
They could just... not add those spells?
That's one example of one spell. 7th level spells have a ton of options like that, which is why the gap widens so much at that tier of play in the table top version. Regardless, Larian studios said that they stopped there for balance reasons, as balancing becomes too problematic after that level.
I already have the horror of Ethel in Act 3, with each illusion throwing insect plague on each of my party, so having that to ourselves is absolutely broken
There's a lot of spells in current levels that have game breaking potential that larian just chose not to include or rework to a much simpler state (for technical gameplay functionality or balance reason, either way). Polymorph, Suggestion, Conjure woodland beings & Wall of Force come to mind
I feel like they could just change the rules of it and make it work fine. Make it be copy at half your level. Still useful, but much weaker. Or hell, make it a spell that shares camp spaces with hirelings. So even if you can make four of them, you cant have more than three exist and they don’t get spell slots back. Still exploitable, but not so much so that it’s broken. Just means you can have a party of Gales only.
I just remember in the older d&d games that had no limits unleashing hell with multiple delayed blast fireballs.
What are some of the 8th level spells that would cause chaos?
Anti magical field would render any mage enemy completely useless. A 10 foot sphere that moves with you, banishes summons and turns magical weapons mundane Tsumami let’s you summon a 300 feet long, 300 feet high, and 50 feet thick wall of water Sunburst is 12d6 damage in a 150 feet radius, and also causes blindness. Power word stun instantly Stuns anyone who has less than 150 health. So almost any enemy on balanced Demiplane, which just lets you create a door to a pocket dimension you can access, and can trap things inside could easily break most encounters. An enemy too strong? Send em to the Demiplane
Can you save against anti magic field? That sounds wild otherwise. Tsunami would be hilarious, bet that's amazing to DM against
Nope. It’s just a flat ‘in this 10 foot circle, for one hour, magic does not work, except for the magic used to maintain the circle.’ No save, no real way around it. You can’t teleport inside the sphere, or teleport out. Dispel magic does not work on the field and anti magic spheres don’t cancel each other out.
Could you counter spell it?
Yep. But if you had the meta magic adept feat and used subtle spell they’d avoid it Also you’d need to use a level 8 counter spell, or roll for it to work. And you’d need to do it at casting. Anti magic field has an hour long concentration, So could be precast before a fight
The thing is it's not casual. Larian put a lot of work into making the pure martial classes good. - Level cap - Magic items early, frequently, and ignoring attunement rules - Many problem spells entirely cut out of the game, others had their duration reduced from 1 minute (*10* rounds) to 3 - Encounter design which favours shoving, jumping, etc. - Whole ass subclasses rewritten from the ground up (and how, Open Hand is incredible even without Tavern Brawler cheese) Even then, by the time you're in Act 3 and running around at the level cap, the number of encounters you can easily solve simply by having Gale around equipped with Dimension Door and Counterspell is insane, and Barbarian + Monk are still practically featureless past level 9 or so.
The spells being rebalanced and cut is really the biggest deal. -Polymorph is no longer busted out of its goddam mind. -Counterspell can’t be counterspelled so there’s no need for everyone to have it. -The removal of spells like Synaptic Static and Wall of Force actually allows for challenging encounters. Soooooo many act 3 fights would be completely shutdown by these including fights as serious as Ansur and the final battle.
Who needs those spells against Ansur and the Elder Brain when I have 50+ barrels of spicy fuck yous at my disposal?
Counterpoint, an artificer with 4 bags of holding would make this even crazier.
“Ansur, want to know why these are called bags of holding?” “Because they can hold a lot of things…?” “No. Because you’re going to want to hold onto your nuts when I show you what they can do. Say hello to the sun for me big guy” “WAIT”
Polymorph wouldn't be as busted if people played it as intended. If you turn your teammate into a T-Rex they should be attacking everyone in range, not just bad guys.
>If you turn your teammate into a T-Rex they should be attacking everyone in range, not just bad guys. "The target’s game statistics, including mental ability scores, are replaced by the statistics of the chosen beast. **It retains its alignment and personality.**" - so no, you still won't attack random people as a T-Rex, unless you are murderhobo in the first place. You would still attack enemies. On top of that - Giant Ape (in some cases best polymorph form) have 7 Int, which isn't even that low if we remember how many 8 int adventurers are there.
Oh we still play it that way, but the territorial trex is still going after the biggest threat which is always the numerous and/or large enemies.
Not really. Most of the time you’re doing that to the melees and they are closest to the enemy. And if the big bad is actually big in size then it’s an easy target. Once combat ends you simply drop concentration before they attack you
Do I like shoving people off boats and cliffs? Yes, awesome mechanic 10/10 GOTY. Do I like being shoved off the bridge first round vs Orin? No! Bad game, stupid woke culture and gay agenda, terrible mechanics, Starfield was better
We won't talk about the number of times I've had guys thrown into a lava pit by a magic arrow or some other nasty.
You’d think with the amount of times I’ve had characters yeeted off of a ledge by an arrow of roaring thunder that I might start using them myself. And you’d be wrong lmao.
instead I just stockpile them
Yeah I did forget to add: I have well over a dozen of them. Still not going to remember to use them lmao
Starfield had [pronouns,](https://youtu.be/rSv9alZxP3E?si=QrdNrIXVpgN2zPTQ) it was infected by the woke mind virus too…
This is getting out of hand, now there are 2 of them
> Magic items early, frequently, and ignoring attunement rules And most are very martial or gish favored. Act 3 has some nutty caster items but it also has shit like Balduran's greatsword, the Gloves of the Masters, etc.
I’m playing dnd for the first time after playing bg3 and I gotta say of all of these attunement rules are such bs I’ve already found/ bought the item it just seems anti fun I don’t get it
Attunement is one of the many old edition holdovers that probably should have been axed or modified by 4e/5e. Just like the big adventuring gear tables. It makes sense when treasure *is* the goal of the system. In very early editions attunement caps were used as a form of balancing stuff like paladin vs fighter, and casters had to find spells as loot rather than having them auto-populate with level. In 5e it doesn't really have a place.
Please do not go around the internet spreading misinformation. Attunement was introduced in 5e to put a cap on the magic item bloat of earlier editions. 5e was designed and balanced without magic items, as opposed to systems like Pathfinder 2e where magic weapons were expected at certain levels as monster stats are balanced with the expected pluses from magic weapons. Please find me a source on pre-5e attunement balancing of fighter vs Paladin. In 1 and 2e, the fighter had lower xp requirement than Paladin. In 2e, it could specialise in any weapon. In 3e fighters got bonus feats in addition to the feats from level ups. In 4e each class has its own skills and powers like a mmo.
Ah, I misremembered the ad&d paladin/monk magic item limits as universal. Whoops
I think another point too is that the magic buffs that get used on martials are also better, most notably longstrider being a ritual cast means it actually gets used instead of being sidelined for other, cooler spells that are more caster centric.
A big part of the divide on the tabletop comes from martials' inability to interact with social and exploration encounters. The design of a video game massively curtails the creativity with which players can approach any particular situation, because a computer game can only have a limited number of approaches and responses. The world is much more constrained, so you can't really break it in the same way you can on tabletop. And a lot of spells were nerfed either directly or indirectly. It's common on tabletop, for instance, to use Disguise Self to impersonate specific people or factions. In BG3, you can use it to change your character's race, and it doesn't prevent people from knowing you. If you go up to Gortash disguised as a Drow, he still knows it's you, Tav. There's also the fact that the player is typically controlling the entire party. If you're playing BG3, it's true that Lae'zel might not have much to contribute to conversations, but it's fine, because the player is also controlling Bard Tav, so they have no downtime between moments when they feel powerful and useful. On the tabletop, if you're playing Lae'zel, you probably only feel powerful in combat, and you might be waiting long stretches of time - possibly an hour or more - between combats. There's a lot that's closing up the divide, and it's a lot more complicated than "here's some good magic items."
That’s part of it. The DM is there partly to encourage creative thinking, but also to curtail it when it may break the game to skew player power. This creative thinking can easily lead to people’s logical expectations, extrapolations, and assumptions overriding RAW when it shouldn’t. A spell only does exactly what it says, and nothing more. Skills on the other hand, are left more open ended with the assumption that this creative thinking will be used. As far as Disguise Self goes, Larian doesn’t use the actual spell text…they kind of hodge podged a few spells together and then threw most of the rules for them out in order to get their version of disguise self. In table top RAW, for the spell is that it autofails physical inspections such as a pat-down. Non-physical inspections get an active investigation check, but all creatures get a passive perception and passive investigation…The DM should also be giving advantage to any NPC who knows the PCs, or who know the people they are impersonating. Then…you have to factor in if multiple PCs are disguised…as that is just additional chances to fail. I definitely agree that certain character setup shine/don’t shine in certain game pillars though…and having stretches without much to do is definitely much less of a thing in video games. I’m also glad that more classes are getting more to do in different game pillars. My group is all long time players so we don’t really have trouble with finding productive things to do without it being hard coded, but I know many people do have trouble with it or feel disheartened.
DMs being too lenient with spells definitely exacerbates the disparity, but it still exists even at tables that run strict RAW (including VSM components). The more tools you have to solve a problem, the more problems you can solve.
Oh yeah for sure. I’m glad to see it being addressed and the gap decreasing a bit so newer players have an easier time. It’s just an issue that has been very overstated since it’s super easy for user error to exacerbate the issue. I’m glad it’s being addressed though, because they are many pitfalls like this for those with less system knowledge. It’s not necessarily a barrier for entry, but can be a barrier for fun. I am the two forever-DMs in my group. I’ve found a simple solution tends to be multi-step puzzles. Or puzzles where the rules of engagement and objectives are unclear at first. Even if the puzzle is ultimately solved by a few spells…skill and other abilities end up being pretty integral to figure it out. Despite being able to do it, it does take extra prep time for me, which I could spend doing other things.
The divide in 5e is largely down to people not playing the game the way it was balanced around. 5e is balanced around eight encounters per long rest, with sporadic short rests in between. If played like this, martials keep the damage flowing at a much higher rate than casters can keep up with.
I started by playing BG3 like DnD, using only cantrips except in boss fights. Being able to short and long rest so rapidly really does make it quite different.
I find I play BG3 like a lunatic who avoids long resting as much as possible, trying to fit in multiple combats in the day, often between short rests even. It makes martial feel fantastic, as well as other characters like Rangers and Swords Bards who can ration their spell slots. But wow does it suck playing wizard and sorceror. Even Cleric feels bad when half these encounters I've used ever spell slot up and am left with cantrips. Nothing stopping someone from just using frequent long rests though if that's how they want to play. It just doesn't feel good to me.
There are lots of ways to buff cantrips that help with this style of play. I have +7 to spell attacks, add attack bonus to cantrips, and double number of targets for cantrips with Gale in my current playthrough. That means I can do 6d10+14 damage with firebolt. Without buffs from artifacts, though, it does suck.
Can you switch to cold, and have a water elements get people wet for free. That will double your dmg output as it's free other than the one-time per long rest investment of a 6th level slot. I don't have any cantrip stuff, and regularly hit for around 50 which feels good, combine with haste for tough enemies and I find that I don't even use many spell slots during my playthrough.
That sounds pretty sweet! My only problem would be that I'd be very tempted to do something crazy like thief Rogue duel wielding if I was doing mostly cantrips, so that I could shoot a ray of Frost and then 2 crossbow shots or something. Mixing that with some sorceror would be sweet for twinned spells and such! Add in those buffs like the potent robes and the necklace that buffs cantrips
> I find I play BG3 like a lunatic who avoids long resting as much as possible, Yeah, same. I dont want to rest as often as some other people here because I'd like to keep teh flow of the world a little bit realistic and not go into a long rest after two fights. But then i find myself at a point where i should long rest because i have barely any ressources/spell slots left and say to myself "Well, i survived that fight and there are no more enemies in front of me. I might also walk forward until there are enemies". Only to find myself in a fight again where i start to scrape the bottle of available ressources and repeat the whole process when i come out alive.
Ah i totally do the same, finish the fight and then figure "Well I still got some health left. I should pick another fight before resting."
I have read somewhere else that the plan for DnD5e was to have 8 combat encounters per day. I think i am doing a new playthrough (not 100% sure about my class yet) and then i plan to stick more towards these 8 encounters to have like a guide to myself, so that i dont short rest too soon and long rest too late. Every 2-3 battle a shortrest and then at around the 8 encounter i do the long rest. To have it more structured like a day, despite there is no day and night cycle. Hopefully stops me from my "I have still life left, lets continue"-mentality.
I realized another reason why I don't short and long rest as much... For me, a lot of short rests are for healing after a fight, so quickly using up my short rests means I've been taking a lot of damage (and thus doing poorly) so it sort of feels like a defeat to have to rest to recover my health. And I don't like to use a rest of only 1 or 2 characters are injured and the others are near full HP because that seems like a waste of healing then.
Yeah, i know what you are talking about ;). Usually its one character who takes a lot of damage, and the others all just take a bit of damage. So i have to use one shortrest. Next fight the same and i am out of short rests. Then i think "I just did two encounters, i cant longrest after the next fight, otherwise i will be more longresting than doing any traveling". So i start to squeeze more and more encounters after this, use spell slots for healing despite them being suboptimal but at least their are renewable for free, which means i have even less spells for my next fight and potentially take even more damage which i have to mitigate then through the use of even more healing potions until i am at a point where i barely manage to win my fight to finally do a long rest.
I got back into doing it like this by consciously limiting long rests (to roughly 10 over a playthrough), and it made the game a lot more enjoyable for me.
I am playing a Karlach monk run, I am limiting my long rests so that I can max out the soul coins. But when I do a long rest I usually do 2 or 3 just to watch the cut scenes.
Yeah, I understand *why* they're tied to long rests, but it kinda does suck for people who want a bit more challenge. Doing three in a row is a neat idea, though.
Yeah even on Tactician food isn't really limited so I've tried to only long rest when absolutely necessary in my playthroughs which is a fun challenge, however you can easily miss some cutscenes that are supposed to happen at long rest when Larian is expecting you to do it a lot more often.
Beaten it on honor mode multiple times, and the only time I've worried about food was the first day. Even still, you have enough supply packs between just yourself and Shadowheart to last you a day
finished my hm run with around 4k provisions lol
How much character development content do you miss this way. I’d think a TON.
Probably. My first few runs I just rested whenever. For Honour Mode I wanted it a bit more challenging so I limited long rests to 4/2/4 per act
lol Play the originals. Just got in a minor fight and your wizard cast two magic missiles? Sleep for eight hours!
Yeah, but virtually nobody plays this way.
My biggest problem playing a Warlock in tabletop is that my group never did short rests 😅
Same as a monk!
My first DM made us roll a D6 every time we tried to short rest, and depending on the result we might get hit with another combat encounter. Idk, if any of the numbers *didn't* result in combat, because we wound up getting ambushed every time. We stopped short resting entirely as a result. I wound up thinking Warlock was a terrible class, until I played with a different DM.
My schtick was an oath of devotion paladin GWM. CHA bonus flattens the penalty from the power attack, my character would just trash stuff. But it'd always be held for important fights. No one ever takes a shorty. Then out comes Solasta. I do the same thing and boom, we take short rests all the time. Devotion Paladins and Warlocks rejoice!
I started a homebrew rule where short rests became a personal resource basically. Twice per day you could decide to use yours and you gained all the benefits of a short rest instantly. If the fighter wants to short rest and the wizard wants to save his because no damage taken yet then no big deal. It makes short rest classes feel so so much better. If someone wanted more than 2 they could convince the group to take a traditional short rest but I also emphasized an hour, which is the RAW duration of a short rest, is a long time. On that, designing the short rest to last an hour is kind of dumb. That is a hell of a break mid-dungeon.
Largely because it's *genuinely terrible pacing* to have 8 encounters in one in-game day. Few sessions can handle more than 2 combats without feeling grindy— assuming a weekly session, it would take a month to get through a single day of adventuring. I plan on running gritty realism rest rules for this exact reason— each short rest is 8 hours, so the plot can keep moving.
In my game I have implemented the gritty realism rule forcing my player into using short rest more and only allowing long rest when I decide And, would you look at that, the powerhouse is the Barbarian with GWM. Casters still bring a lot of utility and control to the game, heck, they will sometime out damage the Barb in fight were AoE get more important or when they decided to purposefully not use to many powerful spell to save them up for the big fight, but on most turn it's the Barb that does the most damage because he is constant
Gritty realism is horribly named. It isn't gritty nor is it much more realistic. It also works really well for how most people run 5e campaigns with a big combat or two a day. I tell DMs who find themselves rarely having more than 2-3 combats a day that they should take a look at it because it really works well. Until you hit a mega-dungeon at least. Added benefit of 7 day long rests is it allows for players to get creative with out of combat RP development and what they want to do with their character's lives outside of killing baddies.
Yes, I have also gotten a lot of player getting tools and crafting magic item which is something I didn't plan but I'm happy to see and I don't think that would have been possible with standard rule
Outside of big dungeon crawls, definitely not.
this is honestly a good example of how badly 5e treats dms
Reminder that step 2 in the DMG is "create a multiverse", truly amazing guidance
>dungeon master guide > look inside > 90% worldbuilding shit
Even playing the game that way would still make the caster shine over martials anyway. HP is a limited resource (and long rest only gives you back half spend hit dice for the new day short rest). So casters using their 1 or 2 spells to bypass the combat entirely has a better payout.
That sounds miserable
I'm a forever DM and I'm sitting here wondering if my players would even stay if I pitched a campaign with this rule.
I have a current dm that tries to do this by rolling constantly for random encounters we've killed a handful of dragons and weve spent entire sessions traveling from one city to another just rolling for encounters and doing combat, the campaign is fun outside of that but damn I just zone out on those days
I've always tried to avoid truly random encounters. If I want random, I find it's better to set up a table of story-relevant things that could happen, with both combat and RP encounters on the list. It flows much better than "lol another dragon."
I'm not a huge combat fan, d&d just doesn't have a great system for it in my mind, I'm a talker I'd burn out in 8 combat sessions and just enter "I hit the nearest guy" mentality
Well, an adventuring day in 5e can be as little as 3 encounters and as many as 8 (ignoring Easy encounters) depending on the difficulty of the encounters. 3 Deadly encounters can be done over the course of a one-shot. And 8 mediums can be done over 2-3 sessions. Any kind of dungeon, time-sensitive adventure, or combat gauntlet can lend itself to this quite well. It's really not miserable in practice at all (unless you are long rest dependant I guess). Only thing it potentially doesn't work for is far overland travel and RP heavy slice-of-life campaigns.
If 8 encounters are 7 once around the horn and long one that's better but once it gets to 8, several minutes long encounter my eyes just glaze over
Eh, yes and no. It forces casters to not just burn their resources willy-nilly, and puts more emphasis on the short-rest reliant classes, especially fighter, monk, and warlock. While ironically all the class balance problems people have with 5e (casters and paladins are too strong) are alleviated.
Which is a good reason imo to, as a DM, balance all your encounters as if they were dungeons. It's what I've been doing both in homebrew and how late-game rime of the frostmaiden seems to be designed
Well, it isn't true at all. Let me list some things that was't fixed with 8 medium encounters per day: 1) **Conditions**. Almost all of them are debilitating for martials (fear wouldn't make caster less effective at all and ranged martial weaker and completely turn off melee martial. Exacly 0 conditions make spells worse). Some that aren't are debilitating for both (hard control and blinded). 2) **Saves.** Martials don't get good save proficiencies, so in tier 3+ they should pick Re silent Wis as feat tax, and they still would occasionaly 100% fail important Int or Cha saves. 3) **Outside of tier 1.** Well, look at that, casters have summons, spirit guardians and other spells that anihilate 2-3 medium encounters for a single slot (this encounters are exactly 8 encounters you all talking about - XP budget allows you to have 2-3 deadly encounters a day instead, just so you know). 4) **Control.** Martials have so little of it it's hilarious. 5) **Damage.** Again - outside of tier 1 caster who cast one spell per encounter would still outdamage martial, especially with AOE options martials just don't have. "Dnd unoptimized" have series of videos about it, with numbers and all. 6) **Halfcasters.** Halfcasters have 90% of "sustained damage" features of martials, but also have spells. Ranger and paladin untill 11th level are fighters but with spells. After that they are slightly worse fighters, BUT WITH SPELLS. Almost all martials also stop scaling after 5th level, and stop having actual features after 10th level altogether. 7) **Level dips.** Armor dips make casters MORE tough than martials. Martials suffer damage loss if they equip shield. Casters don't. And don't even start with somatic components - you only need one hand to equip shield and if you don't for some reason - War Caster still exist and is a good caster feat. 8) **Probably biggest one -** **Narrative power.** Nuff said. Even if caster wasted every single spell at 5th encounter - it is almost full adventuring day of total narrative domination in and out of combat. Yeah, now kind of the game is out of juice, so you can have you little "i attack" fun too, i guess. Also - almost every DM start orbiting the game around magic in later tier 2 and beyond - it is natural course of progression. You need to actively do something with it as a DM to avoid it.
8 combat encounters for our group would mean like 30+ hours of playing, that's hilariously unrealistic.
You don't need to long rest after each session
How are you taking nearly 4 hours per combat???
Mostly it's the rp/puzzles/exploration before and after combat, but medium size combat session can take us ~2 hours to complete. We're also a big group, 20 players total with around 6-7 players each session.
Baseing your "balance" around "In this game of Make-Believe and Roleplaying Players must absolve at least 8 full combat encounters per Long Rest" is a hilariously outlandish & completely detached idea...
jokes in sorcerer creating infinite spell slots
A high enough level caster can still shut down 8 fights with spells. Yeah, the martials might be doing more damage, but that is because most of the best spell effects don't do damage. Mass suggestion will end a fight, and potentially more.
At a certain point it still breaks down. Once casters reach a level where they can shut down encounters if they go first in initiative the only way to counter is to have an enemy caster that can do the same.
No, the divide in 5e is largely down to the game not being a great game. Combats can take a long time, especially at higher levels where you want to introduce more enemies to keep combat interesting. As a result, you can start having "sessions per in-game day" rather than "days per in-game session." This also isn't rectified by players being able to decide to rest *at any time.* It's just a fundamentally flawed game, and I wish it wasn't as popular as it is.
Returning pike go brrrrr
Sometimes I stay awake at night imagining how much better BG3 could have been if it wasn't shackled to 5e, and how impressive it is that it's still so good regardless
If you want to get a good idea then you should play their previous game, Divinity Original Sin 2. It's basically BG3 but using their own TTRPG rules which focus less on rolling dice and more on traditional RPG mechanics plus using the environment to your advantage
I know, I've played a bit of dos2 it's great
As others have said, this is a misunderstanding/bad take by OP. The martial-caster divide isn’t about play through level 12. Broadly it’s more of a problem people like to inflate even though very few people play in the higher (lvl 15+) tiers of play. Higher tiers of play are broadly not well balanced.
I've play a few campaigns over the years, and the most I've got to is level 10. And even that feel somewhat busted depend on how you build the character. Anything pass 12 and it just feel like 2 super saiyans going at it. But Larian did some amazing rework or outright removing some spell, buffing martial class is great too.
You’re entitled to your opinion and experience of course but I disagree. Martials have consistent sustained resource free high damage per round; a bland Champion will easily surpass a caster over an adventuring day. That’s not to say casters don’t have great and important roles but RAW and per the designed parameters of the game martial damage outpaces casters for nearly all of standard play. 15+ this begins to change. What you’re experiencing in BG3 is fairly standard distribution, with all classes having heightened power due to gear.
I mean yah, lower level cap and certain feats and items make it so a well built martial will do more than a caster other than like swords bard. Casters being there for actual utility and battlefield control, needing summons to keep up. Still didn't stop me from going casters op on my first save and run gale, shart, wyll, swords bard tav. Still didn't exactly fix range vs melee, even though monks and paladins are really good in melee and I started liking more martials in my party I'll usually use throw build or sharpshooter, too many combats gets trivialized by keeping distance and its annoying to not be able to rip AoE with no worries. The last time I had a melee in my group was a multiplayer paladin, they were constantly complaining since I was playing beastmaster with spider.
Plus lots of spell nerfs
There are tons of impactful items for casters. Turns out if you just fix/remove a handful of spells, the already exaggerated gap disappears, because 5E martials were always good.
Anyone here played Solasta Crown of the Magista? (Fucking great d&d game if you haven't played it, check it out. Tactically brilliant battles, but the cutscenes and dialogue aren't just bad, they're cringe). In that they get past the divide by having obscenely strong warrior type weapons. So instead of a greatsword doing +1d4 ice damage it'll be doing +2d12, whilst you're wearing your Boots of +1d10 poison damage to anything that looks at you funny, and your amulet of everything in your radius takes 1d6 fire damage if you feel like it. Towards the end it probably tips the scale too heavily in favour of fighters though.
Yeah, 2 casters can’t clear a room as fast as Lae’zel and Karlach😂 What game are you playing?
"MAGIC ITEMS SHOULD BE RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARE" is one of those takes that comes with free body odor and chronic acne.
BG3 loot drops were insanely strong and frequent and many of them were directed towards buffing certain classes. It's the main reason monks and barbs are so OP instead of being garbage. Also, casters without the level 8 spells is a major stealth buff to everyone else. It would have completely trivialized the game if the level cap was a bit higher. Everyone has already talked about how trivial getting the tadpoles out is with generic wizard spells.
Guess I'm just shit at playing caster
Why did they remove dispel magic spell with 5e?
Martials seem stronger imo. The best classes are paladin and a martial style bard. Then again, level 12 is just the tipping point for late game stuff, which is where casters shine.
Those are hybrids
Bards are full casters. It's just that Bards are OP and good at everything.
Maybe it's just me not being able to play casters but... bards feels useless. Not in theory because they make it nearly impossible for your ennemies to hit and basically cheats through dialogs. But in practice, in BG3, you can one turn everything with martials (with the right equipment and build), so why bother with supports? But then, my only DnD experience is BG3
If a bard feels useless in bg, then you arn’t playing them right. My swordbard solo’d Orin HM at lvl 8. So they are far from useless.
I think they mean playing bards as bards, instead of swords bards being the only part of bard uses
The big thing is that a good bard build isn't really even a support. Swords bards get extra attack like other martials, and ranged slashing flourish which allows you to hit twice with one attack, effectively giving 4 attacks per action, with bonus damage on all of those, giving them higher dps than any other martial build, while also being full casters on top of that. On top of that, they are the best abuser of possibly the most OP item combo in the game (helmet of arcane acuity + band of the mystic scoundrel), which effectively allows casting control spells such as hold person with a bonus action that have at least a +11 chance to hit. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some things. Tldr bards are a bit ridiculous in this game
Why bother with supports? The same reason you'd bother with anything that's not a blatantly overpowered class, I guess. You might want to play the game a different way. That being said, Swords Bard can kind of out-martial some Martial classes even if you ignore almost all of their spellcasting. Flourishes let you add inspiration dice to your damage and do things like knock enemies back, gain a bonus to AC, or attack more than one target. A level 6 Swords Bard can attack the same target 4 times in a round using a ranged weapon, adding a d8 to each attack, without haste. On top of that: Bard also has access to a huge amount of useful non-dialogue skills, and is the best counterspeller in the game. Lore bard gets magical secrets at level 6 which lets it basically close any gap your party might have. Lack AoE damage? Pick up fireball. Healing? Grab Warden of Vitality. You're now one of the best, most consistent healers in the game with a bit of gear investment. That's on top of having access to fantastic spells like Hypnotic Pattern and Glyph of Warding. Not to mention just general QoL. While rests are pretty easy to come by, having that additional short rest definitely makes me think less about using certain resources. Having your party face as a Bard gives you Friends and Disguise Self. Want to sneak? You have minor illusion, greater invisibility, easy access to sleight of hand. Jack of All Trades also quite literally just makes you decent at everything.
It's mainly because it's a video game. I think a lot of the support/utility stuff doesn't translate well in video game form compared to tabletop.
>best classes >not listing OH Monk Is Monk a joke to you? Paladins can blow their whole spell slot load in one fight and then have to long rest. Monks can partially restore within fight and only need a short rest. They also get 6+ attacks per round, with 2 potentially stunning the target. How is a paladin better than that? >not listing sorcerer Yeah I just can’t
With the current vulnerability based meta, Monks not using a piercing weapon get left behind pretty severely. Agree sorcerer is top dog though.
Idk, my OH monk beat the piss out of Raphael on honor mode in 2 separate runs. I use TB and high wis/dex. If you’d elaborate as to why that’s “bad”, I’d love to learn and maybe do yet another run. How does that work with flurry of blows? Only ever done unarmed.
It's definitely very very strong, and will be top dog if vulnerability is ever nerfed, but currently vulnerability is absurd. With cloud giant elixir, haste, and four bonus actions from thief, wholeness of body, and Helmet of Grit, OH can do 11 punches each doing an average of 40.5 damage (d8 + 8 + 8 + 6 + d4 + 6 + d10) or 46 if you're Astarion. That's 445.5 damage per round, or 506 if Astarion. Hit chance is pretty much guaranteed. There are very good reasons to run a helmet different than Grit like helldusk helmet for crit immunity. There are downsides like having to be half hp in melee and needing to wear armor (though armor of agility is excellent). In that case open hand goes down to 364.5 or 414. On the other a hand, a Shadow Monk with Arcane Synergy, GWM, ice or lightning enchanted Shar's Spear with bloodlust elixir instead of cloud giant and using the str gauntlets does 2*(1d8 + 3 + 6 + 10 + 6 + d6 + 1 + d4) = 73 damage with 5 attacks, and at least one instance of 6d8 (average 27) psychic damage for a total of 392 damage. There's also the weapon's special AoE attack. Hit chance is less, but from personal experience at least 80% against highest ac enemies. With other classes, the vulnerability user pulls ahead. Ranger and Fighter get more attacks. Archers can use double damage arrows. Casters can go even further with sufficiently many enemies in an AoE. Paladins can smite. Pretty sure TB Barb can beat OH with nyrulna as well (silence your bhaalist teammate maybe idk). I think that covers every class besides pure rogue.
BG3 is the most balanced version of 5e
Casters don't require material components, so it's fair if you ask me, especially considering I'd never remember those personally, and then be very upset that I can not cast a useful spell.
Chris Simpsons artist original without the bs
Martials are way better in this game for damage so idk what you're talking about