I'm fairly new to the crpg genre, knows nothing about d&d, only played DOS2 and Wasteland 3 before BG3. But I personally enjoy challenging games and DOS2's tactician mode did it really well for me. (took me 3 tries to complete the honor mode prior to the release of bg3, a bit waste of time but great experience.)
To begin with, I didn't minmax, save-scum, cheese or exploit any game-breaking mechanisms in this game at all.
I think I'm at least half-way through act 3 by now (in tactician mode), the difficulty level just drastically went down and became such a letdown. I was expecting some big and hard fights in the last act, but instead I kinda became untouchable in the city. I went into act 3 at lv 10 and quickly turn 12 now. I had a feeling that I'm over-leveled but I thought I skipped quite some quests in act 1/2. (Also skipped the entire Mountain Pass area.) Nevertheless, most enemies I've encountered so far in act 3 are complete pushovers. Many of them can only do 0-3 damage to my characters per hit (assuming they can even hit me first) and die in 2-4 hits. All the boss fights (so far I've only completed shar/vampire/Orin fights) are also so underwhelming because they just cannot hurt me, and die so fast. It's just...such a pity. Those fights could have been the highlights of the game (and the build-up and the ambiance of the fight was great) but it fell short so hard. I now became hesitant to use legendary gears (never ever thought about using potions or scrolls) and regret respecing SH to light cleric bc it's kind op under this difficulty. (and I only did that for rp purposes)
At this point, I just wish a new difficulty level would come out soon. And for those ones who have completed the game, could you tell me is there any slightly more difficult fights ahead of me? I heard some said Rapheal is quite hard but some also said the shar fight was hard too. (my SH died in turn one for throwing out some radiant spell without reading the enemy status but still butchered the enemies with the rest of the team. sigh....)
Larian did not do a good job when it came to considering how the combination of legendary weapons, tadpole powers and their own homebrew would combine to accelerate your characters to power levels comparable to characters actually 5-6 levels higher than them in tabletop. It totally throws off the balance and forces them to make fights into gimmicks in order to not be over in the first 2 rounds. It's not a 5e problem either, it's what they added in.
But to be honest, it's not even the legendaries either; TONS of the gear is absurdly overpowered, even non-legendaries, by the end of the game. I'm trying to find a good challenge run for myself now by following these rues:
1. No legendaries
2. No haste
3. No tadpole powers
4. No gear that does stuff like "Adds another die of damage to all melee hits"
But yeah, it doesn't feel great artificially closing yourself off from huge chunks of the game just to try to get some challenge.
I hope for difficulty increases too, but if Larian won't do, modders certainly will!
. It's not like early game was any more demanding.