Tactician difficulty

[el pepe]

I have seen a few posts claiming tactician isn't that hard. What I don't understand is that if I fail a single check and start a fight the whole party is dead within the first turn. If I take the same fight with better positioning I can win but it takes a long time disengage to hide etc. Making a single mistake for me in tactician usually results in a wipe or having to use a ♥♥♥♥ ton of consumables and being even slightly out of position is enough to cause a wipe on big pulls.

What I want to know is what people are running for classes etc that is somehow making the instawipe scenario " not that hard " ? I enjoy the level of difficulty and every fight in combat can be won but I cant help but think the people who are calling tactician easy aren't actually playing it or are switching to normal for hard parts.

Its true that normal fights of like 5-7 mobs are easy and pretty routine but anything 10-12 starts getting gnarly and the amount of times Ive died from pulling 20 due to check fail is alot.

I killed the entire exterior of the goblin camp in 1 giant pull and it was at least 30 goblins and a big dude and it was hard af, how can people say that its easy?

[cfehunter]

Start of the game is difficult, but it's supposed to be, you're level 1 in a game using D&D rules.
Come Act 3 I was barely feeling the difference between balanced and tactician, once you get to level 9 and upwards you should be able to deal with anything the game can throw at you.

[guard65]

Tactician difficulty only give 30% more hit points, +2 to hit and +2 saves for your enemies. Not nearly enough to make it a challenge. May draw out the fight one or two hits per unit.

[Krypto]

Originally posted by Amateur Nitpicker:

Play what you want to play I prefer normal. Others are just flexing than actual complaining. Like I see them post more in steam forums than actually playing the game.

Why do you think most of them hide their achievements or private their profile?

I understand you're trying to be supportive to OP, but i am absolutely not "flexing" or bragging about finding Tactician too easy. I genuinely think that, if you have a good concept of optimization and turn economy, it isn't sufficiently challenging for players who want that difficulty. No shame if you don't, it's fine, I encourage people to play on whatever difficulty they want. But I definitely want something harder than Tactician.

[Jimmy]

just level up until you get haste and put it on a fighter, the game becomes trivial after that point

[guard65]

I changed Tactician difficulty to +130% hp, +3 tp hit, +3 saves, +2 AC. I also add healing potions, scrolls, and magic fire or acid arrows to the enemies. Makes for a whole new game when they can fight back. Unfortunately it becomes hard to save any NPC's but they had it coming.

[BitterHeals]

Originally posted by guard65:

I changed Tactician difficulty to +130% hp, +3 tp hit, +3 saves, +2 AC. I also add healing potions, scrolls, and magic fire or acid arrows to the enemies. Makes for a whole new game when they can fight back. Unfortunately it becomes hard to save any NPC's but they had it coming.

Now that sounds genuinely challenging. I'm looking forward to a Tactician Plus mod, or something like Divinity Unleashed that overhauls combat to be harder.

[guard65]

Sadly Tactician Plus mod only increase the HP and increases + to hit attacks and saves. Basically just the HEALTHBOOST_HARDCORE Boost flag data.

Adding extra consumable items to enemies made all the difference in the game for me.

I have plans on creating various powered up weapons that have bonus that only an NPC can get. Effectively making them useless to the player except to sell. Mainly because anything I give the enemies they will drop when killed.

[DedJim]

If you cheese and save scum it's easy. If you start a conversation and start a battle it's very hard.

[Dx2]

Originally posted by cfehunter:

Start of the game is difficult, but it's supposed to be, you're level 1 in a game using D&D rules.
Come Act 3 I was barely feeling the difference between balanced and tactician, once you get to level 9 and upwards you should be able to deal with anything the game can throw at you.

tactician is easy already from start of game even without going metabuilds or minmax.
would like to go multiclass builds but kinda pointless to go for metabuilds when its so dumb easy

[Mick]

This game is extraordinarily easy with the tools provided even on tactician.

One spell: Ward bond increases all your other party member's AC and saving throws by 1 while splitting half the damage onto the caster.

Used correctly it effectively increases the HP of your party by 2x on top of the boosted defense stats. No concentration checks, permanent until long rest. Your only concern is making sure the caster can outheal the damage on their turns. This alone turned tactician bg3 from reasonably difficult to a cakewalk. Add on gear you find that synergizes with it (some stuff can give extra temp hitpoints per heal, some stuff can maximize heals, some stuff can REVIVE YOU FROM DEATH per rest, etc)

Nevermind the ease with which you can just assassinate most enemies with a rogue using sharpshooter feat and the pickpocket mechanic which lets you clean out entire stores with some basic brain cell cooperation and it's just a joke. I have not felt it necessary to use any consumables except elemental arrows ever since.

Needless to say I am extremely disappointed with how little of a struggle there is. Just like in bg1 it's basically until you hit level 3 or 4 and then you have options to just steamroll everything assuming you built your MC without total ignorance. Narratively you're struggling to survive against impossible odds but meanwhile I'm just walking through a park. Not feeling it.

The most damning thing is how enemies barely ever have or use consumable items and in order to prevent the player from becoming too powerful from looting great gear from enemies, most enemies are just trash and are too weak anyways across the board and they end up relying entirely on just upping the stats. The proper use of unique abilities you get from gear augments your party to such a degree it's absurd meanwhile no one you encounter has even close to the toolset you inevitably accrue.

I wouldn't say there's really any well thought out combat encounters either... I'm close to done with act 2 and have had 5 encounters that actually required some level of thought to deal with. That's about 60 hours of gameplay with most of it being a snoozefest in the encounter difficulty.

tl;dr if you are looking for a challenging combat system, you will not find it here. The story and chars and all that, the dnd system, whathaveyou is very nice and the content as a whole is worth the price but the game is way too easy on the hardest difficulty. The developers should feel safe to brutalize you if you pick tactician but apparently not.

[Цивер]

guard65, how have you added arrows and so on to the enemies? May you tell please?

[guard65]

You have to make changes to the four Equipment.txt via the public folder.

I currently run this script on each of them to add the items I have selected. If you add to much they never use everything and they drop as loot, which I do not want. If you have programming skills this will help, if not - oh well

'On Error Resume Next
Dim oFSO
WScript.Echo "Begining File Processing"
Set oFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
info = "D:\BG3_Mod\script\Equipment.txt"
Set oTS1 = oFSO.OpenTextFile(info, 1)
info = "D:\BG3_Mod\script\Equipment2.txt"
Set oTS2 = oFSO.OpenTextFile(info, 2, True)

Do Until oTS1.AtEndOfStream
info = oTS1.ReadLine
change1 = 0
'Add Potions
if InStr(info,"initialweaponset") then
if rnd() > 0.5 then
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipmentgroup"
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "OBJ_Potion_Healing" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
change1 = 1
end if
end if
if InStr(info,"OBJ_Potion_Healing_Superior") then
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "OBJ_Potion_Healing_Supreme" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
change1 = 1
end if
if InStr(info,"OBJ_Potion_Healing_Greater") then
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "OBJ_Potion_Healing_Superior" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
change1 = 1
end if
if InStr(info,"OBJ_Potion_Healing") then
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "OBJ_Potion_Healing_Greater" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
change1 = 1
end if
'If Quarterstaff add one of these
if InStr(info,"Quarterstaff") then
oTS2.WriteLine info
tmp1 = rnd()
if tmp1 < 0.35 then
info = "add equipmentgroup"
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "OBJ_Scroll_AcidArrow" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
end if
if tmp1 > 0.35 and tmp1 < 0.7 then
info = "add equipmentgroup"
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "OBJ_Scroll_Blindness" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
end if
if tmp1 > 0.7 and tmp1 < 0.85 then
info = "add equipmentgroup"
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "OBJ_Scroll_Darkness" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
end if
if tmp1 > 0.85 then
info = "add equipmentgroup"
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "OBJ_Scroll_ChromaticOrb" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
end if
change1 = 1
end if
'if contain bow add one magic arrow
if InStr(info,"bow") then
oTS2.WriteLine info
tmp1 = rnd()
if tmp1 < 0.45 then
info = "add equipmentgroup"
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "Projectile_ArrowOfFire" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
end if
if tmp1 > 0.15 and tmp1 < 0.85 then
info = "add equipmentgroup"
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "Projectile_ArrowOfAcid" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
end if
if tmp1 > 0.65 and tmp1 < 0.95 then
info = "add equipmentgroup"
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "Projectile_ArrowOfIce" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
end if
if tmp1 > 0.85 then
info = "add equipmentgroup"
oTS2.WriteLine info
info = "add equipment entry " & CHR(34) & "Projectile_ArrowOfDarkness" & CHR(34)
oTS2.WriteLine info
end if
change1 = 1
end if
if change1 = 0 then
oTS2.WriteLine info
end if
Loop

oTS1.Close
oTS2.Close

WScript.Echo "Completed File Processing"

[Cebertus]

Originally posted by Ronald Mcnoggin:

I killed the entire exterior of the goblin camp in 1 giant pull and it was at least 30 goblins and a big dude and it was hard af, how can people say that its easy?

I did that in one playthroug, basically my whole team was standing in the right area on a wall, it was a though fight, with many items used.

In another playthrough i stealthed killed the whole exterior of the camp with astarion. He oneshotted every goblin, without pulling anythin. Only the big guy on the door was left.

[opus132]

Since you can save during combat, this game has no actual "difficulty".

[sanicek]

Originally posted by guard65:

Tactician difficulty only give 30% more hit points, +2 to hit and +2 saves for your enemies. Not nearly enough to make it a challenge. May draw out the fight one or two hits per unit.

I only play tactician so can't compare but they mentioned it should also change the composition of encounters a bit. It also does a bunch of other stuff, especially on bosses or notable enemies, gives them damage resistances or immunities, auras or special passives (such as ranged attacks having disadvantage on them, etc).

Nevertheless it's still too easy.