The writer got mad when a goblin shoved Astarion off a cliff. It reminded me of when I had Karlach shove a goblin in lava, then a goblin ran up and shoved HER in the lava. I didn’t get mad; I took it as a learning moment: enemies can shove me back, so move away from the lava.
The writer finds the combat tedious? I think it’s amazing! Sometimes you stomp a horde of weak enemies, sometimes you come up with a clever strategy to face overwhelming odds, sometimes you fight a tense battle where the enemies get lucky and you use more resources than expected, and once in a while you get stomped because you made a really bad decision or the enemies got really lucky.
Unlike them, I have not found combat on Balanced difficulty to be quick-savey. I’m 90 hours in and I think the only time I’ve saved during combat was when I was trying to brainstorm ways to move a nonlethally knocked-out NPC out of an impending AoE without killing them. (The answer was Shove, btw, it always succeeds on unconscious targets, but be aware of cliffs. Throwing them, on the other hand, will deal 1 damage and murder them.) I have, I think, 2 combat Game Overs, and one of them was on a fight that the game telegraphs as being wildly imbalanced and tries pretty hard to discourage you from engaging in at all; I still went back and won it on the next try, once I had a better idea of what I would be dealing with. Once you are out of the early game and have a few levels under your belt, you should have all the tools you need to control the course of fights.
Honestly, when I was reading the article, I found myself thinking it sounded like the writer would be happier playing a visual novel or a dating sim.
I’m pretty terrible at the combat (never played D&D, never played CRPGs before and terrible at strategy games), but I’m still having fun figuring it out.
Especially compared to DOS2, the combat is really engaging IMO.
Yeah DOS was brutal, especially early on. I was ready for that same experience but was quite surprised how easy/forgiving things are in comparison. I will be upping the difficulty for my next run for sure
I definitely don’t disagree with the author here. Combat does feel tedious. I spent 2 days trying to kill the owlbear on balanced. I had to quick save every turn to avoid my entire party being 1-shot in the same turn. I think I had 15-20 game over scenarios when attempting to fight it.
I never much enjoyed dnd combat either, so that’s probably a major focus. Combat feels almost entirely random with next to no consistent hit rules. Honestly it’s on me for not researching the game more before buying it. It’s a great game but I have a 0% chance of ever finishing it due to how frustrating the combat is.
The easiest cheese is to send a rogue in alone to kill it from stealth. The ai isn’t smart enough to find you if you start on the higher ledges. Attack, bonus action hide, move, repeat.
Doing it straight didn’t give me a lot of trouble. Spread out, don’t skimp on spell slots. Spiritual weapon and flaming sphere are pretty good and might distract the owl bear into hitting them instead of you.
Dnd 5e isn’t a very deep game so there aren’t that many options, really .
Gonna be honest, I have never attempted the owlbear fight; I have Examined the owlbear and I don’t need that kind of heat at level 3, lol. All the obvious ways I can think of to do it either involve getting lucky (for example I’m pretty sure you win if it fails its save against Blindness, but it is strong in Constitution saves so it probably won’t) or respeccing your companions into cheesier classes (for example, everyone is Gloomstalker rangers and you blow it up from stealth on turn 1).
I have some ideas for approaching it with a balanced party (grease bottles to hopefully keep it prone?) but I’d definitely be sweating if I had to fight it that way!
I didn’t even try the owlbear fight because I had Talk with Animals on and the Ranger dialogue option was basically, “my bad my bad sorry didn’t mean to come in here please don’t eat us,” so I figured she knew better than me what we would be up against, so I peaced out immediately upon passing that roll check.
I ended up restarting (had made some decisions that were less than great) and was able to beat it pretty easy once I had someone able to output real dps (15-20 damage)
But yeah, I got lucky when I finally did win. I found it a lot easier than some of the other larger fights in the area.