Summary

• Tactician difficulty in Baldur's Gate 3 increases enemy intelligence and tactics, making battles more challenging and requiring careful strategy and counter-strategies.
• Enemies on Tactician difficulty interact with the environment in clever ways, utilizing cover, elevation, and immobilizing spells, making party placement and individual isolation difficult.
• Tactician mode gives enemies access to more complex strategies, including the use of elemental arrows, consumables, and stronger equipment, adding depth and difficulty to combat encounters.

Baldur's Gate 3 can be challenging on even its Normal difficulty setting, but Tactician provides the perfect way to crank up the difficulty for a particularly punishing run. Like tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, Baldur's Gate 3 features a wide array of systems to master and items to employ. Although these can seem intimidating at first, gaining a true mastery over them and being unafraid to burn through resources can ultimately make many fights in Normal start to feel like a walk in the park.

Committing to Tactician difficulty isn't for the faint of heart, and it's best to understand what will change before deciding to make the world of the Forgotten Realms more threatening than ever before. The name of the mode makes its basic promise clear, as Tactician requires more careful strategy and precise leveraging of risks and supplies to press forward throughout the campaign. Finishing a playthrough on Tactician can be a uniquely rewarding experience, however, and the bragging rights that go along with it are nothing to sneeze at either.

Tactician Makes Baldur's Gate 3 Enemy AI Smarter

Anyone who has ever DMed a DnD campaign should be intimately familiar with how much combat difficulty can be adjusted by the amount of intelligence imbued to the enemies. A horde can become much more threatening if they're targeting glass cannon party more unflinchingly, and moving to quickly finish off downed party can add an extra level of brutality. On Tactician difficulty, enemies skew more heavily toward tactics like these, so maintaining the upper hand will require quicker wits and more complex counter-strategies than on lower settings.

Enemies also tend to interact with the environment in more clever ways on Tactician, establishing party placement more important than ever. Enemies are more responsive to small firefights, making it difficult to isolate and kill individual foes. Ledges are more dangerous than on lower difficulty settings, as enemies are just as happy as players to take advantage of shoves. Cover and elevation likewise see a general boost in usage, and enemies find more effective ways to deal with a party that has the high ground. Immobilizing spells can become a nightmare in certain situations.

Enemies are more likely to take cover in Tactician mode, so direct ranged attacks aren't always a good idea on the setting.

One of the biggest elements of Baldur's Gate 3 tactics is the smart employment of items and weapons, as even a weak character can wreak havoc with powerful spell scrolls or the clever use of miscellaneous tools. Tactician mode puts more of these possibilities into the hands of enemies, helping to give them access to even more complex strategies. Archers that fired typical arrows on lower settings might be equipped with elemental variants on Tactician, and consumables like bombs and health potions come into play with greater frequency. Although random foes won't end up with game-breaking equipment, even small changes can make a big difference in the heat of battle.

Enemies Get Buffs In Baldur's Gate 3's Tactician Mode

The more direct assistance to enemy threats on the Baldur's Gate 3 Tactician difficulty comes from direct stat boosts, and every foe enters combat with some basic upgrades. A 30% increase in HP across the board isn't all that much in some early encounters, but large groups of enemies or bosses with huge health pools ultimately become much harder to chew through. They're also more likely to avoid taking damage or having effects inflicted upon them with a general +2 to saves, which can significantly increase the failure rate of a party's offensive techniques.

On the enemies' offensive end, a +2 to hits likewise lets them dole out damage more consistently. Interestingly, the Karmic Dice feature that reduces failed rolls appears to drastically benefit enemies with the +2 to hit in Tactician mode, resulting in them landing plenty of additional hits on the party to a degree that dwarfs their performance on lower difficulty settings. Turning Karmic Dice off will make the +2 to hit a more manageable threat, although it will also increase a party's failures against the improved defense of enemies on Tactician.

Long Rests Drain More Resources On Tactician In BG3

Long Rests are determined by resource allotment in Baldur's Gate 3, requiring 40 camp supplies for each rest on Normal difficulty. On Tactician, the supply requirement doubles to 80, making recovery a somewhat more precious resource. Not only does this put pressure on the party to loot everything in sight and perhaps purchase more supplies from vendors, but it also incentivizes conserving spell slots and abilities in combat to try to make it through more battles in between rests. Erring too far on the side of caution, however, can leave a party heavily under-equipped to deal with a difficult fight, making for something of a tightrope act overall.

Baldur's Gate 3 tends to throw out a heavy surplus of food and supplies on lower difficulty settings, so increasing the rarity of long rests is a change that's arguably for the better, even in more balanced playthroughs. On the flip side, many character interactions and story events require rests to trigger, so taking them infrequently can lead to more lost story content. Across all difficulty settings, long rests can be taken at most times and in most environments, so the main limiting factor in actual DnD play isn't often relevant to Baldur's Gate 3.

Tactician mode is a great way for veterans of tactical RPG combat to take on a true challenge in Baldur's Gate 3, with a wide array of individually minor tweaks adding up to a significantly more difficult experience overall. Anyone wanting to go even further can look to mods to crank things up to the next level, although taking that step should definitely only be a last resort. With smarter and more powerful enemies and fewer chances for a party to recharge, the Tactician difficulty setting is the definitive way to experience a nail-biting strategic run of Baldur's Gate 3.