Combat Tips
The first step is to examine your combat log in detail. It will give you a breakdown of your attack roll bonuses. You need to increase your attack roll bonuses. How you do that is revealed in the Attack roll formula:
Attack Roll = Ability Modifier + Proficiency + Enchantment/Item Bonus + Class Features
Ability Modifier is the bonus from your characters main stat. For Barbarian it’s STR, Wizard INT, Warlock CHA etc.
Item bonus is derived from equipment. E.g a longsword+2 grants a +2 to attack rolls. Other equipment can also add attack roll bonuses.
Enchantment bonus will derive from a buff of some kind generated by using a spell, potion, scroll or an item that grantrs a spell like ability. E.g a cleric casting Bless will add +1 to the party’s attack rolls for 10m amongst other bonuses to defence etc.
Proficiency is something you get access to by virtue of your race or class. A weapon proficiency grants an attack roll and damage bonus to attacks with that specific weapon for example.
I/m not sure if there are any class features in BG3 that add to attack rolls other than Proficiencies.
So one way deal with low To Hit chances you look to every opportunity to get these bonuses.
The second way is to exploit the advantage/disadvantage system that is big in D&D 5e. If you can manipulate the situation so you have advantage then you get two attack rolls and take the better one. Which is huge. There are many ways to generate advantage.
For example if you are a Drow then you have superior dark vision (a race feature). If you can also cast Darkness then you can plunge your foes into darkness, effectively blinding them, but you can see in darkness perfectly well, thus you have the advantage on your attacks against them and furthermore they have disadvantage against you so when they attack you they have to make two attack rolls and take the worst of them.
This is not a simple game, it’s mechanically a lot more complex than XCOM. But that of course is why people love it so much.
It comes up in a lot of different ways, by the way, not just the advantage/disadvantage system that impacts hit chance.
One main area is character classes. The classes in DnD are all really different. Really different abilities, different ways they are used, and different play possibilities for each of them — different things you need to be looking for, and thinking about, for each one of them when you are coming into a fight. If you don’t know what those things are (and you won’t as a new player who isn’t familiar with DnD classes), you simply won’t know what all of your relevant options are, and so you will almost certainly underperform to baseline. It’s like the saying goes — you don’t even know what you don’t know — that is, you don’t even know that there is something that you don’t know. It’s that kind of knowledge gap.
You *can* get that by spending a few hours examining and studying all of the characters in your party in detail, looking at all of their spells, understanding all of the possibilties for each one, thinking about how they may optimally function, both themselves and with the party members they have … but most new players aren’t going to do that, obviously, so they are at a real disadvantage. They don’t have the cleric do X or the rogue do Y or the wizard do Z because they don’t know that X/Y/Z are what they do, or even that they CAN do. It’s a mountain of knowledge, really, because the classes don’t generally function in the same exact way that they do in most video games, and the differences are outcome significant, as players are learning the hard way,