Difficulty mods/tuning

[Doctor Gitgud]

I'm about to start my first and probably only BG3 playthrough. Since I doubt I'll have time to play it a second time, I want to get the difficulty dialed in for a satisfying experience. I cleared Divinity 1/2 on whatever the hardest difficulties those games launched with, but I'm not familiar with D&D classes/spells/systems.

When BG3 first released, I saw a lot of complaints about difficulty tuning on the hardest level--primarily that it was almost impossible at the start because the enemies had flat bonuses, meaning the attack miss rates near the start of the game were absurd and heavily armored player tank characters would get 1 and 2 shotted. Then by the end of the game, it flips and becomes way too easy because the scaling doesn't keep up with the player.

None of that sounded good to me. The difficulty curve seems backwards (I want it to stay hard at the end), and the RNG might be beyond my tolerance with the miss rates. I like a hard game, but I'd rather have more enemies or enemies with higher HP than enemies I can't hit. And I want melee characters to be able to take a reasonable number of hits.

Have any of these things been tuned through updates after release? What difficulty level and mods (if needed) should I go with?

[Maraxus]

Honestly if you have cleared DOS2 in the hardest settings you probably won't have much trouble even at the beginning on Tactician.

They have added 2 new difficulty options to the game game. Honor Mode, which is a permadeath mode with some additional difficulty added(like bosses legendary actions), and custom mode, which has new difficulty options(like hiding enemies' hp bars, no death saving throws, etc), so without mods those are your two options really, honor mode or a maxed out custom mode... annoyingly some stuff from honor mode cant be added to custom mode. I'd suggest you wait for the next update to see if they flesh out custom mode even more.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3124539500

I haven't a clue about mods yet because I don't wanna deal with them breaking every update but there definitely are some someone else can fill you in on that.

[Boss]

I dont think you can judge difficulty by what peoole on the internet say, because it's equal parts people saying it's piss easy and so hard they cant beat it on the easiest difficulty.

So take it from me, a guy on the internet: Tactician is pretty decently balanced. You need to make good builds, use tactics, and watch your positioning. Some fights are pretty easy, but some will kick your ass if you dont take them seriously, and/or try to brute force them.

What makes the game easy is that you get so much camp supplies, you can long rest twice after every fight and not run out, when DnD is a lot about resource management. Plus the "save-anywhere" quality of life feature. The best experience is without save scumming and resting as little as possible. Try, for example, only saving after you long rest (for the purposes of loading if you mess up. Save often to protect from crashes and bugs).

The flat bonus enemies get from Tactician isnt an issue, but if you dont want that, you can still set their AI and gear/abilities to Tactician, but not the bonuses in custom difficulty. You can also set it to single-save here, but I dont recommend that if you're only gonna play once. Just have discipline instead

[myxlmynx]

I think Tactician is in a great spot - it's not too hard but also not too easy. If you usually play games on higher difficulties, you can start with Tactician right away and you will have a good time with it. After your first playthrough you can try Honor mode.
For some rather overly casual players who might not be familiar with D&D or CRPGs at all, best start at Balanced or below.

[id795078477]

I have bad news for you, OP. While it is possible to have a DnD game with a balanced starting levels experience - and it's probably done by now - there's absolutely no way to have the challenging end-game. Not going to happen, ever - unless the edition, ruleset or some homebrew severely restrict the freedom of character building.

To illustrate why: in BG3 the minmaxers managed to construct builds that dish out 500+ damage per round. Needless to say, such builds oftentimes destroy final game bosses before those even get to have their turn, it's absolutely destroying the game.

So? Do we nerf some classes making them unplayable outside of such (oftentimes obscure) minmax builds? Do we up the difficulty so much so that the game becomes utterly hopeless to try if you're not aware of those minmax builds? Nope, the common solution here is to just accept it as what it is, settle for a middle ground in terms of difficulty (even on hardest settings) and admit that the late game will be much easier than the start of the game because of the scaling.

Of course, this won't be the case if a given player doesn't minmax, doesn't know the mechanics and so on - then perhaps the difficulty will be there even at end-game, but as you see, it requires certain degree of ignorance / inexperience on the player's end.

[♂Warrior of Gachi♂]

Tactician is ridiculously easy. Even on lower levels.

[Gilbert Guyh!]

Originally posted by JCD3nton:

I'm about to start my first and probably only BG3 playthrough. Since I doubt I'll have time to play it a second time, I want to get the difficulty dialed in for a satisfying experience. I cleared Divinity 1/2 on whatever the hardest difficulties those games launched with, but I'm not familiar with D&D classes/spells/systems.

When BG3 first released, I saw a lot of complaints about difficulty tuning on the hardest level--primarily that it was almost impossible at the start because the enemies had flat bonuses, meaning the attack miss rates near the start of the game were absurd and heavily armored player tank characters would get 1 and 2 shotted. Then by the end of the game, it flips and becomes way too easy because the scaling doesn't keep up with the player.

None of that sounded good to me. The difficulty curve seems backwards (I want it to stay hard at the end), and the RNG might be beyond my tolerance with the miss rates. I like a hard game, but I'd rather have more enemies or enemies with higher HP than enemies I can't hit. And I want melee characters to be able to take a reasonable number of hits.

Have any of these things been tuned through updates after release? What difficulty level and mods (if needed) should I go with?

Did you get anywhere in your pursuit of finding good mods & settings?

[Nauct]

Even at the beginning Tactician is very easy early levels. Far easier than the normal pen and paper DnD game would be