Oh ya clerics and wizards in d&d suck in the early levels BUT then they hit level 5 and become unstoppable.
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Like 4 of the domains give heavy armor prof (you should take Life). You fool. You absolute rube
Having played it for a few hours with the Nora crew last night, here are my observations as a 5e nerd + Divos2 nerd:
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Most of my multiclass advice is obsolete because this game seems to only have PHB stuff, so like 3 subclasses per class and no artificer at all. Whoops. Guess I should’ve expected that though
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Part of Larian’s whole approach to tactical combat is information clarity, and this works REALLY well in translating 5e to a computer game. You can see all enemies’ hp, see hit % for all your attacks (meaning you know each enemy’s AC and saves), see each DC for every skill roll you make out of combat, etc, stuff that DMs in tabletop usually obscure, both for verisimilitude and also to give opportunities for fudging. With no DM there is no fudging, so it’s way more satisfying to be able to engage directly with the tactical system for better planning.
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Abilities have been changed in interesting ways to take advantage of the information clarity. Eg: in tabletop 5e barbarian’s reckless attack - get adv on all your attacks in exchange for giving enemies adv against you - is something you can elect to turn on for no action cost before you attack. In bg3, it’s a reaction you can take if you miss. Both a buff and a nerf: it eats your reaction (so you can’t now, for example, opportunity attack) but you also won’t use it and suffer the drawback if you were gonna hit anyway.
Bardic inspiration works the same way: in tabletop, you decide to use it after your roll but before you know the result (a clunky system most people don’t use anyway), but in bg3 it’s used as a reaction after you fail something, and ONLY if the value of the die could conceivably have you succeed; if you rolled so low the die couldn’t help you, it skips even offering. Very clean, very efficient. (Interestingly wotc hit on this same idea in its playtests for the upcoming one dnd or 5.5e or whatever you wanna call it, but enough people whined that they took it out in later revisions.)
- The way time works in general has been overhauled in a smart way, because tracking yet eliding the passage of time isn’t as interesting in a game with no live DM to make those factors have any dramatic impact, and the game doesn’t have the design space to like, track day/night, have NPCs run on a calendar, etc.
This has the biggest impact on the resting system. In tabletop, a short rest takes one hour and a long rest takes 8. There’s no mechanical limit on how much you can do this, except that you can take only one LR per 24 hours. Instead there are practical limits. For one, waiting might have deleterious effects on time-sensitive situations; for another, resting in a dangerous area might draw a random encounter, so you’ll end up using resources instead of recovering them.
Well, Larian wants to handcraft each of its encounters, and random encounters are sort of boring anyway, and there is no passage of time per se. So they regulate resting instead by some hard rules: only 2 SRs per LR, and LR costs resources (“camp supplies”) to perform. This kills many birds with one stone:
-Bard Song of Rest, an extremely mediocre feature in tabletop, now grants a 3rd SR instead, extremely useful!
-You are now incentivized to raid larders and pick up every fish and wheel of cheese you see, but instead of loading down your inventory and having to cook little buff meals or something, they just pile up as “camp supplies” you spend en masse to LR. Perfect.
Etc.
This is all really important because healing in 5e is very expensive and inefficient, and resting is your primary source of healing. It’s also a big departure from divos2 where you regain everything between each combat and start each one fresh. Dnd is much more about grinding down resources and carrying mistakes with you and the rest system is a good way of portraying that in a computer game.
- To go with the time changes, ritual casting is… weird. In tabletop, any spell with the ritual tag can be cast as a ritual. It takes 10 minutes to do, BUT: 1. it won’t cost a spell slot AND 2. you don’t need to have the spell prepared, only on your list.
Well, bg3 requires that you prepare the spell, and moreover you can only cast it once per SR. The only feature that has stayed is it doesn’t cost a spell slot. This is a really huge nerf to ritual spells and one I don’t think was warranted. It makes find familiar, one of the best 1st level spells in the game, barely worth taking. Which is a shame because they’ve redone the familiars to all be unique and have cool effects! Wish I could use them more than once per SR befote they instantly die!
- They seem to have made some other changes to address mechanical issues with base 5e. The big ones I can think of are buffing monks and changing the way wild shape and moon druids work. But I haven’t seen those classes in action yet and can’t comment. Also tons of little changes like trying to make some of the sucky cantrips better, giving illusion and enchantment spells bounded combat effects since they aren’t as useful out of combat any more, etc. Some of the changes are very cool, some don’t quite work imo but you can tell their brains were operating in the correct way.
Big thumbs up from me overall, very good mesh of 5e + divinity that successfully leverages the strong design of the latter against the flavor of the former.
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nsfw peen
I stole shrug’s screenshot from our recent co-op session because it really captures the energy of my character perfectly
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I’m sorry what D&D race canonically has a dog erection
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I think you’re confused by the shading of the foreskin
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oh right all those European modelers aren’t circumcised
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since this is dnd is there anything in it as engaging as a pig wizard, cat summoning etc
because the presentation looks very dry and renfayre
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there’s a person shapeshifted into the form of a cow who is trying to keep a low profile in order to reach baldur’s gate, and all the goblins have delightfully goblin personalities
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It’s not divinity wacky, but it’s wackier than any other computer dnd product (which ain’t saying much). Like everywhere else it’s a very 50/50 dnd/Larian arrangement
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Baldur’s gate was always fairly goofy (especially the first one) and this game seems to be in that area
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I met the legendary blue duergar
and anyway to everyone in this thread asking if this is any good I really can’t recommend original sin 1 and 2 highly enough. I always put down other D&D games after like an hour and that part of it does nothing for me and this still rules in exactly the way I’d hoped
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you can just attack with reckless attack as its own ability every turn. I do it literally every turn because if I don’t I miss every attack and all my other party members already miss every attack so sometimes I gotta actually hit the bad guys
I’m really into how they’ve completely eliminated alignment from the game, way richer choices when I don’t inherently know who is evil or good, especially when it comes to what the guardian asks of you
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this thing is fucking dense too! like a lot has happened in 13 hours and it’s all memorable!
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Yeah this is the best game I’ve played in years, no lie. Like, nothing from this year even comes close.
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There’s a bug where the game loses your anti aliasing settings when you relaunch it
I have somehow played 23 hours of this game and done very little. I did kill many, many goblins though.
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it keeps hitting me that they made an isometric party based game with like, Witcher 3 scope and consistency
if there’s any lesson here it’s that these are both generational and usually impossible to duplicate but as someone who adored Witcher 2 and was gratified by everyone else finally turning up to the party, I’m feeling some real deja vu for a decade ago
anyway I’m about to hit level 6 and I’m finally leaving what was technically all early access stuff though I only got halfway-ish into it in EA so this is all new to me
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