this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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Recently finished my first playthrough. Played as Dark Urge, which was interesting but was probably better saved for a 2nd playthrough, but oh well. I kinda see what people mean about the game being weakest in act 3. At a time when I was starting to see the finish line, the game kept widening and it made me just want to be done with it. I still did a lot of the side content, but I also missed a lot more of it. It also got way too easy. The act 2 boss was the last fight that really threatened me with maybe the exception of Raph. And I wasn’t even min maxing my characters or anything. I’ve seen people build stuff with like a bajillion attacks or infinite spells, but I was just playing the game normally with whatever I found.
This was on normal. I know there’s a harder difficulty, but it’s weird that the intended experience basically lets you ignore most of the difficulty mechanics. I never had to think about long resting because I had basically Infinite food. The only reason why I wouldn’t just instantly do it after every fight was because the load screens would be annoying to sit through. By the end of the game I was hoarding bags and bags of unused consumables and like 50k in unspent gold, which I could have only spent on more consumables I didn’t need. I barely even used the extra powers you get in the finale. If there’s already a story difficulty for people who want to completely ignore the mechanics of the game, why can’t normal be balanced around being a reasonable challenge that makes you at least consider using the tools the game provides to you?
For anyone who’s played tactician, what’s it like? Is it a reasonable kind of challenge or is it more of a masochist difficulty?
Curious to know about tactician as well. I am still early in act 3 but the fights have become increasingly easier.
Is there even a way to change difficult mid play through? I haven’t checked tbh
You can change it at any time i think.
I was playing balanced and changes to tactician two days ago to see how it was. Was expecting to get clobbered, but actually it’s been going fine. The fights are tough, but it sorta quickly pushes you to pay more attention, examine enemies, think about positioning a bit more. The Grymforge fight was way larger than I had expected, and I decided to play it a bit, die and then reload, but I ended up beating it (although poor station did get treated into the lava, and I tested Nere in after him).
Anyway, so far I’m loving tactician, don’t think I need to shift back down. It uses up camp supplies more, both because the cost is 80, and I find that I need to long rest more frequently because I use my character resources up more fully in every engagement. I don’t foresee it becoming a situation where the supplies economy actually starts to become a pressure point, supplies are super prevalent, but it does make make me more “excited” to pick up and store all those wine bottles and mushrooms…
Caveat is you do have to be comfortable getting wiped in engagements, then reloading and trying a different strategy. I’m doing my first playthrough, so most encounters are unknown to me when they start, which means it’s easy to get caught in bad positions, etc.
I say try it if you’re curious—you can switch it back down if you find it frustrating with no downside.
I'm currently level 7 in my Tactician run, and much like Balanced, everything gets a lot easier when you hit level 5. Tav is one of the best starters (Bard) even if the rest of my party was kinda meh at low levels (Champion Fighter, Monk, CotL Druid). The martials are starting to take off now--especially the Monk--though I'm still not thrilled with the Druid. It's possible it would have been a little too punishing if I had a weaker party.
Now I still have 5k gold and probably still more food than I'll ever need (even with the 2x food penalty). I think ultimately food is what would have made the difficulty masochist level, but there's more than enough if you actually loot the scraps you come across. At that point it's all about whether you can handle a single fight with full resources or not, and I haven't come across one that's been too much (although maybe doing the hag at level 4 without Magic Missile was ambitious and I got a bit lucky). Hell, I just breezed through the fight against
Grymforge spoiler
all the Grymforge duergar with Nere tagging along,and that's one of the more difficult fights in the game. Smart tactics still matter, though. I just had that fight go spectacularly wrong in my Explorer difficulty multiplayer run with a friend where we decided to just range them from above. I tossed the Runepowder Vial without lighting it, figuring I'd have time, and they threw it right back and hit it with a fire arrow, killing one of my party on the spot and knocking the other into the lava.
Lol that reminds me. 2 of the hardest fights I had in my playthrough happened because I was a bit careless with my positioning and Shadowheart got yeeted off a cliff to her death right at the start of the fight. One was that same grymforge fight, the other was even funnier because it happened during the act 2 fight that’s relevant to her story.
Got shadowheart yeeted into lava in that fight, was hilarious but made it a fair bit harder than most for sure.
hardest fights act3
Nothing yet has compared to telling Gortash where to shove his deal, sorry Wyll. Only fight I've had to reload and prep. Helped being rested with all spells (and more lightning spells), but used a lot of consumables to win that one.I am disappointed that Lorrakane wasn't harder. It was a cool idea, but I think the AI needs to have him retreat and throw down some big spells not just rely on the rebuke damage as a deterrent.
Is that one in
act 3
the Audience Hall? I've never fought him there. Does seem it'd be pretty rough with the Steel Watch up.That's actually where I had the hardest time in the game, in that multiplayer run. We were tapped out after fighting him up top, and before I realized what she was doing, she started going downstairs instead of teleporting out. Had a hell of a time trying to find enough distance to escape to camp (Steel Watch was up, too).