Baldur's Gate 3 Has Done a Lot to Convince Me that Martials Need a Buff

 I love Karlach. I'm a big fan of Lae'zel. But I rarely use them in my party.

Here's why:

When I can have Wyll and Gale dropping Fireballs on massive groups of Absolute Cultists, as awesome as Lae'zel's Great Weapon-master strikes can be, it just doesn't make up for the multiplicative damage potential of hitting a whole bunch of targets at once. Lae'zel, when a GWM attack lands, hits like a freight train, to be sure. If she's using a Glaive with a +2 enchantment, she's hitting for like 1d10+7+10, or 21.5 damage. And with two attacks (we're level 9 at the moment) she's doing this twice. So, say, 43 damage overall (if the attacks hit).

But if Wyll drops a Fireball on some fools (and as a Warlock, it's upcast to 5th level) we're looking at 10d6, or 35 damage on a failed save. But even if every target succeeds on its save, if I hit three targets (which is usually my threshold for dropping a fireball) or more, we're looking at 17.5 thrice over, or 52.5 damage. In other words, Lae'zel's best case scenario is not doing as much damage as Wyll's worst case scenario.

Now, sure, the idea here is that spells cost resources. But at least in BG3, you have a lot of control over how frequently you rest, and the camp supplies to do so are plentiful (which I'm very grateful for - this isn't a survival horror game, and I don't want to be scrounging constantly while nearly dead for food). The only times when you are really forced to commit without taking long rests is a few "dungeon" areas, but even then, if you consider HP a resource, the ability to clear out, say, a giant swarm of undead with a Fireball will save you a lot.

Now, here's where I think martials could also potentially have a lot of power - their survivability. My main character in BG3 is a Paladin built for tanking. He has some fancy heavy armor (taken from the main villain of act two) and an adamantine shield that ultimately leave him with a 23 AC - so attacks do actually miss him most of the time.

But I think that the survival capability of literally just staying at range is actually stronger. It's rare that Gale or Wyll go down or even take damage, much less knocked out.

On top of that, it's relatively easy to outfit ranged characters with nearly as good armor as melee characters - and sometimes easier. Medium armor is nearly as good as heavy armor until you get to the very pinnacle of it (assuming you have the requisite dexterity). You do have to be tactical and keep your ranged characters at range, but there are lots of tools to help with that (I basically try to get Misty Step on any character who can have it).

I don't really know what the design solution is here. Do we have martials get significantly higher HP? Like, should a Fighter have 50% more or even double the HP of a Wizard? Should they get tools to reduce incoming damage even when they take it? (The Barbarian has this, of course, but also tends to have lower AC, balancing it somewhat with other martials, but not against ranged spellcasters). Do we need martials to deal significantly more damage with their weapons? Or do we need to give them Area-of-Effect tools?

See, my original class-based RPG I played was World of Warcraft, and while balance has shifted over the years, generally every class has area-effect capabilities, and so the many melee classes are pretty great when in the thick of it - a Demon Hunter blade-dancing through swarms of foes, or a Paladin laying down a Consecration to burn any foes standing near them.

It's a very different game, to be sure (for one thing, the monsters are very deterministic in their behavior, and will, for example, happily run into said Paladin's consecration) but it does strike me that D&D could use a way to make the armored knights (and particularly the unarmored monks) shine.

I think in theory you could suggest that in a single-target situation, martials might be better. But it's incredibly rare to face a single monster on its own - the action economy sort of makes such a fight far too easy.

Anyway, given how closely the BG3 mechanics are based on 5E, it actually serves as a kind of accelerated playtest for the game - you can get through several combat encounters in a single sitting, when at a table you're probably doing at most two or three in a night.