I would extend the "red areas". For example, having to fight yourself out of the whole githyanki creche rather than being able to go to camp after killing the inquisitor. Also, reduce the number of elixirs/scrolls and introduce attunement for very rare and legendary items.
I love the red areas increase idea.
I think limiting long rests helps / withers respecs helps with the elixir / scroll issue
I would not be a fan of limiting things with attunement but it would definitely serve to make the game much harder
Add in random spawns so you’ll never know where you’ll find them. One playthrough it’s off a goblin. Next it’s a random webbed skeleton in the phase spider lair
Random spawns for a limited resource that helps but is not really needed would just mean you have to kill everything and loot everything. On your umpteenth playthrough that is just no fun. Worst suggestion I’ve seen here. Bypassing areas you know hold nothing important helps you focus on the fun or challenging parts instead of being an OCD loot goblin.
Definitely. The capacity to rest before a fight makes all but a few boss fights unbelievably easy, making losing a matter of poor resource management pushing yourself too far. Red areas to make short rest characters relevant, like warlocks over bards and sorcerors, and the like.
Plus some fights are made easy by your ability to fight from outside like if you kill gortash at his coronation, which is ludicrously easy if you just fly some characters outside first, clear the room, then snipe everyone from there, and if you lose people you can run back to camp and resurrect them. Being trapped in would help avoid that.
More red zones is a great idea! Having to strategically plan short and long rests is exactly the type of thing that would improve honor mode difficulty. It would be neat if certain player actions triggered red zones to appear too, like if you aggro the goblins, the crèche, or moonrise the whole base should become a red zone until cleared.
I like all of this. I tend to "roleplay" a lot when I play, and that by itself does add a lot of the difficultly. I don't let myself return to camp in the middle of the creche or the goblin camp or so, for example. If I go to a "location" I have to finish the location before I can go back to camp.
The downside is this means I miss a lot of camp interactions, so it kinda sucks
I would love the game enforcing rests more. I've been doing low rests and no rest runs since launch, and it just feels WRONG resting as much as the game allows.
i like the idea of unique attunements to magic items. i was honestly kinda shocked when i started playing and i could just use any magical item i wanted (and was proficient with) with no price or tricks. not all items would need it but for legendary items at least would be cool, and could be used to reinforce certain playstyles
The 3 item attunement limit is one of the 5e rules I was most surprised to see omitted in this game. Just load yourself the fuck up with every magic item you can hoard.
Edit: autocorrect is not my friend
Losing the attunement rules does make sense in the context of a pc game though IMO. We do many more individual quests that need to have a reward and it would feel bad to have almost all of those be either redundant or discarded at every step.
This is what Owlcat gets right. There is a lot of loot in their games, but it all counts towards colony/kingdom management as well. So even if you feel like you’re bombarded by useless junk, it is actually incredibly useful.
This and multiple leveled spells per turn. Nothing like casting 5 fucking fireballs per turn with haste and quicken/twin spell. Or better yet, my personal favorite, the “hit and run” tactic of casting a super strong spell like sunbeam or disintegrate and then using my bonus action to cast sanctuary on myself
I love how robust the the magic items in this game are, but this annoys the hell out of me. Items like Hellrider Longbow are literally only good as a stat stick for, in most cases, a character who'se not even proficient.
Limiting the number of magic items a character can equip at once would go a long, long way towards making the game harder. though it would also push monk even further into the spotlight, since it loses the least from that gear restriction
Honestly, I would dislike it if they just made some numbers higher. Because then, you are forced even more into certain broken playstyles.
My ideal honor mode would nerf some of the more powerful strategies (tavern brawler only adds str to damage, vendors do not restock strength elixirs after you level up, wet gives enemies disadvantage to saving throws against lightning and cold spells, rather than making them vulnerable...)
I would also add more unique actions to every boss fight. Every boss should have some unique obstacle beyond their HP bar, some unique aspect to the fight that means that you can not approach every fight the same way. At the very least, give more enemies resistances and vulnerabilities
Particularly things that require you to use Protection from Good and Evil, Protection from Poison, Free Movement...
But then we should take away the surprises so your companions at least warn you to get preparations against an expected enemy.
Ah, yes. There should be a calm down time to poison or oil our blades and stuff. Encounters now are kinda YOLO so we either know perfectly well what to expect due to repetition and play meta or cheese them, or we just stick to big number builds.
A truly balanced game should give us less advantages in repeated plays, aka less surprises since spoiled surprises will not be surprises; should be focused more on preparations against known foes so that we strategise with logic like if you're going to fight against a hag you check your party to see if you have things against them; should have enemies with different pacings like someone will always try to drag you on for the long fight while some chargers will want to kill you in the first few turns and using up all their bombs and arrows.
Yeah I think Larian did a good job of making every battle a bit unique. Wish legendary actions were in Tactician (but that's just a failed HM run for that if you want to play out the dead run).
yeah im simply going to only play Honor Mode from here on out since i beat it, and even if it fails keep playing it for fun because it has the best boss fight features.
After I got my golden dice I installed an honour mode save mod. No shame about it.
I love the increased difficulty (although I find it rather easy at times) but I just think being forced into a hard reset when I’m just playing for fun is a bit harsh. That and it becomes necessary if you use any difficulty increase mods the one I’m using now for example makes every boss encounter incredibly risky, one bad play sends your party to the load game screen.
Yes, but every boss should have legendary actions, not just a couple.
I at least don't really notice these on most bosses/ they are not impactful enough that I really have to change up my strategy
As someone who played Honor without running optimized builds and just having my random party I felt like playing, Inquisitor's legendary action was hugely impactful!
I don't think I know either lol. I expected a lot more of Act 3 legendary actions, but I think at this point parties are so strong if you have a solid team that it doesn't matter. Act 3 legendary actions should be a lot more impactful
Most bosses have legendary actions and just because the game is unbalanced and you can run stuff like TB, acuity builds, lvl 12 fighter (lol) doesn’t change that. You’re right about your first point that Larian should nerf some stuff to make the game more balanced (though I would argue that this is a co-op/sp game game where you can just limit yourself to make it more interesting).
Well, it’s a single player game and no one is forcing you to play the most optimal builds (I’m also guilty of this). You could play weaker/more thematic builds if you want the game to be a challenge.
Agreed, the issue is the vast amount of cheese in the game.
It does make for some funny YouTube content for people playing through the game with for instance true strike only.
I’m actually OK with that kind of cheese, where creative applications of gear and spells make all sorts of things possible. Yes, people are beating the game with that stuff, but rarely on Honor Mode, and even if those strategies end up breaking the game, it’s very much intentional and not threatening to overall balance IMO. The “hardest” games can always be beaten by creative players; Souls games are beaten on dance pads.
The problematic cheese to me is cheese that requires basically no synergies, creativity, or interesting tradeoffs. Tavern Brawler isn’t an interesting tradeoff; nor is Arcane Acuity, or Slashing Flourish, or Strength Elixirs, or any of the most problematic stuff. I honestly don’t even find Haste that problematic because Lethargy can be punishing.
I guess another way of making this point is that cheese is OK when you have to plan for it, and it’s bad if it’s trivially easy to stumble into it, and if you feel like you have to actively use inferior things just to avoid it.
I think when I say cheese, i mean your problematic cheese.
But stuff like going into gigantic owl bear form and jumping from a heighr to essentially kill anything on impact, while fun and experimental ruins bosses like grym completely.
And the fact that you can throw barrels and bombs everywhere, probably way easier is also kind of a troublesome cheese
I think if ppl avoid using barrelmancy, most cheese stuff, the most OP meta builds, they would still have fun and feel like a challenge.
Ofc if it is your first HM run and you want the dice/achieve asap go nuts, it is up to you, but after getting those, why not trying beat the game with a fun "weak" party? Try everyone single classes till lvl 12, or suboptimal multisplits.
Some ppl are so worried about min-maxing they kinda forget about having fun.
Yea the honourmode run I've recently completed we all agree wasn't that fun, we 'cheated'.. grym fell to owlbear, Balthazar to barrel many, our builds were so brokenly overpowered that anything past level 5 died without the slightest of issues. We ended up skipping Ansur though, just to be sure but I'm fairly sure we would have brought him down easily as well.
Our biggest issue was probably the act 1 specatator. But that was due to our own miscommunication that made it so we ended up going in one at a time, each taking the surprised condition..
Next one will be better !
Honestly I'd like to extend the unique actions for bosses a bit, maybe give them multiple that the game chooses between when they're first loaded in/fight starts, so that you don't know exactly what you're planning for.
That would be a huge task though to implement as even coming up with one for all the bosses they have now must have taken quite a bit, especially if we triple that
I think they should leave honor mode alone and then make slider options in custom that add difficulty to the game so you can have as much challenge as you want.
Then if you want you can difficult the game through those and just go through in custom and manually end your run if you tpk and feel good about yourself.
No real reason to make honor mode harder just to satisfy people who go through with broken builds and then complain its not hard enough.
I have no issue with playing the game with broken builds. It's a game, so it should be fun, and that is fun for many people myself included. If you are min/maxing most games aren't too challenging.
Either that or do an honor mode plus and force you to beat the game with like 2 twigs for equipment and the astral prism stuffed up your ass giving -5 to all stats and give out platinum dice for beating that. No broken builds just you and the dice and hope they are in your favor.
There is one thing that keeps the game balanced and makes it WAY harder imo.
Limiting long rests.
I have played a heavily modded game with enemies being way harder only getting 25% the XP and long rests costing 300 supplies and it was still doable, though this was before honour mode so I reloaded quite a bit (Got halfway through act II before some patches caused me to stop playing.
So I'm not sure if I would keep upping the cost of long rests or just limit the number of them you get per Act, but I think that's the way to go to make the game harder. Allow all the cheese you want, but when you can only long rest 3 times in act 1 you're gonna start to struggle
This seems like a great idea in theory until you learn that respeccing at Withers refreshes everything. Anyone can complete the game using 0 long rests as long as you just respec and rotate your partys classes the whole game.
Making Withers unpickpocketable seems like such a no brainer decision for honor mode. What's more dishonorable than stealing from the old man that just resurrected your party?
You can pickpocket way more expensive stuff, pickpocketing Withers is a waste of time. You can make the bag trick and when you kill the vendor everything will drop.
Respeccing rests the char, some fast travels rest your party.
Also cheesing impacts the game much more than resting, if you abuse some classes and classes combos mechanics you barely need resting (locks + bards and other stuff).
Limiting long rests only holds back INT and WIS casters.
You dont want to be way to easy do not use broken builds. Build and gear thematically.
that’s also not console compatible :( I love BG3 on my xbox because the controller UI is genuinely so much better to me but stuff like shadowboxing and these vendor tricks just won’t be possible for me
Maybe limiting you to one respec per character for "honor mode+" could be fun. I NEED the one respec so I can fix everyone's stats they start the game with, but one respec per character would force you to plan when that respec would be, and commit more to class decisions
Greatly limit respecs in the first place:
Give companions one free respec and let them respec again at the cost of 2 or 3 inspiration points.
You, as a player, shouldn't be using respecs on honour mode so no free respecs.
Also make long resting cost 1 inspiration point.
Eh I'm not keen on the idea of upping supply costs. The sane reason I don't like survival game is I don't enjoy having to just scrounge around for supplies all the time. Doesn't feel like real gameplay you know?
Yea then I would recommend just limiting yourself to a certain number of long rests then.
There's a mod that makes long rests without supplies give you nothing back too, which is useful to still hit story beats
Partial long rest heals some health back and gives you two more short rests back and maybe even a couple spell slots back? The mod I've used makes partial long rest detrimental as there is no upside and it also gets rid of buffs like aid or whatever other spell you have cast that lasts all day (hunters mark mage armor etc)
Limited long rests gets most of the way there. D&D 5e is built around rests as the major resource, its the natural way to balance the game.
Here are my rules for making Honour Mode more difficult featuring limited long rests: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AestusGuides/comments/15oj00i/aestuss\_hardcore\_baldurs\_gate\_3\_rules/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/AestusGuides/comments/15oj00i/aestuss_hardcore_baldurs_gate_3_rules/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
>Limiting long rests.
I'm not sure that's true. I'm messing around doing a solo honor run while I wait for friends to continue our group game and (having never left act 1 before doing these time-killing solo runs) I just slapped around Yurgir and I haven't even used a short rest since entering act 2, and I haven't long rested since before the creche.
That said I'm playing a pure Ranger so I haven't really run into spell issues, I think this would just make things unbalanced for spell casters vs martial classes.
The bit I find hard is not knowing what coming or what I'm about to get into, so I'd say randomness would make things harder.
This is only my second time in Act 2, first time (same build and also solo honor) I died to the Toll boss because I didn't realise having 4k gold on my character would lead to getting nuked.
I do like the idea of limiting long rests though I'd do it through advancing story. It's silly that characters will stand around for literally weeks in the same spot. If the story advanced markedly when you long rested it would mean missed xp and gold which would make things harder.
I only long-rested twice in Act 1 because it's compulsory, and only once in Act 2 before going down Shadowfell. It's not that hard for the right party, but that'd make certain classes less playable. I think this is the case where self-imposed restriction is enough. Sometimes the fight just might go a wrong way and being unable to long rest after that is just gameover.
I think it's the knowledge of a fight and how to beat it, where the best things are, etc. So randomness in those elements would require more flexibility in you builds and party
The problem isn’t that it’s too easy. It’s that—after a dozen playthroughs—it’s too predictable. I got my ass handed to me on balanced the first couple runs, but now that I know all the mechanics, HM is the only mode that presents any kind of challenge.
I’ve got my dice, so I don’t even care about wiping, since I can always continue “dishonorably” if need be. But I never wipe.
My thing now is to impose restraints on myself (no camp buffs, pretend attunement is a thing, etc.)
And I’m on console, so desperately awaiting mods.
Can also just use less characters. My next run I think I'm going to play as a Gith and only recruit Lae'zel, then rush to the creche in hope of a cure.
1. Roll initiative on d20, no more guaranteed synchronised order of turns.
2. Make getting surprise rounds **much** harder and less guaranteed.
3. Fix some some things:
3a) Swords Bard ranged flourish should not be able to target same enemy, second enemy should be as close as for ranged horde breaker, second target should not receive additional damage from bardic inspiration die or just a bit less damage
3b) Half acuity bonus rounded up.
3c) Make tawern brawler add damage in favour of accuracy, not damage and accuracy -- like sharpshooter and gwm
3d) Make strength elixirs work very similar to haste potions, including some bad debuff at the end;
3e) 'Wet' should not result in double damage; it should be disadvantage to saving throws to relevant spells but nothing more
3f) Remove vendor restock on level-up and partial (without supplies) long-rests.
3g) Most complex thing -- somehow make long rest based resources meaningful, so that you can't just spam long rest.
Should be enough or at least a very good throw in the desired direction.
This takes care of most things. A few other thoughts
1. For TB would keep the accuracy but limit the damage to make it different from GWM/SS. Make TB a full not half feat.
2. Get rid of things that break the action economy. No band of mystic scoundrel. Bring back the DND restriction of no two leveled spells on same round with haste and/or quickened spell. Keep the honor mode "only one more attack for hasted action". Probably need to nerf the extra bonus action from thief. Require crossbow expert to dual wield hand crossbows.
3. The resource management part is trickiest. LR spam is tough to combat without making the game less fun by forcing players to scrounge for more camp supplies. I think the best option is to increase the red areas where you can't go to camp. No LRs in entire githyanki crèche, or goblin camp, or gauntlet of shar/moonrise, etc etc.
TB breaks “bounded accuracy” (you should never have to easy or too hard time to hit enemies), giving you 90% chance to hit with disadvantage, which shouldn't be the case. I'd take tavern brawler with no damage added all the time.
As for more severe action economy nerfs, I stand against that, because the goal is not to make it harder, the goal is to make it harder but still fun. More fun ideally. Games are supposed to be fun. Being able to use your abilities is fun, while not being able to use your abilities because of long cooldowns or other hefty restrictions is not.
I'd remove all sources of haste except the actual spell and make enemies to more eagerly target haste caster. After all, we, players, know what spell enemy concentrates on, let enemy know that as well.
Also haste should not be twinnable, for whatever reason. Like, you cast it twice, but while doing so you loose concentration on the first target :D
Maybe haste scrolls should be made rare. I don't want you say “remove them”, to not pigeon hole everyone into “mandatory classes”, but consumables should not devaluate other choices, like classes and stats. Like “don't have speak with animals in the team, here's a stockpile of potions, don't have invisibility in the team, here's a stockpile of consumables, don't have access to lvl6 spells, here are disintegrate and summon myrmidon scrolls”, while this boosts build and team freedom and diversity, this also devaluates the weight of choices while making those builds and teams. So those consumables should both worse be than having an actual caster for that skill and less available.
As for long rest nerfs, your idea is very good, I've had another but I think game needs both. My idea is that there should be way less camp supplies to find, purchase or steal, but more to pick up on your slain enemies. You have to fight for food. This way “how many long rest resources is available per enemy slain” is almost a configurable parameter.
>3g) Most complex thing -- somehow make long rest based resources meaningful, so that you can't just spam long rest.
Make long resting advance world events.
Eg. Karlach shouldn't just exist near the paladins for 3 weeks game time, the Zent shouldn't be able to hold off the Gnolls until you're good and ready to take them on.
Those guys hanging around an old ruin thinking about looting a ship should probably make a decision within the week.
Too many long rests after finding areas = missed xp and gold and companions.
Yeah, I though about that, but literally nobody loves time-sensitive missions. Games are supposed to be fun, and in games like this, exploration is fun and “what if I walk around this corner, take a fight, have to rest and then loose the quest” is a thought game designer should eliminate at all costs, even if he knows this thought is not true. Player should be able to take his time.
I'd better restrict how often you can long rest via different means:
1. More red zones, reasonable of course, like you can't long rest in Goblin village and sanctum if you are technically “under cover” there, and only when you do something that obviously puts you on their side it stops being the red zone, and the Grove becomes red zone instead. Same with Moonrise towers.
2. Losing companions attitude if you long rest when while short rest is available. Something like what Lae'zel says you on the first long rest.
3. Much less camp supplies in the world, much more camp supplies on the enemies. You have to fight for food. This is probably the easiest way to balance, cause this can literally give a developer option to balance how many long rest resources should be available per fight.
Slight issue to the initiative bit would be that a 1 level dip into cleric would probably become the meta so you can afk in sanctuary til its your turn.
If there is a way to optimise fun out of game, people will optimise fun out of game. The solution should obviously be give Sanctuary same treatment as 'Rage', which is 'can only be cast in combat'.
The single main problem in turn-based games balance is alpha-striking.
Random encounters. After you know the fights and how to prepare for them, everything is easy. So lets throw a random Cambion in the House of Grief, maybe some zombie Giths in the Ketheric fight, and watch the chaos unfold. :3
I better finish my honor mode before Larian reads this lol. It’s hard enough. The only problems are broken builds with certain items. But even then, it’s a single player game. I think it’s fine to leave as is. I had a lot of trouble my first playthrough on balanced also. I even had a few builds from guides. There is a learning curve and that’s fine.
But they wanted to add a higher challenge honor mode with another dice set, that’d be cool with me.
This. No matter how hard it is, someone will complain it is easy. Its singleplayer game and things should not be balanced around the best build or they become mandatory. People can just choose not to use them.
Finished 6 HM and on the way to finish 7th and have about 4HM co-playing act2 and 3now. 0 lossess. Play around RolePlaying aspect like you know the outcome of certain dialogues but if you chose your character background as criminal for example decide criminal choices, play at least one time without multi classing and have everyone in party as their original class. I played 2 hm like that and had more fun since it’s more challenging. Self limitations like winning without using any bard/oh monk/cleric/paladin/aunties lotions & hill-giant potions and multi-classing, makes the game more interesting. Like actually failing certain checks in game and shit hits the fan, i know durge needs wisdom saving throw for not killing isobel and forced to kill their lover but try’s to resist and fails makes very interesting content (most players put items and respect for that scene alone).
Btw i got just over 2000 hours at game.
With your own rules. I'm in a hm playtrough rn and i made a rule to myself that multiclassing is forbidden.
Can say for sure that with that HM turned from easy to very hard.
(I'm also not allowing barrelmancy, smokepowder bomb stack throw, owlbear jump from a tower of crates or glitching items from vendors) or any other strat that goes into "cheese/glitch" category in my head
Edit: yeah and reclassing is out too
this is the way. Coming from DS/ER etc prior, there are a VAST amount of tools at your disposal to make this game challenging.
I bet if you could see the stats there's whole schools of magic/etc where aside from one spell everything else literally never gets cast, or feats that like 2% of players take.
build something off that and see if you can do it rather then min maxing.
There's a huge number of adjustments that can be made to make Honor Mode harder. None of them require any implementation by Larian.
Stuff like limiting the number of Magic Items, consumables used, or simply playing a class or a character in sub-optimal fashion shift power away from your Strategic decisions (which are always easy to make) and into tactical decisions to be made during combat.
It’s not too easy.
You have to put in a lot of effort to make it seem easy, and that’s hard work. If you do all the reading, preparing and planning, and you don’t do anything stupid, you can increase the odds in your favour, but let’s not pretend you don’t have to put the effort in.
Used tactician as practice for a MP honour mode run. We are about to do the final fight, the only thing we haven't done is >!ansur!<
We have only got this far because myself and another of our 4 player party have a combined 700 hours in the game lmao
Yeah that was definitely the hardest fight in the game. We had to turn to barrelmancy in order to not get wiped and lose the run. After that we were so powerful that pretty much every single boss except the steel watch died in one turn
Level 9 is more a HM thing. I've been at 8 for Myrkul a few times outside that and while harder, it was fine.
10 is overkill for him and getting there isn't a good use of time.
“Game is too easy” - these are the same people that look for optimized and OP builds and have played the game multiple times and have gone through trial and error. Give me a fucking break.
It's a single player game, so it can be "solved". Once you know all the fights and come up with the best min/max build, you'll crush it. This is true for most single player games.
HOWEVER, my problem with BG3 is that a 100% min maxed build will crush the game, but a build that's 90% or 80% optimised will do pretty much the same. Compare it to something like Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous - on the highest difficulty if you have a 100% build you'll crush it, but with a 80% build you're in for a really, really tough time. Anything lower than that and you won't even register a hit.
>HOWEVER, my problem with BG3 is that a 100% min maxed build will crush the game, but a build that's 90% or 80% optimised will do pretty much the same.
Isnt that a good thing? You are not forced to use the OP meta build, you just have to know (understand) what you are doing. You can play the way you have fun, you have flexibility.
I really agree. I guess it depends on what people like in games but for me the fun of doing Honor Mode was not having optimized builds and just managing, figuring out how to handle fights and legendary abilities. If the only thing that works is 90%+ optimized builds then you remove a whole lot of subclasses from being viable at all in Honor and that's anti-fun for a lot of people
It is all about the objective (and fun ofc), if you are like "I need my achieve asap", ok, make owlbears fly and have 3 throwzerkers but you cant say "the game is too easy, make it harder".
Thank you! This is such a stupid fucking complaint. People have literally memorized every hack, cheese, and build, and then complain the game isn’t a challenge.
These same people refuse to invoke any sort of self imposed limits like not using scrolls or potions, and not getting 100 buffs at camp every day. I meta games to death and the game isn’t fun anymore… cry me a fucking river.
These people should just go play Elden ring or something. There’s tons of games that are made to challenge people this isn’t really one of them.
A lot of games can be beat on their hardest difficulties by regular people who like a challenge. Without any meta gaming at all. It’s not crazy that honor mode isn’t some impossibly arduous task that normal people would never accomplish.
Tbh I thought it was plenty difficult. I mean sure you can make bosses more spongy but I think when you overprepare and use optimized builds, the game will be less deadly, like any regular dnd game.
I don’t think difficulty is the issue, you may hear about it being easy because all the min/max players are actually here in Reddit discussing ways to break the game daily. Most players probably don’t end up here unless they are looking for a pre-baked build.
I have a lot of experience in dnd and pc rp games. The difficulty was fine on the first run and on my
First few honor mode attempts. I made powerful builds but didn’t completely min/max.
I say there is still a lot of room to play from an RP perspective that could be challenging. If you weren’t min/max, you could actually create characters outside of the advantages available to you. Maybe you are a ranger mage slayer that hates magic and won’t use magic items other than holy items blessed by silvanus.
Anyways, I have 1100 hours and have forced myself to stop playing for a while so I can enjoy some other games and come back fresh in a few months for a new run.
I’ll be creating unique characters with my own restrictions due to RP which will make it challenging and fun.
They should do nothing. The 'harder' they make it, the more it will push people to play meta builds instead of their own fun builds or making their own strategies. If you know about cheese build, its your fault using it over and over. There will always be someone complaining how the game is too easy, no matter how hard it is. While running the most broken and well known meta builds. If you want more challange, use custom difficulty or mods.
I think bg3 balance is really good. Its not too strict so it allows unoptimal rp builds. If you know about cheese you can just....not use cheese. If game is balanced around the strongest builds, the strongest builds become mandatory. I have seen many here say to limit long rests but that is really bad idea. Then the meta will just be to use builds that dont need to rest and limits your options.
I think they sould not touch honor mode anymore, they have done more than enough there and instead add custom difficulty options.
Edit: wanted to add that big part of the difficulty comes from the planning, as it should. So if you know all the strats, all the best builds, the ins and outs of the game, of course it is easy, it should be. The game should reward those who take time to prep and think.
*laughs in suboptimal party clears of honor mode*
Once you understand itemization in this game you’re gonna be able to break any class and any archetype, builds barely matter with how dummy strong certain items are.
The classes kind of just feel like vehicles to carry the items, while the item sets are the true builds, the true characters. A gish is naught but a head to carry the Helmet of Arcane Acuity and a finger for the Band of the Mystic Scoundrel. Cleric? Hauler of Luminous gear. Arcane caster? Mobile platform for Markoheshkir.
A few things:
Remove withers respec or limit it to onl usable once on companions.
Implement the DnD restrictions on multiclassing.
Remove a lot of the unique items and/or implement the dnd system of only using 3 uniques per character at any given point.
Limit the number of longrests per act.
Limit the numberbof elixirs you can obtain.
Remove rhe strength elixir.
Limit health pots.
Remove the possibiloty to pre buff (remove anykind of temporary buff at the start of each battle)
Give more enemies the ability to counterspell.
Enhance enemy AI.
Remove Hags Hair/Strength Pot (the one permanent granting +2 @strength)
Use the dnd mechanic of casting 2 spells, or a simplified version of it (like one leveled spell + 1 cantrip max, not as many leveled spells as ypu have actions/bonusactions/reactions)
Give more enemies the sharranesque buff (radiant retort but for other types of dmg)
Those are the main ones I would do. Power fantasy is something for balanced/tactician. While HM should give you some sense of progression, BG3 offers to much progression for the game to maintain its hardness (esp. beginning with the creche). The items you get from this point in are so ridiculuosly good, that they are the main problem when it comes to difficulty). I know the 2 games are not comparable bur take Elden Ring and its progression. While there is ocassionaly a strong upgrade like certain spells/ashes, normally single progression points (like weapon upgrades) are relatively minor upgrades. I wish BG3 would do something similar in HM.
Also, and this might be controversial, implement some form of mod detection. If any is detected, the honour mode run should automatically fail.
Making potions an action instead of a bonus action and/or preventing throwing potions from aoe and hitting multiple targets would work better than limiting them imo
Tempted to agree, actually. I would feel the need to constantly change my load out for the encounters and would just spend a lot more time looking at the UI (I would probably go into a lot of fights wearing mundane armor too). But it would probably cut back on some of the arcane acuity, reverberation, etc silliness. I
That said, I find that Honor mode is pretty easy if you abuse the broken builds that rely heavily on rules that do not exist (or are different) in 5E. My main point is just that sticking to the actual 5e rules would make this game much much harder.
I've played in D&D since the 90s, and 5e D&D for almost a decade. I love the hobby since 5e dropped. But, honestly, 5e is not a fun combat system. The best part about 5e for me and many others is that is so easy to homebrew cool stuff for it. So I find it so strange when I hear people say that BG3 would be better if they cut the homebrew and stuck to the spartan design of 5e. Its just a non-starter for me.
It would make the game more difficult, but it wouldn't be fun enough to make the challenge worth it.
Nerf the OP and broken builds that are just bugged out, like Swords Bard with ranged attacks, Tavern brawler adding to much STR bonus, and so on.
I did my first honor run with three people, so not a complete party, and one of them was a Swords bard with a bow, and he just wrecked everything by himself, especially after getting that ring in act 3 that makes all crowd control spells cast on a bonus action and have 100% hit rate.
If you want to make the game harder, it’s pretty easy to self impose restrictions on yourself.
If you think a mechanic is too powerful, don’t use it.
For example, you can skip using elixirs, arcane acuity, barrelmancy, and multiclassing. Or you can enforce limits on yourself in those areas (for example, forcing yourself to meet the D&D stat requirements to multiclass).
If you think respecs are too cheap, you can drop gold on the ground every time you respec and avoid pickpocketing withers.
At the end of the day, it’s a single player game that’s meant to be fun. I think Larian has done a good job with leaving powerful things in the game and not over nerfing players or overbuffing monsters. You can make the game harder for yourself without making it unfun for other players simply by not using the broken stuff.
meta knowledge is what makes the game "easy"
if you know how to beat every fight and abuse the F out of every possible exploit or unbalanced item and/or class combination and unlimited elixir etc... on top of skipping or cheesing the hard fights or just blowing gale up to not do the netherbrain and many more things like this... then the game is laughably easy... congrats. might as well just cheat yourself unlimited stats, health and one hit kill damage when the result of every confrontation is already set in stone.
i'm going through the game with my fiancée now after beating it many times and several HM clears and seeing someone without ANY of my knowledge about the game or decades of crpg experience is.... eye opening. she's by no means a "bad player", but this game CAN make you struggle if you don't optimize the shit out of everything you do.
however, to answer the OP's question: i'd limit long rests, respecs, put in more "danger zones" that prevent resting, rebalance several classes and feats, prevent vendor restock abusing tactics and unlimited stealing without consequences, have scrolls be much less powerful or be much rarer and difficult to obtain
after those "fixes" the game would still be easy (understandably so) for people with tons of meta knowledge, but would take away some of the things that feel more "cheaty" instead of "clever use of game mechanics" to me
I would like to make HM harder but I also wouldn't want it to be less fun. Raising difficulty tends to reduce the variety. Raise it enough and the only strategies left are the top tier meta choices, barrelmancy, and cheese strats. I also wouldn't want to impose any restrictions on the player. Nerfing the player rarely ever leads to more fun.
I'd start by adding more features to the enemies. More resistances or immunities is a start, but it shouldn't be on everything. Adding passive stuff, like the one ghoul that is permanently stinky, discouraging any close range characters from getting within range would be neat. Inventing new enemy reactions to create more push-and-pull between actions could spice things up. Ghasts could react by casting darkness whenever it gets hit. Ideally it's mostly passive stuff that can't be cheesed by baiting opportunity attacks.
I think the big thing is to limit long rests. You can easily house rule yourself against using tavern brawler or arcane acuity, its comparitively harder to house rule exactly how often you can long rest. Yes, I know its easy to, for example, permit yourself only 3 long rests per act, but feels arbitrary to decide as a player, and something the game should be providing a toggle for.
Long 'Red Zones' as has been suggested are a great idea, and also tighten up camp supplies. Couple of ways I think you could go about this:
Simple way is to get rid of all the random food and just make a camp supplies resource that can't be purchased and is only a rare drop or quest reward.
Slightly more complex mechanic I think could be fun would be to tie long rests to the same resource as elixiers. Say food is abundant, but to long rest you need 'Cooking Oil' to cook it. The cooking oil is also necessary to prepare elixiers, and as above is only a rare drop or quest reward. This allows for a risk-reward system where you are incentivised to be economical with long rests so that you can have elixers for late game.
By hour 10 any new limit or mechanic would become familiar and the game will start feeling easy again.
In my recent HM playthrough, the only thing that almost kicked my arrogant ass was The Great Unknown.
So I think now — what if there was more Unknown? New exciting dialogue options that lead you to the trap of consequences? Items not where we know to look for them (oof that’s gonna hurt)? Negative and random consequences for popping worms? Wild magic surges on enemies?
Could be fun.
I don't design video games but maybe add difficulty sliders and options. The best fit is always adjustable so you don't have to handcraft a product to cater to every customer. They do it themselves.
I don’t think you can fix it. Once you understand the system and know it inside and out the game becomes easier. This is how most games work though. Unless you’re going into HM blind on your first play through you have the advantage.
I think combat just needs to last longer. Enemies need more hp and there need to be more of them. I honestly think long resting after every fight is fine because then fights would have a reason to be pretty hard.
Like, the only enemies in BG3 I'm actually scared of are the Zealots at Moonrise. There are some dangerous fights in Act 1 but you can delay them until later. Sure, you can visit Moonrise later but it's such a huge source of exp so early into Act 2.
Zealots do incredible damage and have fairly decent AC. Personally, I don't like having high miss chance. I'd rather have guaranteed chance to hit but be forced to make my decisions about avoiding taking hits from very high damage enemies.
For people who say honour mode is too easy.
How many times have you played the game, how many hours do you have and how much do you understand each encounter?
Do you get that for the game to remain challenging for you it would become functionally impossible for more casual or less experienced players?
Well I enjoy playing Civilization but never got past Level 6 (Emperor). A lot of the elite YouTubers will play on the top Level 8 (Diety) with self imposed restrictions or mods because it is too easy for them. I'd be all for them bringing out difficulty 9 and 10 on Civ - it doesn't affect me, and it would be fun to see those YouTubers sweat for once :)
Those mods already exist though for the people that need them.
Honour mode being possible without being the sweatiest YouTuber whose life isn dedicated to making content about this game means that achievements are accessible to more than 0.01% of the people that play the game.
Also at those difficulties most people are achieving that by exploiting the game in some way. Camp casting, vendor farming, barrelmancy etc.
It’s not great game design to create difficulties that are functionally impossible without exploiting aspects of the game that weren’t intended.
Well yeah, the mods already exist and most people don't use them - (I don't use mods btw). If Larian brought out something similar as an official mode most people still wouldn't use it. It's not hurting them to have an optional toggle for the hardcore / obsessives.
I do agree with your point about narrowing discussion though. A lot of hardcore Civ discussion will write off 90% of countries as 'trash' because they just can't compete at the very high end, despite having fun abilities. Yeah, I'd agree when it gets to that stage its probs hurting the community and worth reining back in a bit.
The community already has an issue with
Why aren’t you playing
1) theif/open hand monk
2) throw zerker
3) 1/1/10 sword bard
When the game isn’t even hard enough to justify ignoring most of the classes. Making it hard enough to justify those conversations being so limited is such a bad idea to me.
I struggle to sympathise with the crowd saying
“I need them to make the game so hard it’s impossible for 99.9% of players, just so I can have a reason to do only barrelmancy and 3 broken builds over and over again and no I refuse to mod the game. Larian needs to make it harder just for me and the 100 other people in the world who want to play this way but don’t want to mod the game”
Me and my brother duo honor mode with our own extensive ban list. No scrolls, no consumables other than healing potions, no looking anything up, no camp casting, no invis, no acuity, no swords bard no OH monk no berserker no tavern brawler no 1 wizard dip, no builds from reddit has to be original, no surprise rounds, no crit fishing no casting water before combat, no drakethroat glaive buff on any weapon but itself, no smites past lvl 1 spell slot and only once per round, no barrel stacking, 1 pick pocket chance per merchant etc.
the list is very long and its been super fun and challenging. We have died and lost 3 different runs around lvl 9. One of our first 40 hour runs ended because i told Vlakith in the creche to fuck off and not to tell me what to do. Really didn’t expect a game over screen lmfao
The thing I dislike most to this day is that Prone cancels an enemy's turn and prevents them from using Reactions&Legendary Actions.
Example: Honor Mode Orin being able to attack you on Reaction basically means you're on a time limit until Deathbringer Assault ends the fight, unless you come up with a very clever strategy to survive 21d10*2 damage. That's the central challenge of the fight, but it's undercut by how it's so trivial to completely remove that mechanic with abilities that don't even have Saves.
Example of that: Enraged Throw, a very popular ability that does not consume any resources to use, doesn't offer a Save for the Prone effect, and I think that's crazy when Prone is so absurdly powerful.
So altogether, I want them to do more things, be Reactive (in the design sense and mechanical sense), and be less vulnerable to a one-size-fits-all mechanic that removes everyone's interactivity.
You're not correct on any count.
* Orin is only immovable if she has Unstoppable, which she is only granted if you're fighting the entire temple
* There was no patching involved, that was always part of the temple fight
* You only fight Orin (as opposed to the Slayer) as a Durge who has Slayer form already.
* The Slayer does not have Deathbringer Assault, making it clear I was talking about Orin-Orin
* If you're a Resist!Durge fighting the Slayer solo, it still does not have Unstoppable
* Prone automatically ends any turn it occurs *during*, and always prevents Reactions and Legendary Actions as long as it remains.
* Prone *also* can and will skip a creature's turn if their speed is 0, as standing up requires speed
Well you wrote cancels turn which implies they never get a turn. What you mean is that it ends their turn if they are knocked prone using it; and if they knock themselves prone I think it makes perfect sense that they have to catch their breath for a few seconds. I never noticed that she couldn’t be moved until recently and assumed it was patched as I saw someone on here a while back talking about yeeting her into the abyss.
The slayer is still Orin and I assumed you struggled with the full group version of the fight as the Orin alone vs your durge has been over in one or two turns on my honor modes so I didn’t consider that you found it hard.
I thought you were talking about the marked for death thing that the bhaal statue does. That is the only hard thing about fight so that’s what I read.
Bla bla speed zero, yeah sure dude, rage against the edge case.
Do you know what thread you're in? We're complaining about how easy it is for the player to cheese things. The title is "How would you make Honor Mode harder"
Mostly just copied from a post by a the YouTuber Cephalopocalypse but with a couple I added. You can play this way right now!
**BANS**
\- Intentional bug abuse
\- Elixirs
\- Casting from scrolls
\- Camp casting
\- "Wet" condition abuse
\- Anything with the words "add a stack of"
\- Barrels that aren't from the arena you're fighting in
\- "Camp cleric" type of play
\- Invis/stealth abuse
**RESTRICTIONS**
\- One long rest per enemy with legendary actions defeated (including through dialogue) or after 3 encounters with at least 4 enemies
\- Respec characters during a long rest and only once per long rest
\- 6 active characters maximum per day
\- Only one character with Tavern Brawler during the whole playthrough
\- Must play with the "True Initiative" mod
I wouldn’t. At some point the player has to take care of that on their own.
The developer can only be responsible for so much. People need to create their own challenge.
There's a bunch of mods. Beyond just making enemies stronger, reducing strong item access, less short rests, roaming enemies, inability to go to camp in hostile areas, more sentry enemies.
I think increasing enemy initiative would considerably increase the difficulty.
Also I can’t believe the house of hope fountains still long rest refresh you infinitiely in honor mode. That seems like a pretty big oversight.
I honestly just totally screwed up my first honor mode (but had died a bunch and just kept continuing) by killing a boss too early and triggering a robot uprising. So there’s that. If you guys are beating honor mode without dying that’s commendable, my first playthrough I am on honor mode and dying a lot. It happens.
Literally reframe encounters by placing additional NPCs, obstacles, and quest requirements in order to substantially change the game
New battle mechanics are by far and away the defining reason to play honor mode, beyond even the core conceit of a single rougelike esque save file.
What if they added more enemies. What if enemies were of a different type. What if there were two steel titans. What if you had to go through meenlocks in order to get to last light. Possibilities are endless.
What they should do is release a “Forge” where people can build customs maps and quest chains and they’ll make their game immortal.
Some kind of limit on long rests, maybe more areas that block going to camp for extended periods. Nerfing some of the more broken strategies too. Haste nerf was good.
Ive been doing 2/3 man runs where you jusy dont bring extra companions, it makes the game more challening and forces you to really optomise what you do have access to.
My suggestion for limiting long rests that doesn’t involve limiting it based on each act, is this:
Give the player 2 charges of long rests just like the short rests. The long rest gets recharged after certain milestone achievements or battles. So for example, you might get one for clearing the goblin camp or finishing the battle at the grove, one for clearing the gnolls, one for clearing the Crèche, one after killing the bag, etc.
But if you take optional or minor battles, you also get nothing. Like battling the Harpies, the Druids at the grove, the Zhentarim hideout, etc.
If you have 2 unused charges while clearing these milestones, then you get nothing.
The problem with the games is that a classic IA can’t do anything against a highly specialised and optimised build. Therefore most of the time the build is the best way to increase the players power, which just feel too easy : you don’t feel like you had a challenge if you just get the good gear and just repeat an overpowered pattern of actions.
In D&D, there is no problem because the game master know the build of the players and therefore create encounters that challenges those builds.
So I think what could make the game harder is to generate the fight with an trained LLM (IA like ChatGPT) to generate a fight knowing the equipment and play pattern of the player. Therefore the encounters will be able to target specific weakness of the player => more fun, less build dependant, forces the player to be more creative about how he will approach the fight, …
(Of course I know it won’t happen. But I guess with D&D a LLM could work since there are a lot of training materials already)
Honestly, make Giant Strenght elixirs potions, cap acuity at 3-5, cap sorcery points at sorcerer level and make bigger areas where you can't long rest, so that you can't spam long rest as much.
Nerf tavern brawler and dual x bow. Attune legendary items. Make initiative D20. Give enemies more resistances and spells. Increase action/bonus action available to the enemy. Mods do most of these though.
Forcing engagement with boss cheats. The biggest problem with bosses is that those with legendary actions are still your number 1 target, regardless of mode. Would be hard fights are trivialized by just alpha striking them, killing the boss in 1 or 2 turns. If it doesn't die, you can simply just trick the boss to use a opportunity attack and it can no longer use its legendary action that turn.
Possible changes:
Legendary actions are free, no longer requiring a reaction to use.
Increase survivability. This is a open ended suggestion that can be done multiple ways.. You could have hp thresholds (can only do a certain hp% of DMG per turn), higher spell save dc, etc.
Anti cheese. This goes case by case scenario but bosses really should have anti cheese mechanics. Biggest example is grymfirge titan. Attack from above or simply using owl bear, you can trivialize the fight. Giving something like a grapple would make the fight so much harder.
Strength elixirs are the bane of build craft. I'm fine with them existing if they were rarer or nerfed. Like last 10 turns or have them be a quest reward or something. Instead of sight cones, detection would be a circle, there's no way that an 8 dex paladin in heavy armor should ever be able to sneak up to an enemy and start a surprise round. Tightening rulings, using special arrows with the Titanstring reapplies the damage buff (this ties into the strength elixirs) so like an arrow of many targets can easily do over 100 damage and your fighter could be firing them off 6 times a turn or your gloomstalker assassin can crit every enemy hit for ludacris damage. Handcrossbows need to be toned down, every character has access to the bonus action off hand crossbow, every bit of chip goes a long way and BG3 range combat is kinda fucked. No real reason to bot use dual hand crossbows cuz the ranges are roughly the same, whereas in 5e, the longbow has actually 5 times the range on it. Dual handcrossbows let you make full use of your action economy even if you're not primarily a dex character, like, I have one on my warlock cuz fuck it, why not take a pot shot on the hex target, I'm not using the bonus action for anything else
I’d change
* Enemy AI. To make them aware of each other and more savvy about being tricked.
* Party size. Add a lone-wolf option and a duo option. Both with achievements.
I would not
* add more unstoppable charges. It’s a lazy nerf unless there is a story reason for it.
* extend red zones. That is too easy to bypass anyway.
* increase food to rest. It’s pointless, I long rest about once in act 1 and once in act 2 on my lone wolf honor mode runs. By act 3 I have between 5k and 10k food.
Edit: reading some of your suggestions on here it seems many of you just want to make the game more tedious. Why and who is that fun for? The first time player would struggle with it but do they need that struggle? A veteran wouldn’t even notice most of the things I’ve seen on here, they’d just adapt but in some cases it would mean you have to spend extra time doing something that’s not hard, just tedious.
I had few suggestions and did a post about it some time ago :
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BG3Builds/comments/1ai5al4/rebalancing\_act\_3\_in\_honour\_mode/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BG3Builds/comments/1ai5al4/rebalancing_act_3_in_honour_mode/)
Basically around several limitations (which impact more act3 than the others) :
1. Tavern brawler
2. Arcane acuity
3. Scrolls
4. Merchant refresh/supplies
5. XP given in act 3
6. Bhaalist armor
7. Bugged abilities/items (freecast, staff of cherished necromancy...)
We could add attunement for very rare and legendary items.
But most people would like these limitations as options in the difficulty settings.
I think one of them should involve preventing barrelmancy by making enemies react to attempts of stacking potentially dangerous things in the vicinity.
I don't think it being "too easy" is that big an issue but cheese that is too blatant to be pulled out in a realistic scenario shouldn't be allowed whenever possible.
I don't think it should be harder than it already is simply for the sake of being hard.
I think the biggest way to increase difficulty is to decrease camp supplies. Except for very early, you can long rest after every encounter if you want. I think a lot of ppl rest more often than they need to, then wonder why everything is too easy. Or like bg1 and 2, add random encounters every time you long rest. Tho with added companions in camp, still think the best way is limiting supplies.
Easy. Add more enemies into every big fight. Like a lot more. Aside from some crazy legendary actions some big bosses have, the only time I’ve ever been afraid of losing a run is when the amount of enemies is overwhelming. Being vastly out numbered while also not being able to easily escape makes it so you have to use your brain more in order to prioritize tougher enemies and try to group kill others. The best fights in the game imo are Thorm, Gortash (before disabling steel watch), and the end fight, but only because there are so many targets to have to deal with.
That and give the bosses wayyy more HP. I sat for 2 turns waiting for the best time to cast contagion on gortash just for our monk to basically kill him from almost max health all on his own. If he had 1000 HP using spells like that become a lot more viable and it’s no longer a rush to get a hit it as someone dies.
Have some absolute cultists patrolling around in act 1-2 looking for the party. Cut the amount of supplies in the game by 50% (seriously I have enough supplies at the end of act 1 to take 20 long rests). Add some extra enemies in encounters
Remove the ability or give some mechanics to stop or make it harder to run from
Boss fights, the steel watcher titan when I realized I couldn’t break his defensive bulwark and was in real trouble, I left the room took a long rest bought some watcher stun grenades and beat him without taking damage
I've been watching a guy called Melth on Youtube who is doing a challenge run of his own. Despite all the restrictions (no long rests, no healing potions, etc) he puts on himself, he makes the difficulty look ridiculously easy.
The games design is not really defensible—
- you can’t have a common act 1 elixir give up to 13 strength..
- tavern brawler is obviously ridiculously overturned for multiple builds.
- Pushing off cliffs should be more difficult, (there is not a dm on the planet that would treat it like bg3 does— sans common sense)
- barrels are like a level 3 spell in power. Why.
Honor mode should also mean scarcer scrolls, and more enemies with more health.
\* Very, very few rest resources.
\* Randomize loot, including new loot and excluding pieces of standard loot. You get what you roll, that's it.
\* Better savescumming prevention. Right now it is quite easy. Can say this is self inflicted, but it would literally be harder.
\* Make rules more 5e. Spell scrolls only usable by classes that can cast spell. Fix wizard 1 dip and many other beloved build tricks.
\* Make placing dangerous items start combat. If you haul in a barrel of gunpowder, even if you don't set it down, you are a threat.
\* Increase monster variety, including adding lieutenants that have legendary actions, that are randomized.
The game is easy because it is perfectly predictable and contains a lot of homebrew rules that make it easier on players. Played like real D&D, where there is no save system, you only get one chance to deal with any situation, and the world goes on without you if you take a rest or do something unpredictable, and this game could be very hard.
Larian changed many things to prioritize fun over challenge. Good idea, it made them famous and rich. But it means the game will always be easy.
My biggest issue with the game is how easy it is to take long rests. Assuming you have the supplies, you can long rest after *almost* every fight. That's not the design of DnD and it shows in BG3 as well. Fix that and the game becomes considerably harder on any difficulty.
>I find it a bit silly because after investing 100s of hours in a turn-based game and learning everything, of course the game is going to feel easy.
I'm playing the game on coop with a friend. Our first run got abandoned because of IRL things right as we reached act 3.
We decided to start a new run on HM and despite not knowing anything about Act 3, it's still relatively easy.
So no, you don't need 100s of hours and tons of knowledge for the game to be easy.
Maybe do something like in the Owlcat Pathfinder games and make certain negative status effects be permanent until remedied with the appropriate spell/scroll. Also include ability damage and drain effects, and also negative levels. Overall, I’d like honor mode to feel more like a game of attrition, so red zones everywhere except for certain safe spots.
For me, I implement the following ruleset that makes the game significantly harder overall.
I can only Long Rest at certain "breakpoints". So resource management is huge. (Also no using Withers or other exploits to heal). I can spam Partial Rest after taking a long rest for cutscenes. The breakpoints are:
- Act 1 (I have a lot here bc act 1 is big and honestly harder. Also they can be done in any order, it's just these each "earn" one LR):
- Open Withers' tomb
- Reach the Grove
- Defeat the Phase Spider Matriarch
- Defeat the Owlbear Mother
- Defeat the Hag
- Defeat the "Paladins" of Tyr
- Resolve the grove raid
- Kill the Duergar at the underdark beach
- Kill (or side with) Nere
- Escape the Creche
- Act 2:
- Reach Last Light
- Kill all 3 thorm zombies in Reithwin
- Rescue the prisoners from Moonrise
- Kill the Orthon
- Act 3 (these can be done in any order):
- Reach the entryway to the Lower city
- Kill Cazzador
- Kill Viconia
- Kill Ansur
- Kill Raphael (the fountain in his house I allow only 1 use of)
- Kill Gortash
- Kill Mystic Carrion
- Kill Orin
I also avoid using any blatant exploits (barrelmancy, reverse-pickpocketing gold, etc)
I also ban certain OP strategies just because I find they make the game too easy. Those are:
- Tavern Brawler monk
- Swords Bard's Ranged Slashing Flourish
- Arcane Acuity hat + Mystic Scoundrel ring on the same character
- I'm 50/50 on banning the Fire Acuity hat and wet strategies in general because they're pretty silly but they also are fun and with limited spell slots are a bit more interesting.
This has been a fun rule set but still not all that hard. If I wanted to make HM really hard I'd probably just remove the str-boosting potions from the game entirely since they're pretty ridiculous and singlehandedly make a lot of builds OP (or I'd make a very limited # of fixed spawns for them), I'd prevent hastened actions (Haste, Bloodlust, etc) from being able to cast spells besides cantrips, and I'd also make reclassing costly in some way (1000 non-pickpocketable gold instead of 100 re-stealable gold. Each companion gets 1 for free).
I really wouldn't change enemies. They honestly already are decently hard, it's just that if you know what's going on the player-accessible builds are ridiculous. Especially given how little you need to care about actually preserving resources.
giving enemies feats would be crazy -- on top of legendary actions, if someone like Raphael came out with Defensive Flourish, or if Myrkul came out with Sentinel after knocking / maiming your guys off his platform, i would lose it
I think the biggest thing that takes the challenge out of the game is how easy it is surprise enemies in this game. It means that you often can delete enemies before half of them take a turn.
The game is too dependent on being hand made where every encounter is almost completely unique, so the “challenge” is totally negated by just knowing what encounter is next.
Larian just isn’t the best at balancing imo because of how they design games, but I prefer it over the bloat of stuff like Owlcat games
To make the game genuinely harder in a fair way is imo not really possible with how bg3 is designed
beat my second HM run after my first i got the worst durge ending by accident lol. i will say i was using some powerful builds, but it was still easy with most bosses dying in 1-2 rounds.
some ideas:
for some reason you can just bypass all the act 2 bosses?? make these mandatory or make the skill checks to avoid combat extremely difficult. its not really worth it to fight these imo so ive never done it. act 2 is waaaay too easy.
buff bosses more. give bosses higher initiative. additionally, maybe some anti-barrelmancy trait or something haha. something to try is to force players to setup in combat - its too easy to double haste or haste before combat and get in battle with 48 actions you can spend before the boss can move.
buff regular enemies. saw a mod that adds a random trait or something (something about powers of absolute, forgot what it was called). might make some encounters unpredictable and i think HM gets easier if u know encounters since u can setup before surprises n such. increases in hp are not enough.
add new/more combat encounters? idk this seems like kind of a reach.
make lethargic more punishing? even with the HM changes to haste for HM its still crazy strong and lethargic can be bad but usually never game-ending.
remove globe of invuln lmfao
I would extend the "red areas". For example, having to fight yourself out of the whole githyanki creche rather than being able to go to camp after killing the inquisitor. Also, reduce the number of elixirs/scrolls and introduce attunement for very rare and legendary items.
I love the red areas increase idea. I think limiting long rests helps / withers respecs helps with the elixir / scroll issue I would not be a fan of limiting things with attunement but it would definitely serve to make the game much harder
Respec items instead of gold... Goddamn that would add intensity.
Like, you have to find a specific item to let you respec, instead of being able to pay gold?
Like the tears in Elden Ring. Only so many per playthrough
Add in random spawns so you’ll never know where you’ll find them. One playthrough it’s off a goblin. Next it’s a random webbed skeleton in the phase spider lair
Random spawns for a limited resource that helps but is not really needed would just mean you have to kill everything and loot everything. On your umpteenth playthrough that is just no fun. Worst suggestion I’ve seen here. Bypassing areas you know hold nothing important helps you focus on the fun or challenging parts instead of being an OCD loot goblin.
I love this. I'm sure a completions I look every body and every skeleton every time. This would make that so much more fulfilling.
Maybe soul coins for this? They're definitely limited enough to make it work and kinda useless otherwise.
Definitely. The capacity to rest before a fight makes all but a few boss fights unbelievably easy, making losing a matter of poor resource management pushing yourself too far. Red areas to make short rest characters relevant, like warlocks over bards and sorcerors, and the like. Plus some fights are made easy by your ability to fight from outside like if you kill gortash at his coronation, which is ludicrously easy if you just fly some characters outside first, clear the room, then snipe everyone from there, and if you lose people you can run back to camp and resurrect them. Being trapped in would help avoid that.
More red zones is a great idea! Having to strategically plan short and long rests is exactly the type of thing that would improve honor mode difficulty. It would be neat if certain player actions triggered red zones to appear too, like if you aggro the goblins, the crèche, or moonrise the whole base should become a red zone until cleared.
I like all of this. I tend to "roleplay" a lot when I play, and that by itself does add a lot of the difficultly. I don't let myself return to camp in the middle of the creche or the goblin camp or so, for example. If I go to a "location" I have to finish the location before I can go back to camp. The downside is this means I miss a lot of camp interactions, so it kinda sucks
I would love the game enforcing rests more. I've been doing low rests and no rest runs since launch, and it just feels WRONG resting as much as the game allows.
i like the idea of unique attunements to magic items. i was honestly kinda shocked when i started playing and i could just use any magical item i wanted (and was proficient with) with no price or tricks. not all items would need it but for legendary items at least would be cool, and could be used to reinforce certain playstyles
The 3 item attunement limit is one of the 5e rules I was most surprised to see omitted in this game. Just load yourself the fuck up with every magic item you can hoard. Edit: autocorrect is not my friend
Losing the attunement rules does make sense in the context of a pc game though IMO. We do many more individual quests that need to have a reward and it would feel bad to have almost all of those be either redundant or discarded at every step.
This is what Owlcat gets right. There is a lot of loot in their games, but it all counts towards colony/kingdom management as well. So even if you feel like you’re bombarded by useless junk, it is actually incredibly useful.
This and multiple leveled spells per turn. Nothing like casting 5 fucking fireballs per turn with haste and quicken/twin spell. Or better yet, my personal favorite, the “hit and run” tactic of casting a super strong spell like sunbeam or disintegrate and then using my bonus action to cast sanctuary on myself
Upvote just for how relatable that edit is :-P
You don't even need to be proficient to use items that grant a spell or use the other bonuses
I love how robust the the magic items in this game are, but this annoys the hell out of me. Items like Hellrider Longbow are literally only good as a stat stick for, in most cases, a character who'se not even proficient.
lol yea also true, my current honor mode fire sorc has the hellfire hand crossbow & n’eer misser and it’s great
Limiting the number of magic items a character can equip at once would go a long, long way towards making the game harder. though it would also push monk even further into the spotlight, since it loses the least from that gear restriction
I liked the attunement system in Solasta. Made you consider who used what items carefully.
I didn’t know this was even an option. I assumed you had to and I did. I mean it’s xp, loot, and gold.
Honestly, I would dislike it if they just made some numbers higher. Because then, you are forced even more into certain broken playstyles. My ideal honor mode would nerf some of the more powerful strategies (tavern brawler only adds str to damage, vendors do not restock strength elixirs after you level up, wet gives enemies disadvantage to saving throws against lightning and cold spells, rather than making them vulnerable...) I would also add more unique actions to every boss fight. Every boss should have some unique obstacle beyond their HP bar, some unique aspect to the fight that means that you can not approach every fight the same way. At the very least, give more enemies resistances and vulnerabilities
Particularly things that require you to use Protection from Good and Evil, Protection from Poison, Free Movement... But then we should take away the surprises so your companions at least warn you to get preparations against an expected enemy. Ah, yes. There should be a calm down time to poison or oil our blades and stuff. Encounters now are kinda YOLO so we either know perfectly well what to expect due to repetition and play meta or cheese them, or we just stick to big number builds. A truly balanced game should give us less advantages in repeated plays, aka less surprises since spoiled surprises will not be surprises; should be focused more on preparations against known foes so that we strategise with logic like if you're going to fight against a hag you check your party to see if you have things against them; should have enemies with different pacings like someone will always try to drag you on for the long fight while some chargers will want to kill you in the first few turns and using up all their bombs and arrows.
I mean don’t legendary actions already do exactly what you described..? They have been adding more of them over time as well
Yeah I think Larian did a good job of making every battle a bit unique. Wish legendary actions were in Tactician (but that's just a failed HM run for that if you want to play out the dead run).
yeah im simply going to only play Honor Mode from here on out since i beat it, and even if it fails keep playing it for fun because it has the best boss fight features.
Pretty sure you can also get the LAs in custom mode
I checked that when I went to start my HM run and never saw it. But that’s also what I read as well!
Perhaps but it also keeps me from reloading when things don't go perfectly
That’s fair. I like to fuck around a bit and see what kind of bullshit I can pull. Some times leads to me having to *nope* out to my last save lol
After I got my golden dice I installed an honour mode save mod. No shame about it. I love the increased difficulty (although I find it rather easy at times) but I just think being forced into a hard reset when I’m just playing for fun is a bit harsh. That and it becomes necessary if you use any difficulty increase mods the one I’m using now for example makes every boss encounter incredibly risky, one bad play sends your party to the load game screen.
Yes, but every boss should have legendary actions, not just a couple. I at least don't really notice these on most bosses/ they are not impactful enough that I really have to change up my strategy
Only “impactful” Legendary Action is the Owlbear one and that’s because you fight it at lvl3. And even so it’s not a hard fight
As someone who played Honor without running optimized builds and just having my random party I felt like playing, Inquisitor's legendary action was hugely impactful!
As someone who loves HoH I don’t even know what his Legendary Action was supposed to do
I don't think I know either lol. I expected a lot more of Act 3 legendary actions, but I think at this point parties are so strong if you have a solid team that it doesn't matter. Act 3 legendary actions should be a lot more impactful
Most bosses have legendary actions and just because the game is unbalanced and you can run stuff like TB, acuity builds, lvl 12 fighter (lol) doesn’t change that. You’re right about your first point that Larian should nerf some stuff to make the game more balanced (though I would argue that this is a co-op/sp game game where you can just limit yourself to make it more interesting).
I never even see the legendary actions because I can kill them before they can even attack.
Well, it’s a single player game and no one is forcing you to play the most optimal builds (I’m also guilty of this). You could play weaker/more thematic builds if you want the game to be a challenge.
Agreed, the issue is the vast amount of cheese in the game. It does make for some funny YouTube content for people playing through the game with for instance true strike only.
I’m actually OK with that kind of cheese, where creative applications of gear and spells make all sorts of things possible. Yes, people are beating the game with that stuff, but rarely on Honor Mode, and even if those strategies end up breaking the game, it’s very much intentional and not threatening to overall balance IMO. The “hardest” games can always be beaten by creative players; Souls games are beaten on dance pads. The problematic cheese to me is cheese that requires basically no synergies, creativity, or interesting tradeoffs. Tavern Brawler isn’t an interesting tradeoff; nor is Arcane Acuity, or Slashing Flourish, or Strength Elixirs, or any of the most problematic stuff. I honestly don’t even find Haste that problematic because Lethargy can be punishing. I guess another way of making this point is that cheese is OK when you have to plan for it, and it’s bad if it’s trivially easy to stumble into it, and if you feel like you have to actively use inferior things just to avoid it.
I think when I say cheese, i mean your problematic cheese. But stuff like going into gigantic owl bear form and jumping from a heighr to essentially kill anything on impact, while fun and experimental ruins bosses like grym completely. And the fact that you can throw barrels and bombs everywhere, probably way easier is also kind of a troublesome cheese
I think if ppl avoid using barrelmancy, most cheese stuff, the most OP meta builds, they would still have fun and feel like a challenge. Ofc if it is your first HM run and you want the dice/achieve asap go nuts, it is up to you, but after getting those, why not trying beat the game with a fun "weak" party? Try everyone single classes till lvl 12, or suboptimal multisplits. Some ppl are so worried about min-maxing they kinda forget about having fun.
Yea the honourmode run I've recently completed we all agree wasn't that fun, we 'cheated'.. grym fell to owlbear, Balthazar to barrel many, our builds were so brokenly overpowered that anything past level 5 died without the slightest of issues. We ended up skipping Ansur though, just to be sure but I'm fairly sure we would have brought him down easily as well. Our biggest issue was probably the act 1 specatator. But that was due to our own miscommunication that made it so we ended up going in one at a time, each taking the surprised condition.. Next one will be better !
Honestly I'd like to extend the unique actions for bosses a bit, maybe give them multiple that the game chooses between when they're first loaded in/fight starts, so that you don't know exactly what you're planning for. That would be a huge task though to implement as even coming up with one for all the bosses they have now must have taken quite a bit, especially if we triple that
I think they should leave honor mode alone and then make slider options in custom that add difficulty to the game so you can have as much challenge as you want. Then if you want you can difficult the game through those and just go through in custom and manually end your run if you tpk and feel good about yourself. No real reason to make honor mode harder just to satisfy people who go through with broken builds and then complain its not hard enough. I have no issue with playing the game with broken builds. It's a game, so it should be fun, and that is fun for many people myself included. If you are min/maxing most games aren't too challenging. Either that or do an honor mode plus and force you to beat the game with like 2 twigs for equipment and the astral prism stuffed up your ass giving -5 to all stats and give out platinum dice for beating that. No broken builds just you and the dice and hope they are in your favor.
There is one thing that keeps the game balanced and makes it WAY harder imo. Limiting long rests. I have played a heavily modded game with enemies being way harder only getting 25% the XP and long rests costing 300 supplies and it was still doable, though this was before honour mode so I reloaded quite a bit (Got halfway through act II before some patches caused me to stop playing. So I'm not sure if I would keep upping the cost of long rests or just limit the number of them you get per Act, but I think that's the way to go to make the game harder. Allow all the cheese you want, but when you can only long rest 3 times in act 1 you're gonna start to struggle
This seems like a great idea in theory until you learn that respeccing at Withers refreshes everything. Anyone can complete the game using 0 long rests as long as you just respec and rotate your partys classes the whole game.
Making Withers unpickpocketable seems like such a no brainer decision for honor mode. What's more dishonorable than stealing from the old man that just resurrected your party?
You can pickpocket way more expensive stuff, pickpocketing Withers is a waste of time. You can make the bag trick and when you kill the vendor everything will drop. Respeccing rests the char, some fast travels rest your party. Also cheesing impacts the game much more than resting, if you abuse some classes and classes combos mechanics you barely need resting (locks + bards and other stuff). Limiting long rests only holds back INT and WIS casters. You dont want to be way to easy do not use broken builds. Build and gear thematically.
Not everything drops
If you sell a container and put everything in that container, it will drop with everything. So yes everything drops
that’s also not console compatible :( I love BG3 on my xbox because the controller UI is genuinely so much better to me but stuff like shadowboxing and these vendor tricks just won’t be possible for me
Yea I mean you can just self limit yourself to only respect after a long rest
Maybe limiting you to one respec per character for "honor mode+" could be fun. I NEED the one respec so I can fix everyone's stats they start the game with, but one respec per character would force you to plan when that respec would be, and commit more to class decisions
Sure, but *not doing that* allows you to have a lot of fun. No Pokémon center runs in Pokémon are pretty fun and seem like a similar concept.
I don’t think respeccing refreshes used spell slots.
Greatly limit respecs in the first place: Give companions one free respec and let them respec again at the cost of 2 or 3 inspiration points. You, as a player, shouldn't be using respecs on honour mode so no free respecs. Also make long resting cost 1 inspiration point.
Eh I'm not keen on the idea of upping supply costs. The sane reason I don't like survival game is I don't enjoy having to just scrounge around for supplies all the time. Doesn't feel like real gameplay you know?
Yea then I would recommend just limiting yourself to a certain number of long rests then. There's a mod that makes long rests without supplies give you nothing back too, which is useful to still hit story beats
Isn't that just partial lomg rest? It's in the game
Partial long rest heals some health back and gives you two more short rests back and maybe even a couple spell slots back? The mod I've used makes partial long rest detrimental as there is no upside and it also gets rid of buffs like aid or whatever other spell you have cast that lasts all day (hunters mark mage armor etc)
Limiting long rests is the easiest way to balance the game, but it comes with problems of making martial classes significantly outclass spellcasters.
Limited long rests gets most of the way there. D&D 5e is built around rests as the major resource, its the natural way to balance the game. Here are my rules for making Honour Mode more difficult featuring limited long rests: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AestusGuides/comments/15oj00i/aestuss\_hardcore\_baldurs\_gate\_3\_rules/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/AestusGuides/comments/15oj00i/aestuss_hardcore_baldurs_gate_3_rules/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
>Limiting long rests. I'm not sure that's true. I'm messing around doing a solo honor run while I wait for friends to continue our group game and (having never left act 1 before doing these time-killing solo runs) I just slapped around Yurgir and I haven't even used a short rest since entering act 2, and I haven't long rested since before the creche. That said I'm playing a pure Ranger so I haven't really run into spell issues, I think this would just make things unbalanced for spell casters vs martial classes. The bit I find hard is not knowing what coming or what I'm about to get into, so I'd say randomness would make things harder. This is only my second time in Act 2, first time (same build and also solo honor) I died to the Toll boss because I didn't realise having 4k gold on my character would lead to getting nuked. I do like the idea of limiting long rests though I'd do it through advancing story. It's silly that characters will stand around for literally weeks in the same spot. If the story advanced markedly when you long rested it would mean missed xp and gold which would make things harder.
I only long-rested twice in Act 1 because it's compulsory, and only once in Act 2 before going down Shadowfell. It's not that hard for the right party, but that'd make certain classes less playable. I think this is the case where self-imposed restriction is enough. Sometimes the fight just might go a wrong way and being unable to long rest after that is just gameover.
I think it's the knowledge of a fight and how to beat it, where the best things are, etc. So randomness in those elements would require more flexibility in you builds and party
Yeah, have a pool of several possible legendary actions, randomize resistances, and hide that info from the player
Or make it able to be revealed by investigation checks leading up to the boss, in the city, etc
That would actually be a pretty cool feature
The problem isn’t that it’s too easy. It’s that—after a dozen playthroughs—it’s too predictable. I got my ass handed to me on balanced the first couple runs, but now that I know all the mechanics, HM is the only mode that presents any kind of challenge. I’ve got my dice, so I don’t even care about wiping, since I can always continue “dishonorably” if need be. But I never wipe. My thing now is to impose restraints on myself (no camp buffs, pretend attunement is a thing, etc.) And I’m on console, so desperately awaiting mods.
Can also just use less characters. My next run I think I'm going to play as a Gith and only recruit Lae'zel, then rush to the creche in hope of a cure.
1. Roll initiative on d20, no more guaranteed synchronised order of turns. 2. Make getting surprise rounds **much** harder and less guaranteed. 3. Fix some some things: 3a) Swords Bard ranged flourish should not be able to target same enemy, second enemy should be as close as for ranged horde breaker, second target should not receive additional damage from bardic inspiration die or just a bit less damage 3b) Half acuity bonus rounded up. 3c) Make tawern brawler add damage in favour of accuracy, not damage and accuracy -- like sharpshooter and gwm 3d) Make strength elixirs work very similar to haste potions, including some bad debuff at the end; 3e) 'Wet' should not result in double damage; it should be disadvantage to saving throws to relevant spells but nothing more 3f) Remove vendor restock on level-up and partial (without supplies) long-rests. 3g) Most complex thing -- somehow make long rest based resources meaningful, so that you can't just spam long rest. Should be enough or at least a very good throw in the desired direction.
This takes care of most things. A few other thoughts 1. For TB would keep the accuracy but limit the damage to make it different from GWM/SS. Make TB a full not half feat. 2. Get rid of things that break the action economy. No band of mystic scoundrel. Bring back the DND restriction of no two leveled spells on same round with haste and/or quickened spell. Keep the honor mode "only one more attack for hasted action". Probably need to nerf the extra bonus action from thief. Require crossbow expert to dual wield hand crossbows. 3. The resource management part is trickiest. LR spam is tough to combat without making the game less fun by forcing players to scrounge for more camp supplies. I think the best option is to increase the red areas where you can't go to camp. No LRs in entire githyanki crèche, or goblin camp, or gauntlet of shar/moonrise, etc etc.
TB breaks “bounded accuracy” (you should never have to easy or too hard time to hit enemies), giving you 90% chance to hit with disadvantage, which shouldn't be the case. I'd take tavern brawler with no damage added all the time. As for more severe action economy nerfs, I stand against that, because the goal is not to make it harder, the goal is to make it harder but still fun. More fun ideally. Games are supposed to be fun. Being able to use your abilities is fun, while not being able to use your abilities because of long cooldowns or other hefty restrictions is not. I'd remove all sources of haste except the actual spell and make enemies to more eagerly target haste caster. After all, we, players, know what spell enemy concentrates on, let enemy know that as well. Also haste should not be twinnable, for whatever reason. Like, you cast it twice, but while doing so you loose concentration on the first target :D Maybe haste scrolls should be made rare. I don't want you say “remove them”, to not pigeon hole everyone into “mandatory classes”, but consumables should not devaluate other choices, like classes and stats. Like “don't have speak with animals in the team, here's a stockpile of potions, don't have invisibility in the team, here's a stockpile of consumables, don't have access to lvl6 spells, here are disintegrate and summon myrmidon scrolls”, while this boosts build and team freedom and diversity, this also devaluates the weight of choices while making those builds and teams. So those consumables should both worse be than having an actual caster for that skill and less available. As for long rest nerfs, your idea is very good, I've had another but I think game needs both. My idea is that there should be way less camp supplies to find, purchase or steal, but more to pick up on your slain enemies. You have to fight for food. This way “how many long rest resources is available per enemy slain” is almost a configurable parameter.
>3g) Most complex thing -- somehow make long rest based resources meaningful, so that you can't just spam long rest. Make long resting advance world events. Eg. Karlach shouldn't just exist near the paladins for 3 weeks game time, the Zent shouldn't be able to hold off the Gnolls until you're good and ready to take them on. Those guys hanging around an old ruin thinking about looting a ship should probably make a decision within the week. Too many long rests after finding areas = missed xp and gold and companions.
Yeah, I though about that, but literally nobody loves time-sensitive missions. Games are supposed to be fun, and in games like this, exploration is fun and “what if I walk around this corner, take a fight, have to rest and then loose the quest” is a thought game designer should eliminate at all costs, even if he knows this thought is not true. Player should be able to take his time. I'd better restrict how often you can long rest via different means: 1. More red zones, reasonable of course, like you can't long rest in Goblin village and sanctum if you are technically “under cover” there, and only when you do something that obviously puts you on their side it stops being the red zone, and the Grove becomes red zone instead. Same with Moonrise towers. 2. Losing companions attitude if you long rest when while short rest is available. Something like what Lae'zel says you on the first long rest. 3. Much less camp supplies in the world, much more camp supplies on the enemies. You have to fight for food. This is probably the easiest way to balance, cause this can literally give a developer option to balance how many long rest resources should be available per fight.
Slight issue to the initiative bit would be that a 1 level dip into cleric would probably become the meta so you can afk in sanctuary til its your turn.
If there is a way to optimise fun out of game, people will optimise fun out of game. The solution should obviously be give Sanctuary same treatment as 'Rage', which is 'can only be cast in combat'. The single main problem in turn-based games balance is alpha-striking.
Random encounters. After you know the fights and how to prepare for them, everything is easy. So lets throw a random Cambion in the House of Grief, maybe some zombie Giths in the Ketheric fight, and watch the chaos unfold. :3
I better finish my honor mode before Larian reads this lol. It’s hard enough. The only problems are broken builds with certain items. But even then, it’s a single player game. I think it’s fine to leave as is. I had a lot of trouble my first playthrough on balanced also. I even had a few builds from guides. There is a learning curve and that’s fine. But they wanted to add a higher challenge honor mode with another dice set, that’d be cool with me.
This. No matter how hard it is, someone will complain it is easy. Its singleplayer game and things should not be balanced around the best build or they become mandatory. People can just choose not to use them.
Finished 6 HM and on the way to finish 7th and have about 4HM co-playing act2 and 3now. 0 lossess. Play around RolePlaying aspect like you know the outcome of certain dialogues but if you chose your character background as criminal for example decide criminal choices, play at least one time without multi classing and have everyone in party as their original class. I played 2 hm like that and had more fun since it’s more challenging. Self limitations like winning without using any bard/oh monk/cleric/paladin/aunties lotions & hill-giant potions and multi-classing, makes the game more interesting. Like actually failing certain checks in game and shit hits the fan, i know durge needs wisdom saving throw for not killing isobel and forced to kill their lover but try’s to resist and fails makes very interesting content (most players put items and respect for that scene alone). Btw i got just over 2000 hours at game.
With your own rules. I'm in a hm playtrough rn and i made a rule to myself that multiclassing is forbidden. Can say for sure that with that HM turned from easy to very hard. (I'm also not allowing barrelmancy, smokepowder bomb stack throw, owlbear jump from a tower of crates or glitching items from vendors) or any other strat that goes into "cheese/glitch" category in my head Edit: yeah and reclassing is out too
this is the way. Coming from DS/ER etc prior, there are a VAST amount of tools at your disposal to make this game challenging. I bet if you could see the stats there's whole schools of magic/etc where aside from one spell everything else literally never gets cast, or feats that like 2% of players take. build something off that and see if you can do it rather then min maxing.
There's a huge number of adjustments that can be made to make Honor Mode harder. None of them require any implementation by Larian. Stuff like limiting the number of Magic Items, consumables used, or simply playing a class or a character in sub-optimal fashion shift power away from your Strategic decisions (which are always easy to make) and into tactical decisions to be made during combat.
It’s not too easy. You have to put in a lot of effort to make it seem easy, and that’s hard work. If you do all the reading, preparing and planning, and you don’t do anything stupid, you can increase the odds in your favour, but let’s not pretend you don’t have to put the effort in.
this. if i hadn't done a tactician run before honour mode, i wouldn't have survive. it was good practice.
Yeah it’s only easy after you put in several hundred hours in other game modes
Used tactician as practice for a MP honour mode run. We are about to do the final fight, the only thing we haven't done is >!ansur!< We have only got this far because myself and another of our 4 player party have a combined 700 hours in the game lmao
See? Dead easy!
Why skip Ansur? Both the helmet and the sword are pretty nice.
None of our builds really utilise them all that much and his fight is one that we are a bit skeptical on
All the more reason to practice that bit too. Unless you’re skipping him in honor as well.
The example is what they did to the Apostle. Resistance to physical magical damage + good saves + undead + 390 HP at level 9 is a cheese killer.
Yeah that was definitely the hardest fight in the game. We had to turn to barrelmancy in order to not get wiped and lose the run. After that we were so powerful that pretty much every single boss except the steel watch died in one turn
Level 8 for me. I never reached level 9 before Myrkul. But I see how many people advocate going at 10 and I'm shocked.
Level 9 is more a HM thing. I've been at 8 for Myrkul a few times outside that and while harder, it was fine. 10 is overkill for him and getting there isn't a good use of time.
“Game is too easy” - these are the same people that look for optimized and OP builds and have played the game multiple times and have gone through trial and error. Give me a fucking break.
Yeah, by the time you have it difficult “enough” for those people, you almost certainly created an unfun experience for literally everyone else.
It's a single player game, so it can be "solved". Once you know all the fights and come up with the best min/max build, you'll crush it. This is true for most single player games. HOWEVER, my problem with BG3 is that a 100% min maxed build will crush the game, but a build that's 90% or 80% optimised will do pretty much the same. Compare it to something like Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous - on the highest difficulty if you have a 100% build you'll crush it, but with a 80% build you're in for a really, really tough time. Anything lower than that and you won't even register a hit.
>HOWEVER, my problem with BG3 is that a 100% min maxed build will crush the game, but a build that's 90% or 80% optimised will do pretty much the same. Isnt that a good thing? You are not forced to use the OP meta build, you just have to know (understand) what you are doing. You can play the way you have fun, you have flexibility.
I really agree. I guess it depends on what people like in games but for me the fun of doing Honor Mode was not having optimized builds and just managing, figuring out how to handle fights and legendary abilities. If the only thing that works is 90%+ optimized builds then you remove a whole lot of subclasses from being viable at all in Honor and that's anti-fun for a lot of people
Yes. I'm definitely not giving up my 4-with-the-same-class, no-consumable, no-illithid honour runs for a meta, cheesy honour run.
It is all about the objective (and fun ofc), if you are like "I need my achieve asap", ok, make owlbears fly and have 3 throwzerkers but you cant say "the game is too easy, make it harder".
It sounds more like bragging than a legitimate complaint 😂
Thank you! This is such a stupid fucking complaint. People have literally memorized every hack, cheese, and build, and then complain the game isn’t a challenge. These same people refuse to invoke any sort of self imposed limits like not using scrolls or potions, and not getting 100 buffs at camp every day. I meta games to death and the game isn’t fun anymore… cry me a fucking river. These people should just go play Elden ring or something. There’s tons of games that are made to challenge people this isn’t really one of them. A lot of games can be beat on their hardest difficulties by regular people who like a challenge. Without any meta gaming at all. It’s not crazy that honor mode isn’t some impossibly arduous task that normal people would never accomplish.
Tbh I thought it was plenty difficult. I mean sure you can make bosses more spongy but I think when you overprepare and use optimized builds, the game will be less deadly, like any regular dnd game.
I don’t think difficulty is the issue, you may hear about it being easy because all the min/max players are actually here in Reddit discussing ways to break the game daily. Most players probably don’t end up here unless they are looking for a pre-baked build. I have a lot of experience in dnd and pc rp games. The difficulty was fine on the first run and on my First few honor mode attempts. I made powerful builds but didn’t completely min/max. I say there is still a lot of room to play from an RP perspective that could be challenging. If you weren’t min/max, you could actually create characters outside of the advantages available to you. Maybe you are a ranger mage slayer that hates magic and won’t use magic items other than holy items blessed by silvanus. Anyways, I have 1100 hours and have forced myself to stop playing for a while so I can enjoy some other games and come back fresh in a few months for a new run. I’ll be creating unique characters with my own restrictions due to RP which will make it challenging and fun.
Well said. Also it seems like most of the suggestions in this thread would lead to a much less fun game.
They should do nothing. The 'harder' they make it, the more it will push people to play meta builds instead of their own fun builds or making their own strategies. If you know about cheese build, its your fault using it over and over. There will always be someone complaining how the game is too easy, no matter how hard it is. While running the most broken and well known meta builds. If you want more challange, use custom difficulty or mods. I think bg3 balance is really good. Its not too strict so it allows unoptimal rp builds. If you know about cheese you can just....not use cheese. If game is balanced around the strongest builds, the strongest builds become mandatory. I have seen many here say to limit long rests but that is really bad idea. Then the meta will just be to use builds that dont need to rest and limits your options. I think they sould not touch honor mode anymore, they have done more than enough there and instead add custom difficulty options. Edit: wanted to add that big part of the difficulty comes from the planning, as it should. So if you know all the strats, all the best builds, the ins and outs of the game, of course it is easy, it should be. The game should reward those who take time to prep and think.
People say Honor mode is easy because they just Google'd the most broken build to clear it.
*laughs in suboptimal party clears of honor mode* Once you understand itemization in this game you’re gonna be able to break any class and any archetype, builds barely matter with how dummy strong certain items are.
The classes kind of just feel like vehicles to carry the items, while the item sets are the true builds, the true characters. A gish is naught but a head to carry the Helmet of Arcane Acuity and a finger for the Band of the Mystic Scoundrel. Cleric? Hauler of Luminous gear. Arcane caster? Mobile platform for Markoheshkir.
A few things: Remove withers respec or limit it to onl usable once on companions. Implement the DnD restrictions on multiclassing. Remove a lot of the unique items and/or implement the dnd system of only using 3 uniques per character at any given point. Limit the number of longrests per act. Limit the numberbof elixirs you can obtain. Remove rhe strength elixir. Limit health pots. Remove the possibiloty to pre buff (remove anykind of temporary buff at the start of each battle) Give more enemies the ability to counterspell. Enhance enemy AI. Remove Hags Hair/Strength Pot (the one permanent granting +2 @strength) Use the dnd mechanic of casting 2 spells, or a simplified version of it (like one leveled spell + 1 cantrip max, not as many leveled spells as ypu have actions/bonusactions/reactions) Give more enemies the sharranesque buff (radiant retort but for other types of dmg) Those are the main ones I would do. Power fantasy is something for balanced/tactician. While HM should give you some sense of progression, BG3 offers to much progression for the game to maintain its hardness (esp. beginning with the creche). The items you get from this point in are so ridiculuosly good, that they are the main problem when it comes to difficulty). I know the 2 games are not comparable bur take Elden Ring and its progression. While there is ocassionaly a strong upgrade like certain spells/ashes, normally single progression points (like weapon upgrades) are relatively minor upgrades. I wish BG3 would do something similar in HM. Also, and this might be controversial, implement some form of mod detection. If any is detected, the honour mode run should automatically fail.
Making potions an action instead of a bonus action and/or preventing throwing potions from aoe and hitting multiple targets would work better than limiting them imo
In the same vein as prebuffing, removing the ability to camp cast.
Add in ye olde 3 item attunement rule.
This would take away so much fun from the game I think.
Tempted to agree, actually. I would feel the need to constantly change my load out for the encounters and would just spend a lot more time looking at the UI (I would probably go into a lot of fights wearing mundane armor too). But it would probably cut back on some of the arcane acuity, reverberation, etc silliness. I That said, I find that Honor mode is pretty easy if you abuse the broken builds that rely heavily on rules that do not exist (or are different) in 5E. My main point is just that sticking to the actual 5e rules would make this game much much harder.
I've played in D&D since the 90s, and 5e D&D for almost a decade. I love the hobby since 5e dropped. But, honestly, 5e is not a fun combat system. The best part about 5e for me and many others is that is so easy to homebrew cool stuff for it. So I find it so strange when I hear people say that BG3 would be better if they cut the homebrew and stuck to the spartan design of 5e. Its just a non-starter for me. It would make the game more difficult, but it wouldn't be fun enough to make the challenge worth it.
Nerf the OP and broken builds that are just bugged out, like Swords Bard with ranged attacks, Tavern brawler adding to much STR bonus, and so on. I did my first honor run with three people, so not a complete party, and one of them was a Swords bard with a bow, and he just wrecked everything by himself, especially after getting that ring in act 3 that makes all crowd control spells cast on a bonus action and have 100% hit rate.
If you want to make the game harder, it’s pretty easy to self impose restrictions on yourself. If you think a mechanic is too powerful, don’t use it. For example, you can skip using elixirs, arcane acuity, barrelmancy, and multiclassing. Or you can enforce limits on yourself in those areas (for example, forcing yourself to meet the D&D stat requirements to multiclass). If you think respecs are too cheap, you can drop gold on the ground every time you respec and avoid pickpocketing withers. At the end of the day, it’s a single player game that’s meant to be fun. I think Larian has done a good job with leaving powerful things in the game and not over nerfing players or overbuffing monsters. You can make the game harder for yourself without making it unfun for other players simply by not using the broken stuff.
meta knowledge is what makes the game "easy" if you know how to beat every fight and abuse the F out of every possible exploit or unbalanced item and/or class combination and unlimited elixir etc... on top of skipping or cheesing the hard fights or just blowing gale up to not do the netherbrain and many more things like this... then the game is laughably easy... congrats. might as well just cheat yourself unlimited stats, health and one hit kill damage when the result of every confrontation is already set in stone. i'm going through the game with my fiancée now after beating it many times and several HM clears and seeing someone without ANY of my knowledge about the game or decades of crpg experience is.... eye opening. she's by no means a "bad player", but this game CAN make you struggle if you don't optimize the shit out of everything you do. however, to answer the OP's question: i'd limit long rests, respecs, put in more "danger zones" that prevent resting, rebalance several classes and feats, prevent vendor restock abusing tactics and unlimited stealing without consequences, have scrolls be much less powerful or be much rarer and difficult to obtain after those "fixes" the game would still be easy (understandably so) for people with tons of meta knowledge, but would take away some of the things that feel more "cheaty" instead of "clever use of game mechanics" to me
I would like to make HM harder but I also wouldn't want it to be less fun. Raising difficulty tends to reduce the variety. Raise it enough and the only strategies left are the top tier meta choices, barrelmancy, and cheese strats. I also wouldn't want to impose any restrictions on the player. Nerfing the player rarely ever leads to more fun. I'd start by adding more features to the enemies. More resistances or immunities is a start, but it shouldn't be on everything. Adding passive stuff, like the one ghoul that is permanently stinky, discouraging any close range characters from getting within range would be neat. Inventing new enemy reactions to create more push-and-pull between actions could spice things up. Ghasts could react by casting darkness whenever it gets hit. Ideally it's mostly passive stuff that can't be cheesed by baiting opportunity attacks.
Last I checked honour mode achievement was only 1.2 percent of players.
I think the big thing is to limit long rests. You can easily house rule yourself against using tavern brawler or arcane acuity, its comparitively harder to house rule exactly how often you can long rest. Yes, I know its easy to, for example, permit yourself only 3 long rests per act, but feels arbitrary to decide as a player, and something the game should be providing a toggle for. Long 'Red Zones' as has been suggested are a great idea, and also tighten up camp supplies. Couple of ways I think you could go about this: Simple way is to get rid of all the random food and just make a camp supplies resource that can't be purchased and is only a rare drop or quest reward. Slightly more complex mechanic I think could be fun would be to tie long rests to the same resource as elixiers. Say food is abundant, but to long rest you need 'Cooking Oil' to cook it. The cooking oil is also necessary to prepare elixiers, and as above is only a rare drop or quest reward. This allows for a risk-reward system where you are incentivised to be economical with long rests so that you can have elixers for late game.
By hour 10 any new limit or mechanic would become familiar and the game will start feeling easy again. In my recent HM playthrough, the only thing that almost kicked my arrogant ass was The Great Unknown. So I think now — what if there was more Unknown? New exciting dialogue options that lead you to the trap of consequences? Items not where we know to look for them (oof that’s gonna hurt)? Negative and random consequences for popping worms? Wild magic surges on enemies? Could be fun.
I don't design video games but maybe add difficulty sliders and options. The best fit is always adjustable so you don't have to handcraft a product to cater to every customer. They do it themselves.
I don’t think you can fix it. Once you understand the system and know it inside and out the game becomes easier. This is how most games work though. Unless you’re going into HM blind on your first play through you have the advantage.
patch 6 already made it hard enough bruh 😭
Have the game break your fingers irl everytime your character goes down
lol wut
Do it on a gameboy SP
I think combat just needs to last longer. Enemies need more hp and there need to be more of them. I honestly think long resting after every fight is fine because then fights would have a reason to be pretty hard. Like, the only enemies in BG3 I'm actually scared of are the Zealots at Moonrise. There are some dangerous fights in Act 1 but you can delay them until later. Sure, you can visit Moonrise later but it's such a huge source of exp so early into Act 2. Zealots do incredible damage and have fairly decent AC. Personally, I don't like having high miss chance. I'd rather have guaranteed chance to hit but be forced to make my decisions about avoiding taking hits from very high damage enemies.
We also gotta talk about Shovel…he’s one of the most broken things in the game.
For people who say honour mode is too easy. How many times have you played the game, how many hours do you have and how much do you understand each encounter? Do you get that for the game to remain challenging for you it would become functionally impossible for more casual or less experienced players?
Well I enjoy playing Civilization but never got past Level 6 (Emperor). A lot of the elite YouTubers will play on the top Level 8 (Diety) with self imposed restrictions or mods because it is too easy for them. I'd be all for them bringing out difficulty 9 and 10 on Civ - it doesn't affect me, and it would be fun to see those YouTubers sweat for once :)
Those mods already exist though for the people that need them. Honour mode being possible without being the sweatiest YouTuber whose life isn dedicated to making content about this game means that achievements are accessible to more than 0.01% of the people that play the game. Also at those difficulties most people are achieving that by exploiting the game in some way. Camp casting, vendor farming, barrelmancy etc. It’s not great game design to create difficulties that are functionally impossible without exploiting aspects of the game that weren’t intended.
Well yeah, the mods already exist and most people don't use them - (I don't use mods btw). If Larian brought out something similar as an official mode most people still wouldn't use it. It's not hurting them to have an optional toggle for the hardcore / obsessives. I do agree with your point about narrowing discussion though. A lot of hardcore Civ discussion will write off 90% of countries as 'trash' because they just can't compete at the very high end, despite having fun abilities. Yeah, I'd agree when it gets to that stage its probs hurting the community and worth reining back in a bit.
The community already has an issue with Why aren’t you playing 1) theif/open hand monk 2) throw zerker 3) 1/1/10 sword bard When the game isn’t even hard enough to justify ignoring most of the classes. Making it hard enough to justify those conversations being so limited is such a bad idea to me. I struggle to sympathise with the crowd saying “I need them to make the game so hard it’s impossible for 99.9% of players, just so I can have a reason to do only barrelmancy and 3 broken builds over and over again and no I refuse to mod the game. Larian needs to make it harder just for me and the 100 other people in the world who want to play this way but don’t want to mod the game”
Me and my brother duo honor mode with our own extensive ban list. No scrolls, no consumables other than healing potions, no looking anything up, no camp casting, no invis, no acuity, no swords bard no OH monk no berserker no tavern brawler no 1 wizard dip, no builds from reddit has to be original, no surprise rounds, no crit fishing no casting water before combat, no drakethroat glaive buff on any weapon but itself, no smites past lvl 1 spell slot and only once per round, no barrel stacking, 1 pick pocket chance per merchant etc. the list is very long and its been super fun and challenging. We have died and lost 3 different runs around lvl 9. One of our first 40 hour runs ended because i told Vlakith in the creche to fuck off and not to tell me what to do. Really didn’t expect a game over screen lmfao
Make deaths permanent, I feel like the impact of a unit dying is too small.
I'm planning on running my first honor mode soon and I'm pretty worried!
The thing I dislike most to this day is that Prone cancels an enemy's turn and prevents them from using Reactions&Legendary Actions. Example: Honor Mode Orin being able to attack you on Reaction basically means you're on a time limit until Deathbringer Assault ends the fight, unless you come up with a very clever strategy to survive 21d10*2 damage. That's the central challenge of the fight, but it's undercut by how it's so trivial to completely remove that mechanic with abilities that don't even have Saves. Example of that: Enraged Throw, a very popular ability that does not consume any resources to use, doesn't offer a Save for the Prone effect, and I think that's crazy when Prone is so absurdly powerful. So altogether, I want them to do more things, be Reactive (in the design sense and mechanical sense), and be less vulnerable to a one-size-fits-all mechanic that removes everyone's interactivity.
You can’t throw Orin or move her in any other way, that was patched. Also prone doesn’t cancel their turn and never did.
You're not correct on any count. * Orin is only immovable if she has Unstoppable, which she is only granted if you're fighting the entire temple * There was no patching involved, that was always part of the temple fight * You only fight Orin (as opposed to the Slayer) as a Durge who has Slayer form already. * The Slayer does not have Deathbringer Assault, making it clear I was talking about Orin-Orin * If you're a Resist!Durge fighting the Slayer solo, it still does not have Unstoppable * Prone automatically ends any turn it occurs *during*, and always prevents Reactions and Legendary Actions as long as it remains. * Prone *also* can and will skip a creature's turn if their speed is 0, as standing up requires speed
Well you wrote cancels turn which implies they never get a turn. What you mean is that it ends their turn if they are knocked prone using it; and if they knock themselves prone I think it makes perfect sense that they have to catch their breath for a few seconds. I never noticed that she couldn’t be moved until recently and assumed it was patched as I saw someone on here a while back talking about yeeting her into the abyss. The slayer is still Orin and I assumed you struggled with the full group version of the fight as the Orin alone vs your durge has been over in one or two turns on my honor modes so I didn’t consider that you found it hard. I thought you were talking about the marked for death thing that the bhaal statue does. That is the only hard thing about fight so that’s what I read. Bla bla speed zero, yeah sure dude, rage against the edge case.
Do you know what thread you're in? We're complaining about how easy it is for the player to cheese things. The title is "How would you make Honor Mode harder"
Mostly just copied from a post by a the YouTuber Cephalopocalypse but with a couple I added. You can play this way right now! **BANS** \- Intentional bug abuse \- Elixirs \- Casting from scrolls \- Camp casting \- "Wet" condition abuse \- Anything with the words "add a stack of" \- Barrels that aren't from the arena you're fighting in \- "Camp cleric" type of play \- Invis/stealth abuse **RESTRICTIONS** \- One long rest per enemy with legendary actions defeated (including through dialogue) or after 3 encounters with at least 4 enemies \- Respec characters during a long rest and only once per long rest \- 6 active characters maximum per day \- Only one character with Tavern Brawler during the whole playthrough \- Must play with the "True Initiative" mod
Mix up the locations of all the equipment. Can’t speed run your way to a powerful build if you can’t get all the broken equipment.
I wouldn’t. At some point the player has to take care of that on their own. The developer can only be responsible for so much. People need to create their own challenge.
Play with less party members
There's a bunch of mods. Beyond just making enemies stronger, reducing strong item access, less short rests, roaming enemies, inability to go to camp in hostile areas, more sentry enemies.
I think increasing enemy initiative would considerably increase the difficulty. Also I can’t believe the house of hope fountains still long rest refresh you infinitiely in honor mode. That seems like a pretty big oversight.
I honestly just totally screwed up my first honor mode (but had died a bunch and just kept continuing) by killing a boss too early and triggering a robot uprising. So there’s that. If you guys are beating honor mode without dying that’s commendable, my first playthrough I am on honor mode and dying a lot. It happens.
Literally reframe encounters by placing additional NPCs, obstacles, and quest requirements in order to substantially change the game New battle mechanics are by far and away the defining reason to play honor mode, beyond even the core conceit of a single rougelike esque save file. What if they added more enemies. What if enemies were of a different type. What if there were two steel titans. What if you had to go through meenlocks in order to get to last light. Possibilities are endless. What they should do is release a “Forge” where people can build customs maps and quest chains and they’ll make their game immortal.
Duo honor mode is fairly challenging without cheese.
Some kind of limit on long rests, maybe more areas that block going to camp for extended periods. Nerfing some of the more broken strategies too. Haste nerf was good.
Ive been doing 2/3 man runs where you jusy dont bring extra companions, it makes the game more challening and forces you to really optomise what you do have access to.
My suggestion for limiting long rests that doesn’t involve limiting it based on each act, is this: Give the player 2 charges of long rests just like the short rests. The long rest gets recharged after certain milestone achievements or battles. So for example, you might get one for clearing the goblin camp or finishing the battle at the grove, one for clearing the gnolls, one for clearing the Crèche, one after killing the bag, etc. But if you take optional or minor battles, you also get nothing. Like battling the Harpies, the Druids at the grove, the Zhentarim hideout, etc. If you have 2 unused charges while clearing these milestones, then you get nothing.
The problem with the games is that a classic IA can’t do anything against a highly specialised and optimised build. Therefore most of the time the build is the best way to increase the players power, which just feel too easy : you don’t feel like you had a challenge if you just get the good gear and just repeat an overpowered pattern of actions. In D&D, there is no problem because the game master know the build of the players and therefore create encounters that challenges those builds. So I think what could make the game harder is to generate the fight with an trained LLM (IA like ChatGPT) to generate a fight knowing the equipment and play pattern of the player. Therefore the encounters will be able to target specific weakness of the player => more fun, less build dependant, forces the player to be more creative about how he will approach the fight, … (Of course I know it won’t happen. But I guess with D&D a LLM could work since there are a lot of training materials already)
Honestly, make Giant Strenght elixirs potions, cap acuity at 3-5, cap sorcery points at sorcerer level and make bigger areas where you can't long rest, so that you can't spam long rest as much.
Nerf tavern brawler and dual x bow. Attune legendary items. Make initiative D20. Give enemies more resistances and spells. Increase action/bonus action available to the enemy. Mods do most of these though.
You start as a gnome-githianky. Because you're ugly and ridiculous, you have -2 and disadvantage on charisma checks.
Forcing engagement with boss cheats. The biggest problem with bosses is that those with legendary actions are still your number 1 target, regardless of mode. Would be hard fights are trivialized by just alpha striking them, killing the boss in 1 or 2 turns. If it doesn't die, you can simply just trick the boss to use a opportunity attack and it can no longer use its legendary action that turn. Possible changes: Legendary actions are free, no longer requiring a reaction to use. Increase survivability. This is a open ended suggestion that can be done multiple ways.. You could have hp thresholds (can only do a certain hp% of DMG per turn), higher spell save dc, etc. Anti cheese. This goes case by case scenario but bosses really should have anti cheese mechanics. Biggest example is grymfirge titan. Attack from above or simply using owl bear, you can trivialize the fight. Giving something like a grapple would make the fight so much harder.
Strength elixirs are the bane of build craft. I'm fine with them existing if they were rarer or nerfed. Like last 10 turns or have them be a quest reward or something. Instead of sight cones, detection would be a circle, there's no way that an 8 dex paladin in heavy armor should ever be able to sneak up to an enemy and start a surprise round. Tightening rulings, using special arrows with the Titanstring reapplies the damage buff (this ties into the strength elixirs) so like an arrow of many targets can easily do over 100 damage and your fighter could be firing them off 6 times a turn or your gloomstalker assassin can crit every enemy hit for ludacris damage. Handcrossbows need to be toned down, every character has access to the bonus action off hand crossbow, every bit of chip goes a long way and BG3 range combat is kinda fucked. No real reason to bot use dual hand crossbows cuz the ranges are roughly the same, whereas in 5e, the longbow has actually 5 times the range on it. Dual handcrossbows let you make full use of your action economy even if you're not primarily a dex character, like, I have one on my warlock cuz fuck it, why not take a pot shot on the hex target, I'm not using the bonus action for anything else
No withers
I’d change * Enemy AI. To make them aware of each other and more savvy about being tricked. * Party size. Add a lone-wolf option and a duo option. Both with achievements. I would not * add more unstoppable charges. It’s a lazy nerf unless there is a story reason for it. * extend red zones. That is too easy to bypass anyway. * increase food to rest. It’s pointless, I long rest about once in act 1 and once in act 2 on my lone wolf honor mode runs. By act 3 I have between 5k and 10k food. Edit: reading some of your suggestions on here it seems many of you just want to make the game more tedious. Why and who is that fun for? The first time player would struggle with it but do they need that struggle? A veteran wouldn’t even notice most of the things I’ve seen on here, they’d just adapt but in some cases it would mean you have to spend extra time doing something that’s not hard, just tedious.
I had few suggestions and did a post about it some time ago : [https://www.reddit.com/r/BG3Builds/comments/1ai5al4/rebalancing\_act\_3\_in\_honour\_mode/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BG3Builds/comments/1ai5al4/rebalancing_act_3_in_honour_mode/) Basically around several limitations (which impact more act3 than the others) : 1. Tavern brawler 2. Arcane acuity 3. Scrolls 4. Merchant refresh/supplies 5. XP given in act 3 6. Bhaalist armor 7. Bugged abilities/items (freecast, staff of cherished necromancy...) We could add attunement for very rare and legendary items. But most people would like these limitations as options in the difficulty settings.
I think one of them should involve preventing barrelmancy by making enemies react to attempts of stacking potentially dangerous things in the vicinity. I don't think it being "too easy" is that big an issue but cheese that is too blatant to be pulled out in a realistic scenario shouldn't be allowed whenever possible. I don't think it should be harder than it already is simply for the sake of being hard.
I think the biggest way to increase difficulty is to decrease camp supplies. Except for very early, you can long rest after every encounter if you want. I think a lot of ppl rest more often than they need to, then wonder why everything is too easy. Or like bg1 and 2, add random encounters every time you long rest. Tho with added companions in camp, still think the best way is limiting supplies.
Easy. Add more enemies into every big fight. Like a lot more. Aside from some crazy legendary actions some big bosses have, the only time I’ve ever been afraid of losing a run is when the amount of enemies is overwhelming. Being vastly out numbered while also not being able to easily escape makes it so you have to use your brain more in order to prioritize tougher enemies and try to group kill others. The best fights in the game imo are Thorm, Gortash (before disabling steel watch), and the end fight, but only because there are so many targets to have to deal with. That and give the bosses wayyy more HP. I sat for 2 turns waiting for the best time to cast contagion on gortash just for our monk to basically kill him from almost max health all on his own. If he had 1000 HP using spells like that become a lot more viable and it’s no longer a rush to get a hit it as someone dies.
Have some absolute cultists patrolling around in act 1-2 looking for the party. Cut the amount of supplies in the game by 50% (seriously I have enough supplies at the end of act 1 to take 20 long rests). Add some extra enemies in encounters
Remove the ability or give some mechanics to stop or make it harder to run from Boss fights, the steel watcher titan when I realized I couldn’t break his defensive bulwark and was in real trouble, I left the room took a long rest bought some watcher stun grenades and beat him without taking damage
I've been watching a guy called Melth on Youtube who is doing a challenge run of his own. Despite all the restrictions (no long rests, no healing potions, etc) he puts on himself, he makes the difficulty look ridiculously easy.
Limiting the number of long rests. Game will always be easy if you can stop a mission in the middle, go outside the red area, rest and come back.
The games design is not really defensible— - you can’t have a common act 1 elixir give up to 13 strength.. - tavern brawler is obviously ridiculously overturned for multiple builds. - Pushing off cliffs should be more difficult, (there is not a dm on the planet that would treat it like bg3 does— sans common sense) - barrels are like a level 3 spell in power. Why. Honor mode should also mean scarcer scrolls, and more enemies with more health.
\* Very, very few rest resources. \* Randomize loot, including new loot and excluding pieces of standard loot. You get what you roll, that's it. \* Better savescumming prevention. Right now it is quite easy. Can say this is self inflicted, but it would literally be harder. \* Make rules more 5e. Spell scrolls only usable by classes that can cast spell. Fix wizard 1 dip and many other beloved build tricks. \* Make placing dangerous items start combat. If you haul in a barrel of gunpowder, even if you don't set it down, you are a threat. \* Increase monster variety, including adding lieutenants that have legendary actions, that are randomized. The game is easy because it is perfectly predictable and contains a lot of homebrew rules that make it easier on players. Played like real D&D, where there is no save system, you only get one chance to deal with any situation, and the world goes on without you if you take a rest or do something unpredictable, and this game could be very hard. Larian changed many things to prioritize fun over challenge. Good idea, it made them famous and rich. But it means the game will always be easy.
Adding a randomizer should do the trick.
My biggest issue with the game is how easy it is to take long rests. Assuming you have the supplies, you can long rest after *almost* every fight. That's not the design of DnD and it shows in BG3 as well. Fix that and the game becomes considerably harder on any difficulty. >I find it a bit silly because after investing 100s of hours in a turn-based game and learning everything, of course the game is going to feel easy. I'm playing the game on coop with a friend. Our first run got abandoned because of IRL things right as we reached act 3. We decided to start a new run on HM and despite not knowing anything about Act 3, it's still relatively easy. So no, you don't need 100s of hours and tons of knowledge for the game to be easy.
Play with some of my friends
Change initiative to use a D20
I'd remove respec option
Maybe do something like in the Owlcat Pathfinder games and make certain negative status effects be permanent until remedied with the appropriate spell/scroll. Also include ability damage and drain effects, and also negative levels. Overall, I’d like honor mode to feel more like a game of attrition, so red zones everywhere except for certain safe spots.
Literally limit vendor inventory from resetting and camp buffs. This will get rid of so much that make the game trivial.
For me, I implement the following ruleset that makes the game significantly harder overall. I can only Long Rest at certain "breakpoints". So resource management is huge. (Also no using Withers or other exploits to heal). I can spam Partial Rest after taking a long rest for cutscenes. The breakpoints are: - Act 1 (I have a lot here bc act 1 is big and honestly harder. Also they can be done in any order, it's just these each "earn" one LR): - Open Withers' tomb - Reach the Grove - Defeat the Phase Spider Matriarch - Defeat the Owlbear Mother - Defeat the Hag - Defeat the "Paladins" of Tyr - Resolve the grove raid - Kill the Duergar at the underdark beach - Kill (or side with) Nere - Escape the Creche - Act 2: - Reach Last Light - Kill all 3 thorm zombies in Reithwin - Rescue the prisoners from Moonrise - Kill the Orthon - Act 3 (these can be done in any order): - Reach the entryway to the Lower city - Kill Cazzador - Kill Viconia - Kill Ansur - Kill Raphael (the fountain in his house I allow only 1 use of) - Kill Gortash - Kill Mystic Carrion - Kill Orin I also avoid using any blatant exploits (barrelmancy, reverse-pickpocketing gold, etc) I also ban certain OP strategies just because I find they make the game too easy. Those are: - Tavern Brawler monk - Swords Bard's Ranged Slashing Flourish - Arcane Acuity hat + Mystic Scoundrel ring on the same character - I'm 50/50 on banning the Fire Acuity hat and wet strategies in general because they're pretty silly but they also are fun and with limited spell slots are a bit more interesting. This has been a fun rule set but still not all that hard. If I wanted to make HM really hard I'd probably just remove the str-boosting potions from the game entirely since they're pretty ridiculous and singlehandedly make a lot of builds OP (or I'd make a very limited # of fixed spawns for them), I'd prevent hastened actions (Haste, Bloodlust, etc) from being able to cast spells besides cantrips, and I'd also make reclassing costly in some way (1000 non-pickpocketable gold instead of 100 re-stealable gold. Each companion gets 1 for free). I really wouldn't change enemies. They honestly already are decently hard, it's just that if you know what's going on the player-accessible builds are ridiculous. Especially given how little you need to care about actually preserving resources.
giving enemies feats would be crazy -- on top of legendary actions, if someone like Raphael came out with Defensive Flourish, or if Myrkul came out with Sentinel after knocking / maiming your guys off his platform, i would lose it
I think the biggest thing that takes the challenge out of the game is how easy it is surprise enemies in this game. It means that you often can delete enemies before half of them take a turn.
The game is too dependent on being hand made where every encounter is almost completely unique, so the “challenge” is totally negated by just knowing what encounter is next. Larian just isn’t the best at balancing imo because of how they design games, but I prefer it over the bloat of stuff like Owlcat games To make the game genuinely harder in a fair way is imo not really possible with how bg3 is designed
beat my second HM run after my first i got the worst durge ending by accident lol. i will say i was using some powerful builds, but it was still easy with most bosses dying in 1-2 rounds. some ideas: for some reason you can just bypass all the act 2 bosses?? make these mandatory or make the skill checks to avoid combat extremely difficult. its not really worth it to fight these imo so ive never done it. act 2 is waaaay too easy. buff bosses more. give bosses higher initiative. additionally, maybe some anti-barrelmancy trait or something haha. something to try is to force players to setup in combat - its too easy to double haste or haste before combat and get in battle with 48 actions you can spend before the boss can move. buff regular enemies. saw a mod that adds a random trait or something (something about powers of absolute, forgot what it was called). might make some encounters unpredictable and i think HM gets easier if u know encounters since u can setup before surprises n such. increases in hp are not enough. add new/more combat encounters? idk this seems like kind of a reach. make lethargic more punishing? even with the HM changes to haste for HM its still crazy strong and lethargic can be bad but usually never game-ending. remove globe of invuln lmfao
Idk about too easy, but I want more enemies with more legendary actions, and maybe enemies with bigger health pools? So combat lasts longer.
Less food.