Spells and abilities work very differently in Baldur’s Gate 3 than the tooltips indicate. The community has now found this out – the reason is a display bug.
The mechanics behind Baldur’s Gate 3 are not so easy for newcomers to understand:
- Why do spells hit and why do they miss?
- How exactly do the values affect the probabilities of attacks?
What is child’s play for Pen&Paper veterans can be very confusing for newcomers.
It is even more annoying when the game does not provide the correct information and misleads even veterans.
What is the problem with spells? For attacks to hit in Baldur’s Gate 3, there are two different types of attacks:
- For attack rolls, the attacker must roll and exceed a certain value, such as the armor of the enemy. If the value is exceeded, the attack hits.
- For saving throws, the victim may roll. For example, they must exceed the “Spell Save DC” of the attacker to resist the spell.
The probability of whether an attack or defense is successful is displayed in the game in the tooltips. These are percentage chances that usually relate to a 20-sided die.
The problem: The game often takes the wrong values as the basis for the calculations in the tooltips and therefore shows lower chances than actually are the case.
How does the error occur? It seems to simply be confusions in the code. Because in the tooltips, the modifier of the same attribute, which the defender must take when defending, is taken for the difficulty of the “Spell Save DC” – even if these values differ.
Or, to illustrate with an example:
- The spell “Sacred Flame” is enhanced on the attacker’s side by the Willpower value. The higher the attacker’s Willpower value, the more difficult the “Spell Save DC” that the defender must roll over.
- The defender rolls and adds their Dexterity modifier to the result when defending against “Sacred Flame”, as it is a Dexterity saving throw.
- The problem here is: Even for the attacker, the attribute is included in the tooltip that indicates the modifier for the defender.
This means: In the tooltip of the spell “Sacred Flame”, Baldur’s Gate shows the Spell Save DC calculated from the base value (10) plus talents plus the Dexterity modifier of the target, even though it should actually use the Willpower modifier. The calculation in the tooltip is therefore incorrect.
That sounds complicated – and it is at first glance. This is probably also the reason why the error has not been noticed clearly until now.
At least: If you select a spell and hover the mouse over the desired target, the correct probability of a hit is displayed there. The correct calculation is also performed in the calculation that you can view in the combat log.
Ultimately, it is mainly a bug in the tooltip, thus a visual error. While it is not a game-breaker, it is still very annoying for all those who are not very familiar with D&D or Pen&Paper in general. For them, this can be quite confusing.
That the bug has been in the game since the end of last year and is only now being properly understood is also a bit strange. But at least players have been able to make sense of it now. Therefore, it is probably only a matter of time before it gets fixed in an upcoming patch.
