Due to mods, many/most enemies in the game will be encountered at a higher level than vanilla to limit the frequency of “out leveling” the game (although this may not be reflected in the UI). Enemies will try to roughly scale on a slight lag behind the player. With Combat Extender, enemies will have access to 5e and PF2e spells, will fight smarter, and receive additional buffs to catch up with the accelerating player power after level 10. Some of the new spells (especially PF2e) can be quite nasty, but the most debilitating ones (like turn to stone, or AoE banish effects) should be limited to boss encounters like N’ere and Balthazar. A handful of new encounters are seeded throughout Act 1 and Act 2, with hopefully more to come in Act 3! All of these factors will inflate XP gain over the course of your campaign, possibly pushing Listonomicon into a “1.66x speed” leveling experience. Make sure to provide feedback on this pace, and let us know what level you are at the start of Act 2 and Act 3.
As a baseline, boss fights are tuned to be slightly more difficult, in addition to the Honour Mode Features Unlocker providing bosses with their unique, honor mode mechanics. Regular enemies will receive a bonus to their stats, rolls, movement, damage, and resources at a slower pace. Essentially, every time the player would reach a new power tier (earning a feat, extra attack, or new spell level), enemies will receive a small bonus one or two levels later. The goal of this enemy tuning is to keep combat challenging for longer, while still allowing players to enjoy the power fantasy of leveling and eventually outpacing non-boss enemies/encounters. Bosses, however, will receive their incremental bonuses to roughly keep parity with players (or slightly exceed them!). Scaling decisions are made on the assumption that players will honor Listonomicon’s recommendation to keep their party size to 6 and play on Tactician Difficulty, as well as explore all of the options they now have (upgrading magic weapons, new items for sale at vendors throughout all 3 acts, rewards from new fights, etc). Solo runs, speed runs, no vendor challenge runs, and other unusual ways of playing BG3 will likely suffer heavily! Playing on an easier challenge setting, or with a larger party, will not feel challenging.
Please provide feedback if enemies are appearing with excessive bonus HP or excessive AC. These are the largest areas of concern for balancing challenge with fun. Enemies who simply can’t be hit without a crit, or a constant treadmill of enemies with too much HP, is a slog. Combat should be surprising and challenging, not slow and tedious. The one known flaw in how mods implement balance tweaks to Listonomicon is the manner in which NPCs are given extra damage. Split attacks, such as magic missile and ray of fire, will add this extra damage to each attack, much like the Agonizing Blast +cha damage bonus is added to each beam of Eldritch Blast. This can lead to unexpected, huge spikes of damage from enemy casters, especially in the early game. Focus fire on enemy mages!
Currently, I do not believe Combat Extender and Additional Enemies Extended interact unless AEE adds enemies that follow the vanilla tag system (e.g. labeling enemies as clerics, wizards, fighters, barbarians, bosses, etc in the same way the base game does). Do not expect all of AEE’s encounters to be scaled or for casters in AEE to be given the same 5e and PF2e spell lists.
Recommended party size is 6. Use more companions at your peril.
Strictly speaking, nothing stops you from steam rolling the entire game with 12 characters. If your PC specs and sanity can handle it, we can’t stop you. But consider the following issues, and more:
Excessive companions reduce game performance. This is especially noticeable in Act 2 when the party begins to bask in VFX from potions, elixirs, buffs, magic items, fairy blessing, moonglow lanterns, Selune’s blessing, etc. Like 10-20 FPS lost per extra character, and frequent CTDs - especially in populated areas like Moonrise and the Last Light Inn. This only gets worse into Act 3 where the city already has poor performance for many players, and many magic items now glow or carry other VFX. In all three acts, particularly large fights (such as the goblin camp, and Nere) are likely to crash with an excessive party.
The game is quickly unbalanced. Every extra character represents +25% more actions, bonus actions, magic items, and other resources over the base game. This leads to fewer Long Rests, which disrupts Larian’s (already awkward) pacing of camp events/camp scenes. While Listonomicon can try to balance combat difficulty around 6 heroes, anything more than that is silly beyond reason.
Dialogue/cutscenes break more frequently as party count goes above 5. There is a surprising amount of resiliency in most of the game for companions to speak correctly in cutscenes, and even banter with each other during overworld travel, but after adding too many you will have audio fail to play, the camera looking at the wrong people, audio/visual desync, and other issues.
Do not ride boats with more than 4 party members. At this time, the only known game breaking bug caused by party size is riding the boats to Grymforge. If any characters get stuck, dismiss as many working characters as possible; ride the boat back to the UD; and then ride the boat back to Grymforge, and the missing characters should arrive safely in Grymforge. Sometimes characters will fall off elevators and other moving platforms in the game when you have too many members. The creche elevator has a hard time fitting everyone. All other level transitions I have tested work, so far.