Sneaking is op because you can start a battle with a sneak attack from Astarion and then the combat tracker is just Astarion and the enemies that saw him, or maybe only the little pillar of light that shows up.
Once Astarion gets locked into the combat tracker you can still maneuver everyone else around the enemies sight lines and get a few more alpha strikes in outside of the combat tracker. My paladin – in full plate – can walk right up to an enemy that’s frozen in the combat tracker as long as he doesn’t walk into the sight cone.
I beat dror, m, and gut in the goblin camp all without any of them taking any turns because I was able to alpha strike them into the dirt by just starting combat with the whole party sneaking, and then walking them right up outside of the combat tracker.
Is there a party that can really exploit this? Ranger, wolf barb, shadowharts +10 party sneak, and an assassin rogue? Just alpha strike everything.
So the current stealth mechanics are definitely powerful, and if you wanted to you could solo the game with a Gloomstalker 5/Assassin 7 (though Thief 7 would still be better most of the time) extremely easily.
I never really bothered with it after Act 1 though. The game gives abilities, items, and consumables that break the action economy and increase damage beyond what could be considered reasonable for the levels at play. These items/abilities are also much less tedious to use than all of the setup work that goes into positioning the party for the type of ambush situations you describe.
That means it mostly comes down to how you want to play it. You want to be a sneaky boy, great you can and the game even rewards you for that type of playstyle. I don’t really think it’s broken though, unless you happen to be of the opinion that the whole combat system is broken, since it seems to follow the game’s design philosophy of giving tools, a sandbox, and seeing what we make of it.
For a full stealth party I would run a Gloomstalker 5/Thief 7 Sharpshooter, Battlemaster 11/Rogue 1 TavernBrawler/Drunken Equipment, Draconic Sorcerer 11/Wizard or Cleric 1 Magic Missile caster, Tigerheart 8/Thief 4 DexGWM Cleave.
This the juice right here
The game is as hard as you want to make it. If you think it’s broken, don’t use it. Simple as. There’s enough food to long rest after every encounter. Do you do that?
Isn’t there a long rest clock, per se? Aren’t certain events dependent upon or locked behind various thresholds that way?
Sure seems like some of them should be, but from as far as I can tell from my own game and from YouTube, no.
Dammit, I’ve been restricting their use worse than ol’ Link with health potions. 🤦🏼♂️
It’s one of my biggest criticism. The premise push you toward minimizing the rest, and so does the gameplay (because it would be silly to just heal for free al the time, right?).
Turns out, I slept too little and I have so little development that required me to sleep to have them happen :(
There are points where if you long rest it will fail the encounter, but they are rare.
Verisimilitude. First time it happens it took me out of flow. Now I notice when NPCs use it against me.
To answer your question, no I don’t rest after every fight. That’s missing the point. Maybe I didn’t do a good job explaining in the post. I like nuking people. Was curious if others came across this mechanic and how they use it.
If this was criticism of the difficulty I’d say ideally every character would get locked in turn based when combat started. Stealth could also use a pass to make it a little more internally logical. I shouldn’t be able to walk undetected in plate, in half light, at 45 degrees to someone’s eyeballs. But I’m not criticizing.
Should noise and peripheral vision be things? Yes. Are they well defined in 5e? No. Is the game capable of being a great stealth game with the engine? Also no.
The biggest issue is the preciseness of the field of vision. It could probably be wider once combat has begun, but also there could be a gray area around the red where you don’t know if they can see you.
You could use:
- Passive investigation to have a better idea where they might be able to see you.
- Passive survival to know where it’s dangerous.
- Active stealth to actually move it.
- Active stealth every time you move your base movement within earshot.
Modding community will come up with some fun stuff. I’m pretty excited to see where that goes in the next few years.
It’s not really broken. Your party members are completely separate and distinct characters that can do whatever they want from a role playing perspective, including splitting up - arbitrarily adding everyone into initiative even if the enemies can’t see the other PC’s would feel less realistic and more videogamey. I’m saying this as someone who plays tabletop dnd and values the flexibility and near limitless options the game can accommodate. This is also a weird situation cuz many tabletop players have very different homebrew rules about how combat is initiated. Some DM’s allow people to opt into combat when someone else initiates, some DM’s decide who is in an encounter by distance, some force everyone into initiative when one party member initiates - there’s a lot of permutations and I think Larian did the right thing here cuz if you don’t like it and think it’s broken you can very easily not use stealth and line of sight to nuke your enemies. This isn’t a competitive game after all. I for one appreciate the tabletop spirit carrying over to BG3 instead of being unnecessarily restrictive.
What’s broken for me after using Astarion for assasinations in the same place is the “enemy of justice” condition. They can smell him through every shapeshift, I changed the entire party to gnomes after the deed and still couldn’t walk away from my crimes.
Yeah, you’re right, and I’ve definitely taken advantage of this strategy. There are some encounters that seem to be hard-coded to not let you do this, like the occasional conversations that don’t let you switch characters.
From a realistic perspective, enemy sight lines shouldn’t be fixed straight ahead during combat; naturally they would look around occasionally, and try to maintain some kind of situational awareness. Intelligent enemies, at least, should follow this pattern.
Gameplay-wise, I’m not sure how you’d square that with characters that are sneaking in turn-based mode. If vision cones continue to operate in real-time, they’re going to be screwed. Maybe the key to fixing this isn’t sightlines, but hearing? I’m not sure how enemy noise-detection works in the game, but there does seem to be some mechanism in place. You definitely shouldn’t be able to waltz up to them in full plate without triggering combat. I would think your approach should trigger a super easy reaction roll to detect you before you get close enough to hit them.
Yeah, it’s the “realism” thing that breaks the illusion that the enemies have any basic situational awareness.
The first thing most mammal type animals do when surprised or fear attack is look around and prick up their ears.
i reckon i’ve seen mice, rats, cats squirrels, dogs, sheep, and many more animals all do this type of thing just on hearing an unepexted noise or something., much less seeing someone shot or mysteriosy smashed with a dagger out of no where.
And here I always thought combat was proximity based, not just sight based. Is it really the case that party members remain out of combat until they are seen or choose to engage?
Setting the combat tracker to be based on proximity to engaged friends/foes seems like the simplest solution.
Anyone far enough from combat doesn’t get pulled in. Anyone in hiding as long as they aren’t in sight lines won’t get pulled into combat. If they are in sight they have to pass a stealth check to remain hidden. Anytime they move they’ll have to pass a check as well to remain hidden. You can abuse this during the Cazador fight to keep Astarion from being sacrificed. Leave him at the door and start the fight with Cazador then bring Astarion down to the fight. Cazador won’t sacrifice Astarion.
Works even better with invisibility. You can waltz right through the middle of an ongoing battle and assassinate that hard to reach mage in the back.
Yeah, I’ve always thought that mechanic was so broken. When one person initiates combat, the entire party really should just go into initiative. It’s weird having certain party members be out of turn-based mode, like they were in a separate time stream or something.
Also I still don’t understand the mechanics when you go into initiative from that state. Sometimes, you have an action, sometimes you don’t and just have to pass your turn.
So here’s my best understanding of the mechanics of the first turn of combat:
If you use an action to attack someone and it starts combat, everyone rolls initiative and takes turns in order. When your turn comes around, you’ll be missing that action–basically, you to use your action before everyone else got a turn, but that counts as your action for the round.
If you engage turn-based mode out of combat and your actions initiate combat, it works the same way. I this case, you might also have used some movement and/or your bonus action.
There are some abilities that grant all your actions, bonus actions, and movement back when you roll initiative (the Assassin gets this, I believe). So if you spec’d Astarion as an assassin, he’ll “break” the above rule and have all his resources available, even if he did a massive sneak attack to start combat.
Even in real time, if you do something like jump, you’ll notice your bonus action icon goes gray for a few seconds. If combat starts in that window, you’ll have already used that bonus action for that round.
Hope that helps clarify!
That makes a TON of sense actually. Thanks for the explanation!
When a non-tracked character enters the battle they roll initiative and get slotted in. So Astarion usually end up at the start. Then my paladin gets out at the back after the alpha strike. That part makes sense to me.
Otherwise, agreed turn based mode should be everywhere. Not just localized to the battle or a little tu n based bubble.
Like, I started my assault on the goblin camp with a fireball and then everyone outside of range piled on. The whole camp should’ve been locked in.
Yeah that makes sense to me too. I was more referring to the fact that when some of my characters join into combat late, a lot of times they’re missing an action even though its their turn. I always just have to pass in those situations.
The whole camp should’ve been locked in.
Agreed. In the Goblin Camp, I’ve even had situations where I would trigger one group, but I can clearly see goblins in another room just walking around casually. Breaks immersion a bit.
The worst part is when only one character goes in and you don’t realize the rest of your party is still free and all the enemies just gank on that one character relentlessly.
they’re missing an action even though its their turn.
That is weird. Haven’t noticed that so it went right over my head. Will watch for it.
I actually cheesed it the other way–my tired and battered party was trying to exit the goblin camp without fighting the main force in the courtyard (at this point, I didn’t know I could fast travel when not near a portal, and wanted to play it out for RP reasons anyway).
So I sent my thief out first, and he disengage/sprinted through the entire camp, drawing all the attention. Once everyone was drawn away, I let combat sit there “paused” while the other three party members waltzed out the front door and off to safety. Then my thief outran everyone.
Personally, I wish Larian would have given the option to lock the entire map into turn-based mode when combat begins anywhere, but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea (especially with multi-player). Just my preference.
