Baldur’s Gate 3 players are praising Larian for balancing martial and spellcasting characters, addressing a long-running Dungeons & Dragons issue.
D&D players have long criticized the power disparity between melee and magic characters, with many noting that spellcasting classes greatly overshadow martial ones as the game goes on.
But while Baldur’s Gate 3 draws on D&D, Fifth Edition players have praised developer Larian Studios for bridging the “martial/caster divide,” with one meme shared on Reddit summing up the situation and sparking a conversation on how the devs pulled it off.
The post cites potions that temporarily increase the Strength stat and the prevalence of magic items as factors that let martial characters keep up with magic users.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is full of gear that improves aspects of a build, providing extra abilities, spells, and more that a melee character can really benefit from. The best are unsurprisingly limited to later in the game, but there are plenty of helpful ones you can find early in Act 1.
Commenters on the Reddit post have also noted that the game’s level cap helps even things out. Limiting characters to level 12 means you won’t be able to cast spells higher than level 6, eliminating potentially overpowered options like the level 7 Wizard spell Simulacrum – which essentially allows you to make copies of yourself or other party members.
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Also notable are the elimination of 5e’s attunement rules (which greatly limit how many magic items a character can benefit from at once), nerfs to spells like Polymorph and Counterspell, and encounter designs that make shoving and jumping (things martial characters do better than casters) incredibly useful.
Of course, not all of these options are transferable to tabletop D&D. For one, plenty of Dungeon Masters have cautioned against adapting Baldur’s Gate 3’s gear, explaining that they would be overpowered in a TTRPG.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat is more favorable to players than D&D’s. This is by design, as D&D players have infinite options for how they use their character’s abilities in and out of combat, and a human DM can adjust in ways a video game obviously cannot.
While Larian’s solutions might not be the answer, D&D is planning to address the martial/caster divide. Playtests for the upcoming rules revision include a brand-new weapon mastery system and other tweaks, which should hopefully help melee characters keep with their their spellcasting counterparts.
