I've just finished a playthrough. I'll give my own thoughts on that. My characters were a Sword + Shield Warrior and a Fire + Earth Wizard.
- Stat balance still encourages mages to purely pump int (both mine finished with +14/15) or str / con (averaged +12/+11 for fighters at the end). I mean this seriously: not a single character I've played has put a point into stats other than str, int, dex, con.
- Suggestion: it's fine for gear to have split stat requirements? However, players will max their primary stats asap.
- I'm going to disagree that the Stat balance still only encourages mages to focus on Int. I ignored Jahan's Speed, and it really showed in how little AP he got back per turn. Con is also going to be useful to increase your maximum AP capacity. My next two characters will be a Crossbow Ranger and a Rogue, and they will focus more on Perception, Speed and Dexterity. From the last patch, Speed was already pretty useful, and now that it gives more recovery AP, I expect my Rogue to be a lot better. I can't say how good Perception will be, but I'll try it out.
- I agree that the low number of 5, and the lack of restrictions towards speeding to 5 does make it very tempting to max your primary stats out quickly.
- I didn't pump Luck, other than what I got from choosing "Romantic" once or twice in Dual Dialogue. I did put 1-2 points into Barter though, to increase money from selling things.
I ended up with 15,415 gold, but I didn't have any Abilities at level 5, so I didn't bother buying any skill books above level 4. EDIT: After buying 3 Level 4 Earth spellbooks, I had a lot less gold (10,821). If I got some level 5 ones, I could probably only afford one or two. So it seems that Luck is quite substantial.
- I agree that the Lighthouse Fight was the hardest in the alpha. It's the only one where any of my characters died. It's not that I was being terribly cautious either, I rarely had to use health potions. It wasn't unheard of, but I didn't have to drink them very often either.
- I agree that the poison from dying undead was the biggest danger in some of the fights.
- Earth magic definitely needs a level 2 spell, and more particularly, some EARTH spells. Not POISON, EARTH. Undead are either healed or don't care about poison. Boulderdash is probably the best of the Earth line. it's simple but effective and it has a narrow enough radius to slip between your teammates to hit the targets.
Yes, items also require you to put most of your points into your primary stat. I don't like the stats changes too much with this build. Last time I build dex mages (int+dex), which had some synergy, because I could get off a lot of spear attacks and still heal me after battle. But now int only affects casting spells. I like if Larian can make it in some way so that that putting all points in your primary stat is just bad. Some examples of how they could do it is: -putting points in strength makes you slower. -dexterity increase hitchance -intelligence increase AP (the way it was before) -also for every extra point you put in str, the bonus becomes smaller. Mages would need dex to hit spells and strength to be able to wield their staff. Just suggestions. Please make this complex and not cookie cutter put everything in 1 stat.
I agree that you should have to find a use for more than one attribute, but a cautionary note:
There's going to be a level cap of 20. That means that you only get 15 attribute points to play with (not counting gear) on top of the base 5 in all stats.
I don't think that requring you to pump everything (Int for spells, Dex to hit with spells, Str to carry a staff, Con for HP, speed for movement...) is necessarily a great idea, because that could just lead to a jumbled up mix of stats all about the same level. Just something to think about.
80% of much magical gear (not weapons) has +Armour on it, it's ridiculous, and I don't think that's helping the combat balance when it's so easy for everyone to get giant bonuses to armour. It doesn't help that the Armour Specialist requirement is gone.
