Larian Banner: Baldur's Gate Patch 9
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Joined: Mar 2019
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
stranger
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Joined: Mar 2019
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
Firstly I want to thank you Larian, This is one of the best RPG/Strategy games ever made, and one of my favorite games of all time. You are one of the only game companies left with real integrity, and I'm very excited to see what you are going to do in the future.

Here are some ideas I have for issues that you might want to address with the game:

POISON ELEMENT

Problem:
The game very frequently has undead (and/or poison strong or immune enemies). Unlike other immunities, its super frequent, is a complete 200% immunity, and often effects every enemy on the field. This is just a general balance issue - the undead trait makes pursuing poison damage builds nearly impossible to sustain. Having a poison weapon makes fights against undead very hard, but as a Geomancer focus its something you often need. You can switch to a different weapon but that is a lot of maintenance and you lose AP during battle. This on top of all your poison skills becoming useless during the fight. I've tried to do poison builds and they were super fun when not fighting undead, but the undead problem was just too much of an issue to continue the build.

Ideas to fix:
- Make it so when you combine a weapon with an Oil barrel, you get an earth damage enchant (give Geomancers an alternative enchant)
- Change poison enchants on weapons to 'Venom' which still does the damage to undead, but they are immune to the poison effect.
- Add an earth damage enchant spell as an alternative to Venom Coating
- Improve weapon swapping (see below)

HIGHLIGHTS/CIRCLES

Problem:
Highlights work great but just seem to take away from the beautiful graphics. Highlights also seem more prominent on the consoles. Circles are really prominent and basic, they remind me of circles in sports games.

Ideas to Fix:
- It would be great if there was a way to set the highlight line width and opacity to your liking
- I like the idea of circles but they are super basic looking with the hard color outline. It would be awesome if the circles were a more stylized pattern and slightly translucent so they stand out and look cool. (concept: http://classic.battle.net/images/battle/diablo2exp/images/skills/resistfire01.jpg)
- A third option would be cool with down arrows above peoples heads (cool stylized arrows might look great)

WEAPON SWITCHING

Problem:
Switching weapons is kind of too easy, and also frustrating. Why can I switch to a bow for 1AP, but two daggers for 2CP? Any char can hold a shield and exploit 'Shields Up' for minimal CP.

Ideas to Fix:
- As far as the CP issue, add a weapon swap action for 1CP - or just make 2-handers 2CP - just for consistency.
- Ideally each char would only need two weapon sets, so adding two weapon sets for each char (rather than allowing full weapon swapping in combat) would be ideal. This opens up great builds like bow/daggers or bow/spear, switching between 2H/SnS for melee chars, etc. The problem here is the exploit of taking advantage of the free skills in combat - my idea to balance this would be that you never gain new skills during combat. This way, a warrior can switch freely between setups, but they would have to pick between having access to all-in or shields up. Bow/Dagger setups would usually not have a penalty which should be fine. You can then start with a shield and switch to bow or dual wands but you might lose out on special skills they might provide, so there is still freedom but ther would be more balance here.

CHAMELEON CLOAK (INVISIBILITY)
- Invisibility is crazy, there should be some way to counter this skill. Playing Lone Wolf and activating Cloak (then delaying your initiative) is a massive exploit that kind of makes the game too easy.

SUMMON INCARNATE
-Incarnate can't critical which is just not fun. I'd love it if you could add Incarnate to Savage Sortilege trait. It could be something balanced like like 25% flat.

ELEMENTAL TOTEM
- Add a 'unsummon' as a free action in case you summon in a wrong spot or a wrong element by accident. (I'd also love if they lasted a turn longer)

MERCHANTS: BUYING/SELLING
When looking at their items, its hard to get a good look at only the new items. Lower level items and stuff you have sold clutter the view. It would be nice to have an option to filter by level, where you only look at weapons and armor that match your current level. This would be especially useful on consoles since you don't have any other filters. A different fix might be to move all sold items exclusively to a 'buyback' tab and never shown in the default view.

OBSCURED BY CLOUDS
Clouds are sometimes very hard to see, and its confusing when you cannot attack a target in a cloud. It would be great if there was a tooltip when a target cannot be targeted, noting that it is because they are "obscured by clouds".

CONSOLES (PS4)
- When you click the left thumbstick you go into "free look" mode. It would be nice if you showed the character health bar when you are 'over' them (especially in combat).
- in a multiplayer game, during combat the default view currently focuses on the char who's turn it is. When your ally is taking their turn, it just shows your default action bar. It would be nice if during your allys turn, you could see their action bar and see their camera and see what they are doing.

Last edited by Woolly Mammoth; 12/03/19 07:20 PM.
Joined: Jan 2018
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MERCHANTS: BUYING/SELLING

For items, there is a tag called Stolen. I think the game could add a tag to items that are sold. Then have a filter for items that are sold or having a separated tab.

Joined: Feb 2019
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I agree with having oil barrels add earth damage, just as poison barrels do. It's low effort to implement, but gives certain builds a viable alternative to their venom coating / poison infused weapons when facing undead. I could go either way on a coating spell for earth damage - it'd be nice but venom coating is a hybrid between geo and scoundrel, so I don't know how it should be implemented into the game world.

Savage Sortilege to Champion Incarnates would be nice.

Strongly agree on the Merchants idea. Right now merchants are a pain if you've previously sold them any amount of previous items.

Joined: Mar 2019
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
stranger
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Joined: Mar 2019
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
MORE FEEDBACK / IDEAS:

BACKPACKS
As your inventory gets overloaded, re-organizing things into your backpack(s) is essential. But everyone just has the same generic packpack. This is especially confusing on the crafting tab. It would be nice if you could rename your backpacks, and/or add other ways to distinguish them. Another idea is being able to combine dye with the backpacks to color them, but really its such a key thing that there should just be an option to customize the backpack icons with colors or symbols to distinguish.

ACCIDENTALLY STEALING
This is a huge problem on the consoles. People are constantly walking away from you and your target moves to something else as soon as you click them. There should be an option you can set to give you a warning before you steal anything (do you really want to steal this? Y/N)

HIGHER LEVEL ENEMIES
It would be nice if higher level enemies had like a skull icon next to them like in other games, so you are more aware before you walk into an extra tough fight.

UPGRADE UNIQUE ITEMS
There are a lot of really cool unique items in Act 1 that are just too weak later on. It would be nice to have a special process where you can upgrade a unique item to your current level, so the base stats (like armor/magic armor, or base damage for weapons) upgrade to your level. It could be a difficult recipe like item + 5 Augmentors.


Joined: Feb 2019
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-Buying/Selling
Ditto to the "sold" tag idea.
I hate it when it empties the offered item when you switch hero during a trade window.

-Invisibility
Yep, invis OP. Especially if you have skin graft, play dead, or invis potions. It's especially useful to use on a a turn you adrenaline'd a lot, so you can skip the next turn of low AP, and delay the turn after that.

-Poison
Not enough poison spells imo. Not enough earth damage spells too for that matter, what with the two sharing a single skill tree. Don't really see the problem with the immunities tho, going geomancer you already have 2 elements.

-Melee Underpowered
Less damage? Check. No highground bonus? Check. Not being able to attack from a safe distance? Check. Need to waste AP relocating to another target? Check.
There are literally no reason to ever go melee if you want to do damage. I say a +30% to the base damage of melee weapons (daggers, 2H, 1H) to make the tradeoff of not having range be something more than "thematically pleasing". Or nerf all spells+bows. One of the two.

Edit: I take back everything I said about melee underpowered, Sparkmaster+Three Sisters (the unique staff)= OP

Last edited by Abao; 20/03/19 05:55 PM. Reason: Oops
Joined: Mar 2019
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
stranger
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stranger
Joined: Mar 2019
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
@Abao
2-handed melee builds blow magic away IMO. Higher base damage, great AoE and CC options combined with the fact that enemies don't have resistances to physical. The damage is off the charts. Lone Wolf 2-handed strength builds are easy mode, even on Tactician.

MORE GAME FEEDBACK
- I had Fane wear the Tyrant set, and when the event happened it unequipped his helm, causing everyone around me to attack (since hes undead)
- One note is there seems to be a ton of unique 2H axes and hammers. I find myself admiring the 2H swords but they never compare to all the axes and hammers I'm getting. One example is Hanal Lechet and the axe you get at the gallows to the east of driftwood are very similar and right next to each other.

Last edited by Woolly Mammoth; 20/03/19 10:34 PM.

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